Lex Fridman Podcast - Christof Koch: Consciousness

Episode Date: September 2, 2018

A conversation with Christof Koch as part of MIT course on Artificial General Intelligence. Video version is available on YouTube. He is the President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. From 1986 until 2013, he was a professor at CalTech. Cited more than 105,000 times. Author of several books including "Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist." If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations.

Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. My name is Lex Friedman. I am a research scientist at MIT. If you would like to skip ahead to the conversation of Kristalko, I started introducing him at about the one minute and thirty second mark. This podcast is an extension of the courses on deep learning, autonomous vehicles, and artificial general intelligence that I've taught and organized. on those vehicles and artificial general intelligence that I've taught and organized. It is not only about machine learning, robotics, neuroscience, philosophy, or any one technical field. It considers all these avenues of thought in a way that is, hopefully, accessible to everyone. The aim here is to explore the nature of human and machine intelligence, the big picture of understanding the human mind and creating echoes of it in the machine.

To me, that is one of our civilization's most challenging and exciting scientific journeys into the unknown. I will first repost parts of previous YouTube conversations and lecture Q&As that can be listened to without video. If you want to see the video version, please go to my YouTube channel. My username is there on Twitter and everywhere else is Lex Friedman, spelled F-R-I-D without the E. So reach out and connect if you find these conversations interesting. In this episode, I talk with Christav Koch, who is one of the seminal figures in the fields

of neurobiology, neuroscience, and generally in the study of consciousness. He is the president and chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute of Brain Science in Seattle. From 1986 until 2013, he was a professor at Caltech. His work has received over 100,000 citations. He is the author of several books including Consciousness, Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. His research, his writing, his ideas have had a big impact on the scientific community and the general public in the way we think about consciousness and in the way we think of ourselves as human beings. I enjoyed and learned a lot from this conversation.

I hope you do as well. 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 universe where we have 10 to the 11 galaxies and each galaxy has between 10 to 11 10 to the 12 Stars and we know most 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 other creatures or they are, I still feel the world. 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, if they would have to be, they will also experience their own world.

The consciousness isn't just 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, we have a stroke in the, let's see, the left inferior frontal dryers can talk about it. But most normal adult people can talk about it. And so we think that makes us special. Compared to letty monkeys, a dog, a cat, some 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 lightly that other aliens would also experience their world. Of course, differently, because they have a different sensorium, the different sensors, they have a very different environment. But the fact that I would strongly suppose that they also have experiences. If you're pain and pleasure and see in some sort of spectrum and hear and have all the other senses.

Of course, their language, if they have one, would be different. So, women, I 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 Suppuzzo, a DAXHound that you came up with, that you grew up with, it was part of your family when you were young. First of all, you're technically a Midwestern boy. You just... Technically. After that, you travel there on a bit, hence a little bit of the accent. You talked about support, so the dachshund having these elements of human,

humanness of consciousness that you discovered. So I just wanted to ask, can you look back and you childhood and remember one was the first time you realize you yourself, sort of from a third person perspective or our conscious being, this idea of 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 discreet moment. I mean, you take it for granted because that's the only world, you know, 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 unagreited 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 foundation equation of quantum mechanics, general relativity. You can look at the period table of the elements. You can look at the endless ATG, C, 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 experience. Some people call it subjective feeling, some people call it phenomenology, some people call it qualia, if they're philosopher, but they all denote the same thing.

It feels like something in the famous word of the philosopher Thomas Nagle. It feels like something to be a bad or to be 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 in a chair, could be as exalted as having a mystical moment 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 he had been the birth of, of a computer. So that's a question, Alan Turing, try to answer. And of course,

he did it in this indirect way by proposing his 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 personal, 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 poise.

