Transcript
00:00:00 As part of MIT course 6S099 on artificial general intelligence, I got a chance to sit
00:00:05 down with Christoph Koch, who is one of the seminal figures in neurobiology, neuroscience,
00:00:12 and generally in the study of consciousness.
00:00:15 He is the president, the chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science
00:00:21 in Seattle.
00:00:22 From 1986 to 2013, he was a professor at Caltech.
00:00:27 Before that, he was at MIT, he is extremely well cited, over 100,000 citations.
00:00:33 His research, his writing, his ideas have had big impact on the scientific community
00:00:38 and the general public in the way we think about consciousness, in the way we see ourselves
00:00:43 as human beings.
00:00:44 He’s the author of several books, The Quest for Consciousness and Neurobiological Approach,
00:00:49 and a more recent book, Consciousness, Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist.
00:00:55 If you enjoy this conversation, this course, subscribe, click the little bell icon to make
00:01:00 sure you never miss a video, and in the comments, leave suggestions for any people you’d like
00:01:05 to see be part of the course or any ideas that you would like us to explore.
00:01:09 Thanks very much and I hope you enjoy.
00:01:11 Okay, before we delve into the beautiful mysteries of consciousness, let’s zoom out a little
00:01:17 bit and let me ask, do you think there’s intelligent life out there in the universe?
00:01:23 Yes, I do believe so.
00:01:25 We have no evidence of it, but I think the probabilities are overwhelming in favor of
00:01:29 it.
00:01:30 Given a universe where we have 10 to the 11 galaxies and each galaxy has between 10 to
00:01:35 the 11, 10 to the 12 stars and we know most stars have one or more planets.
00:01:41 So how does that make you feel?
00:01:43 It still makes me feel special because I have experiences.
00:01:49 I feel the world, I experience the world and independent of whether there are other creatures
00:01:55 out there, I still feel the world and I have access to this world in this very strange
00:02:00 compelling way and that’s the core of human existence.
00:02:04 Now, you said human, do you think if those intelligent creatures are out there, do you
00:02:10 think they experience their world?
00:02:13 Yes, if they are evolved, if they are a product of natural evolution as they would have to
00:02:18 be, they will also experience their own world.
00:02:20 The consciousness isn’t just human, you’re right, it’s much wider.
00:02:24 It may be spread across all of biology.
00:02:27 The only thing that we have special is we can talk about it.
00:02:30 Of course, not all people can talk about it.
00:02:33 Babies and little children can talk about it.
00:02:35 Patients who have a stroke in the left inferior frontal gyrus can talk about it, but most
00:02:41 normal adult people can talk about it and so we think that makes us special compared
00:02:45 to let’s say monkeys or dogs or cats or mice or all the other creatures that we share the
00:02:49 planet with, but all the evidence seems to suggest that they too experience the world
00:02:54 and so it’s overwhelmingly likely that aliens would also experience their world.
00:02:59 Of course, differently because they have a different sensorium, they have different sensors,
00:03:02 they have a very different environment, but the fact that I would strongly suppose that
00:03:08 they also have experiences.
00:03:09 They feel pain and pleasure and see in some sort of spectrum and hear and have all the
00:03:16 other senses.
00:03:17 Of course, their language, if they have one, would be different so we might not be able
00:03:21 to understand their poetry about the experiences that they have.
00:03:24 That’s correct.
00:03:26 So in a talk, in a video, I’ve heard you mention Siputzo, a dachshund that you came up with,
00:03:33 that you grew up with, it was part of your family when you were young.
00:03:37 First of all, you’re technically a Midwestern boy.
00:03:40 You just –
00:03:41 Technically.
00:03:42 Yes.
00:03:43 But after that, you traveled around a bit, hence a little bit of the accent.
00:03:48 You talked about Siputzo, the dachshund, having these elements of humanness, of consciousness
00:03:55 that you discovered.
00:03:56 So I just wanted to ask, can you look back in your childhood and remember when was the
00:04:01 first time you realized you yourself, sort of from a third person perspective, are a
00:04:07 conscious being?
00:04:08 This idea of stepping outside yourself and seeing there’s something special going on
00:04:15 here in my brain.
00:04:17 I can’t really actually – it’s a good question.
00:04:19 I’m not sure I recall a discrete moment.
00:04:21 I mean, you take it for granted because that’s the only world you know.
00:04:25 The only world I know and you know is the world of seeing and hearing voices and touching
00:04:33 and all the other things.
00:04:34 So it’s only much later at early – in my underguided days when I enrolled in physics
00:04:40 and in philosophy that I really thought about it and thought, well, this is really fundamentally
00:04:43 very, very mysterious and there’s nothing really in physics right now that explains
00:04:48 this transition from the physics of the brain to feelings.
00:04:52 Where do the feelings come in?
00:04:53 So you can look at the foundational equation of quantum mechanics, general relativity.
00:04:57 You can look at the periodic table of the elements.
00:04:59 You can look at the endless ATGC chat in our genes and nowhere is consciousness.
00:05:05 Yet I wake up every morning to a world where I have experiences.
00:05:09 And so that’s the heart of the ancient mind body problem.
00:05:12 How do experiences get into the world?
00:05:16 So what is consciousness?
00:05:19 Experience.
00:05:20 This is any experience.
00:05:24 Some people call it subjective feeling.
00:05:26 Some people call it phenomenology.
00:05:29 Some people call it qualia of the philosopher.
00:05:31 But they all denote the same thing.
00:05:32 It feels like something in the famous word of the philosopher Thomas Nagel.
00:05:37 It feels like something to be a bat or to be an American or to be angry or to be sad
00:05:45 or to be in love or to have pain.
00:05:49 And that is what experience is, any possible experience.
00:05:53 Could be as mundane as just sitting in a chair.
00:05:55 Could be as exalted as having a mystical moment in deep meditation.
00:06:01 Those are just different forms of experiences.
00:06:03 Experience.
00:06:04 So if you were to sit down with maybe the next, skip a couple generations, of IBM Watson,
00:06:11 something that won Jeopardy, what is the gap, I guess the question is, between Watson, that
00:06:18 might be much smarter than you, than us, than any human alive, but may not have experience,
00:06:26 what is the gap?
00:06:27 Well, so that’s a big, big question.
00:06:30 That’s occupied people for the last, certainly last 50 years since we, you know, since the
00:06:35 advent, the birth of computers.
00:06:39 That’s a question Alan Turing tried to answer.
00:06:40 And of course he did it in this indirect way by proposing a test, an operational test.
00:06:46 But that’s not really, that’s, you know, he tried to get at what does it mean for a person
00:06:50 to think, and then he had this test, right?
00:06:52 You lock them away, and then you have a communication with them, and then you try to guess after
00:06:57 a while whether that is a person or whether it’s a computer system.
00:07:00 There’s no question that now or very soon, you know, Alexa or Siri or, you know, Google
00:07:05 now will pass this test, right?
00:07:07 And you can game it, but you know, ultimately, certainly in your generation, there will be
00:07:12 machines that will speak with complete poise that will remember everything you ever said.
00:07:16 They’ll remember every email you ever had, like Samantha, remember in the movie Her?
00:07:21 Yeah.
00:07:22 There’s no question it’s going to happen.
00:07:24 But of course, the key question is, does it feel like anything to be Samantha in the movie
00:07:28 Her?
00:07:29 Or does it feel like anything to be Watson?
00:07:32 And there one has to very, very strongly think there are two different concepts here that
00:07:38 we co mingle.
