WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:06.000 As part of MIT course 6S099 on artificial general intelligence, I got a chance to sit down with 00:06.000 --> 00:13.680 Kristof Koch, who is one of the seminal figures in neurobiology, neuroscience, and generally in 00:13.680 --> 00:20.320 the study of consciousness. He is the president, the chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute 00:20.320 --> 00:27.520 for Brain Science in Seattle. From 1986 to 2013, he was the professor at Caltech. Before that, 00:27.520 --> 00:34.400 he was at MIT. He is extremely well cited, over a hundred thousand citations. His research, 00:34.400 --> 00:40.080 his writing, his ideas have had big impact on the scientific community and the general public 00:40.080 --> 00:44.560 in the way we think about consciousness, in the way we see ourselves as human beings. 00:44.560 --> 00:49.120 He's the author of several books, The Quest for Consciousness and Your Biological Approach, 00:49.120 --> 00:54.320 and a more recent book, Consciousness, Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. 00:54.320 --> 01:00.000 If you enjoy this conversation, this course, subscribe, click the little bell icon to make 01:00.000 --> 01:05.360 sure you never miss a video. And in the comments, leave suggestions for any people you'd like to 01:05.360 --> 01:10.480 see be part of the course or any ideas that you would like us to explore. Thanks very much, 01:10.480 --> 01:16.320 and I hope you enjoy. Okay, before we delve into the beautiful mysteries of consciousness, 01:16.320 --> 01:22.240 let's zoom out a little bit. And let me ask, do you think there's intelligent life out there in 01:22.240 --> 01:27.920 the universe? Yes, I do believe so. We have no evidence of it, but I think the probabilities 01:27.920 --> 01:33.440 are overwhelming in favor of it. Give me a universe where we have 10 to the 11 galaxies, 01:33.440 --> 01:39.280 and each galaxy has between 10 to the 11, 10 to the 12 stars, and we know more stars have one or 01:39.280 --> 01:47.360 more planets. So how does that make you feel? It still makes me feel special, because I have 01:47.360 --> 01:54.480 experiences. I feel the world, I experience the world. And independent of whether there are the 01:54.480 --> 02:00.480 creatures out there, I still feel the world and I have access to this world in this very strange, 02:00.480 --> 02:07.840 compelling way. And that's the core of human existence. Now you said human, do you think 02:07.840 --> 02:13.360 if those intelligent creatures are out there, do you think they experience their world? 02:13.360 --> 02:18.080 Yes, they are evolved. If they are a product of natural evolution, as they would have to be, 02:18.080 --> 02:22.400 they will also experience their own world. So consciousness isn't just a human, you're right, 02:22.400 --> 02:28.320 it's much wider. It's probably, it may be spread across all of biology. We have, the only thing 02:28.320 --> 02:33.040 that we have special is we can talk about it. Of course, not all people can talk about it. 02:33.040 --> 02:38.320 Babies and little children can talk about it. Patients who have a stroke in the left 02:38.320 --> 02:43.040 inferior frontal gyrus can talk about it. But most normal adult people can talk about it. 02:43.040 --> 02:48.000 And so we think that makes us special compared to little monkeys or dogs or cats or mice or all 02:48.000 --> 02:52.400 the other creatures that we share the planet with. But all the evidence seems to suggest 02:52.400 --> 02:56.960 that they too experience the world. And so it's overwhelmingly likely that other aliens, 02:56.960 --> 03:00.640 that aliens would also experience their world. Of course, differently, because they have a 03:00.640 --> 03:04.000 different sensorium, they have different sensors, they have a very different environment. 03:04.640 --> 03:11.360 But the fact that I would strongly suppose that they also have experiences. They feel pain and 03:11.360 --> 03:17.600 pleasure and see in some sort of spectrum and hear and have all the other sensors. 03:17.600 --> 03:21.040 Of course, their language, if they have one would be different. So we might not be able to 03:21.040 --> 03:24.320 understand their poetry about the experiences that they have. 03:24.320 --> 03:32.240 That's correct. Right. So in a talk, in a video, I've heard you mention Siputzo, a Daxhound that 03:32.240 --> 03:37.360 you came up with, that you grew up with was part of your family when you were young. First of all, 03:37.360 --> 03:46.320 you're technically a Midwestern boy. Technically. But after that, you traveled there on a bit, 03:46.320 --> 03:50.800 hence a little bit of the accent. You talked about Siputzo, the Daxhound, having 03:51.680 --> 03:57.440 these elements of humanness, of consciousness that you discovered. So I just wanted to ask, 03:58.000 --> 04:03.520 can you look back in your childhood and remember when was the first time you realized you yourself, 04:03.520 --> 04:09.600 sort of from a third person perspective, our conscious being, this idea of, 04:11.280 --> 04:16.320 you know, stepping outside yourself and seeing there's something special going on here in my brain? 04:17.840 --> 04:22.480 I can't really actually. It's a good question. I'm not sure I recall a discrete moment. I mean, 04:22.480 --> 04:27.280 you take it for granted because that's the only world you know, right? The only world I know, 04:27.280 --> 04:33.520 you know, is the world of seeing and hearing voices and touching and all the other things. 04:33.520 --> 04:40.000 So it's only much later at early in my undergraduate days when I became, when I enrolled in physics 04:40.000 --> 04:43.520 and in philosophy that I really thought about it and thought, well, this is really fundamentally 04:43.520 --> 04:48.800 very, very mysterious. And there's nothing really in physics right now that explains this transition 04:48.800 --> 04:54.560 from the physics of the brain to feelings. Where do the feelings come in? So you can look at the 04:54.560 --> 04:58.800 foundational equation of quantum mechanics, general relativity, you can look at the period table of 04:58.800 --> 05:05.360 the elements, you can look at the endless ATG seed chat in our genes and no way is consciousness. 05:05.360 --> 05:11.120 Yet I wake up every morning to a world where I have experiences. And so that's the heart of the 05:11.120 --> 05:19.040 ancient mind body problem. How do experiences get into the world? So what is consciousness? 05:19.040 --> 05:25.680 Experience. Consciousness is any, any, any experience. Some people call it subjective 05:25.680 --> 05:30.560 feelings, some people call it phenomenon, phenomenology, some people call it qualia, 05:30.560 --> 05:34.480 their philosophy, but they all denote the same thing. It feels like something in the 05:34.480 --> 05:40.640 famous word of the philosopher Thomas Nagel, it feels like something to be a bad or to be, you know, 05:40.640 --> 05:47.440 an American or to be angry or to be sad or to be in love or to have pain. 05:49.040 --> 05:54.480 And that is what experience is, any possible experience could be as mundane as just sitting 05:54.480 --> 05:59.760 here in a chair could be as exalted as, you know, having a mystical moment, you know, 05:59.760 --> 06:03.200 in deep meditation, those are just different forms of experiences. 06:03.200 --> 06:10.080 Experience. So if you were to sit down with maybe the next skip a couple generations of 06:10.080 --> 06:16.480 IBM Watson, something that won jeopardy, what is the gap? I guess the question is between Watson, 06:18.000 --> 06:26.000 that might be much smarter than you than us than all any human alive, but may not have experience. 06:26.000 --> 06:31.920 What is the gap? Well, so that's a big, big question that's occupied people for the last, 06:32.640 --> 06:38.800 certainly last 50 years since we, you know, since the advent of birth of, of computers. 06:38.800 --> 06:42.720 That's a question on Turing tried to answer. And of course, he did it in this indirect way 06:42.720 --> 06:48.480 by proposing a test, an operational test. So, but that's not really that's, you know, 06:48.480 --> 06:52.480 he tried to get it. What does it mean for a person to think? And then he had this test, 06:52.480 --> 06:56.400 right? You lock him away, and then you have a communication with them. And then you try to, 06:56.400 --> 07:00.400 to guess after a while whether that is a person or whether it's a computer system. 07:00.400 --> 07:05.680 There's no question that now or very soon, you know, Alexa or Siri or, you know, Google now 07:05.680 --> 07:10.720 will pass this test, right? And you can game it. But, you know, ultimately, certainly in your 07:10.720 --> 07:15.440 generation, there will be machines that will speak with complete points that will remember 07:15.440 --> 07:20.320 everything you ever said. They'll remember every email you ever had, like, like Samantha remember 07:20.320 --> 07:25.520 in the movie, her snow question is going to happen. But of course, the key question is, 07:25.520 --> 07:31.120 does it feel like anything to be Samantha in the movie? Does it feel like anything to be Watson? 