I will remember everything you ever said. They'll remember every email you ever had, like, like Samantha, remember in the movie her. It's no question it's going to happen. But of course, the key question is, it doesn't feel like anything to be Samanta in the movie heur. Or to, 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 come mingle. There is a concept of intelligence, natural or artificial, and there is a concept

of consciousness, of experience, natural or artificial. Those 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 leaving aside computers of natural selection, where we are surrounded by creatures, either our own kin, that are less or more intelligent, or we go across species. Some are more adapted to particular environment, others are less adapted, whether it's a whale or dog or you go talk about a permeatium or a little worm. And we see the complexity of the nervous system goes from one cell to a specialized cells

to a worm that has three net that has 30% of itself on nerve cells to creature like also 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 their particular ecological niche. And they become more conscious, partly because they're brain growth, 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 have 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 hyperthalamus. And for Valentine's Day, you should give your sweetheart, they know, honey, I love you, with all my lateral hypothalamus. And for Valentine's day, you should give your sweetheart, you know, hypothalamix in peace of chocolate, not a heart-shaped chocolate, right? And you know, 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 the 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 the actor 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, were in traffic accident, etc. They're pretty much immobile. Terry Shiveau, you may have heard historically, she was a person here in the in the 90s in Florida. Her heart stood still. She was reanimated. Then for the next 14 years, she was called in a vegetative state. There are thousands of people in a vegetative state. So 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 behavior. They do like, you know, there, 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. So the, 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 experience something. And of course, at these cases of locked-in state, there's this famous book called the the diving ball in the butterfly where you had an editor, a French editor, you had a stroke in the brainstem, unable to move except his vertical eyes, eye movement. You could just move his eyes up and down.

You need to dictate it 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. So 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 are different from everyday experience. You might fly, you might not be surprised at your flying, you might meet along their pet, child or dog, and you're not surprised that you're meeting them, but you have conscious experience of love of hate. They can be very emotional. Your body during this state, typically to them,

states sends an active signal to your motor neurons to paralyze you. It's called etonia, right? Because if you don't have that, like some patients, what do you do? You act out your dreams. You get for example, a marine behavioral disorder, which is a bad, which is bad juju, together. 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, 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 if a 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 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. So there you are, bodyless, timeless, you know, soundless, sightless, mindless, but you're in a conscious experience, you're not asleep, you're not asleep, you're being of pure, you're pure being, there isn't any function, you're 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, you mean, epiphenomenon? So what's the select effect? Meaning why, what's the function of you being able to lay in this sensory free deprivation tank and still have a conscious experience? Evolutionary? Obviously, we did evolve with flotation tanks in our environment. I mean, so biology is notoriously bad at asking why question till anomical question, why do we have two eyes? Why don't we have four eyes? Like some creatures 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, biology is very, or science is very good about mechanistic question. Why is that charge in the universe, right? We find a certain universe where the positive negative charges. Why? Why does quantum mechanics hold? You know, why, why doesn't some other theory hold? Quantum mechanics hold in our universe. It's very unclear why. So, till anomical 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 these 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 intelligence, from conscious. No consciousness. You called me asking a Y question. Let me ask a question that's not a Y question. You're giving a talk later today on the touring test for intelligence and consciousness drawing 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, 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 of 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 for for humans,

let's just stick with humans. There's now a test called a zap and zip. It's a procedure where you ping the brain using transcrania 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 anisatize 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

A complexity is either high or low And then you can adopt these techniques to similar creatures like monkeys and dogs and 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 there are all these children, babies, don't talk, right? But we believe that the babies

also have conscious experiences, right? And then there are all these patients, I mentioned, and they don't talk. When you dream, you can't talk because you're paralyzed so so what would we ultimately need we can't just rely on our intuition We need a theory of conscience 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 that anymore in the old story It's a soul right that used to be the most common explanation that most people accept, that insta a lot of people today believe, well, there's God in doubt, you only ask with a special thing that animals don't have, Renee Dickard famously said, a dog, if you hit it with your carriage,