00:07:39 There is the concept of intelligence, natural or artificial, and there is a concept of consciousness,
00:07:45 of experience, natural or artificial.
00:07:47 Those are very, very different things.
00:07:49 Now, historically, we associate consciousness with intelligence.
00:07:53 Why?
00:07:54 Because we live in a world, leaving aside computers, of natural selection, where we’re
00:07:59 surrounded by creatures, either our own kin that are less or more intelligent, or we go
00:08:04 across species.
00:08:06 Some are more adapted to a particular environment.
00:08:08 Others are less adapted, whether it’s a whale or dog, or you go talk about a paramecium
00:08:12 or a little worm.
00:08:15 And we see the complexity of the nervous system goes from one cell to specialized cells, to
00:08:21 a worm that has three nets, that has 30 percent of its cells are nerve cells, to creature
00:08:26 like us or like a blue whale that has 100 billion, even more nerve cells.
00:08:30 And so based on behavioral evidence and based on the underlying neuroscience, we believe
00:08:35 that as these creatures become more complex, they are better adapted to their particular
00:08:40 ecological niche, and they become more conscious, partly because their brain grows.
00:08:46 And we believe consciousness, unlike the ancient, ancient people thought most, almost every
00:08:50 culture thought that consciousness with intelligence has to do with your heart.
00:08:55 And you still see that today.
00:08:56 You see, honey, I love you with all my heart.
00:08:59 But what you should actually say is, no, honey, I love you with all my lateral hypothalamus.
00:09:04 And for Valentine’s Day, you should give your sweetheart, you know, hypothalamus, a piece
00:09:09 of chocolate and not a heart shaped chocolate.
00:09:11 Anyway, so we still have this language, but now we believe it’s a brain.
00:09:14 And so we see brains of different complexity and we think, well, they have different levels
00:09:18 of consciousness.
00:09:19 They’re capable of different experiences.
00:09:25 But now we confront the world where we know where we’re beginning to engineer intelligence.
00:09:32 And it’s radical unclear whether the intelligence we’re engineering has anything to do with
00:09:37 consciousness and whether it can experience anything.
00:09:40 Because fundamentally, what’s the difference?
00:09:42 Intelligence is about function.
00:09:44 Intelligence no matter exactly how you define it, sort of adaptation to new environments,
00:09:48 being able to learn and quickly understand, you know, the setup of this and what’s going
00:09:53 on and who are the actors and what’s going to happen next.
00:09:55 That’s all about function.
00:09:58 Consciousness is not about function.
00:10:00 Consciousness is about being.
00:10:02 It’s in some sense much fundamental.
00:10:05 You can see this in several cases.
00:10:08 You can see it, for instance, in the case of the clinic.
00:10:12 When you’re dealing with patients who are, let’s say, had a stroke or had were in traffic
00:10:17 accident, et cetera, they’re pretty much immobile.
00:10:20 Terri Schiavo, you may have heard historically, she was a person here in the 90s in Florida.
00:10:26 Her heart stood still.
00:10:27 She was reanimated.
00:10:28 And then for the next 14 years, she was what’s called in a vegetative state.
00:10:31 So there are thousands of people in a vegetative state.
00:10:34 So they’re, you know, they’re, you know, they’re like this.
00:10:36 Occasionally, they open their eyes for two, three, four, five, six, eight hours, and then
00:10:40 close their eyes.
00:10:41 They have sleep wake cycle.
00:10:42 Occasionally, they have behaviors.
00:10:44 They do like, you know, but there’s no way that you can establish a lawful relationship
00:10:50 between what you say or the doctor says or the mom says and what the patient does.
00:10:55 So there isn’t any behavior, yet in some of these people, there is still experience.
00:11:03 You can design and build brain machine interfaces where you can see there’s still experience
00:11:08 something.
00:11:09 And of course, these cases of locked in state, there’s this famous book called The Diving
00:11:13 Bell and the Butterfly, where you had an editor, a French editor, he had a stroke in the brainstem,
00:11:19 unable to move except his vertical eyes, eye movement.
00:11:22 He could just move his eyes up and down.
00:11:25 And he dictated an entire book.
00:11:27 And some people even lose this at the end.
00:11:30 All the evidence seems to suggest that they’re still in there.
00:11:33 In this case, you have no behavior, you have consciousness.
00:11:37 Second case is tonight, like all of us, you’re going to go to sleep, close your eyes, you
00:11:41 go to sleep, you will wake up inside your sleeping body, and you will have conscious
00:11:46 experiences.
00:11:47 They are different from everyday experience.
00:11:49 You might fly, you might not be surprised that you’re flying, you might meet a long
00:11:53 dead pet, childhood dog, and you’re not surprised that you’re meeting them.
00:11:58 But you have conscious experience of love, of hate, they can be very emotional.
00:12:02 Your body during this state, typically it’s REM state, sends an active signal to your
00:12:07 motor neurons to paralyze you.
00:12:09 It’s called atonia.
00:12:11 Because if you don’t have that, like some patients, what do you do?
00:12:14 You act out your dreams.
00:12:15 You get, for example, REM behavioral disorder, which is bad juju to get.
00:12:19 Okay.
00:12:20 Third case is pure experience.
00:12:22 So I recently had this, what some people call a mystical experience.
00:12:27 I went to Singapore and went into a flotation tank.
00:12:30 Yeah.
00:12:31 All right.
00:12:32 So this is a big tub filled with water, that’s body temperature and Epsom salt.
00:12:37 You strip completely naked, you lie inside of it, you close the lid.
00:12:41 Darkness.
00:12:42 Complete darkness, soundproof.
00:12:44 So very quickly, you become bodiless because you’re floating and you’re naked.
00:12:48 You have no rings, no watch, no nothing.
00:12:50 You don’t feel your body anymore.
00:12:52 There’s no sound, soundless.
00:12:54 There’s no photon, sightless, timeless, because after a while, early on you actually hear
00:13:01 your heart, but then you sort of adapt to that and then sort of the passage of time
00:13:06 ceases.
00:13:07 Yeah.
00:13:08 And if you train yourself, like in a meditation, not to think, early on you think a lot.
00:13:12 It’s a little bit spooky.
00:13:13 You feel somewhat uncomfortable or you think, well, I’m going to get bored.
00:13:17 And if you try to not to think actively, you become mindless.
00:13:20 There you are, bodiless, timeless, you know, soundless, sightless, mindless, but you’re
00:13:27 in a conscious experience.
00:13:28 You’re not asleep.
00:13:29 Yeah.
00:13:30 You’re not asleep.
00:13:31 You are a being of pure, you’re a pure being.
00:13:33 There isn’t any function.
00:13:34 You aren’t doing any computation.
00:13:36 You’re not remembering.
00:13:37 You’re not projecting.
00:13:38 You’re not planning.
00:13:39 Yet you are fully conscious.
00:13:40 You’re fully conscious.
00:13:41 There’s something going on there.
00:13:42 It could be just a side effect.
00:13:44 So what is the…
00:13:45 You mean epiphenomena.
00:13:47 So what’s the select, meaning why, what is the function of you being able to lay in this
00:13:57 sensory free deprivation tank and still have a conscious experience?
00:14:01 Evolutionary?
00:14:02 Evolutionary.
00:14:03 Obviously we didn’t evolve with flotation tanks in our environment.
00:14:06 I mean, so biology is notoriously bad at asking why question, telenormical question.
00:14:11 Why do we have two eyes?
00:14:12 Why don’t we have four eyes like some teachers or three eyes or something?
00:14:15 Well, no, there’s probably, there is a function to that, but we’re not very good at answering
00:14:20 those questions.