07:31.120 --> 07:38.240 And there one has to very, very strongly think there are two different concepts here that we 07:38.240 --> 07:44.400 co mingle. There is a concept of intelligence, natural or artificial, and there is a concept of 07:44.400 --> 07:48.880 consciousness of experience, natural or artificial. Those are very, very different things. 07:49.520 --> 07:55.520 Now, historically, we associate consciousness with intelligence. Why? Because we live in a world 07:55.520 --> 08:01.520 living aside computers of natural selection, where we're surrounded by creatures, either our own kin 08:01.520 --> 08:06.880 that are less or more intelligent, or we go across species, some some are more adapted to 08:06.880 --> 08:12.000 particular environment, others are less adapted, whether it's a whale or dog, or you go talk about 08:12.000 --> 08:17.680 a permitium or a little worm, all right. And we see the complexity of the nervous system goes from 08:17.680 --> 08:24.400 one cell to to a specialized cells to a worm that has three net that has 30% of its cells are nerve 08:24.400 --> 08:29.920 cells, to creature like us or like a blue whale that has 100 billion even more nerve cells. 08:29.920 --> 08:35.280 And so based on behavioral evidence and based on the underlying neuroscience, we believe that 08:35.840 --> 08:41.440 as these creatures become more complex, they are better adapted to to their particular ecological 08:41.440 --> 08:46.960 niche. And they become more conscious, partly because their brain grows. And we believe 08:46.960 --> 08:52.080 consciousness unlike the ancient ancient people thought most almost every culture thought that 08:52.080 --> 08:56.800 consciousness with intelligence has to do with your heart. And you still to see that today, 08:56.800 --> 09:00.800 you see honey, I love you with all my heart. Yes. But what you should actually say is they 09:00.800 --> 09:05.520 know honey, I love you with all my lateral hypothalamus. And for Valentine's Day, you should 09:05.520 --> 09:11.040 give your sweetheart, you know, hypothalamus in piece of chocolate, not a heart shaped chocolate, 09:11.040 --> 09:15.280 right. And so we still have this language, but now we believe it's a brain. And so we see brains 09:15.280 --> 09:19.680 of different complexity. And we think, well, they have different levels of consciousness, 09:19.680 --> 09:28.160 they're capable of different experiences. But now we confront a world where we know where we're 09:28.160 --> 09:34.960 beginning to engineer intelligence. And it's radical unclear whether the intelligence we're 09:34.960 --> 09:40.160 engineering has anything to do with consciousness and whether it can experience anything. Because 09:40.160 --> 09:45.520 fundamentally, what's the difference? Intelligence is about function. Intelligence, no matter exactly 09:45.520 --> 09:50.400 how you define it sort of adaptation to new environments, being able to learn and quickly 09:50.400 --> 09:54.400 understand, you know, the setup of this and what's going on and who are the actors and what's 09:54.400 --> 10:00.800 going to happen next. That's all about function. Consciousness is not about function. Consciousness 10:00.800 --> 10:08.080 is about being. It's in some sense much fundamental. You can see folks, you can see this in several 10:08.080 --> 10:13.600 cases, you can see it, for instance, in the case of the clinic, when you're dealing with patients 10:13.600 --> 10:19.200 who are, let's say, had a stroke or had wear and traffic accident, etc. They're pretty much 10:19.200 --> 10:24.960 immobile. Terri Schievo, you may have heard historically, she was a person here in the 10:24.960 --> 10:29.680 90s in Florida. Her heart stood still. She was reanimated. Then for the next 14 years, 10:29.680 --> 10:33.600 she was what's called in a vegetative state. So there's thousands of people in the vegetative 10:33.600 --> 10:37.840 state. So they're, you know, they're, you know, they're like this. Occasionally, they open their 10:37.840 --> 10:42.160 eyes for two, three, four, five, six, eight hours and then close their eyes. They have sleep wake cycle. 10:42.160 --> 10:48.720 Occasionally, they have behaviors. They do like, you know, they, but there's no way that you can 10:48.720 --> 10:53.200 establish a lawful relationship between what you say, or the doctor says, or the mom says, 10:53.200 --> 11:00.000 and what the patient does. Right. So, so the, so the, there isn't any behavior yet in some of 11:00.000 --> 11:06.480 these people, there is still experience. You can, you can design and build brain machine interfaces 11:06.480 --> 11:10.400 where you can see there's, they still explain something. And of course, that these cases 11:10.400 --> 11:15.040 are blocked in state. There's this famous book called the, the, the diving bell in the butterfly 11:15.040 --> 11:20.160 where you had an editor, a French editor, he had a stroke in the, in the brainstem, unable to move 11:20.160 --> 11:25.920 except his vertical eyes, eye movement. He could just move his eyes up and down. You need dictated 11:25.920 --> 11:31.760 in an entire book. And some people even lose this at the end. And all the evidence seems to suggest 11:31.760 --> 11:37.120 that they're still in there. In this case, you have no behavior. You have consciousness. 11:37.120 --> 11:42.080 Second case is tonight, like all of us, you're going to go to sleep, close your eyes, you go to 11:42.080 --> 11:46.720 sleep. You will wake up inside your sleeping body and you will have conscious experiences. 11:47.440 --> 11:52.000 They're different from everyday experience. You might fly. You might not be surprised that you're 11:52.000 --> 11:57.600 flying. You might meet a long dead pet, childhood dog, and you're not surprised that you're meeting 11:57.600 --> 12:01.280 them, you know, but you have conscious experience of love, of hate, you know, they can be very 12:01.280 --> 12:07.680 emotional. Your body doing this state, typically to them, state sends an active signal to your 12:07.680 --> 12:13.120 motor neurons to paralyze you. It's called atonia, right? Because if you don't have that, like some 12:13.120 --> 12:17.200 patients, what do you do? You act out your dreams, you get for example, rem behavioral disorder, 12:17.200 --> 12:23.440 which is the bad, which is bad juju to get. Okay. Third case is pure experience. So I recently had 12:23.440 --> 12:29.600 this, what some people call a mystical experience, I went to Singapore and went into a flotation 12:29.600 --> 12:36.960 tank. Yeah. All right. So this is a big tub filled with water, that's body temperature and absent 12:36.960 --> 12:42.400 salt. You strip completely naked, you lie inside of it, you close the, the, the darkness, complete 12:42.400 --> 12:48.480 darkness, soundproof. So very quickly, you become bodyless because you're floating and you're naked. 12:48.480 --> 12:53.600 You have no rings, no watch, no nothing. You don't feel your body anymore. It's no sound, 12:53.600 --> 13:00.320 soundless. There's no photon, a sightless, timeless, because after a while, early on, 13:00.320 --> 13:05.360 you actually hear your heart, but then that you, you sort of adapt to that and then sort of the 13:05.360 --> 13:11.360 passage of time ceases. And if you train yourself like in a, in a meditation, not to think early 13:11.360 --> 13:15.200 on, you think a lot, it's a little bit spooky. You feel somewhat uncomfortable or you think, 13:15.200 --> 13:20.320 well, I'm going to get bored. But if you try to not to think actively, you become mindless. 13:20.320 --> 13:27.520 There you are, bodyless, timeless, soundless, sightless, mindless, but you're in a conscious 13:27.520 --> 13:32.560 experience. You're not asleep. You're not asleep. You are, you are being of pure, 13:32.560 --> 13:36.400 you're pure being. There isn't any function. You aren't doing any computation. You're not 13:36.400 --> 13:40.400 remembering, you're not projecting, you're not planning, yet you are fully conscious. 