may yelp, may cry, but it doesn't have this special thing. It doesn't have the magic sauce. It doesn't have rice cognitance. The soul. Now, we believe doesn't have the magic sauce. So, yeah. It doesn't have that's cogitance. So, now we believe that isn't the case anymore. So, what is the difference between brains and these guys? Silicon. And in particular, one say behavior matches. So, if you have Siri or 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, she says, it's of course she will. Of course I'm conscious. You ask how you're doing and she'll say, well, you know, they'll generate some way

to, of course, she'll behave like a person. Now there's several differences. One is, so this relates to the problem, the very hard. Why is consciousness a hard 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 of 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 an abduction 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 gave you this musically 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, that your conscious. Now with Syria, 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 integrated information theory But let me first maybe it's introduction for people are not familiar the car Can you yeah you talk a lot about panpsychism, can you describe what physicalism versus dualism, this, you mentioned the soul, what is the history of that idea, what the idea of panpsychism? No, the debate really, out of which panpsychism can emerge of dualism versus physicalism. Or do you not see panpsychism as fitting into that? No, you can argue there's some,

let's step back. So, panpsychism is a very ancient belief that's been around, I mean Plato and as Dottler talks about it, modern philosophers talk about it, of course, in Buddhism, the idea is very prevalent, that I mean, there are different versions 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 soul, everything. Rocks and stones and dogs and people and forests and iPhones, all of 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 sequoetry feel like something. That's one I think is somewhat more realistic. So the different words, what do you mean by feel like something? Have feeling, have some kind of experience. It feels like something, it may well be possible that it feels like something to be a pyramidium. I think it's pretty likely it feels like something to be a B or a mouse or a dog. Sure. So, okay. So, so that you can see that's also so Pamp Psychem is very broad.

And you can, so some people, for example Bertrand Russell, try to advocate this for this idea, it's called Racialian Monism, that that Pamp Psychism 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. You know, described the relationship between curvature and mass distribution. Okay, that's a 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. I was from like a third person observer. Yes. 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 paramitium, you got to remember, you say paramitium, 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 know, folks, I mean, you can go to Aristotle, who's probably the most important scientist and philosophers ever lived in certain Western culture. He had this idea, it's called Heilomorphism. 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, nonlinear thermodynamics. Right? Then he says they have a sensitive soul. That's life principle. Today we think we understand something more than this biochemistry non-linear thermodynamics. Then he says they have a sensitive soul. Only animals and humans have also a sensitive soul or an repetitive soul. They can see, they can smell, and they have drives. They want to reproduce, they want to eat, etc. And then only humans have what he called rational soul. And that idea that made it into Christendom, and then the rational soul is a one that lives forever. He wasn't really, I mean, different readings of Aristotle, what did he believe that rational soul was a mortal or not?

I probably think he didn't, but then of course, that made it into a true play to the Christianity, and then this soul became a mortal and then became the connection to God. Now, you, so you were asking me essentially, what is our modern conception of these three are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are, are although we don't understand how they're originated, but it's been difficult to rigorously pin down. You see this in modern definitions of death. It's in the 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, you have stopped beating, you're dead, totally unconversial. If you answer, you wait another 10 minutes, if the patient doesn't breathe, you know, he's dead. Well, now we have ventilators, we have heart, a pacemaker. So it's much more difficult to define what this is. Typically, this is defined as the end of life. And life is defined before death. So, 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 out for go and and and Watson and you know Google cars and Uber cars and all of that. That's still narrow

away. I 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 priority. 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? So, 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 It's sort of ultimately is what is closely tied to consciousness Ultimately, it's causal power upon itself and so in evolution in evolved systems they go together in artificial system particularly in digital machines 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 you can easily pass every two in test, is 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 him all the success. So in 10 years, we have this perfect simulation of the human brain every neuron is simulated

and it has a larynx and it has motor neurons and it has a bocus area. And of course, they'll talk and they'll say, hi, I just woke up, I feel great. Okay, even that computer simulation that can imprints a 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 they're 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, 9 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 sample, the black hole at the center of our galaxy will be so massive that it'll 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 the computer when the computer runs cold, 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 a human brain. Yes. You have to build so-called a neuromorphic machine that has hardware that is very similar to the human brain, not a digital clocked for Neumann computer. So that's just a 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, of course. So maybe just because this is AGI, this is digging a little bit about what we mean by intelligence.