00:14:21 We can speculate endlessly where biology is very, or science is very good about mechanistic
00:14:25 question.
00:14:26 Why is there a charge in the universe?
00:14:27 Right?
00:14:28 We find a certain universe where there are positive and negative charges.
00:14:30 Why?
00:14:31 Why does quantum mechanics hold?
00:14:33 You know, why doesn’t some other theory hold?
00:14:36 Quantum mechanics holding our universe is very unclear why.
00:14:38 So telenormical question, why questions are difficult to answer.
00:14:42 There’s some relationship between complexity, brain processing power and consciousness.
00:14:49 But however, in these cases, in these three examples I gave, one is an everyday experience
00:14:53 at night.
00:14:54 The other one is trauma.
00:14:55 And third one is in principle, you can, everybody can have these sort of mystical experiences.
00:15:00 You have a dissociation of function from, of intelligence from consciousness.
00:15:09 You caught me asking a why question.
00:15:12 Let me ask a question that’s not a why question.
00:15:15 You’re giving a talk later today on the Turing test for intelligence and consciousness, drawing
00:15:19 lines between the two.
00:15:21 So is there a scientific way to say there’s consciousness present in this entity or not?
00:15:28 And to anticipate your answer, cause you, you will also, there’s a neurobiological answer.
00:15:34 So we can test the human brain, but if you take a machine brain that you don’t know tests
00:15:38 for yet, how would you even begin to approach a test if there’s consciousness present in
00:15:45 this thing?
00:15:46 Okay.
00:15:47 That’s a really good question.
00:15:48 So let me take it in two steps.
00:15:49 So as you point out for, for, for, for humans, let’s just stick with humans.
00:15:54 There’s now a test called the Zap and Zip is a procedure where you ping the brain using
00:15:58 transcranial magnetic stimulation.
00:16:00 You look at the electrical reverberations essentially using EG, and then you can measure
00:16:06 the complexity of this brain response.
00:16:07 And you can do this in awake people, in asleep, normal people, you can do it in awake people
00:16:12 and then anesthetize them.
00:16:13 You can do it in patients.
00:16:15 And it, it, it has a hundred percent accuracy that in all those cases, when you’re clear,
00:16:20 the patient or the person is either conscious or unconscious, the complexity is either high
00:16:23 or low.
00:16:24 And then you can adopt these techniques to similar creatures like monkeys and dogs and,
00:16:28 and, and mice that have very similar brains.
00:16:32 Now of course you, you point out that may not help you because we don’t have a cortex,
00:16:36 you know, and if I send a magnetic pulse into my iPhone or my computer, it’s probably going
00:16:40 to break something.
00:16:41 So we don’t have that.
00:16:42 So what we need ultimately, we need a theory of consciousness.
00:16:47 We can’t just rely on our intuition.
00:16:49 Our intuition is, well, yeah, if somebody talks, they’re conscious.
00:16:52 However, then there are all these patients, children, babies don’t talk, right?
00:16:56 But we believe that, that the babies also have conscious experiences, right?
00:17:01 And then there are all these patients I mentioned and they don’t talk.
00:17:04 When you dream, you can’t talk because you’re paralyzed.
00:17:07 So what we ultimately need, we can’t just rely on our intuition.
00:17:11 We need a theory of conscience that tells us what is it about a piece of matter?
00:17:15 What is it about a piece of highly excitable matter like the brain or like a computer that
00:17:19 gives rise to conscious experience?
00:17:21 We all believe, none of us believes anymore in the old story.
00:17:24 It’s a soul, right?
00:17:25 That used to be the most common explanation that most people accept that instill a lot
00:17:28 of people today believe, well, there’s, there’s God endowed only us with a special thing
00:17:34 that animals don’t have.
00:17:35 Rene Descartes famously said, a dog, if you hit it with your carriage may yell, may cry,
00:17:39 but it doesn’t have this special thing.
00:17:41 It doesn’t have the magic, the magic soul.
00:17:45 It doesn’t have res cogitans, the soul.
00:17:46 Now we believe that isn’t the case anymore.
00:17:48 So what is the difference between brains and, and these guys, silicon?
00:17:55 And in particular, once their behavior matches.
00:17:58 So if you have Siri or Alexa in 20 years from now that she can talk just as good as any
00:18:03 possible human, what grounds do you have to say she’s not conscious in particular, if
00:18:07 she says it’s of course she will, well, of course I’m conscious.
00:18:11 You ask her how are you doing?
00:18:12 And she’ll say, well, you know, they, they’ll generate some way to, of course she’ll behave
00:18:17 like a, like a person.
00:18:19 Now there’s several differences.
00:18:21 One is, so this relates to the problem, the very hard, why is consciousness a hard problem?
00:18:28 It’s because it’s subjective, right?
00:18:30 Only I have it, for only I know I have direct experience of my own consciousness.
00:18:36 I don’t have experience in your consciousness.
00:18:38 Now I assume as a sort of a Bayesian person who believes in probability theory and all
00:18:42 of that, you know, I can do, I can do an abduction to the, to the best available facts.
00:18:46 I deduce your brain is very similar to mine.
00:18:48 If I put you in a scanner, your brain is roughly going to behave the same way as I do.
00:18:53 If, if, if, you know, if I give you this muesli and ask you, how does it taste?
00:18:56 You tell me things that, you know, that, that I would also say more or less, right?
00:19:00 So I infer based on all of that, that you’re conscious.
00:19:02 Now with theory, I can’t do that.
00:19:03 So there I really need a theory that tells me what is it about, about any system, this
00:19:09 or this, that makes it conscious.
00:19:11 We have such a theory.
00:19:12 Yes.
00:19:13 So the integrated information theory, but let me first, maybe as an introduction for
00:19:17 people who are not familiar, Descartes, can you, you talk a lot about pan, panpsychism.
00:19:24 Can you describe what, uh, physicalism versus dualism?
00:19:29 This you, you mentioned the soul, what, what is the history of that idea?
00:19:33 What is the idea of panpsychism or no, the debate really, uh, out of which panpsychism
00:19:39 can, um, emerge of, of, of, um, dualism versus, uh, physicalism or do you not see panpsychism
00:19:48 as fitting into that?
00:19:49 No, you can argue there’s some, okay, so let’s step back.
00:19:52 So panpsychism is a very ancient belief that’s been around, uh, I mean, Plato and Aristotle
00:19:57 talks about it, uh, modern philosophers talk about it.
00:20:01 Of course, in Buddhism, the idea is very prevalent that, I mean, there are different versions
00:20:06 of it.
00:20:07 One version says everything is ensouled, everything, rocks and stones and dogs and people and forest
00:20:12 and iPhones, all of us all, right?
00:20:14 All matter is ensouled.
00:20:15 That’s sort of one version.
00:20:17 Another version is that all biology, all creatures, small or large, from a single cell to a giant
00:20:24 sequoia tree feel like something.
00:20:26 This one I think is somewhat more realistic.
00:20:28 Um, so the different versions, what do you mean by feel like something, have, have feelings,
00:20:33 have some kind of, it feels like something, it may well be possible that it feels like
00:20:37 something to be a paramecium.
00:20:39 I think it’s pretty likely it feels like something to be a bee or a mouse or a dog.
00:20:45 Sure.
00:20:46 So, okay.
00:20:47 So, so that you can see that’s also, so panpsychism is very broad and you can, so some people,
00:20:53 for example, Bertrand Russell, tried to advocate this, this idea, it’s called Rasselian Monism,
00:20:59 that that panpsychism is really physics viewed from the inside.