13:40.400 --> 13:44.400 You're fully conscious. There's something going on there. It could be just a side effect. So what 13:44.400 --> 13:52.480 is the, the, um, you mean epiphenomena? So what's the select, meaning why, uh, why, what, what, 13:52.480 --> 13:59.200 what is the function of you being able to lay in this, uh, sense sensory free deprivation tank 13:59.200 --> 14:04.640 and still have a conscious experience? Evolutionary. Obviously we didn't evolve with floatation 14:04.640 --> 14:10.480 tanks in our, in our environment. I mean, so biology is not totally bad at asking why question to 14:10.480 --> 14:14.560 leonormical question. Why do we have two eyes? Why don't we have four eyes like some teachers or three 14:14.560 --> 14:19.360 eyes or something? Well, no, there's probably, there is a function to that, but it's, we're not 14:19.360 --> 14:23.200 very good at answering those questions. We can speculate. And Leslie, where biology is very, 14:23.200 --> 14:26.800 or science is very good about mechanistic question. Why is there charge in the universe, 14:26.800 --> 14:31.040 right? We find a certain universe where there are positive and negative charges. Why? Why does 14:31.040 --> 14:36.320 quantum mechanics hold? You know, why, why, why doesn't some other theory hold quantum mechanics 14:36.320 --> 14:41.040 hold in our universe? It's very unclear why. So telenomical question, why questions are difficult 14:41.040 --> 14:46.480 to answer. Clearly there's some relationship between complexity, brain processing power and 14:46.480 --> 14:53.280 consciousness. But however, in these cases, in the three examples I gave, one is an everyday 14:53.280 --> 14:57.920 experience at night. The other one is a trauma and third one is in principle, you can, everybody 14:57.920 --> 15:04.080 can have these sort of mystical experiences. You have a dissociation of function from, of 15:04.080 --> 15:12.320 intelligence from, from conscious consciousness. You caught me asking a white question. Let me 15:12.320 --> 15:17.120 ask a question that's not a white question. You're giving a talk later today on the touring test 15:17.760 --> 15:23.200 for intelligence and consciousness drawn lines between the two. So is there a scientific way 15:23.200 --> 15:30.560 to say there's consciousness present in this entity or not? And to anticipate your answer, 15:30.560 --> 15:35.840 because you, you will also, there's a neurobiological answer. So we can test a human brain. But if you 15:35.840 --> 15:42.240 take a machine brain that you don't know tests for yet, how would you even begin to approach 15:42.960 --> 15:47.760 a test if there's consciousness present in this thing? Okay, that's a really good question. So 15:47.760 --> 15:54.000 let me take in two steps. So as you point out for, for, for humans, let's just stick with humans, 15:54.000 --> 15:58.640 there's now a test called a zap and zip is a procedure where you ping the brain using 15:58.640 --> 16:04.160 transcranial magnetic stimulation. You look at the electrical reverberations essentially using EG 16:04.960 --> 16:08.800 and then you can measure the complexity of this brain response. And you can do this in awake 16:08.800 --> 16:13.680 people in asleep, normal people, you can do it in awake people and then anesthetize them. You 16:13.680 --> 16:20.240 can do it in patients and it has 100% accuracy that in all those cases, when you're clear, 16:20.240 --> 16:24.080 the patient or the person is either conscious or unconscious, the complexity is either high or 16:24.080 --> 16:28.320 low. And then you can adopt these techniques to similar creatures like monkeys and dogs and, 16:28.320 --> 16:34.400 and mice that have very similar brains. Now, of course, you point out that may not help you 16:34.400 --> 16:39.040 because we don't have a cortex, you know, and if I send a magnetic pulse into my iPhone or my 16:39.040 --> 16:43.600 computer, it's probably going to break something. So we don't have that. So what we need ultimately, 16:45.120 --> 16:50.080 we need a theory of consciousness. We can't just rely on our intuition. Our intuition is, well, 16:50.080 --> 16:55.040 yeah, if somebody talks, they're conscious. However, then they're all these page children, 16:55.040 --> 17:00.560 babies don't talk, right? But we believe that that the babies also have conscious experiences, 17:00.560 --> 17:05.360 right? And then they're all these patients I mentioned. And they don't talk when you dream, 17:05.360 --> 17:10.000 you can't talk because you're paralyzed. So, so what we ultimately need, we can't just rely 17:10.000 --> 17:15.280 on our intuition, we need a theory of consciousness that tells us what is it about a piece of matter, 17:15.280 --> 17:19.600 what is it about a piece of highly excitable matter like the brain or like a computer that 17:19.600 --> 17:24.160 gives rise to conscious experience. We all believe none of us believe anymore in the old story, 17:24.160 --> 17:28.160 it's a soul, right? That used to be the most common explanation that most people accept that 17:28.160 --> 17:33.440 it's still a lot of people today believe, well, there's God in doubt, only us with a special 17:33.440 --> 17:38.240 thing that animals don't have, René Descartes famously said, a dog, if you hit it with your 17:38.240 --> 17:42.800 carriage, may yell, may cry, but it doesn't have this special thing. It doesn't have the magic, 17:42.800 --> 17:47.920 the magic sauce. So yeah, it doesn't have red corketons, the soul. Now we believe that isn't 17:47.920 --> 17:54.000 the case anymore. So what is the difference between brains and, and these guys, silicon. 17:55.200 --> 18:01.120 And in particular, once their behavior matches. So if you have Siri of Alexa and 20 years from now 18:01.120 --> 18:06.400 that she can talk just as good as any possible human, what grounds do you have to say she's not 18:06.400 --> 18:11.280 conscious? In particular, if she says, it's of course she will. Well, of course I'm conscious. 18:11.280 --> 18:15.600 You ask, how are you doing? And she'll say, well, you know, they'll generate some way to, 18:15.600 --> 18:21.840 yeah, yeah, exactly. She'll behave like a, like a person. Now there's several differences. One is, 18:23.280 --> 18:29.120 so this relates to the problem, the very heart. Why is consciousness a heart problem? It's because 18:29.120 --> 18:35.280 it's subjective, right? Only I have it, for only I know, I have direct experience of my own 18:35.280 --> 18:40.240 consciousness. I don't have experience, your consciousness. Now I assume as a sort of a 18:40.240 --> 18:43.680 Bayesian person who believes in probability theory and all of that, you know, I can do, 18:43.680 --> 18:48.160 I can do an abduction to the, to the best available facts. I deduce your brain is very 18:48.160 --> 18:51.840 similar to mine. If I put you in a scanner, your brain is roughly going to behave the same with 18:51.840 --> 18:56.240 I do. If, if, if, you know, if I give you this music and ask you, how does it taste? 18:56.240 --> 19:00.240 Do you tell me things that, you know, that, that I would also say more or less, right? 19:00.240 --> 19:03.920 So I infer based on all of that, that you're conscious. Now with Siri, I can't do that. So 19:03.920 --> 19:09.680 there I really need a theory that tells me what is it about, about any system this or this that 19:09.680 --> 19:14.880 makes it conscious. We have such a theory. Yes. So the, the integrated information theory. 19:15.520 --> 19:19.360 But let me first, maybe it's introduction for people who are not familiar to car. 19:20.640 --> 19:28.400 Can you, you talk a lot about panpsychism. Can you describe what physicalism versus dualism 19:29.040 --> 19:35.280 this you mentioned the soul? What, what is the history of that idea? What is the idea of panpsychism? 19:35.280 --> 19:44.560 Well, no, the debate really out of which panpsychism can emerge of, of, of dualism versus 19:45.200 --> 19:49.200 physicalism. Or do you not see panpsychism as fitting into that? 19:49.760 --> 19:53.840 No, you can argue there's some, well, okay, so let's step back. So panpsychism is a very 19:53.840 --> 19:58.560 ancient belief that's been around. I mean, Plato and us totally talks about it. 19:59.200 --> 20:05.040 Modern philosophers talk about it. Of course, in Buddhism, the idea is very prevalent that 20:05.040 --> 20:08.960 I mean, there are different versions of it. One version says everything is in salt, 20:08.960 --> 20:13.680 everything rocks and stones and dogs and people and forest and iPhones all have a soul. 20:14.240 --> 20:20.240 All matter is in soul. That's sort of one version. Another version is that all biology, 20:20.240 --> 20:26.080 all creatures, smaller, large from a single cell to a giant sequoia tree feel like something. That's 20:26.080 --> 20:30.800 one I think is somewhat more realistic. So the different versions of what do you mean by feel 20:30.800 --> 20:36.240 like something? Well, have, have feeling, have some kind of experience. It may well be possible 20:36.240 --> 20:41.120 that it feels like something to be a paramedium. I think it's pretty likely it feels like something 20:41.120 --> 20:48.320 to be a bee or a mouse or a dog. Sure. So, okay. So, so that you can say that's also, 20:48.320 --> 20:53.920 so panpsychism is very broad, right? And you can, so some people, for example, 20:53.920 --> 21:00.720 Bertrand Russell, try to advocate this, this idea is called Rasellian monism that, that 21:00.720 --> 21:06.640 panpsychism is really physics viewed from the inside. So the idea is that physics is very 21:06.640 --> 21:13.120 good at describing relationship among objects like charges or like gravity, right? You know, 21:13.120 --> 21:17.360 describe the relationship between curvature and mass distribution. Okay. That's the relationship 21:17.360 --> 21:21.440 among things. Physics doesn't really describe the ultimate reality itself. It's just 21:21.440 --> 21:27.280 relationship among, you know, quarks or all these other stuff from like a third person observer. 21:27.280 --> 21:33.440 Yes. Yes. And consciousness is what physics feels from the inside to my conscious experience. 21:33.440 --> 21:37.760 It's the way the physics of my brain, particular my cortex feels from the inside. 