So one thing is the G factor, these kind of IQ test 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 a sense that you have to impress them with your intelligence. And there are, 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 and understanding 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. No, well, yes, I do believe we can get what we call high level functional intelligence, particular sort of the G, you know, this, this, um, fluid-like intelligence that we cherish, particularly the place like MRT, right? In, in, in machines, I see a priori, no reasons, and I see a lot of reasons to believe it's going to happen very, you know, over the next 50 years or 30 years. So for the beneficial AI, for creating an AI system that's, so you mentioned ethics.

That is exceptionally intelligent, but also does not do, does, aligns its values with our values as humanity. Do you think then in these consciousness? Yes, I think that that is a very good argument that if we're concerned about AI and the threat of AI at the Nick Postrom, extensionist threat, I think having an intelligent that has empathy.

Right. Why do we find abusing a dog? Why do most of us find that a parent or using any animal? Why do we find that a parent? 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, 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 the earlier days, nichens 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, you can, people have done this in the rat, where you implant a 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, you have, you know, 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, right? But if I'd engineered artificially, I don't think, 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 count. Because any real creature, whether artificial engineer, you want to give it fear, the fear of extinction, that we all have, and you also want to give it a positive, repetitive state, 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, you know, 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 to, well, is there something special about human consciousness. So everything having some elements of consciousness. Is there something special about human consciousness? So it's not everything. Like a spoon, there's no, the form of panthegon, I think, about doesn't ascribe consciousness to anything like this, the spoon or my liver. However, the theory, the integrated information theory, does say that system even wants to look from the outside relatively simple. At least if they have this internal causal power, they are, they, they, they, it does feel

like something. The theory, aprolyo, doesn't say anything, what's special about human. Biologically, we know what the, the one thing that's special about human is we speak and we have an overblown sense of our own importance. We believe we are exceptional and we are just God's gift to the universe. But the, but the, the main thing that we have, we can plan over the long term. We have language and that gives us enormous amount of power.

That's why we are the current dominant species on the planet. So you mentioned God, you grew up a devout 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 religion fit into you thinking about consciousness? And you've grown throughout your life and changed your views on religion as far as I understand. Yeah, I mean, I'm now much closer to. So I'm not a Roman Catholic anymore. I don't believe that sort of this God, the God 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 universe, right? Dark matter, dark energy. We have no idea what it is. Maybe it's lost socks, what do I know? the universe, dark matter, dark energy. We have no idea what it is. Maybe it's lost sucks, what do I know? 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. 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 they talk about so when I spent several meetings with Siddhali Lama and what always impressed me about him, he really unlike, for example, 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 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 and this universe and they have these techniques You know, you can think of them like mindfulness, etc. and meditation that tries to access sort of what they claim of this more fundamental aspect of reality. I'm not sure it's more fundamental is 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've I've access to in my life. And you've 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. Actually, I 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, so for example, when you do rock climbing or now I do a rowing, cool rowing and a bike every day, you can get into this thing called the zone. And I've always wanted about it, particularly with want to keep on going back to it. And you wonder, 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 of inner voice anymore. There's always this 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.

They're 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 those things, they're always there. But when you're in the zone, all of that is gone. And you're just in this wonderful state where you're fully out in the world, like you're climbing or you're roaring or biking or doing soccer or whatever you're doing. And sort of consciousness sort of is this, you're all action or in this case of pure experience,

you're not action at all. But in both cases, you experience some aspect of, of you touch some basic part of, 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 got your own notes? I think it's for us. 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 just existing in the mind of God. And this is just a modern version of it. It's equally plausible. People love talking about these sorts of things. I know their book written about this simulation hypothesis. If that's what people want to do, that's fine.