00:21:04 So the idea is that physics is very good at describing relationship among objects like
00:21:09 charges or like gravity, right?
00:21:12 You know, describe the relationship between curvature and mass distribution, okay?
00:21:16 That’s the relationship among things.
00:21:18 Physics doesn’t really describe the ultimate reality itself.
00:21:21 It’s just relationship among, you know, quarks or all these other stuff from like a third
00:21:25 person observer.
00:21:27 Yes.
00:21:28 Yes.
00:21:29 Yes.
00:21:30 And consciousness is what physics feels from the inside.
00:21:31 So my conscious experience, it’s the way the physics of my brain, particularly my cortex
00:21:36 feels from the inside.
00:21:38 And so if you are paramecium, you got to remember, you say paramecium, well, that’s a pretty
00:21:42 dumb creature.
00:21:43 It is, but it has already a billion different molecules, probably, you know, 5,000 different
00:21:49 proteins assembled in a highly, highly complex system that no single person, no computer
00:21:54 system so far on this planet has ever managed to accurately simulate.
00:21:59 Its complexity vastly escapes us.
00:22:01 Yes.
00:22:02 And it may well be that that little thing feels like a tiny bit.
00:22:04 Now, it doesn’t have a voice in the head like me.
00:22:06 It doesn’t have expectations.
00:22:07 You know, it doesn’t have all that complex things, but it may well feel like something.
00:22:12 Yeah.
00:22:13 So this is really interesting.
00:22:14 Can we draw some lines and maybe try to understand the difference between life, intelligence
00:22:20 and consciousness?
00:22:23 How do you see all of those?
00:22:25 If you had to define what is a living thing, what is a conscious thing and what is an intelligent
00:22:31 thing?
00:22:32 Do those intermix for you or are they totally separate?
00:22:34 Okay.
00:22:35 So A, that’s a question that we don’t have a full answer to.
00:22:38 A lot of the stuff we’re talking about today is full of mysteries and fascinating ones,
00:22:42 right?
00:22:43 For example, you can go to Aristotle, who’s probably the most important scientist and
00:22:46 philosopher who’s ever lived in, certainly in Western culture.
00:22:49 He had this idea, it’s called hylomorphism.
00:22:51 It’s quite popular these days, that there are different forms of soul.
00:22:55 The soul is really the form of something.
00:22:57 He says, all biological creatures have a vegetative soul.
00:23:00 That’s life principle.
00:23:01 Today, we think we understand something more than it is biochemistry and nonlinear thermodynamics.
00:23:07 Then he said they have a sensitive soul.
00:23:09 Only animals and humans have also a sensitive soul or a petitive soul.
00:23:15 They can see, they can smell, and they have drives.
00:23:18 They want to reproduce, they want to eat, et cetera.
00:23:21 And then only humans have what he called a rational soul, okay?
00:23:26 And that idea then made it into Christendom and then the rational soul is the one that
00:23:30 lives forever.
00:23:31 He was very unclear.
00:23:32 He wasn’t really, I mean, different readings of Aristotle give different, whether did he
00:23:35 believe that rational soul was immortal or not.
00:23:38 I probably think he didn’t.
00:23:39 But then, of course, that made it through Plato into Christianity, and then this soul
00:23:43 became immortal and then became the connection to God.
00:23:48 So you ask me, essentially, what is our modern conception of these three, Aristotle would
00:23:54 have called them different forms.
00:23:56 Life, we think we know something about it, at least life on this planet, right?
00:24:00 Although we don’t understand how to originate it, but it’s been difficult to rigorously
00:24:04 pin down.
00:24:05 You see this in modern definitions of death.
00:24:08 In fact, right now, there’s a conference ongoing, again, that tries to define legally and medically
00:24:14 what is death.
00:24:15 It used to be very simple.
00:24:16 Death is you stop breathing, your heart stops beating, you’re dead, totally uncontroversial.
00:24:21 If you’re unsure, you wait another 10 minutes.
00:24:23 If the patient doesn’t breathe, he’s dead.
00:24:25 Well, now we have ventilators, we have heart pacemakers, so it’s much more difficult to
00:24:29 define what death is.
00:24:30 Typically, death is defined as the end of life and life is defined before death.
00:24:35 Okay, so we don’t have really very good definitions.
00:24:39 Intelligence, we don’t have a rigorous definition.
00:24:41 We know something how to measure, it’s called IQ or G factors, right?
00:24:46 And we’re beginning to build it in a narrow sense, right?
00:24:50 Like go, AlphaGo and Watson and, you know, Google cars and Uber cars and all of that,
00:24:56 it’s still narrow AI and some people are thinking about artificial general intelligence.
00:25:01 But roughly, as we said before, it’s something to do with ability to learn and to adapt to
00:25:05 new environments.
00:25:06 But that is, as I said, also, it’s radical difference from experience.
00:25:11 And it’s very unclear if you build a machine that has AGI, it’s not at all a priori, it’s
00:25:16 not at all clear that this machine will have consciousness, it may or may not.
00:25:20 So let’s ask it the other way, do you think if you were to try to build an artificial
00:25:25 general intelligence system, do you think figuring out how to build artificial consciousness
00:25:31 would help you get to an AGI?
00:25:34 So or put another way, do you think intelligent requires consciousness?
00:25:40 In human, it goes hand in hand.
00:25:43 In human, or I think in biology, consciousness, intelligence goes hand in hand, quay is illusion
00:25:48 because the brain evolved to be highly complex, complexity via the theory integrated information
00:25:54 theory is sort of ultimately is what is closely tied to consciousness.
00:25:59 Ultimately it’s causal power upon itself.
00:26:01 And so in evolved systems, they go together.
00:26:05 In artificial system, particularly in digital machines, they do not go together.
00:26:09 And if you ask me point blank, is Alexa 20.0 in the year 2040, when she can easily pass
00:26:16 every Turing test, is she conscious?
00:26:18 No, even if she claims she’s conscious.
00:26:21 In fact, you could even do a more radical version of this thought experiment.
00:26:24 You can build a computer simulation of the human brain.
00:26:26 You know what Henry Markham in the Blue Brain Project or the Human Brain Project in Switzerland
00:26:31 is trying to do.
00:26:32 Let’s grant them all the success.
00:26:33 So in 10 years, we have this perfect simulation of the human brain.
00:26:36 Every neuron is simulated and it has a larynx and it has motor neurons.
00:26:40 It has a Broca’s area and of course they’ll talk and they’ll say, hi, I just woke up.
00:26:45 I feel great.
00:26:46 OK, even that computer simulation that can in principle map onto your brain will not
00:26:50 be conscious.
00:26:51 Why?
00:26:52 Because it simulates, it’s a difference between the simulated and the real.
00:26:56 So it simulates the behavior associated with consciousness.
00:26:59 It might be, it will, if it’s done properly, will have all the intelligence that that particular
00:27:04 person they’re simulating has.
00:27:06 But simulating intelligence is not the same as having conscious experiences.
00:27:10 And I give you a really nice metaphor that engineers and physicists typically get.
00:27:15 I can write down Einstein’s field equation, nine or ten equations that describe the link
00:27:19 in general relativity between curvature and mass.
00:27:23 I can do that.
00:27:24 I can run this on my laptop to predict that the central, the black hole at the center
00:27:29 of our galaxy will be so massive that it will twist space time around it so no light can
00:27:36 escape.
00:27:37 It’s a black hole.
00:27:38 But funny, have you ever wondered why doesn’t this computer simulation suck me in?