21:38.400 --> 21:42.400 And so if you are a paramedium, you got to remember, you say paramedium, well, that's a 21:42.400 --> 21:48.960 pretty dumb creature. It is, but it has already a billion different molecules, probably, you know, 21:48.960 --> 21:54.160 5,000 different proteins assembled in a highly, highly complex system that no single person, 21:54.160 --> 21:58.880 no computer system so far on this planet has ever managed to accurately simulate. 21:58.880 --> 22:04.240 It's complexity vastly escapes us. Yes. And it may well be that that little thing feels like a 22:04.240 --> 22:08.160 tiny bit. Now, it doesn't have a voice in the head like me. It doesn't have expectations. 22:08.160 --> 22:12.400 You know, it doesn't have all that complex things, but it may well feel like something. 22:12.400 --> 22:17.520 Yeah. So this is really interesting. Can we draw some lines and maybe try to understand 22:17.520 --> 22:24.560 the difference between life, intelligence and consciousness? How do you see all of those? 22:25.280 --> 22:31.120 If you have to define what is a living thing, what is a conscious thing and what is an intelligent 22:31.120 --> 22:35.920 thing? Do those intermix for you or are they totally separate? Okay. So A, that's a question 22:35.920 --> 22:40.000 that we don't have a full answer. Right. A lot of the stuff we're talking about today 22:40.000 --> 22:44.240 is full of mysteries and fascinating ones, right? Well, you can go to Aristotle, 22:44.240 --> 22:48.480 who's probably the most important scientist and philosopher who's ever lived in certainly 22:48.480 --> 22:53.280 in Western culture. He had this idea. It's called hylomorphism. It's quite popular these days 22:53.280 --> 22:58.080 that there are different forms of soul. The soul is really the form of something. He says, 22:58.080 --> 23:02.480 all biological creatures have a vegetative soul. That's life principle. Today we think we 23:02.480 --> 23:07.680 understand something more than this biochemistry in nonlinear thermodynamics. Right. Then he says 23:07.680 --> 23:13.840 they have a sensitive soul. Only animals and humans have also a sensitive soul or a 23:13.840 --> 23:18.960 petitive soul. They can see, they can smell and they have drives. They want to reproduce, 23:18.960 --> 23:24.080 they want to eat, etc. Then only humans have what he called a rational soul. 23:25.040 --> 23:29.840 Okay. Right. And that idea that made it into Christendom and then the rational soul is the one 23:29.840 --> 23:34.240 that lives forever. He was very unclear. He wasn't really... I mean, different readings of Aristotle 23:34.240 --> 23:39.040 give different... Did he believe that rational soul was immortal or not? I probably think he 23:39.040 --> 23:43.040 didn't. But then, of course, that made it through play to into Christianity and then this soul 23:43.040 --> 23:49.840 became immortal and then became the connection to God. Now, so you asked me, essentially, 23:49.840 --> 23:56.240 what is our modern conception of these three... Aristotle would have called them different forms. 23:56.240 --> 24:00.160 Life, we think we know something about it, at least life on this planet. Right. Although, 24:00.160 --> 24:05.120 we don't understand how to originate it, but it's been difficult to rigorously pin down. 24:05.120 --> 24:10.320 You see this in modern definitions of death. It's in fact, right now there's a conference 24:10.320 --> 24:16.000 ongoing, again, that tries to define legally and medically what is death. It used to be very 24:16.000 --> 24:19.920 simple. Death is, you stop breathing, your heart stops beating, you're dead. Right? 24:19.920 --> 24:24.160 Totally unconventional. If you're unsure, you wait another 10 minutes. If the patient doesn't 24:24.160 --> 24:28.640 breathe, you know, he's dead. Well, now we have ventilators, we have pacemakers. So, 24:28.640 --> 24:33.360 it's much more difficult to define what death is. Typically, death is defined as the end of life 24:33.360 --> 24:38.160 and life is defined before death. Thank you for that. Okay. So, we don't have really very good 24:38.160 --> 24:42.640 definitions. Intelligence, we don't have a rigorous definition. We know something how to 24:42.640 --> 24:49.920 measure. It's called IQ or G factors. Right. And we're beginning to build it in a narrow sense. 24:49.920 --> 24:56.560 Right. Like, go AlphaGo and Watson and, you know, Google cars and Uber cars and all of that. 24:56.560 --> 25:00.960 That's still narrow AI. And some people are thinking about artificial general intelligence. 25:00.960 --> 25:05.120 But roughly, as we said before, it's something to do with the ability to learn and to adapt 25:05.120 --> 25:10.160 to new environments. But that is, as I said, also its radical difference from experience. 25:10.800 --> 25:16.480 And it's very unclear if you build a machine that has AGI, it's not at all a priori. It's 25:16.480 --> 25:20.560 not at all clear that this machine will have consciousness. It may or may not. 25:20.560 --> 25:25.280 So, let's ask it the other way. Do you think if you were to try to build an artificial general 25:25.280 --> 25:31.040 intelligence system, do you think figuring out how to build artificial consciousness 25:31.040 --> 25:39.360 would help you get to an AGI? Or put another way, do you think intelligent requires consciousness? 25:40.320 --> 25:46.240 In human, it goes hand in hand. In human, or I think in biology, consciousness, intelligence 25:46.240 --> 25:52.640 goes hand in hand. Quay is illusion because the brain evolved to be highly complex, complexity 25:52.640 --> 25:58.160 via the theory integrated information theory is sort of ultimately is what is closely tied to 25:58.160 --> 26:04.000 consciousness. Ultimately, it's causal power upon itself. And so, in evolved systems, they go 26:04.000 --> 26:09.120 together. In artificial systems, particularly in digital machines, they do not go together. 26:09.120 --> 26:16.800 And if you ask me point blank, is Alexa 20.0 in the year 2040, once she can easily pass every 26:16.800 --> 26:21.600 Turing test that she conscious? No. Even if she claims she's conscious. In fact, you could even 26:21.600 --> 26:25.840 do a more radical version of this thought experiment. We can build a computer simulation 26:25.840 --> 26:30.320 of the human brain. You know what Henry Markham in the blue brain project or the human brain 26:30.320 --> 26:34.240 project in Switzerland is trying to do. Let's grant them all the success. So in 10 years, 26:34.240 --> 26:38.560 we have this perfect simulation of the human brain, every neuron is simulated. And it has 26:38.560 --> 26:43.520 alarmics, and it has motor neurons, it has a blockers area. And of course, they'll talk and 26:43.520 --> 26:48.480 they'll say, Hi, I just woken up. I feel great. Okay, even that computer simulation that can in 26:48.480 --> 26:53.840 principle map onto your brain will not be conscious. Why? Because it simulates, it's a difference 26:53.840 --> 26:59.280 between the simulated and the real. So it simulates the behavior associated with consciousness. It 26:59.280 --> 27:03.920 might be, it will, if it's done properly, will have all the intelligence that that particular 27:03.920 --> 27:09.760 person that simulating has. But simulating intelligence is not the same as having conscious 27:09.760 --> 27:14.240 experiences. And I give you a really nice metaphor that engineers and physicists typically get. 27:15.120 --> 27:20.000 I can write down Einstein's field equation nine or 10 equations that describe the link in general 27:20.000 --> 27:27.600 relativity between curvature and mass. I can do that. I can run this on my laptop to predict that 27:27.600 --> 27:34.960 the center, the black hole at the center of our galaxy will be so massive that it will twist space 27:34.960 --> 27:40.240 time around it so no light can escape. It's a black hole, right? But funny, have you ever wondered 27:40.240 --> 27:47.040 why doesn't this computer simulation suck me in? Right? It simulates gravity, but it doesn't have 27:47.040 --> 27:52.720 the causal power of gravity. That's a huge difference. So it's a difference between the real 27:52.720 --> 27:57.360 and the simulated, just like it doesn't get wet inside a computer when the computer runs code 27:57.360 --> 28:03.360 that simulates a weather storm. And so in order to have to have artificial consciousness, you have 28:03.360 --> 28:08.720 to give it the same causal power as the human brain. You have to build so called a neuromorphic 28:08.720 --> 28:15.040 machine that has hardware that is very similar to the human brain, not a digital clock for 28:15.040 --> 28:22.480 Neumann computer. So that's just to clarify, though, you think that consciousness is not required 28:22.480 --> 28:29.360 to create human level intelligence. It seems to accompany in the human brain, but for machine 28:29.360 --> 28:37.360 not. That's correct. So maybe just because this is AGI, let's dig in a little bit about what we 28:37.360 --> 28:44.000 mean by intelligence. So one thing is the g factor of these kind of IQ tests of intelligence. 28:44.000 --> 28:51.520 But I think if you maybe another way to say so in 2040, 2050, people will have Siri that is 28:52.320 --> 28:57.600 just really impressive. Do you think people will say Siri is intelligent? 