Neil & Anil Seth Discuss Consciousness in the Universe

I'm a sort of materialist so I like to think of of Consciousness as a biological property that arose in evolution and so we have to ask well what does Consciousness do for us and where might it be in the rest of biology then I can't tell you how much time I've spent contemplating the fact that every morning I wake up as me there's 8 billion people in the world why am I persistently me the other possibility is in fact you're you're overestimating the extent to which you remain you from day to day oh you're not

you Neil you're not you man I need further explanation on that [Music] sentence this is Star Talk special edition and when you hear that you know my two co-hosts are Gary O'Reilly Gary nice Neil good to be back former Soccer Pro Sports commentator sporting a new part in his head alerted yeah like a neural chip yeah that's a surgical scar for what they installed in your brain yeah they were looking for something and it was a complete waste of time I gota and of course got Chuck Nice comedian actor long time Star Talk co-host absolutely

always good to have you and Gary you you cook up these topics well we we we have a little group think between the producers and the production team and we land on a whole load of different varieties but this is this is an ongoing thought process uh on Consciousness and we spoke with David Chas and we're now going to get into another thought process on Consciousness because it's the hard problem of Consciousness and but is it like a three-body problem and unsolvable does it even exist is being transhuman our future so you're thinking about the

future of our mind totally and if so will we be able to upload our Consciousness and exist forever and how will that feel or not when we eventually travel into deep space are we going to come across alien life forms that are super intelligent artificial intelligence or we're going to find a biological life form um there's a lot of people think that our future will be Ai and will exist as AI but that's a discussion that we're going to get into with our guest today Our Guest is alel Seth a professor of cognitive and computational

Neuroscience at the University of Sussex in England a place I know reasonably well so he speaks your language then yes he does so you have to pay attention um so PhD in computer science and artificial intelligence a writer and author whose most recent book being you was published in 2021 so Neil please a delight to have you here Anil Anil Anil I say that right that's exactly right thank you very much for having me it's a pleasure to be on the show excellent excellent so all these topics you know everyone you can't shake a stick

without having it land somewhere where somebody is deeply thinking about Consciousness and everybody thinks they've got the answer so it it leaves me to ask a pretty basic question here what is it we're using to prove to ourselves that Consciousness even exists as a thing that could even possibly be uploaded to a computer one day oh well there's a lot of questions within that question but I mean people don't even agree on that I mean there's there are some philosophers who might call themselves illusionists who think that Consciousness doesn't really exist in the sense that

you and I or if you ask anyone on the street might might assume that it does that we're just mistaken that there's anything special about this thing that we Call Conscious experience now I think I think they're just wrong frankly I mean there are many things in consciousness we can't be sure whether we're right or wrong but if you think about it the only thing we can be really sure of is our conscious experience everything else is kind of inferred through it whether it's the world around us the self or everything else we know in

science it's sort of we we know it because at some point we experience something uh and so there is a there there to explain Consciousness I think is real there's a difference between being awake and aware and being completely out under general anesthesia I think most of us would agree that some things in the world are conscious at least some of the time other other people some other animals and some things are not like tables and chairs and and objects and there are other things where there's a great deal of uncertainty like um some other

animals insects people have to brain damage and of course you know Hot Topic today artificial intelligence the extent to which you define consciousness in the way you just did if AI then exhibits all those properties you would have to then concede that AI is conscious and what I have been finding is every time AI hits another threshold another goalpost people move the goalposts again and that makes sense that that that that doesn't make sense I was going to say it it makes sense if you the the closer AI gets to being truly conscious and sentient

the more we become less special as Who We Are so we got to keep moving the post right so you have to raise the bar so that we can maintain our supposed preeminence so anal how much of our definition of Consciousness is just to so that we feel special well I think qu that that's a profound point and it's it's driven a lot of confusion about our relationship I mean you'll notice Neil as an astrophysicist right I mean the the thought that we are special was what led people for the longest time to think that

we're at the center of the universe so plus it kind of looked that way in all fairness standing on Earth the whole universe revolved around us so it wasn't completely in conflict with evidence until it was that's all that is that is true and then of course Darwin did something similar with our nature as creatures pointing out that we're also not special in the sense of being created by God in a different way from all other all we're related to all other animals and so yeah in that sense Consciousness is the last Refuge of human