00:27:44 It simulates gravity, but it doesn’t have the causal power of gravity.
00:27:49 That’s a huge difference.
00:27:50 So it’s a difference between the real and the simulator, just like it doesn’t get wet
00:27:55 inside a computer when the computer runs code that simulates a weather storm.
00:27:59 And so in order to have, to have artificial consciousness, you have to give it the same
00:28:04 causal power as the human brain.
00:28:06 You have to build so called a neuromorphic machine that has hardware that is very similar
00:28:11 to the human brain, not a digital clocked phenomenon computer.
00:28:16 So that’s, just to clarify though, you think that consciousness is not required to create
00:28:24 human level intelligence.
00:28:25 It seems to accompany in the human brain, but for machine not.
00:28:30 That’s correct.
00:28:31 So maybe just because this is AGI, let’s dig in a little bit about what we mean by intelligence.
00:28:39 So one thing is the G factor, these kind of IQ tests of intelligence.
00:28:44 But I think if you, maybe another way to say, so in 2040, 2050, people will have Siri that
00:28:51 is just really impressive.
00:28:54 Do you think people will say Siri is intelligent?
00:28:57 Yes.
00:28:58 Intelligence is this amorphous thing.
00:29:01 So to be intelligent, it seems like you have to have some kind of connections with other
00:29:05 human beings in a sense that you have to impress them with your intelligence.
00:29:11 And there feels, you have to somehow operate in this world full of humans.
00:29:17 And for that, there feels like there has to be something like consciousness.
00:29:21 So you think you can have just the world’s best natural NLP system, natural language
00:29:26 understanding generation, and that will be, that will get us happy and say, you know what,
00:29:32 we’ve created an AGI.
00:29:33 I don’t know happy, but yes, I do believe we can get what we call high level functional
00:29:40 intelligence, particular sort of the G, you know, this fluid like intelligence that we
00:29:46 cherish, particularly at a place like MIT, right, in machines.
00:29:51 I see a priori no reasons, and I see a lot of reason to believe it’s going to happen
00:29:54 very, you know, over the next 50 years or 30 years.
00:29:58 So for beneficial AI, for creating an AI system that’s, so you mentioned ethics, that is exceptionally
00:30:06 intelligent but also does not do, does, you know, aligns its values with our values as
00:30:11 humanity.
00:30:12 Do you think then it needs consciousness?
00:30:14 Yes, I think that that is a very good argument that if we’re concerned about AI and the threat
00:30:19 of AI, a la Nick Bostrom, existentialist threat, I think having an intelligence that has empathy,
00:30:26 right, why do we find abusing a dog, why do most of us find that abhorrent, abusing any
00:30:32 animal, right?
00:30:33 Why do we find that abhorrent because we have this thing called empathy, which if you look
00:30:37 at the Greek really means feeling with, I feel a path of empathy, I have feeling with
00:30:42 you.
00:30:43 I see somebody else suffer that isn’t even my conspecific, it’s not a person, it’s not
00:30:48 my wife or my kids, it’s a dog, but I feel naturally most of us, not all of us, most
00:30:53 of us will feel emphatic.
00:30:55 And so it may well be in the long term interest of survival of homo sapiens sapiens that if
00:31:02 we do build AGI and it really becomes very powerful that it has an emphatic response
00:31:08 and doesn’t just exterminate humanity.
00:31:11 So as part of the full conscious experience to create a consciousness, artificial or in
00:31:17 our human consciousness, do you think fear, maybe we’re going to get into the earlier
00:31:23 days with Nietzsche and so on, but do you think fear and suffering are essential to
00:31:29 have consciousness?
00:31:30 Do you have to have the full range of experience to have a system that has experience or can
00:31:37 you have a system that only has very particular kinds of very positive experiences?
00:31:41 Look you can have in principle, people have done this in the rat where you implant an
00:31:46 electrode in the hypothalamus, the pleasure center of the rat and the rat stimulates itself
00:31:51 above and beyond anything else.
00:31:52 It doesn’t care about food or natural sex or drink anymore, it just stimulates itself
00:31:57 because it’s such a pleasurable feeling.
00:32:00 I guess it’s like an orgasm just you have all day long.
00:32:04 And so a priori I see no reason why you need a great variety.
00:32:11 Now clearly to survive that wouldn’t work, right?
00:32:14 But if I’d engineered artificially, I don’t think you need a great variety of conscious
00:32:22 experience.
00:32:23 You could have just pleasure or just fear.
00:32:25 It might be a terrible existence, but I think that’s possible at least on conceptual logical
00:32:30 ground.
00:32:31 Because any real creature whether artificially engineered, you want to give it fear, the
00:32:35 fear of extinction that we all have.
00:32:38 And you also want to give it positive repetitive states, states that you want the machine encouraged
00:32:44 to do because they give the machine positive feedback.
00:32:48 So you mentioned panpsychism, to jump back a little bit, everything having some kind
00:32:54 of mental property.
00:32:57 How do you go from there to something like human consciousness?
00:33:02 So everything having some elements of consciousness, is there something special about human consciousness?
00:33:08 So it’s not everything.
00:33:10 Like a spoon, the form of panpsychism I think about doesn’t ascribe consciousness to anything
00:33:17 like this, the spoon on my liver.
00:33:20 However, the theory, the integrated information theory does say that the system, even one
00:33:26 that looks from the outside relatively simple, at least if they have this internal causal
00:33:30 power, it does feel like something.
00:33:35 The theory a priori doesn’t say anything what’s special about human.
00:33:38 Biologically we know the one thing that’s special about human is we speak and we have
00:33:44 an overblown sense of our own importance.
00:33:48 We believe we’re exceptional and we’re just God’s gift to the universe.
00:33:54 But behaviorally the main thing that we have, we can plan over the long term, we have language
00:33:58 and that gives us an enormous amount of power and that’s why we are the current dominant
00:34:03 species on the planet.
00:34:05 So you mentioned God, you grew up a devout Roman Catholic family, so with consciousness
00:34:15 you’re sort of exploring some really deeply fundamental human things that religion also
00:34:21 touches on.
00:34:22 Where does religion fit into your thinking about consciousness?
00:34:27 You’ve grown throughout your life and changed your views on religion as far as I understand.
00:34:31 Yeah, I mean I’m now much closer to, I’m not a Roman Catholic anymore, I don’t believe
00:34:37 there’s sort of this God, the God I was educated to believe in, sits somewhere in the fullness
00:34:43 of time, I’ll be united in some sort of everlasting bliss, I just don’t see any evidence for that.
00:34:49 Look, the world, the night is large and full of wonders, there are many things that I don’t
00:34:55 understand, I think many things that we as a cult, look we don’t even understand more
00:34:59 than 4% of all the universe, dark matter, dark energy, we have no idea what it is, maybe
00:35:03 it’s lost socks, what do I know?
00:35:06 So all I can tell you is it’s sort of my current religious or spiritual sentiment is much closer
00:35:13 to some form of Buddhism, without the reincarnation unfortunately, there’s no evidence for it
00:35:19 than reincarnation.
00:35:20 So can you describe the way Buddhism sees the world a little bit?
00:35:25 Well so they talk about, so when I spent several meetings with the Dalai Lama and what always
00:35:32 impressed me about him, he really, unlike for example let’s say the Pope or some Cardinal,
00:35:36 he always emphasized minimizing the suffering of all creatures.