28:57.600 --> 29:04.080 Yes. Intelligence is this amorphous thing. So to be intelligent, it seems like you have to have 29:04.080 --> 29:09.520 some kind of connections with other human beings in the sense that you have to impress them with 29:09.520 --> 29:17.200 your intelligence. And there feels you have to somehow operate in this world full of humans. 29:17.200 --> 29:22.240 And for that, there feels like there has to be something like consciousness. So you think you 29:22.240 --> 29:28.080 can have just the world's best natural NLP system, natural language, understanding a generation, 29:28.080 --> 29:33.840 and that will be that will get us happy and say, you know what, we've created an AGI. 29:33.840 --> 29:41.120 I don't know, happy. Yes, I do believe we can get what we call high level functional intelligence, 29:41.120 --> 29:47.200 particularly sort of the G, you know, this fluid like intelligence that we charge, 29:47.200 --> 29:52.640 particularly the place like MIT, right? In machines, I see a priori no reasons, 29:52.640 --> 29:58.160 and I see a lot of reason to believe it's going to happen very over the next 50 years or 30 years. 29:58.160 --> 30:04.160 So for beneficial AI, for creating an AI system that's, so you mentioned ethics, 30:04.880 --> 30:10.880 that is exceptionally intelligent, but also does not do, does, you know, aligns its values 30:10.880 --> 30:14.800 with our values of humanity. Do you think then it needs consciousness? 30:14.800 --> 30:19.920 Yes, I think that that is a very good argument that if we're concerned about AI and the threat 30:19.920 --> 30:26.160 of AI, like Nick Bostrom, existentialist threat, I think having an intelligence that has empathy, 30:26.160 --> 30:32.480 right? Why do we find abusing a dog? Why do most of us find that abhorrent or abusing any animal? 30:32.480 --> 30:37.600 Right? Why do we find that abhorrent? Because we have this thing called empathy, which if you 30:37.600 --> 30:42.960 look at the Greek really means feeling with. I feel a pathos empathy. I have feeling with you. 30:42.960 --> 30:48.400 I see somebody else suffer. That isn't even my conspecific. It's not a person. It's not a love. 30:48.400 --> 30:53.280 It's not my wife or my kids. It's a dog. But I feel naturally, most of us, not all of us, 30:53.280 --> 31:00.560 most of us will feel emphatic. And so it may well be in the long term interest of survival 31:00.560 --> 31:05.840 of Homo sapiens sapiens, that if we do build AGI, and it's really becomes very powerful, 31:05.840 --> 31:10.880 that it has an emphatic response and doesn't just exterminate humanity. 31:11.760 --> 31:17.920 So as part of the full conscious experience to create a consciousness, artificial, or in our 31:17.920 --> 31:24.320 human consciousness, do you think fear, maybe we're going to get into your earlier days with 31:24.320 --> 31:30.560 Nietzsche and so on, but do you think fear and suffering are essential to have consciousness? 31:30.560 --> 31:34.800 Do you have to have the full range of experience to have a system that has experience? 31:36.480 --> 31:41.600 Or can you have a system that only has very particular kinds of very positive experiences? 31:41.600 --> 31:46.880 Look, you can have, in principle, people have done this in a rat where you implant an electrode 31:46.880 --> 31:51.680 in the hypothalamus, the pleasure center of the rat, and the rat stimulates itself above and 31:51.680 --> 31:57.200 beyond anything else. It doesn't care about food or natural sex or drink anymore, it just stimulates 31:57.200 --> 32:02.960 itself because it's such a pleasurable feeling. I guess it's like an orgasm, just you have all 32:02.960 --> 32:11.040 day long. And so a priori, I see no reason why you need different, why you need a great variety. 32:11.040 --> 32:16.800 Now, clearly to survive, that wouldn't work. But if I engineered artificially, I don't think 32:18.720 --> 32:24.960 you need a great variety of conscious experience. You could have just pleasure or just fear. 32:25.680 --> 32:30.240 It might be a terrible existence, but I think that's possible, at least on conceptual logical 32:30.240 --> 32:34.640 ground. Because any real creature, whether artificial or engineered, you want to give 32:34.640 --> 32:40.080 it fear, the fear of extinction that we all have. And you also want to give it a positive, 32:40.080 --> 32:45.600 repetitive states, states that you want the machine encouraged to do because they give 32:45.600 --> 32:52.000 the machine positive feedback. So you mentioned panpsychism to jump back a little bit. 32:53.440 --> 33:00.400 Everything having some kind of mental property. How do you go from there to something like human 33:01.120 --> 33:05.760 consciousness? So everything having some elements of consciousness. Is there something 33:05.760 --> 33:12.320 special about human consciousness? Well, so just it's not everything like a spoon. There's no 33:13.600 --> 33:18.160 the form of panpsychism, I think about doesn't ascribe consciousness to anything like this, 33:18.160 --> 33:25.440 the spoon on my liver. However, it is the theory of integrated information theory does say that 33:25.440 --> 33:29.680 system even ones that look from the outside relatively simple, at least if they have this 33:29.680 --> 33:36.800 internal causal power, they are they does feel like something. The theory doesn't say anything 33:36.800 --> 33:41.920 what's special about human. Biologically, we know what the one thing that's special about 33:41.920 --> 33:48.800 human is we speak. And we have an overblown sense of our own importance. Right. We believe we're 33:48.800 --> 33:54.800 exceptional. And we're just God's gift to to into the universe. But the but behaviorally, 33:54.800 --> 33:58.720 the main thing that we have, we can plan, we can plan over the long term, we have language, 33:58.720 --> 34:04.080 and that gives us enormous amount of power. And that's why we are the the condominant species 34:04.080 --> 34:11.440 on the planet. So you mentioned God, you grew up a devout Roman Catholic, you know, Roman Catholic 34:11.440 --> 34:19.360 family. So, you know, with consciousness, you're sort of exploring some really deeply fundamental 34:19.360 --> 34:24.320 human things that religion also touches on. So where does, where does religion fit into your 34:24.320 --> 34:29.760 thinking about consciousness? And you've you've grown throughout your life and changed your views 34:29.760 --> 34:35.520 on religion, as far as I understand. Yeah, I mean, I'm not much closer to so I'm not a Roman 34:35.520 --> 34:40.960 Catholic anymore. I don't believe there's sort of this God, the God I was, I was educated to 34:40.960 --> 34:46.560 believe in, you know, sit somewhere in the fullness of time, I'll be united in some sort of everlasting 34:46.560 --> 34:52.160 bliss. I just don't see any evidence for that. Look, the world, the night is large and full of 34:52.160 --> 34:57.360 wonders, right? There are many things that I don't understand. I think many things that we as a 34:57.360 --> 35:01.520 cult, you look, we don't even understand more than 4% of all the the universe, right? Dark 35:01.520 --> 35:05.760 matter, dark energy. We have no idea what it is. Maybe it's lost socks. What do I know? So, 35:06.480 --> 35:12.960 so all I can tell you is it's a sort of my current religious or spiritual sentiment is much closer 35:12.960 --> 35:19.600 to some form of Buddhism. Can you just without the reincarnation? Unfortunately, there's no evidence 35:19.600 --> 35:25.280 for reincarnation. So, can you describe the way Buddhism sees the world a little bit? 35:25.280 --> 35:31.920 Well, so, you know, they talk about so when I spent several meetings with the Dalai Lama and what 35:31.920 --> 35:36.720 always impressed me about him, he really unlike, for example, let's say the Pope or some Cardinal, 35:36.720 --> 35:42.560 he always emphasized minimizing the suffering of all creatures. So, they have this from the early 35:42.560 --> 35:47.520 beginning, they look at suffering in all creatures, not just in people, but in everybody, this 35:47.520 --> 35:52.880 universal. And of course, by degrees, right in the animal, general will have less is less capable 35:52.880 --> 35:59.520 of suffering than a well developed, normally developed human. And they think consciousness 35:59.520 --> 36:05.440 pervades in this universe. And they have these techniques, you know, you can think of them 36:05.440 --> 36:10.880 like mindfulness, etc. in meditation that tries to access sort of what they claim of this more 36:10.880 --> 36:15.840 fundamental aspect of reality. I'm not sure it's more fundamentalist. I think about it. There's 36:15.840 --> 36:20.240 a physical and then there's this inside view consciousness. And those are the two aspects 36:20.240 --> 36:24.880 that the only thing I have access to in my life. And you got to remember my conscious 36:24.880 --> 36:28.640 experience and your conscious experience comes prior to anything you know about physics, 36:28.640 --> 36:33.680 comes prior to knowledge about the universe and atoms and super strings and molecules and all of 36:33.680 --> 36:39.040 that. The only thing you directly are acquainted with is this world that's populated with things 36:39.040 --> 36:42.720 and images and sounds in your head and touches and all of that. 36:42.720 --> 36:49.120 I actually have a question. So it sounds like you kind of have a rich life. You talk about 36:49.120 --> 36:55.040 rock climbing and it seems like you really love literature and consciousness is all about 36:55.040 --> 37:00.160 experiencing things. So do you think that has helped your research on this topic? 