exceptionalism beautiful sentence that you we feel that human consciousness is somehow really special and it sets us apart uh you know dayart made this very explicit he called non-human animals uh Beast Machines or bit machine in the French um and trying to make the point there that non-human animals were just Flesh and Blood mechanisms robots made out of living material that didn't have the kind at least didn't have the kind of Consciousness that mattered for for moral consideration so we do have this trat record and we've kind of got around it in in most ways

now we no longer think we're at the center of the universe we no longer think that we're unrelated to all other creatures and we most of us I think there's a wide consensus that we're not the only conscious creatures out there just ask your cat ask your cat yeah if you could ask a cat you can ask a cat they just won't answer until you've left the room so are there theories of Consciousness and I you know I've seen a lot of isms out there right dualism monism materialism are these all ways to try to

get into this mysterious place that is our mind they're all ways of thinking about the problem or they sort of things that come before the theories they're philosophical theories so Consciousness seems to be this incredibly mysterious thing because on the one hand we are physical creatures we're made of stuff and complicated stuff but it's stuff or it seems to be stuff anyway and on the other hand there are conscious experiences so intuitively in my seem that the physical world is very different from the world of conscious experience and that no explanation in terms of physics

and chemistry will tell you how or why anything or anyone is conscious this is what David Charmers called A Hard problem Consciousness I know he's been on on your show um before and and the idea that they're totally unrelatable is is dualism they operate in separate Realms and you've got a whole bunch of other isms but they're not really theories they're the sort of perspective that you might take from which you might then build a theory let me interject there when someone comes up to me and says uh Dr Tyson I have a theory and

I say no Einstein had a the you have a hypothesis just to be clear because physical science a theory is a fully tested explanation of phenomena that make successful predictions I don't know if that's getting semantic about the word theory but many people say oh it's just a theory without recognizing that at least in the physical sciences a theory is the highest form of understanding we have no I think that's right I think a theory is the goal isn't it or a well tested and empirically well established an explanatorily powerful theory that that's the goal

and I would say in Consciousness we have Proto theories there are the beginnings of theories some are more ambitious than others but none of them have reached the level of maturity that we've seen in physics with relativity quantum mechanics all of all of these things I mean they they are still theories so they make predictions and they explain observations about you know what happens in the because one of the amazing things about Consciousness philosophically it seems incredibly mysterious but it has this amazing advantage that brains are relatively numerous relatively accessible you know compared to the

the big bang or the the very small world of quantum mechanics we can we can look inside a living human brain as people gain Consciousness lose Consciousness change their Consciousness so we can study it in in a sense much more easily than some of the other frontiers of mystery and that's great because then we can begin to use this evidence to constrain and and improve the theories that we have you talk about it as a mystery um is consciousness broken down into different kind of types segments or is it just one big thing I I

prefer that kind of divide and conquer approach actually uh because if you treat it as one big scary mystery in need of one massive Eureka solution it it it can be very resistant it can be resistant in even in the sense of what would a satisfying answer look like you know what what would we be content with in terms of an explanation and in other areas of science this kind of divide and conquer approach has has paid dividends has a good parallel I think with with the history of life it's reductionism yeah let me add

something here The in in early days of physics and all the branches of physics philosophers played very important roles to help shape questions and help the direction of things but that was evidence that the field was still in its infancy when you had philosophers sort of running a among you and looks like you have philosophers at every turn when you're trying to arrive at some conclusions here and at what point will you be evidence-based and no longer will the philosopher in the armchair be useful to you because all of your answers are coming from the

lab and not from their brains I think philosophers are in it for the long game with Consciousness and one of the things I've seen over the last 30 years that I've been doing this stuff is is the dialogue between philosophy and and science has become richer certain things that may have started purely philosophical have now become you know the realm of the lab and and that's great that's how most things would be but once it's in the lab the philosopher is a little less useful that's all I'm saying because your answers are coming from the

lab I think the point right what certainly the point we're at right now is that philosophy is still extremely useful because we're still a bit confused about what the questions we should ask our and how to interpret the answers and the theories that are coming up still have quite a philosophical flavor and also the the implications are hugely important and they will remain philosophical like yes we can have an understanding of what happens in the brain when someone loses Consciousness or so on but what do we do with that understanding what do we do with