00:35:40 So they have this, from the early beginning they look at suffering in all creatures, not
00:35:45 just in people, but in everybody, this universal and of course by degrees, an animal in general
00:35:52 is less capable of suffering than a well developed, normally developed human and they think consciousness
00:35:59 pervades in this universe and they have these techniques, you can think of them like mindfulness
00:36:06 etc. and meditation that tries to access what they claim of this more fundamental aspect
00:36:12 of reality.
00:36:13 I’m not sure it’s more fundamental, I think about it, there’s the physical and then there’s
00:36:17 this inside view, consciousness and those are the two aspects that’s the only thing
00:36:21 I have access to in my life and you’ve got to remember my conscious experience and your
00:36:25 conscious experience comes prior to anything you know about physics, comes prior to knowledge
00:36:29 about the universe and atoms and super strings and molecules and all of that.
00:36:34 The only thing you directly are acquainted with is this world that’s populated with things
00:36:39 in images and sounds in your head and touches and all of that.
00:36:43 I actually have a question, so it sounds like you kind of have a rich life, you talk about
00:36:49 rock climbing and it seems like you really love literature and consciousness is all about
00:36:55 experiencing things, so do you think that has helped your research on this topic?
00:37:00 Yes, particularly if you think about it, the various states, so for example when you do
00:37:05 rock climbing or now I do rowing, crew rowing and a bike every day, you can get into this
00:37:11 thing called the zone and I’ve always wanted about it, particularly with respect to consciousness
00:37:16 because it’s a strangely addictive state.
00:37:20 Once people have it once, they want to keep on going back to it and you wonder what is
00:37:24 it so addicting about it and I think it’s the experience of almost close to pure experience
00:37:30 because in this zone, you’re not conscious of inner voice anymore, there’s always inner
00:37:35 voice nagging you, you have to do this, you have to do that, you have to pay your taxes,
00:37:39 you have to fight with your ex and all of those things, they’re always there.
00:37:42 But when you’re in the zone, all of that is gone and you’re just in this wonderful state
00:37:46 where you’re fully out in the world, you’re climbing or you’re rowing or biking or doing
00:37:51 soccer or whatever you’re doing and sort of consciousness is this, you’re all action or
00:37:57 in this case of pure experience, you’re not action at all but in both cases, you experience
00:38:02 some aspect of conscious, you touch some basic part of conscious existence that is so basic
00:38:10 and so deeply satisfying.
00:38:12 You I think you touch the root of being, that’s really what you’re touching there, you’re
00:38:16 getting close to the root of being and that’s very different from intelligence.
00:38:21 So what do you think about the simulation hypothesis, simulation theory, the idea that
00:38:25 we all live in a computer simulation?
00:38:28 Rapture for nerds.
00:38:30 Rapture for nerds.
00:38:31 I think it’s as likely as the hypothesis had engaged hundreds of scholars for many centuries,
00:38:39 are we all just existing in the mind of God?
00:38:42 And this is just a modern version of it, it’s equally plausible.
00:38:47 People love talking about these sort of things, I know they’re book written about this simulation
00:38:51 hypothesis, if that’s what people want to do, that’s fine, it seems rather esoteric,
00:38:56 it’s never testable.
00:38:58 But it’s not useful for you to think of in those terms, so maybe connecting to the questions
00:39:02 of free will which you’ve talked about, I vaguely remember you saying that the idea
00:39:07 that there’s no free will, it makes you very uncomfortable.
00:39:13 So what do you think about free will from a physics perspective, from a conscious perspective,
00:39:19 what does it all fit?
00:39:20 Okay, so from the physics perspective, leaving aside quantum mechanics, we believe we live
00:39:24 in a fully deterministic world, right?
00:39:27 But then comes of course quantum mechanics, so now we know that certain things are in
00:39:30 principle not predictable, which as you said I prefer, because the idea that the initial
00:39:36 condition of the universe and then everything else, we’re just acting out the initial condition
00:39:40 of the universe, that doesn’t…
00:39:42 It’s not a romantic notion.
00:39:45 Certainly not.
00:39:47 Now when it comes to consciousness, I think we do have certain freedom.
00:39:50 We are much more constrained by physics of course and by our past and by our own conscious
00:39:55 desires and what our parents told us and what our environment tells us.
00:39:59 We all know that, right?
00:40:00 There’s hundreds of experiments that show how we can be influenced.
00:40:03 But finally in the final analysis, when you make a life – and I’m talking really about
00:40:08 critical decision where you really think, should I marry, should I go to this school
00:40:11 or that school, should I take this job or that job, should I cheat on my taxes or not?
00:40:18 These are things where you really deliberate and I think under those conditions, you are
00:40:22 as free as you can be.
00:40:24 When you bring your entire being, your entire conscious being to that question and try to
00:40:31 analyze it under all the various conditions, then you make a decision, you are as free
00:40:37 as you can ever be.
00:40:38 That is I think what free will is.
00:40:40 It’s not a will that’s totally free to do anything it wants.
00:40:44 That’s not possible.
00:40:45 Right.
00:40:46 So as Jack mentioned, you actually write a blog about books you’ve read, amazing books
00:40:52 from, I’m Russian, from Bulgakov, Neil Gaiman, Carl Sagan, Murakami.
00:41:01 So what is a book that early in your life transformed the way you saw the world, something
00:41:06 that changed your life?
00:41:09 Nietzsche I guess did.
00:41:10 That’s Brooks R. Truster because he talks about some of these problems.
00:41:14 He was one of the first discoverer of the unconscious.
00:41:17 This is a little bit before Freud when he was in the air.
00:41:23 He makes all these claims that people sort of under the guise or under the mass of charity
00:41:29 actually are very noncharitable.
00:41:32 So he is sort of really the first discoverer of the great land of the unconscious and that
00:41:39 really struck me.
00:41:41 And what do you think about the unconscious, what do you think about Freud, what do you
00:41:45 think about these ideas?
00:41:47 Just like dark matter in the universe, what’s over there in that unconscious?
00:41:51 A lot.
00:41:52 I mean much more than we think.
00:41:53 This is what a lot of last 100 years of research has shown.
00:41:57 So I think he was a genius, misguided towards the end, but he started out as a neuroscientist.
00:42:02 He contributed, he did the studies on the lamprey, he contributed himself to the neuron
00:42:09 hypothesis, the idea that there are discrete units that we call nerve cells now.
00:42:13 And then he wrote about the unconscious and I think it’s true, there’s lots of stuff happening.
00:42:20 You feel this particular when you’re in a relationship and it breaks asunder, right?
00:42:25 And then you have this terrible, you can have love and hate and lust and anger and all of
00:42:29 it’s mixed in.
00:42:31 And when you try to analyze yourself, why am I so upset?
00:42:35 It’s very, very difficult to penetrate to those basements, those caverns in your mind
00:42:41 because the prying eyes of conscious doesn’t have access to those, but they’re there in
00:42:45 the amygdala or lots of other places.
00:42:48 They make you upset or angry or sad or depressed and it’s very difficult to try to actually
00:42:53 uncover the reason.
00:42:54 You can go to a shrink, you can talk with your friend endlessly, you construct finally
00:42:58 a story why this happened, why you love her or don’t love her or whatever, but you don’t
00:43:02 really know whether that actually happened because you simply don’t have access to those
00:43:07 parts of the brain and they’re very powerful.
00:43:09 Do you think that’s a feature or a bug of our brain?
00:43:12 The fact that we have this deep, difficult to dive into subconscious?
00:43:16 I think it’s a feature because otherwise, look, we are like any other brain or nervous
00:43:24 system or computer, we are severely band limited.
