vtt/episode_002_small.vtt

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 As part of MIT course 6S099 on artificial general intelligence, I got a chance to sit down with

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 Kristof Koch, who is one of the seminal figures in neurobiology, neuroscience, and generally in

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 the study of consciousness. He is the president, the chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute

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 for Brain Science in Seattle. From 1986 to 2013, he was the professor at Caltech. Before that,

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 he was at MIT. He is extremely well cited, over a hundred thousand citations. His research,

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 his writing, his ideas have had big impact on the scientific community and the general public

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 in the way we think about consciousness, in the way we see ourselves as human beings.

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 He's the author of several books, The Quest for Consciousness and Your Biological Approach,

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 and a more recent book, Consciousness, Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist.

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 If you enjoy this conversation, this course, subscribe, click the little bell icon to make

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 sure you never miss a video. And in the comments, leave suggestions for any people you'd like to

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 see be part of the course or any ideas that you would like us to explore. Thanks very much,

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 and I hope you enjoy. Okay, before we delve into the beautiful mysteries of consciousness,

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 let's zoom out a little bit. And let me ask, do you think there's intelligent life out there in

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 the universe? Yes, I do believe so. We have no evidence of it, but I think the probabilities

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 are overwhelming in favor of it. Give me a universe where we have 10 to the 11 galaxies,

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 and each galaxy has between 10 to the 11, 10 to the 12 stars, and we know more stars have one or

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 more planets. So how does that make you feel? It still makes me feel special, because I have

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 experiences. I feel the world, I experience the world. And independent of whether there are the

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 creatures out there, I still feel the world and I have access to this world in this very strange,

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 compelling way. And that's the core of human existence. Now you said human, do you think

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 if those intelligent creatures are out there, do you think they experience their world?

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 Yes, they are evolved. If they are a product of natural evolution, as they would have to be,

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 they will also experience their own world. So consciousness isn't just a human, you're right,

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 it's much wider. It's probably, it may be spread across all of biology. We have, the only thing

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 that we have special is we can talk about it. Of course, not all people can talk about it.

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 Babies and little children can talk about it. Patients who have a stroke in the left

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 inferior frontal gyrus can talk about it. But most normal adult people can talk about it.

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 And so we think that makes us special compared to little monkeys or dogs or cats or mice or all

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 the other creatures that we share the planet with. But all the evidence seems to suggest

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 that they too experience the world. And so it's overwhelmingly likely that other aliens,

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 that aliens would also experience their world. Of course, differently, because they have a

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 different sensorium, they have different sensors, they have a very different environment.

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 But the fact that I would strongly suppose that they also have experiences. They feel pain and

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 pleasure and see in some sort of spectrum and hear and have all the other sensors.

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 Of course, their language, if they have one would be different. So we might not be able to

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 understand their poetry about the experiences that they have.

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 That's correct. Right. So in a talk, in a video, I've heard you mention Siputzo, a Daxhound that

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 you came up with, that you grew up with was part of your family when you were young. First of all,

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 you're technically a Midwestern boy. Technically. But after that, you traveled there on a bit,

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 hence a little bit of the accent. You talked about Siputzo, the Daxhound, having

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 these elements of humanness, of consciousness that you discovered. So I just wanted to ask,

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 can you look back in your childhood and remember when was the first time you realized you yourself,

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 sort of from a third person perspective, our conscious being, this idea of,

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 you know, stepping outside yourself and seeing there's something special going on here in my brain?

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 I can't really actually. It's a good question. I'm not sure I recall a discrete moment. I mean,

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 you take it for granted because that's the only world you know, right? The only world I know,

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 you know, is the world of seeing and hearing voices and touching and all the other things.

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 So it's only much later at early in my undergraduate days when I became, when I enrolled in physics

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 and in philosophy that I really thought about it and thought, well, this is really fundamentally

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 very, very mysterious. And there's nothing really in physics right now that explains this transition

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 from the physics of the brain to feelings. Where do the feelings come in? So you can look at the

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 foundational equation of quantum mechanics, general relativity, you can look at the period table of

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 the elements, you can look at the endless ATG seed chat in our genes and no way is consciousness.

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 Yet I wake up every morning to a world where I have experiences. And so that's the heart of the

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 ancient mind body problem. How do experiences get into the world? So what is consciousness?