37:00.640 --> 37:05.440 Yes, particularly if you think about it, the various states of what I'm going to do rock 37:05.440 --> 37:11.600 climbing. And now I do a rowing crew rowing and a bike every day, you can get into this thing called 37:11.600 --> 37:16.320 the zone. And I've always I want to I wanted about a particular with respect to consciousness 37:16.320 --> 37:21.120 because it's a strangely addictive state. You want to you want to appear. I mean, once people 37:21.120 --> 37:25.360 have it once, they want to keep on going back to it. And you wonder why what is it so addicting 37:25.360 --> 37:31.840 about it. And I think it's the experience of almost close to pure experience. Because in this 37:31.840 --> 37:35.840 in this zone, you're not conscious or inner voice anymore. There's always an inner voice 37:35.840 --> 37:38.960 nagging you, right? You have to do this, you have to do that, you have to pay your taxes, 37:38.960 --> 37:42.960 you had this fight with your ex and all of those things are always there. But when you're in the 37:42.960 --> 37:47.280 zone, all of that is gone. And you're just this in this wonderful state where you're fully out in 37:47.280 --> 37:53.440 the world, right? You're climbing or you're rowing or biking or doing soccer, whatever you're doing. 37:53.440 --> 37:59.280 And sort of consciousness sort of is this your all action, or in this case of pure experience, 37:59.280 --> 38:06.160 you're not action at all. But in both cases, you experience some aspect of you touch some basic 38:06.160 --> 38:13.600 part of conscious existence that is so basic and so deeply satisfying. You I think you touch the 38:13.600 --> 38:18.320 root of being. That's really what you're touching there, you're getting close to the root of being. 38:18.320 --> 38:24.400 And that's very different from intelligence. So what do you think about the simulation hypothesis, 38:24.400 --> 38:28.320 simulation theory, the idea that we all live in a computer simulation? Have you even ever? 38:28.320 --> 38:35.760 Rapture for nerds. Rapture for nerds. I think it's as likely as the hypothesis that 38:35.760 --> 38:41.440 engaged hundreds of scholars for many centuries, are we all just existing in the mind of God? 38:42.000 --> 38:46.320 Right. And this is just a modern version of it. It's it's it's equally plausible. 38:47.280 --> 38:51.280 People love talking about these sorts of things. I know their book written about the simulation 38:51.280 --> 38:56.480 hypothesis. If that's what people want to do, that's fine. It seems rather esoteric. It's never 38:56.480 --> 39:02.240 testable. But it's not useful for you to think of in those terms. So maybe connecting to the 39:02.240 --> 39:07.200 questions of free will, which you've talked about. I think I vaguely remember you saying 39:07.200 --> 39:11.760 that the idea that there's no free will, it makes you very uncomfortable. 39:13.280 --> 39:17.840 So what do you think about free will? And from the from a physics perspective, 39:17.840 --> 39:22.400 from a consciousness perspective, what does it all fit? Okay, so from the physics perspective, 39:22.400 --> 39:26.960 leaving aside quantum mechanics, we believe we live in a fully deterministic world, right? 39:26.960 --> 39:30.880 But then comes, of course, quantum mechanics. So now we know that certain things are in principle 39:30.880 --> 39:37.040 not predictable, which I, as you said, I prefer because the idea that at the initial condition 39:37.040 --> 39:40.800 of the universe, and then everything else, we're just acting out the initial condition of the 39:40.800 --> 39:47.120 universe that doesn't that doesn't make it's not a romantic notion. Certainly not. Right. Now, 39:47.120 --> 39:52.400 when it comes to consciousness, I think we do have certain freedom. We are much more constrained by 39:52.400 --> 39:57.040 physics, of course, and by our past and by our own conscious desires and what our parents told us 39:57.040 --> 40:01.200 and what our environment tells us, we all know that, right? There's hundreds of experiments 40:01.200 --> 40:06.480 that show how we can be influenced. But finally, in the in the final analysis, when you make a 40:06.480 --> 40:10.560 life and I'm talking really about critical decision, what you really think, should I marry, 40:10.560 --> 40:14.800 should I go to this school of that good, should I take this job with that job, 40:14.800 --> 40:20.240 should I cheat on my taxes or not? These sort of these are things where you really deliberate. 40:20.240 --> 40:25.200 And I think on those conditions, you are as free as you can be. When you when you bring your 40:25.200 --> 40:33.360 entire being your entire conscious being to that question and try to analyze it on all the 40:33.360 --> 40:37.920 the various conditions, then you take you make a decision you are as free as you can ever be. 40:38.560 --> 40:44.160 That is I think what what free will is it's not a will that's totally free to do anything it wants. 40:44.160 --> 40:50.880 That's not possible. Right. So as Jack mentioned, yet you actually read a blog about books you've 40:50.880 --> 41:01.680 read amazing books from Russian from Bulgakov. Yeah, Neil Gaiman, Carl Sagan, Murakami. So what 41:01.680 --> 41:07.360 is a book that early in your life transformed the way you saw the world, something that changed your 41:07.360 --> 41:14.160 life? Nietzsche, I guess, did. That's broke out Trista, because he talks about some of these problems. 41:14.160 --> 41:18.720 You know, he was one of the first discoverer of the unconscious. This is, you know, a little bit 41:18.720 --> 41:26.240 before Freud when it was in the air. And you know, he makes all these claims that people sort of 41:26.240 --> 41:33.360 under the guise of under the mass of charity actually are very non charitable. So he is sort 41:33.360 --> 41:40.480 of really the first discoverer of the great land of the of the unconscious. And that that really 41:40.480 --> 41:44.000 struck me. And what do you think? What do you think about the unconscious? What do you think 41:44.000 --> 41:49.760 about Freud? What do you think about these ideas? What's what's just like dark matter in the universe? 41:49.760 --> 41:54.560 What's over there in that unconscious? A lot. I mean, much more than we think, right? This is what 41:54.560 --> 42:00.080 a lot of last 100 years of research has shown. So I think he was a genius, misguided towards the 42:00.080 --> 42:04.800 end. But he was all he started out as a neuroscientist, right? He contributed. He did the studies on the 42:06.000 --> 42:11.600 on the lamp. He contributed himself to the neuron hypothesis, the idea that they're discrete units 42:11.600 --> 42:17.920 that we call nerve cells now. And then he started then he he wrote, you know, about the unconscious. 42:17.920 --> 42:22.720 And I think it's true. There's lots of stuff happening. You feel this particular when you're 42:22.720 --> 42:27.520 in a relationship and it breaks a thunder, right? And then you have this terrible, you can have 42:27.520 --> 42:33.200 love and hate and lust and anger and all of it is mixed in. And when you try to analyze yourself, 42:33.200 --> 42:40.080 why am I so upset? It's very, very difficult to penetrate to those basements, those caverns in 42:40.080 --> 42:45.440 your mind, because the prying eyes of conscience doesn't have access to those. But they're there 42:45.440 --> 42:50.240 in the amygdala or, you know, in lots of other places, they make you upset or angry or sad or 42:50.240 --> 42:55.360 depressed. And it's very difficult to try to actually uncover the reason you can go to a shrink, 42:55.360 --> 42:59.760 you can talk with your friend endlessly, you construct finally a story why this happened, 42:59.760 --> 43:03.760 why you love her or don't love her or whatever. But you don't really know whether that's actually 43:04.640 --> 43:08.400 that actually happened, because you simply don't have access to those parts of the brain. And 43:08.400 --> 43:13.120 they're very powerful. Do you think that's a feature or a bug of our brain? The fact that we 43:13.120 --> 43:19.120 have this deep, difficult to dive into subconscious? I think it's a feature, because otherwise, 43:19.120 --> 43:28.480 look, we are like any other brain or nervous system or computer, we are severely band limited. 43:28.480 --> 43:34.640 If we, if everything I do, every emotion I feel, every eye movements I make, if all of that had 43:34.640 --> 43:41.520 to be under the control of consciousness, I couldn't, I couldn't, I wouldn't be here. Right. 43:41.520 --> 43:46.880 So, so what you do early on your brain, you have to be conscious when you learn things like typing 43:46.880 --> 43:52.640 or like riding on a bike. But then you what you do, you train up route, I think that involved 43:52.640 --> 43:57.760 basal ganglia and stratum, you train up different parts of your brain. And then once you do it 43:57.760 --> 44:01.600 automatically like typing, you can show you do it much faster without even thinking about it, 44:01.600 --> 44:05.280 because you've got these highly specialized what Franz Krik and I called zombie agents 44:06.160 --> 44:09.680 that I sort of they're taking care of that while your consciousness can sort of worry 44:09.680 --> 44:14.640 about the abstract sense of the text you want to write. I think that's true for many, many things. 44:14.640 --> 44:20.400 But for the things like all the fights you had with an ex girlfriend, things that 44:20.960 --> 44:25.120 you would think are not useful to still linger somewhere in the subconscious. 44:25.120 --> 44:29.600 So that seems like a bug that it would stick there. You think it would be better if you can 44:29.600 --> 44:34.320 analyze and then get it out of the system or just forget it ever happened. You know, 44:34.320 --> 44:39.520 that that seems a very buggy kind of. Well, yeah, in general, we don't have and that's 44:39.520 --> 44:43.840 probably functional. We don't have an ability unless it's extreme, the outcases clinical 44:43.840 --> 44:48.880 dissociations, right? When people are heavily abused when they completely repress them, 44:48.880 --> 44:53.280 they the memory, but that doesn't happen in, in, in, you know, in normal people, 44:53.280 --> 44:58.800 we don't have an ability to remove traumatic memories. And of course, we suffer from that. 44:58.800 --> 45:03.680 On the other hand, probably if you have the ability to constantly wipe your memory, 45:03.680 --> 45:10.160 you probably do it to an extent that isn't useful to you. So yeah, it's a good question. 45:10.160 --> 45:15.760 It's a balance. So on the books, as Jack mentioned, correct me if I'm wrong, but 45:16.640 --> 45:21.280 broadly speaking, academia and different scientific disciplines, certainly in engineering, 45:21.920 --> 45:27.680 reading literature seems to be a rare pursuit. Perhaps I'm wrong in this, but that's in my 45:27.680 --> 45:34.880 experience, most people read much more technical texts and do not sort of escape or seek truth 45:34.880 --> 45:40.400 in literature. It seems like you do. So what do you think is the value? What do you think 45:40.400 --> 45:46.000 literature adds to the pursuit of scientific truth? Do you think it's good? It's useful for 45:47.120 --> 45:51.520 give you access to much wider array of human experiences? 45:52.320 --> 45:54.000 How valuable do you think it is? 45:54.000 --> 45:58.720 Well, if you want to understand human nature and nature in general, then I think you have to 45:58.720 --> 46:04.800 better understand a wide variety of experiences, not just sitting in a lab staring at a screen and 46:04.800 --> 46:09.200 having a face flashed onto you for 100 milliseconds and pushing a button. That's what I used to do. 46:09.200 --> 46:13.280 That's what most psychologists do. There's nothing wrong with that, but you need to consider 46:13.280 --> 46:18.800 lots of other strange states. And literature is a shortcut for this. 46:18.800 --> 46:22.880 Well, yeah, because literature, that's what literature is all about. All sorts of interesting 46:22.880 --> 46:28.640 experiences that people have, the contingency of it, the fact that women experience a world 46:28.640 --> 46:33.840 different, black people experience a world different. One way to experience that is reading 46:33.840 --> 46:38.320 all these different literature and try to find out. You see everything so relative. You read 46:38.320 --> 46:42.320 the books 100 years ago, they thought about certain problems very, very differently than 46:42.320 --> 46:47.120 us today. We today, like any culture, think we know it all. That's common to every culture. 46:47.120 --> 46:50.960 Every culture believes that it's heyday, they know it all. And then you realize, well, there's 46:50.960 --> 46:55.360 other ways of viewing the universe. And some of them may have lots of things in their favor. 46:56.560 --> 47:03.200 So this is a question I wanted to ask about timescale or scale in general. When you, with 47:03.200 --> 47:07.520 IIT or in general, try to think about consciousness, try to think about these ideas, 47:08.880 --> 47:17.520 kind of naturally thinking human timescales. Do you or and also entities that are sized 47:17.520 --> 47:21.680 close to humans? Do you think of things that are much larger, much smaller as containing 47:21.680 --> 47:31.200 consciousness? And do you think of things that take, you know, well, ages, eons to operate 47:31.200 --> 47:36.560 in their conscious cause effect? It's a very good question. So I think a lot of what small 47:36.560 --> 47:42.400 creatures, because experimentally, a lot of people work on flies and bees. So most people 47:42.400 --> 47:46.320 just think they're automata. They're just bugs, for heaven's sake. But if you look at their behavior, 47:46.320 --> 47:50.080 like bees, they can recognize individual humans. They have this very complicated 47:50.960 --> 47:54.880 way to communicate. If you've ever been involved, or you know, your parents, when they bought a 47:54.880 --> 47:59.760 house, what sort of agonizing decision that is. And bees have to do that once a year, right? 47:59.760 --> 48:03.200 When they swarm in the spring, and then they have this very elaborate way, they have three 48:03.200 --> 48:07.360 nuts scouts, they go to the individual sites, they come back, they have this power, this dance, 48:07.360 --> 48:11.520 literally where they dance for several days, they try to recruit other these very complicated 48:11.520 --> 48:16.480 decision weight. When they finally want to make a decision, the entire swarm, the scouts warm up 48:16.480 --> 48:20.320 the entire swarm, then go to one location, they don't go to 50 equation, they go to one location 48:20.320 --> 48:24.800 that the scouts have agreed upon by themselves. That's awesome. If we look at the circuit complexity, 48:24.800 --> 48:28.400 it's 10 times more denser than anything we have in our brain. Now they only have a million 48:28.400 --> 48:32.640 neurons, but the neurons are amazingly complex, complex behavior, very complicated circuitry. 48:32.640 --> 48:37.120 So there's no question, they experience something, their life is very different, they're tiny, 48:37.120 --> 48:44.240 they only live for, well, workers live maybe for two months. So I think an IIT tells you this, 48:44.240 --> 48:49.680 in principle, the substrate of consciousness is the substrate that maximizes the cause effect 48:49.680 --> 48:54.640 power over all possible spatial temple grains. So when I think about, for example, do you know 48:54.640 --> 48:59.840 the science fiction story, The Black Cloud? Okay, it's a classic by Fred Hoel, the astronomer. 48:59.840 --> 49:07.120 He has this cloud intervening between the earth and the sun and leading to some sort of global 49:07.120 --> 49:13.200 cooling that's written in the 50s. It turns out you can, using the radio dish, they communicate 49:13.200 --> 49:18.240 with actually an entity, it's actually an intelligent entity. And they sort of, they 49:18.240 --> 49:23.600 convince it to move away. So here you have a radical different entity. And in principle, 49:23.600 --> 49:28.640 IIT says, well, you can measure the integrated information in principle at least. And yes, 49:28.640 --> 49:34.640 if that, if the maximum of that occurs at a time scale of month, rather than an acid sort of fraction 49:34.640 --> 49:40.720 of a second, yes, and they would experience life where each moment is a month rather than, or 49:40.720 --> 49:47.600 microsecond, right, rather than a fraction of a second in the human case. And so there may be 49:47.600 --> 49:51.760 forms of consciousness that we simply don't recognize for what they are, because they are so 49:51.760 --> 49:56.960 radical different from anything you and I are used to. Again, that's why it's good to read 49:56.960 --> 50:03.120 or to watch science fiction movie or to think about this. Like this is, do you know Stanislaw 50:03.120 --> 50:07.520 Lem, this Polish science fiction writer, he wrote Solaris, it was turned into a Hollywood movie? 50:07.520 --> 50:13.280 Yes. His best novel was in the 60s, a very, very ingenious, an ingenious background. His most 50:13.280 --> 50:19.680 interesting novel is called The Victorious, where human civilization, they have this mission to 50:19.680 --> 50:25.280 this planet and everything is destroyed and they discover machines, humans got killed and then 50:25.280 --> 50:30.480 these machines took over and there was a machine evolution, a Darwinian evolution, he talks about 50:30.480 --> 50:37.200 this very vividly. And finally, the dominant, the dominant machine intelligence organism that 50:37.200 --> 50:42.960 survived are gigantic clouds of little hexagonal universal cell automata. This is written in the 50:42.960 --> 50:48.320 60s. So typically they're all lying on the ground individual by themselves, but in times of crisis 50:48.320 --> 50:54.080 they can communicate, they assemble into gigantic nets, into clouds of trillions of these particles 50:54.080 --> 50:59.760 and then they become hyper intelligent and they can beat anything that humans can throw at it. 50:59.760 --> 51:05.040 It's a very beautiful and compelling way you have an intelligence where finally the humans 51:05.040 --> 51:09.600 leave the planet, they simply unable to understand and comprehend this creature and they can say, 51:09.600 --> 51:14.000 well, either we can nuke the entire planet and destroy it or we just have to leave because 51:14.000 --> 51:19.520 fundamentally it's an alien, it's so alien from us and our ideas that we cannot communicate with them. 51:19.520 --> 51:25.440 Yeah, actually in conversation, cellular automata, Stephen Wolf from 51:25.440 --> 51:31.760 brought up is that there could be some ideas that you already have these artificial general 51:31.760 --> 51:36.000 intelligence like super smart or maybe conscious beings in the cellular automata, we just don't 51:36.000 --> 51:40.320 know how to talk to them. So it's the link with the communication, but you don't know what to do 51:40.320 --> 51:47.920 with it. So that's one sort of view is consciousness is only something you can measure. So it's not 51:47.920 --> 51:52.880 conscious if you can't measure it. But so you're making an ontological and an epistemic statement. 51:52.880 --> 51:58.640 One is there, it's just like seeing their multiverses, that might be true, but I can't 51:58.640 --> 52:03.600 communicate with them. I don't have any knowledge of them. That's an epistemic argument. Those are 52:03.600 --> 52:07.520 two different things. So it may well be possible. Look, another case that's happening right now, 52:07.520 --> 52:12.240 people are building these mini organoids. Do you know about this? So you can take stem cells from 52:12.240 --> 52:15.920 under your arm, put it in a dish, add for transcription factors and then you can induce 52:15.920 --> 52:20.800 them to grow into large, well large, they're a few millimeter, they're like a half a million 52:20.800 --> 52:25.840 neurons that look like nerve cells in a dish called mini organoids. At Harvard, at Stanford, 52:25.840 --> 52:29.760 everywhere they're building them. It may be well be possible that they're beginning to feel like 52:29.760 --> 52:34.560 something. But we can't really communicate with them right now. So people are beginning to think 52:34.560 --> 52:40.800 about the ethics of this. So yes, he may be perfectly right. But it's one question, are 52:40.800 --> 52:44.480 they conscious or not? It's totally separate question. How would I know? Those are two different 52:44.480 --> 52:52.480 things. Right. If you could give advice to a young researcher sort of dreaming of understanding or 52:52.480 --> 52:58.560 creating human level intelligence or consciousness, what would you say? 52:59.840 --> 53:07.680 Follow your dreams. Read widely. No, I mean, I suppose with discipline, what is the pursuit 53:07.680 --> 53:11.760 that they should take on? Is it neuroscience? Is it competition, cognitive science? Is it 53:11.760 --> 53:19.600 philosophy? Is it computer science or robotics? No, in a sense that, okay, so the only known 53:20.960 --> 53:25.520 system that have high level of intelligence is homo sapiens. So if you wanted to build it, 53:25.520 --> 53:30.080 it's probably good to continue to study closely what humans do. So cognitive neuroscience, 53:30.080 --> 53:34.400 you know, somewhere between cognitive neuroscience on the one hand, and some philosophy of mind, 53:34.400 --> 53:40.160 and then AI computer science. You can look at all the original ideas, neural networks, 53:40.160 --> 53:45.440 they all came from neuroscience, right? And reinforce whether it's snarky, Minsky building 53:45.440 --> 53:49.040 is snarky, or whether it's, you know, the early Schubel and Wiesel experiments at Harvard that 53:49.040 --> 53:54.880 then gave rise to networks and then multi layer networks. So it may well be possible. In fact, 53:54.880 --> 53:59.760 some people argue that to make the next big step in AI once we realize the limits of deep 53:59.760 --> 54:03.680 convolutional networks, they can do certain things, but they can't really understand. 54:03.680 --> 54:09.440 But they don't, they don't, they can't really, I can't really show them one image. I can show you a 54:09.440 --> 54:15.600 single image of somebody a pickpocket who steals a wallet from a purse, you immediately know that's 54:15.600 --> 54:20.800 a pickpocket. Now computer system would just say, well, it's a man, it's a woman, it's a purse, right? 54:20.800 --> 54:25.200 Unless you train this machine on showing it 100,000 pickpockets, right? So it doesn't, 54:25.200 --> 54:31.040 it doesn't have this easy understanding that you have, right? So, so some people make the argument 54:31.040 --> 54:34.640 in order to go to the next step where you really want to build machines that understand in a way 54:34.640 --> 54:39.280 you and I, we have to go to psychology. We need to understand how we do it and how our brains 54:39.280 --> 54:44.480 enable us to do it. And so therefore being on the cusp, it's also so exciting to try to understand 54:44.480 --> 54:49.040 better our nature and then to build to take some of those insight and build them. So I think the 54:49.040 --> 54:53.680 most exciting thing is somewhere in the interface between cognitive science, neuroscience, AI, 54:53.680 --> 54:55.520 computer science and philosophy of mind. 54:55.520 --> 55:00.160 Beautiful. Yeah, I'd say if there is, from the machine learning from, from the computer science, 55:00.160 --> 55:05.760 computer vision perspective, many of the research is kind of ignore the way the human brain works. 55:05.760 --> 55:12.160 Ignore even psychology or literature or studying the brain. I would hope Josh Tannenbaum talks 55:12.160 --> 55:18.640 about bringing that in more and more. And that's, yeah. So you worked on some amazing 55:18.640 --> 55:25.520 stuff throughout your life. What's the thing that you're really excited about? What's the mystery 55:25.520 --> 55:31.440 that you would love to uncover in the near term beyond, beyond all the mysteries that you already 55:31.440 --> 55:37.200 surrounded by? Well, so there's this structure called the claustrum. Okay, this is a structure. 55:37.200 --> 55:42.480 It's underneath our cortex. It's a big, you have one on the left and a right underneath this 55:42.480 --> 55:46.720 underneath the insular. It's very thin. It's like one millimeter. It's embedded in, in wiring, 55:46.720 --> 55:53.760 in white matters. It's very difficult to image. And it has, it has connection to every cortical 55:53.760 --> 55:58.640 region. And Francis Crick, the last paper he ever wrote, he dictated corrections the day he died 55:58.640 --> 56:05.360 in hospital on this paper. He now we hypothesize, well, because it has this unique anatomy, it gets 56:05.360 --> 56:11.280 input from every cortical area and projects back to every, every cortical area, that the function 56:11.280 --> 56:18.560 of this structure is similar. It's just a metaphor to the role of a conductor in a symphony orchestra. 56:18.560 --> 56:22.720 You have all the different cortical players. You have some that do motion, some that do theory of 56:22.720 --> 56:26.880 mind, some that infer social interaction and color and hearing and all the different modules and 56:26.880 --> 56:31.280 cortex. But of course, what consciousness is, consciousness puts it all together into one 56:31.280 --> 56:35.840 package, right? The binding problem, all of that. And this is really the function because it has 56:35.840 --> 56:41.280 relatively few neurons compared to cortex, but it, it talks, it sort of receives input from all of 56:41.280 --> 56:45.520 them, and it projects back to all of them. And so we're testing that right now. We've got this 56:45.520 --> 56:51.120 beautiful neuronal reconstruction in the mouse called crown of thorn, crown of thorn neurons that 56:51.120 --> 56:56.160 are in the classroom that have the most widespread connection of any nerve neuron I've ever seen. 56:56.160 --> 57:00.320 They're very deep. You have individual neurons that sit in the clouds from tiny, but then they have 57:00.320 --> 57:06.000 this single neuron that have this huge axonal tree that cover both ipsy and contralateral cortex 57:06.880 --> 57:11.280 and, and trying to turn using, you know, fancy tools like optogenetics, trying to turn those 57:11.280 --> 57:14.720 neurons on or off and study it. What happens in the, in the mouse? 57:14.720 --> 57:18.720 So this thing is perhaps where the parts become the whole. 57:19.920 --> 57:25.440 Perhaps it's one of the structures. It's a very good way of putting it where the, the individual 57:25.440 --> 57:31.760 parts turn into the whole of, the whole of the conscious experience. Well, with that, 57:32.640 --> 57:36.000 thank you very much for being here today. Thank you very much. 57:36.000 --> 57:56.560 I'll be back in a minute. Thanks Jack. Thank you very much.