00:43:28 If everything I do, every emotion I feel, every eye movements I make, if all of that
00:43:34 had to be under the control of consciousness, I wouldn’t be here.
00:43:42 What you do early on, your brain, you have to be conscious when you learn things like
00:43:46 typing or like riding on a bike, but then what you do, you train up routes, I think
00:43:52 that involve basal ganglia and striatum.
00:43:54 You train up different parts of your brain and then once you do it automatically like
00:43:58 typing, you can show you do it much faster without even thinking about it because you’ve
00:44:02 got these highly specialized, what Frans Krik and I call zombie agents, they’re taking care
00:44:07 of that while your consciousness can sort of worry about the abstract sense of the text
00:44:11 you want to write.
00:44:12 I think that’s true for many, many things.
00:44:15 But for the things like all the fights you had with an ex girlfriend, things that you
00:44:21 would think are not useful to still linger somewhere in the subconscious.
00:44:25 So that seems like a bug that it would stick to there.
00:44:28 You think it would be better if you can analyze it and then get it out of the system.
00:44:31 Better to get it out of the system or just forget it ever happened.
00:44:34 That seems a very buggy kind of.
00:44:37 Well yeah, in general we don’t have, and that’s probably functional, we don’t have an ability
00:44:41 unless it’s extreme, there are cases, clinical dissociations, right?
00:44:45 When people are heavily abused, when they completely repress the memory, but that doesn’t
00:44:50 happen in normal people.
00:44:53 We don’t have an ability to remove traumatic memories and of course we suffer from that.
00:44:59 On the other hand, probably if you had the ability to constantly wipe your memory, you’d
00:45:04 probably do it to an extent that isn’t useful to you.
00:45:07 So yeah, it’s a good question to balance.
00:45:11 So on the books, as Jack mentioned, correct me if I’m wrong, but broadly speaking, academia
00:45:18 and the different scientific disciplines, certainly in engineering, reading literature
00:45:23 seems to be a rare pursuit.
00:45:26 So I’m wrong on this, but that’s in my experience, most people read much more technical text
00:45:30 and do not sort of escape or seek truth in literature.
00:45:36 It seems like you do.
00:45:38 So what do you think is the value, what do you think literature adds to the pursuit of
00:45:42 scientific truth?
00:45:43 Do you think it’s good, it’s useful for everybody?
00:45:46 Gives you access to a much wider array of human experiences.
00:45:52 How valuable do you think it is?
00:45:54 Well if you want to understand human nature and nature in general, then I think you have
00:45:58 to better understand a wide variety of experiences, not just sitting in a lab staring at a screen
00:46:04 and having a face flashed onto you for a hundred milliseconds and pushing a button.
00:46:08 That’s what I used to do, that’s what most psychologists do.
00:46:10 There’s nothing wrong with that, but you need to consider lots of other strange states.
00:46:16 And literature is a shortcut for this.
00:46:18 Well yeah, because literature, that’s what literature is all about, all sorts of interesting
00:46:22 experiences that people have, the contingency of it, the fact that women experience the
00:46:28 world different, black people experience the world different.
00:46:32 The one way to experience that is reading all these different literature and try to
00:46:35 find out.
00:46:36 You see, everything is so relative.
00:46:37 You read a book 300 years ago, they thought about certain problems very, very differently
00:46:41 than us today.
00:46:43 We today, like any culture, think we know it all.
00:46:46 That’s common to every culture.
00:46:47 Every culture believes at its heyday they know it all.
00:46:50 And then you realize, well, there’s other ways of viewing the universe and some of them
00:46:53 may have lots of things in their favor.
00:46:56 So this is a question I wanted to ask about time scale or scale in general.
00:47:02 When you, with IIT or in general, try to think about consciousness, try to think about these
00:47:07 ideas, we kind of naturally think in human time scales, and also entities that are sized
00:47:17 close to humans.
00:47:18 Do you think of things that are much larger and much smaller as containing consciousness?
00:47:22 And do you think of things that take, you know, eons to operate in their conscious cause
00:47:32 effect?
00:47:33 That’s a very good question.
00:47:35 So I think a lot about small creatures because experimentally, you know, a lot of people
00:47:38 work on flies and bees, right?
00:47:41 So most people just think they are automata, they’re just bugs for heaven’s sake, right?
00:47:45 But if you look at their behavior, like bees, they can recognize individual humans.
00:47:48 They have this very complicated way to communicate.
00:47:52 If you’ve ever been involved or you know your parents when they bought a house, what sort
00:47:55 of agonizing decision that is.
00:47:57 And bees have to do that once a year, right, when they swarm in the spring.
00:48:01 And then they have this very elaborate way, they have free and scouts, they go to the
00:48:04 individual sites, they come back, they have this power, this dance, literally, where they
00:48:08 dance for several days, they try to recruit other deets, this very complicated decision
00:48:12 rate, when they finally, once they make a decision, the entire swarm, the scouts warm
00:48:16 up the entire swarm and then go to one location.
00:48:18 They don’t go to 50 locations, they go to one location that the scouts have agreed upon
00:48:21 by themselves.
00:48:22 That’s awesome.
00:48:23 If we look at the circuit complexity, it’s 10 times more denser than anything we have
00:48:27 in our brain.
00:48:28 Now they only have a million neurons, but the neurons are amazingly complex.
00:48:31 Complex behavior, very complicated circuitry, so there’s no question they experience something,
00:48:35 their life is very different, they’re tiny, they only live, you know, for, well, workers
00:48:39 live maybe for two months.
00:48:42 So I think, and IIT tells you this, in principle, the substrate of consciousness is the substrate
00:48:47 that maximizes the cause effect power over all possible spatial temporal grains.
00:48:53 So when I think about, for example, do you know the science fiction story, The Black
00:48:55 Cloud?
00:48:56 Okay, it’s a classic by Fred Hoyle, the astronomer.
00:49:00 He has this cloud intervening between the earth and the sun and leading to some sort
00:49:06 of, to global cooling, this is written in the 50s.
00:49:09 It turns out you can, using the radio dish, they communicate with actually an entity,
00:49:14 it’s actually an intelligent entity, and they sort of, they convince it to move away.
00:49:19 So here you have a radical different entity, and in principle, IIT says, well, you can
00:49:24 measure the integrated information, in principle at least, and yes, if the maximum of that
00:49:30 occurs at a time scale of months, rather than in assets for a fraction of a second, yes,
00:49:35 then they would experience life where each moment is a month rather than, or microsecond,
00:49:41 right, rather than a fraction of a second in the human case.
00:49:46 And so there may be forms of consciousness that we simply don’t recognize for what they
00:49:50 are because they are so radical different from anything you and I are used to.
00:49:55 Again, that’s why it’s good to read or to watch science fiction movies, well, to think
00:49:59 about this.
00:50:00 Do you know Stanislav Lem, this Polish science fiction writer, he wrote Solaris and was turned
00:50:06 into a Hollywood movie?
00:50:07 Yes.
00:50:08 His best novel is in the 60s, a very engineer, he’s an engineer in background.
00:50:13 His most interesting novel is called The Victorious, where human civilization, they have this
00:50:19 mission to this planet and everything is destroyed and they discover machines, humans got killed
00:50:25 and then these machines took over and there was this machine evolution, Darwinian evolution,
00:50:30 he talks about this very vividly.
00:50:32 And finally, the dominant machine intelligence organism that survived were gigantic clouds
00:50:39 of little hexagonal universal cellular automata.