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 Experience. Consciousness is any, any, any experience. Some people call it subjective

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 feelings, some people call it phenomenon, phenomenology, some people call it qualia,

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 their philosophy, but they all denote the same thing. It feels like something in the

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 famous word of the philosopher Thomas Nagel, it feels like something to be a bad or to be, you know,

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 an American or to be angry or to be sad or to be in love or to have pain.

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 And that is what experience is, any possible experience could be as mundane as just sitting

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 here in a chair could be as exalted as, you know, having a mystical moment, you know,

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 in deep meditation, those are just different forms of experiences.

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 Experience. So if you were to sit down with maybe the next skip a couple generations of

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 IBM Watson, something that won jeopardy, what is the gap? I guess the question is between Watson,

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 that might be much smarter than you than us than all any human alive, but may not have experience.

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 What is the gap? Well, so that's a big, big question that's occupied people for the last,

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 certainly last 50 years since we, you know, since the advent of birth of, of computers.

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 That's a question on Turing tried to answer. And of course, he did it in this indirect way

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 by proposing a test, an operational test. So, but that's not really that's, you know,

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 he tried to get it. What does it mean for a person to think? And then he had this test,

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 right? You lock him away, and then you have a communication with them. And then you try to,

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 to guess after a while whether that is a person or whether it's a computer system.

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 There's no question that now or very soon, you know, Alexa or Siri or, you know, Google now

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 will pass this test, right? And you can game it. But, you know, ultimately, certainly in your

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 generation, there will be machines that will speak with complete points that will remember

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 everything you ever said. They'll remember every email you ever had, like, like Samantha remember

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 in the movie, her snow question is going to happen. But of course, the key question is,

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 does it feel like anything to be Samantha in the movie? Does it feel like anything to be Watson?

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 And there one has to very, very strongly think there are two different concepts here that we

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 co mingle. There is a concept of intelligence, natural or artificial, and there is a concept of

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 consciousness of experience, natural or artificial. Those are very, very different things.

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 Now, historically, we associate consciousness with intelligence. Why? Because we live in a world

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 living aside computers of natural selection, where we're surrounded by creatures, either our own kin

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 that are less or more intelligent, or we go across species, some some are more adapted to

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 particular environment, others are less adapted, whether it's a whale or dog, or you go talk about

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 a permitium or a little worm, all right. And we see the complexity of the nervous system goes from

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 one cell to to a specialized cells to a worm that has three net that has 30% of its cells are nerve

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 cells, to creature like us or like a blue whale that has 100 billion even more nerve cells.

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 And so based on behavioral evidence and based on the underlying neuroscience, we believe that

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 as these creatures become more complex, they are better adapted to to their particular ecological

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 niche. And they become more conscious, partly because their brain grows. And we believe

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 consciousness unlike the ancient ancient people thought most almost every culture thought that

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 consciousness with intelligence has to do with your heart. And you still to see that today,

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 you see honey, I love you with all my heart. Yes. But what you should actually say is they

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 know honey, I love you with all my lateral hypothalamus. And for Valentine's Day, you should

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 give your sweetheart, you know, hypothalamus in piece of chocolate, not a heart shaped chocolate,

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 right. And so we still have this language, but now we believe it's a brain. And so we see brains

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 of different complexity. And we think, well, they have different levels of consciousness,

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 they're capable of different experiences. But now we confront a world where we know where we're

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 beginning to engineer intelligence. And it's radical unclear whether the intelligence we're

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 engineering has anything to do with consciousness and whether it can experience anything. Because

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 fundamentally, what's the difference? Intelligence is about function. Intelligence, no matter exactly

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 how you define it sort of adaptation to new environments, being able to learn and quickly

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 understand, you know, the setup of this and what's going on and who are the actors and what's

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 going to happen next. That's all about function. Consciousness is not about function. Consciousness

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 is about being. It's in some sense much fundamental. You can see folks, you can see this in several

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 cases, you can see it, for instance, in the case of the clinic, when you're dealing with patients

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 who are, let's say, had a stroke or had wear and traffic accident, etc. They're pretty much

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 immobile. Terri Schievo, you may have heard historically, she was a person here in the

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 90s in Florida. Her heart stood still. She was reanimated. Then for the next 14 years,

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 she was what's called in a vegetative state. So there's thousands of people in the vegetative

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 state. So they're, you know, they're, you know, they're like this. Occasionally, they open their

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 eyes for two, three, four, five, six, eight hours and then close their eyes. They have sleep wake cycle.