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 conscious perspective, what is 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 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. There's hundreds of experiments that show how we can be influenced. But finally, in the final analysis, when you make a life, and I'm talking about critical decision, what you really think, should I marry, should I go to this school, that school, should I take this job, should I cheat on my taxes or not? These are things where you really deliberate, and I think on those conditions, you're as free as you can be. When you bring your entire being, your entire conscious being to that question,

and try to analyze it on all the various conditions, and then you make a decision, you are as free as you can ever be. That is, I think, what free will is. It's not a will that's totally free to do anything it wants. That's not a will that's totally free to do anything it wants. That's not possible. Right. So as Jack mentioned, you actually read a blog about books you've read, amazing books from Russian, from the Akka of Tcha. Yeah. Neil Gaiman, Konseg and Marokami. 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 books are a Tristop because he talks about some of these problems. You know, he was one of the first discover of the unconscious. This is, you know, a little bit before Freud, when he 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's sort of really the first discoverer of the great land

of the unconscious, and that really struck me. And what do you think about the unconscious? What do you think about Freud? Do you think about these ideas? 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, 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 started out as a neuroscientist. He contributed, he did studies on the on the lampry, 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, he, wrote, you know, about the unconscious. And I think it's to this lots of stuff happening. You feel this particular, when you're in a relationship and it breaks a sonner, right? And then you have this terrible, you can have love and hate and lust and anger and all of it's 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, they're in the amygdala, 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 can struct finally a story why this happened, why you love it or don't love it or whatever. But you don't really know whether that's actually the, whether 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, we are, like any other brain

or nervous system or computer, we are severely band limited. If everything I do, every emotion I feel, every I move into I make of all of that had to be under the control of consciousness, I couldn't, I couldn't, I wouldn't be here. So what you do early on, your brain, you have to be conscious when you learn things like typing or like writing on a bike. But then what you do, you train up, uh, or routes, I think that involved Beasel Ganglia and Stratham, 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 that taken 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 the X 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 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 off-case is 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 had the ability to constantly wipe your memory, you'll 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, 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 are 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 our... Give the 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 wide variety of experiences, not just sitting in a lab, staring at a screen and having a face flashed onto you for 100 millis I'm pushing a button. That's what that's what I usually do. That's what most psychologists do. There's nothing wrong with that But you need to consider lots of other strange States, you know, and literature is a shortcut for this. Well, yeah, because literature That's that's what literature is all about all sorts of interesting experiences that people have the You know the contingency of it, the fact that women experience all different black people, experience all different.

And the one way to experience it is reading all these different literature and try to find out. You see everything is so relative. Right? You read the books, Finland. 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 at a day 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 time scale or scale in general. When you, with IIT or in general tried to think about consciousness, tried 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 consciousnesses. And do you think of things that take, you know, the ages, to operate in their conscious cause effect, cause effect? That's a very good question. So I think a lot of it's small creatures because

experimentally, you know, a lot of people work on fly than in bees. Right. So most people just think they are a tomato. They're just bugs for having 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,

I'd want this swarm in the spring, and then they have this very elaborate way. They have three-nut scouts. They go to the individual sites. They come back. They have this power, this dance. Literally, where the dance was several days, they try to recruit other needs.

It's very complicated decision way. When they finally want to make a decision, then tire swarm, they scouts warm up the entire swarm, then go to one location. They don't go to 50 location. They go to one location that the scouts have agreed upon by themselves. That's awesome.

If you look at the circuit complexity, it's 10 times more denser than anything we have in our brain. 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, you know, for 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 Holde astronomer. He has this cloud

intervening between the earth and the sun and leading to some sort of global cooling, this written in the 50s. It turns out you can, using the radio dish, the communicate was actually an entity, it's actually an intelligent entity. And they sort of, they convince it to move away. But here you have a radical different entity. And in principle, IT says, well, you can measure the

integrated information in principle at least. And yes, if that, if the maximum of that occurs at a timescale of month, rather than in athit for the fraction of a second, yes, then 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 conscience 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 what science fiction movie is all to think about this. Like this is, do you know Stanislav Lenn? This Polish science fiction section writer he wrote for Lares, I was turned into Hollywood movie. Yes. His best novel so was in the 60s, a very very engineers and engineering background. His most interesting novel is called The Victorious, where human civilization, they have this mission to this planet and everything is destroyed, they discover machines, humans got killed and then these machines took over and there was a machine evolution.