00:50:42 This was written in the 60s, so typically they’re all lying on the ground individual
00:50:46 by themselves, but in times of crisis, they can communicate, they assemble into gigantic
00:50:50 nets into clouds of trillions of these particles and then they become hyper intelligent and
00:50:55 they can beat anything that humans can throw at it.
00:51:00 It’s very beautiful and compelling where you have an intelligence where finally the humans
00:51:05 leave the planet, they’re simply unable to understand and comprehend this creature.
00:51:09 They can say, well, either we can nuke the entire planet and destroy it or we just have
00:51:13 to leave because fundamentally it’s an alien, it’s so alien from us and our ideas that we
00:51:18 cannot communicate with them.
00:51:20 Yeah, actually in conversation, so you’re talking to us, Steven Wolf from Brought Up
00:51:25 is that there could be ideas that you already have these artificial general intelligence
00:51:32 like super smart or maybe conscious beings in the cellular automata, we just don’t know
00:51:36 how to talk to them.
00:51:37 So it’s the language of communication, but you don’t know what to do with it.
00:51:41 So that’s one sort of view is consciousness is only something you can measure.
00:51:46 So it’s not conscious if you can’t measure it.
00:51:50 So you’re making an ontological and an epistemic statement.
00:51:53 One is it’s just like seeing the multiverses, that might be true, but I can’t communicate
00:51:59 with them.
00:52:00 I can’t have any knowledge of them.
00:52:01 That’s an epistemic argument.
00:52:02 Right?
00:52:03 So those are two different things.
00:52:04 So it may well be possible.
00:52:05 Look, in another case that’s happening right now, people are building these mini organoids.
00:52:09 Do you know what this is?
00:52:10 So you can take stem cells from under your arm, put it in a dish, add four transcription
00:52:14 factors and then you can induce them to grow into large, well, large, they’re a few millimeters.
00:52:19 They’re like a half a million neurons that look like nerve cells in a dish called mini
00:52:23 organoids at Harvard, at Stanford, everywhere they’re building them.
00:52:27 It may well be possible that they’re beginning to feel like something, but we can’t really
00:52:31 communicate with them right now.
00:52:33 So people are beginning to think about the ethics of this.
00:52:36 So yes, he may be perfectly right, but it’s one question, are they conscious or not?
00:52:41 It’s a totally separate question.
00:52:43 How would I know?
00:52:44 Those are two different things.
00:52:45 If you could give advice to a young researcher, sort of dreaming of understanding or creating
00:52:52 human level intelligence or consciousness, what would you say?
00:52:59 Just follow your dreams.
00:53:01 Read widely.
00:53:02 No, I mean, I suppose with discipline, what is the pursuit that they should take on?
00:53:08 Is it neuroscience?
00:53:09 Is it computational cognitive science?
00:53:11 Is it philosophy?
00:53:12 Is it computer science or robotics?
00:53:15 No, in a sense that, okay, so the only known system that have high level of intelligence
00:53:22 is homo sapiens.
00:53:24 So if you wanted to build it, it’s probably good to continue to study closely what humans
00:53:28 do.
00:53:29 So cognitive neuroscience, you know, somewhere between cognitive neuroscience on the one hand
00:53:32 and some philosophy of mind and then AI, AI computer science.
00:53:37 You can look at all the original ideas in your network, they all came from neuroscience,
00:53:42 right?
00:53:43 Reinforce whether it’s Snarky, Minsky building is Snarky or whether it’s, you know, the early
00:53:47 Hubel and Wiesel experiments at Harvard that then gave rise to networks and then multi
00:53:50 layer networks.
00:53:52 So it may well be possible, in fact, some people argue that to make the next big step
00:53:57 in AI once we realize the limits of deep convolutional networks, they can do certain things, but
00:54:02 they can’t really understand.
00:54:03 They don’t, they can’t really, I can’t really show them one image.
00:54:08 I can show you a single image of somebody, a pickpocket who steals a wallet from a purse.
00:54:14 You immediately know that’s a pickpocket.
00:54:17 Now computer system would just say, well, it’s a man, it’s a woman, it’s a purse, right?
00:54:21 Unless you train this machine on showing it a hundred thousand pickpockets, right?
00:54:24 So it doesn’t have this easy understanding that you have, right?
00:54:29 So some people make the argument in order to go to the next step or you really want
00:54:33 to build machines that understand in a way you and I, we have to go to psychology.
00:54:37 We need to understand how we do it and how our brains enable us to do it.
00:54:40 And so therefore being on the cusp, it’s also so exciting to try to understand better our
00:54:45 nature and then to build, to take some of those inside and build them.
00:54:48 So I think the most exciting thing is somewhere in the interface between cognitive science,
00:54:52 neuroscience, AI, computer science and philosophy of mind.
00:54:55 Beautiful.
00:54:56 Yeah.
00:54:57 I’d say if there is from the machine learning, from our, from the computer science, computer
00:55:00 vision perspective, many of the researchers kind of ignore the way the human brain works
00:55:05 or even psychology or literature or studying the brain, I would hope Josh Tenenbaum talks
00:55:12 about bringing that in more and more.
00:55:14 And that’s, yeah, so you’ve worked on some amazing stuff throughout your life.
00:55:20 What’s the thing that you’re really excited about?
00:55:24 What’s the mystery that you would love to uncover in the near term beyond, beyond all
00:55:30 the mysteries that you’re already surrounded by?
00:55:32 Well, so there’s a structure called the claustrum.
00:55:36 This is a structure, it’s underneath our cortex, it’s yay big.
00:55:40 You have one on the left, on the right, underneath this, underneath the insula, it’s very thin,
00:55:44 it’s like one millimeter, it’s embedded in, in wiring, in white matter, so it’s very difficult
00:55:48 to image.
00:55:50 And it has, it has connection to every cortical region.
00:55:55 And Francis Crick, the last paper he ever wrote, he dictated corrections the day he
00:55:58 died in hospital on this paper.
00:56:00 You know, we hypothesize, well, because it has this unique anatomy, it gets input from
00:56:05 every cortical area and projects back to every, every cortical area.
00:56:10 That the function of this structure is similar, it’s just a metaphor to the role of a conductor
00:56:16 in a symphony orchestra.
00:56:18 You have all the different cortical players.
00:56:20 You have some that do motion, some that do theory of mind, some that infer social interaction
00:56:24 and color and hearing and all the different modules in cortex.
00:56:28 But of course, what consciousness is, consciousness puts it all together into one package, right?
00:56:32 The binding problem, all of that.
00:56:33 And this is really the function because it has relatively few neurons compared to cortex,
00:56:38 but it talks, it receives input from all of them and it projects back to all of them.
00:56:43 And so we’re testing that right now.
00:56:45 We’ve got this beautiful neuronal reconstruction in the mouse called crown of thorns, crown
00:56:50 of thorns neurons that are in the claustrum that have the most widespread connection of
00:56:54 any neuron I’ve ever seen.
00:56:56 They’re very, you have individual neurons that sit in the claustrum tiny, but then they
00:57:00 have this single neuron, they have this huge axonal tree that cover both ipsy and contralateral
00:57:05 cortex and trying to turn using, you know, fancy tools like optogenetics, trying to turn
00:57:11 those neurons on or off and study it, what happens in the, in the mouse.
00:57:15 So this thing is perhaps where the parts become the whole.
00:57:20 Perhaps it’s one of the structures, it’s a very good way of putting it, where the individual
00:57:25 parts turn into the whole of the whole of the conscious experience.
00:57:30 Well, with that, thank you very much for being here today.
00:57:35 Thank you very much.
00:57:36 Thank you very much.
00:57:37 All right, thank you very much.