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 Occasionally, they have behaviors. They do like, you know, they, but there's no way that you can

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 establish a lawful relationship between what you say, or the doctor says, or the mom says,

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 and what the patient does. Right. So, so the, so the, there isn't any behavior yet in some of

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 these people, there is still experience. You can, you can design and build brain machine interfaces

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 where you can see there's, they still explain something. And of course, that these cases

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 are blocked in state. There's this famous book called the, the, the diving bell in the butterfly

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 where you had an editor, a French editor, he had a stroke in the, in the brainstem, unable to move

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 except his vertical eyes, eye movement. He could just move his eyes up and down. You need dictated

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 in an entire book. And some people even lose this at the end. And all the evidence seems to suggest

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 that they're still in there. In this case, you have no behavior. You have consciousness.

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 Second case is tonight, like all of us, you're going to go to sleep, close your eyes, you go to

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 sleep. You will wake up inside your sleeping body and you will have conscious experiences.

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 They're different from everyday experience. You might fly. You might not be surprised that you're

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 flying. You might meet a long dead pet, childhood dog, and you're not surprised that you're meeting

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 them, you know, but you have conscious experience of love, of hate, you know, they can be very

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 emotional. Your body doing this state, typically to them, state sends an active signal to your

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 motor neurons to paralyze you. It's called atonia, right? Because if you don't have that, like some

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 patients, what do you do? You act out your dreams, you get for example, rem behavioral disorder,

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 which is the bad, which is bad juju to get. Okay. Third case is pure experience. So I recently had

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 this, what some people call a mystical experience, I went to Singapore and went into a flotation

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 tank. Yeah. All right. So this is a big tub filled with water, that's body temperature and absent

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 salt. You strip completely naked, you lie inside of it, you close the, the, the darkness, complete

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 darkness, soundproof. So very quickly, you become bodyless because you're floating and you're naked.

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 You have no rings, no watch, no nothing. You don't feel your body anymore. It's no sound,

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 soundless. There's no photon, a sightless, timeless, because after a while, early on,

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 you actually hear your heart, but then that you, you sort of adapt to that and then sort of the

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 passage of time ceases. And if you train yourself like in a, in a meditation, not to think early

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 on, you think a lot, it's a little bit spooky. You feel somewhat uncomfortable or you think,

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 well, I'm going to get bored. But if you try to not to think actively, you become mindless.

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 There you are, bodyless, timeless, soundless, sightless, mindless, but you're in a conscious

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 experience. You're not asleep. You're not asleep. You are, you are being of pure,

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 you're pure being. There isn't any function. You aren't doing any computation. You're not

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 remembering, you're not projecting, you're not planning, yet you are fully conscious.

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 You're fully conscious. There's something going on there. It could be just a side effect. So what

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 is the, the, um, you mean epiphenomena? So what's the select, meaning why, uh, why, what, what,

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 what is the function of you being able to lay in this, uh, sense sensory free deprivation tank

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 and still have a conscious experience? Evolutionary. Obviously we didn't evolve with floatation

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 tanks in our, in our environment. I mean, so biology is not totally bad at asking why question to

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 leonormical question. Why do we have two eyes? Why don't we have four eyes like some teachers or three

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 eyes or something? Well, no, there's probably, there is a function to that, but it's, we're not

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 very good at answering those questions. We can speculate. And Leslie, where biology is very,

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 or science is very good about mechanistic question. Why is there charge in the universe,

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 right? We find a certain universe where there are positive and negative charges. Why? Why does

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 quantum mechanics hold? You know, why, why, why doesn't some other theory hold quantum mechanics

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 hold in our universe? It's very unclear why. So telenomical question, why questions are difficult

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 to answer. Clearly there's some relationship between complexity, brain processing power and

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 consciousness. But however, in these cases, in the three examples I gave, one is an everyday

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 experience at night. The other one is a trauma and third one is in principle, you can, everybody

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 can have these sort of mystical experiences. You have a dissociation of function from, of

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 intelligence from, from conscious consciousness. You caught me asking a white question. Let me

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 ask a question that's not a white question. You're giving a talk later today on the touring test

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 for intelligence and consciousness drawn lines between the two. So is there a scientific way

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 to say there's consciousness present in this entity or not? And to anticipate your answer,

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 because you, you will also, there's a neurobiological answer. So we can test a human brain. But if you

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 take a machine brain that you don't know tests for yet, how would you even begin to approach

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 a test if there's consciousness present in this thing? Okay, that's a really good question. So

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 let me take in two steps. So as you point out for, for, for humans, let's just stick with humans,

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 there's now a test called a zap and zip is a procedure where you ping the brain using

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 transcranial magnetic stimulation. You look at the electrical reverberations essentially using EG

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 and then you can measure the complexity of this brain response. And you can do this in awake

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 people in asleep, normal people, you can do it in awake people and then anesthetize them. You

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 can do it in patients and it has 100% accuracy that in all those cases, when you're clear,

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 the patient or the person is either conscious or unconscious, the complexity is either high or

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 low. And then you can adopt these techniques to similar creatures like monkeys and dogs and,

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 and mice that have very similar brains. Now, of course, you point out that may not help you

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 because we don't have a cortex, you know, and if I send a magnetic pulse into my iPhone or my

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 computer, it's probably going to break something. So we don't have that. So what we need ultimately,

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 we need a theory of consciousness. We can't just rely on our intuition. Our intuition is, well,

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 yeah, if somebody talks, they're conscious. However, then they're all these page children,

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 babies don't talk, right? But we believe that that the babies also have conscious experiences,

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 right? And then they're all these patients I mentioned. And they don't talk when you dream,

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 you can't talk because you're paralyzed. So, so what we ultimately need, we can't just rely

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 on our intuition, we need a theory of consciousness that tells us what is it about a piece of matter,

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 what is it about a piece of highly excitable matter like the brain or like a computer that

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 gives rise to conscious experience. We all believe none of us believe anymore in the old story,

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 it's a soul, right? That used to be the most common explanation that most people accept that

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 it's still a lot of people today believe, well, there's God in doubt, only us with a special

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 thing that animals don't have, René Descartes famously said, a dog, if you hit it with your

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 carriage, may yell, may cry, but it doesn't have this special thing. It doesn't have the magic,

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 the magic sauce. So yeah, it doesn't have red corketons, the soul. Now we believe that isn't

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 the case anymore. So what is the difference between brains and, and these guys, silicon.

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 And in particular, once their behavior matches. So if you have Siri of Alexa and 20 years from now

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 that she can talk just as good as any possible human, what grounds do you have to say she's not

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 conscious? In particular, if she says, it's of course she will. Well, of course I'm conscious.

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 You ask, how are you doing? And she'll say, well, you know, they'll generate some way to,

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 yeah, yeah, exactly. She'll behave like a, like a person. Now there's several differences. One is,

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 so this relates to the problem, the very heart. Why is consciousness a heart problem? It's because

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 it's subjective, right? Only I have it, for only I know, I have direct experience of my own

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 consciousness. I don't have experience, your consciousness. Now I assume as a sort of a

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 Bayesian person who believes in probability theory and all of that, you know, I can do,

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 I can do an abduction to the, to the best available facts. I deduce your brain is very

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 similar to mine. If I put you in a scanner, your brain is roughly going to behave the same with

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 I do. If, if, if, you know, if I give you this music and ask you, how does it taste?

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 Do you tell me things that, you know, that, that I would also say more or less, right?

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 So I infer based on all of that, that you're conscious. Now with Siri, I can't do that. So

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 there I really need a theory that tells me what is it about, about any system this or this that

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 makes it conscious. We have such a theory. Yes. So the, the integrated information theory.

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 But let me first, maybe it's introduction for people who are not familiar to car.

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 Can you, you talk a lot about panpsychism. Can you describe what physicalism versus dualism

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 this you mentioned the soul? What, what is the history of that idea? What is the idea of panpsychism?

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 Well, no, the debate really out of which panpsychism can emerge of, of, of dualism versus

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 physicalism. Or do you not see panpsychism as fitting into that?

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 No, you can argue there's some, well, okay, so let's step back. So panpsychism is a very

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 ancient belief that's been around. I mean, Plato and us totally talks about it.

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 Modern philosophers talk about it. Of course, in Buddhism, the idea is very prevalent that

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 I mean, there are different versions of it. One version says everything is in salt,

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 everything rocks and stones and dogs and people and forest and iPhones all have a soul.

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 All matter is in soul. That's sort of one version. Another version is that all biology,

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 all creatures, smaller, large from a single cell to a giant sequoia tree feel like something. That's

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 one I think is somewhat more realistic. So the different versions of what do you mean by feel

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 like something? Well, have, have feeling, have some kind of experience. It may well be possible

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 that it feels like something to be a paramedium. I think it's pretty likely it feels like something

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 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

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 experience, most people read much more technical texts and do not sort of escape or seek truth

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 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

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 all these different literature and try to find out. You see everything so relative. You read

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 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.

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 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,

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 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.