A Darwinian evolution he talks about is very vividly. And finally the dominant, the dominant machine intelligence, organism that survived, your gigantic clouds of little hexagonal universal cellar 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 assembly into gigantic nets, into clouds, or billions of these particles, and then they become hyperintelligent and they can beat anything that humans can can can throw at it. It's a very beautiful and compelling where you have an intelligence where finally the humans

leave the planet, they simply are unable to understand and comprehend this creature. 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, so your talent to steal a lot from, brought up is that there could be, there's ideas that you know, you already have these artificial general intelligence, like super smart or maybe conscious beings in the cellular talent, we just don't know how to talk

to them. So it's the language of communication, which you don't know what to do with it. So that's one sort of view is conscious, this is only something you can measure. So that's one sort of view is cautious. This is only something you can measure. So it's not cautious if you can't measure it. So you're making an ontological and an epistemic statement. One is there, there, it's just like seeing their multiverse as that might be true, but I can't communicate with them. I don't have, I can't have anything also. That's an epistemic argument, right? So those are two different things. So it may well be possible look and then another case that's happening right now people are building these mini

Organoids you know what this so you know you can take stem cells from under your armpit and then dish add four Transcription factors and then you can induce them to grow 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, everywhere they're building them. It may be well-be-possil 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 they may, it's one question, are the conscious

and not as 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? Just follow your dreams. Read widely. No, I mean, I suppose we're disciplined. 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, then some philosophy of mind

and then AI, AI computer science. You can look at all the original ideas in your network. They all came from neuroscience, right? Reinforce, whether it's snarky, minzky, building is snarky, or whether it's, you know, the early Shubel and Viesel 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. They can't really,. They can't really show one image. I can show you a single image of some 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. Unless you train this machine on showing it a 100,000 pickpockets, right? So 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 or 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 our brains enable us to do it And so therefore being on the cuss. It's also so exciting. I try understand better our nature and then to build, to take some of those inside 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. I'd say if there is from the machine learning from the computer science, computer vision perspective, many of the research is kind of ignore the way the human brain works. Yes.

So, ignore even psychology or literature or studying the brain. I would hope Josh Tannabon talks about bringing that in more and more. And that's, yeah. So, you've 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 all the mysteries that you're already surrounded by?

Well, so there's this structure called the claustrome. Okay. So this is structure. It's underneath our cortex. It's yay big. You have one on the left on the right. Underneath this, underneath the insula, it's very thin.

It's like one millimeter. It's embedded in wiring in white matter. It's very difficult to image. And it has connection to every cortical region. And Francis, the last paper you 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 cortical area. That the function of this structure is similar, it's just a metaphor to the role of a conductor and symphony orchestra. You have all the different cortical players. You have some that do motion, some that do theory of mind, some that in first social interaction and color and hearing in 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 a relatively few neurons compared to cortex, but it talks, it's a received input from all of them and it projects back to all of them. And so we are testing that right now. We've got this beautiful neuronal reconstruction in the mouse called crown of thaw, crown of thaw neurons that are in the clouser that have the most widespread connection of any neuron I've ever seen. They're very, they have, you know, individual neurons that sit in the clouser and tiny, but then they have this single neuron that have this huge axonal tree that cover both Ipsi and Contra-Natal Cortex.

And trying to turn using fancy tools like Optogenetics, trying to turn those neurons on or off and study it, what happens in the miles. So this thing is perhaps where the parts become the whole. It becomes inter-experienced. Perhaps it's one of the structures, it's a very good way of putting it, where the individual parts turn into the whole of the whole of the conscious experience

Well, well that Thank you very much for being here today Thank you very much Thank you very much Yn yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw