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