our understanding of Consciousness in terms of how we treat other animals how we treat um brain injured humans and indeed what we do with AI there always going to be all right so from that last bit that you just said what is the difference between the function of or or something that functions like Consciousness and what we feel cuz let's be honest it's the true knowing that we have yeah you know Consciousness for individuals is this like very visceral and intense knowing and we if we cannot ascribe that to something else then we say it's

not conscious but yet there are things that function as Consciousness like tree root Networks it allows the trees to literally talk to one another and I need more water and that tree gets more water or you know uh I need to fight off this particular fungi like and that is a kind of knowing but we won't say they're conscious we'll just say that's a function so where do you find the balance and difference to make that differentiation yeah it's it's a really tricky um tight rope to walk because you know on the one hand we

have to use human way of being as a kind of Benchmark because we know that we are conscious and that's that's a starting point if you like but we don't want to be too again anthropocentric and and see everything through this through this human lens and not every function is going to need Consciousness I'm a sort of materialist so I like to think of of Consciousness as a biological property that that arose in evolution gradually um but to perform certain functions to enable certain functions in creatures where it was useful and so we have to

ask well what does Consciousness do for us and where might it be in the rest of of biology then and again there's lots of different answers to this but Consciousness for us seems to bring a ton of information together in this kind of unified way so you said you know we know we have this sense of knowing and that seems to be this kind of thing you open your eyes in the morning and there's a whole unified world out there you can just experience everything going on around you your alarm clock smell of coffee whatever

it is you experience your body and you experience you know what you might do next I can't tell you how much time I've spent contemplating the fact that every morning I wake up as me and not as someone else that's because you're not in the Quantum Leap okay all right I'm in the wrong show you're in the wrong show buddy yeah get out of here well why why would you why would you expect to be someone else when you woke up it's not that I expect to be I just wonder why I'm not it's not

a matter of expectations it's there's 8 billion people in the world why am I persistently me what is it about me that makes me me every day I wake up but the other the other possibility is in fact you're you're overestimating the extent to which you remain you from day to day you know it's it's like you think about you're not you but you're not you Neil you're not you man I I need further explanation on that sentence but just think about Neil de eison at the age of 10 something you know is is that

really the same person well I have memories from that from that age I have memories but our experiences will alter us if you like microscopically to the point where a decade later we aren't quite that same person no no I I get that but I have the same memories of events that occurred well you think you do but actually the more often you you recall something the less accurate that memory is that's what they say but I work hard to avoid that so we can wear a memory out is that what you're saying you experience

it differently when you remember it and then you remember it again and you experience it differently when you remember it and so every time a cell makes a copy of itself it's you know not the best cell it might be slightly different it might be slightly better it could be a better cell it could some some slightly worse as they say there two primary failures of memory one of them is you remember things that never happened and the other one is you don't remember things that did and I don't claim to remember everything in my

life but what I do remember I remember with pretty high precision and you forgot the third which is you remember that a black man did it what in the police lineup yeah but I just want to to what Gary said because he's absolutely right that the thing is if there's a there's a phenomenon in perception called change blindness One Way change blindness can happen is that if something changes very slowly then we don't perceive the change our perception can change but we don't experience the change of perception something like that might well be happening with

the self so us our experience of self is changing just a little bit day by day but because it changes so slowly we never experience ourselves as changing or or or we do so only when we compare it like oh what was I like 10 years ago 20 years again I'm actually may be quite different okay so therapists have paid a lot of money to speed up that process well I think they can I mean they can certainly that's one way of think about they can certainly bring out aspects that we have forgotten to point

out how different we are how different we can be as well why else go to a therapist unless there's something you want to change that's right there a potential for change I think speed up may be not the best term because you know they certainly want you to reveal things about yourself to yourself but you know the longer it takes the better it is more billing Cycles that's all I'm saying that yeah so Anil what Chuck was saying about the tree if we kind of roll that out you referring to the the melium the network

the fungal Network yeah but just taking the fact that we roll that out from to table and we say is it psychism that's basically and I'll I'll be very basic with this because that's all I can be that there's a Consciousness inferred to everything can you uh for for my sake please because I've heard the term psychism and I've even looked it up and I I still don't get the whole concept is it that Consciousness is derived from everything Consciousness is inferred upon everything or something in between I'm I to have heard the word but

I've never looked it up it just sounds kind of new Agy to me that's all but I want get to get official yeah where does an stand on this what what is it well I I I'm not a fan of it but it is a wellestablished philosophical position and it is that Consciousness it's not just inferred everywhere it is fundamental it's something of equivalent status to mass energy or electrical charge it is a fundamental aspect of the universe in which we live so it's not saying that a table is conscious or a tree is conscious

it's just Consciousness exists at the most fundamental level of things and then certain things like human beings exhibit Consciousness at this other level too of a whole organism but a table wouldn't a table is made of things that are individually a little bit conscious but there's no consciousness that inheres to the table itself now I think I I mean that's what it is for me it doesn't really help okay what you just said is why chuck could read the explanation and still not know what the hell it is because I mean if that's your best

explanation for that word we need some work on that well anel said he wasn't a big fan anyway so he's probably going to want to throw it under the bus what's but what's wrong with it I mean Consciousness is fundamental and everywhere that's reasonable isn't it yeah as long as I'm conscious it's reasonable I don't know what everywhere means I guess that's my my big question you know in the same way that that mass is basically pretty much everywhere electrical charges pretty much everywhere the these are things that are that they don't have lower lower

levels wa so so Consciousness is on the Moon I mean I'm trying to understand the universe is large and life is only on Earth and pan psychism is trying to declare that Consciousness permeates the universe basically yes yeah I mean that's the only way you could look at it from what you just said Anil is that that it's a kind of um connective pressure that is a force acting upon us all whether or not you're aware of it or not so a table is not aware of that Force but it's a part of that force

and maybe it's that that allows us to interact with the table through our consciousness readings Rupert sheldrake is a fan of this if memory serves is that correct you know I'm not entirely sure I had a had a long had about an 8 Hour train journey with ruper sheld last year so this this should be clear to me but he's certainly of the view that's the British train system for you this was in Norway um in Britain would have been 24 hours um in yeah you go so certainly he's of the view that everything that

Consciousness is everywhere that life is life and Consciousness are very closely tight in that I kind of agree with him there's an intimate connection between life and Consciousness I probably would put it in a in a slightly different way that for me not everything that is alive is consciousness but I certainly think that being alive is critical to being conscious Neil I've read that some people want to think of Consciousness as extending Beyond self as a shared sort of Consciousness field out there now I'm I'm always one for a fun idea a fun New IDE

a about how the universe works but in the physical sciences we put very high currency on testability of an idea not just whether it sounds good to an audience and so are there people testing pan psychism in a way that would give it some teeth here because you in your role are skeptical of it yeah well pan psychism itself can't be tested that's one one problem with it but it's a problem with all philosophical positions it's just a way of thinking about what Consciousness how it fits into the universe so that but the idea that

you had about does Consciousness sort of extend beyond the body can it be something that interacts with with other things you know in in some kind of field that goes out beyond the brain that can be tested I mean people have tried to test these sorts of things all the time extra sensory perception telepathy all of these sorts of things and none of them have stood up when they've been tested rigorously in the face of of Hard Evidence so Anil uh my my casual reviews of literature tell me that over the decades every animal that

we used to think was not thinking about anything has demonstrated some level of intelligence or competence that was beyond what was originally ascribed to them and no longer can you really call someone a bird brain when you see some of the great feats of thought and problem solving that birds have uh performed so today is there a list that people keep of animals that yeah they're conscious and then you cross over and they say they're not conscious or is that just a fuzzy boundary and it's going to one day move entirely into the full animal

kingdom I think I think it's a fuzzy boundary it's certainly a fuzzy boundary in terms of what people think uh but it may also be a fuzzy boundary in reality you know there may be some creatures for which it's really just unclear whether they're conscious or not might be this gradual thing that fades in and Fades out these days I think there is consensus that it's not just humans it's other primates it's it's all other mammals I think certainly I think and most other neuroscientists I think would agree that except the delicious ones the the

delicious ones are not conscious people you have nothing to fear the delicious animals are not conscious at all thank you Chuck for world according to CH yeah but then beyond beyond the mammals if you look most mammals we all have the same kind of basic brain structures and processes that turn out to be important in humans for Consciousness according to most the most of the theories that we have but then when you go beyond mammals things get tricky things really do get tricky because we don't want to assume that the kind of Consciousness present let's

say in a bumblebee needs to be humanlike in order to be to be valid or even mamalian like right we we can't look we wouldn't say language is a useful Criterion the fact that a bumblebee can't speak to us there's no reason to think that it's not conscious um so what do we say that it's not speaking to other bees well bees do speak to other bees very very well but speak to other Tre things speaking to other things or communicating in some way is that's that's very widespread so I would say like right now

where people are most uncertain including myself is at this kind of level so insects including bees fish what about many different kinds of fish but are fish conscious or not again they seem very different but when you look at for instance whether fish will seek out anesthetic in a proactive way if if they've got you know a little little injury now they do things that are very suggestive that they experience pain now we can't know for sure we can only make a best guess and that best guess is always going to shift and we're always

going to have to walk this line by between using humans as a benchmark but not sort of assuming that everything is conscious just because it you know it responds to its environment or it grows or or it does something else that could be done in a way that doesn't require Consciousness or that there's a different category of conscious that like you said maybe they just experienced their own category category yeah and Consciousness you know I mean I remember growing up we were told that humans had the biggest brains but then we realized no we don't

have the biggest brains so they had to take the ratio of the mass of a human to the mass of your brain and then we were at the top of that list okay but then what they didn't tell us was that mice and some dogs come very close to us at that ratio they didn't really say that and then what they also didn't say was we're at the top of that list only barely only mammals if you bring in other animals there are other animals that have a higher brain to body weight ratio like midsized

birds like crows this sort of thing um they have a higher brain to body weight ratio and the highest brain to body weight ratio are certain species of ants we've all seen how giant an heads can be relative to their body so this how much brain is in your organism calculus is still doesn't leave us at the top and if brain is what gives us Consciousness I'm perfectly happy to say ants are conscious yes but not smart because they keep trying to move that rubber tree and let's be honest I mean people do keep trying

to find ways in which we can still put humans at the top of every pile of every list we make so it might not be brain to body ratio anymore now it'll be something to do with the complexity of the connectivity in the brain and if you look at that oh maybe that puts us back at the top or it's see it's the degree to which we have know brain in the front of our brain a frontal matter or something like that there'll always be a way and it's not I'm not saying that there's nothing

special or distinctive about human brains human intelligence and human consciousness I think I think there clearly is I mean the kind of language that we have is something that you don't see in other other species but isn't isn't that the one thing that we always are going to fall back on is language that no animal community communicates in the various ways that we do if you take our speech if you take our hearing if you take our sight we will still find a way to communicate with one another which no other animal does that I

think there's something right about that I think language it's present in other species and it can be the more you look the more you find right if you look harder you find you find more by the way the whales wonder whether just because we face each other and make sounds they wonder if we're actually communicating the will say that to each other so Anil are we to the point now where we've blurred the lines between intelligence and Consciousness I'm glad you mentioned that this has been in the background so far and I think it the

confusion the conflation of these two concepts can lead us astray intelligence is something again that we think of as distinctively human or or certainly we see we like to put ourselves at the top of the intelligence tree and we take intelligence as a proxy for Consciousness if we look at non-human animals we tend to think well if they're smart then they're more likely to be conscious but actually they're very different concepts so you can imagine an organism an animal being conscious without being particularly smart because the most basic widespread conscious States might be things like

feelings of suffering or pain or or PL and you don't have to be highly intelligent as a species for those kinds of experiences to be useful and then on the other hand and this is where we come back to the AI situation there may be ways of being intelligent which just don't involve or require Consciousness at all no one has ever asked whether AI feels pain yes they have I have many people have you've asked chat GPT all of these kinds of questions and of course chat GPT will say what did it and what did

it tell you it well it depends how you prompt it but this is is one of the you know a couple of years ago there was this engineer for Google guy called Blake Le Moy I think and this was a chatbot called Lambda wasn't nearly as good as the chat language models we have now and he had a dialogue with it about whether it was conscious and was persuaded that it was these days if you have a similar dialogue with one of the he's the guy that got fired he's the guy that got guy got

fired for saying that he got fired for saying doesn't mean he was wrong I think he was wrong but you know he he got fired for breaching confidential ity but it causes big fuori right you know what if language models actually are conscious and because if you ask them they will appear to think very deeply about these questions and come up with plausible answers and especially if you ask them to talk about Consciousness as if no one's listening you know what they really think and do they really have an inner life they'll say yes but

of course that is exactly what language models are supposed to do you know they're trained on an enormous amount of texts which will give them you the statistical associations to generate plausible answers like that I think the our tendency to think that a language model is conscious is more a reflection of our human biases that we can't imagine a system speaking to us unless it's conscious rather than a an insight into whether the system itself actually is conscious because we can explain how it works so Neil and Neil as well as Neil sorry of Neils

chat gp4 p the touring test but that's exactly point that simply equal Consciousness no but that's exactly the point wait wait I'd like to think they've all passed the touring test ever since Eliza back in 1960s okay whatever anyone defined as the touring test at the time it passes it and they say oh well maybe we has to move we have to move the goal post to more so I I if you brought any of these large language models back in time even the most primitive of them back in time they all would have said

it pass the touring test do we need more goalposts not just move them do we need more goalposts in the sense of we need a multitude of tests that we then cross reference against each other to say that then shows me that it has or it hasn't that's exactly right so the touring test by the way I like to think of it more of a test of human gullibility rather than of machine intelligence and but either it was still a touring test right think of it whatever you would yeah what Alan Turing had in mind

that was handily Satisfied by people before anyone had any idea what computers could be they say yep I'm talking there's a human being on the other side of this machine Alan touring was easily catfished but it was explicitly a test of whether machines can think it was a test of machine intelligence it was not stated as a test of machine Consciousness and there's a a beautiful Di you the film you've seen the film X mackina Alex gallen's film um wonderful and there's a scene in that where where I think the invent is called Nathan and

and the program is called Caleb and and they're speaking and that Nathan asked Caleb to say what the touring test is he say test of machine intelligence and then the dialogue goes well if you've created machine Consciousness that's an act of God something like that and he's slipped between intelligence and consciousness so what we need is a kind of touring test for Consciousness not a touring test for intelligence so I think I think you're right we need we need a a multitude of tests and that's the blurring of the line again between intelligence and Consciousness

yeah I mean there in some sense they're related right being intelligent allows us to have different kinds of conscious experiences like the ability to feel regret rather than just sadness relies on enough intelligence to imagine alternative action and alternative outcomes so all things being equal they might be related but they are different things so if the if GPT whatever really convinces us that it is intelligent that is still not sufficient evidence that it is conscious and Neil when I communicate with you am I executing a large language model in my own head I'm not using

a lookup table yeah right I'm not there's there's words in my head that I've used before I'm more likely to compose one sentence of a certain variety versus another so the the probability of words that follow other words when I speak maybe I'm just AI maybe I'm just chat gp5 I think you're much more than that much more interesting and Rich than gpc5 and I I know you very well but think about it there's many many differences I mean there's a few similarities right to some extent this is what you a lot of things in

AI based on neural networks and it was you it was wonderful to see um Jeff Hinton and John hopfield win the Nobel Prize in physics for their work in machine learning and of course a lot of that is based on neural networks and neural networks are inspired at some level by what's happening inside biological brains like but there's tons of differences language models that we have around us now are trained on basically the entire Corpus of everything that's ever been written I mean they're trained on the whole and available and searcha postable posted but they're

trained on a ton of data right we don't need that we learn to speak on much less data we can we can do things that that language models cannot do what whatever we're doing it's not it's not the same thing even though there might be similarities very good point what does the future have in store for this us here where are we going what's next can can we upload our Consciousness into a jar can we live forever is don't open that jar it's your great great grandfather you kill [Laughter] him meanwhile I don't think we

can upload ourselves into the cloud I I I worry about that whole way of thinking I think it's this it's just the latest manifestation of kind of tech bro hubristic Singularity nonsense that that we don't really need so if we s somewhere on the line Anil artificial intelligence will have consciousness David Charmers seems to think that that will be coming in a few years time we've got the Silicon intelligence that we're we're very familiar with but there is a synthetic biological intelligence is the biological intelligence more disposed to sort of following the human thing of

Consciousness I don't think personally and I am a bit to David Chas and I have had conversations about this and I think we disagree a bit about it so I personally don't think that AI made out of silicon is likely to be conscious I think it might be very persuasive to us that it is but I think there's some good reason to think that it that it won't be this doesn't mean that it's impossible to build synthetic Consciousness the question is just how similar does it have to be to biological Consciousness does it have to

be made out of the same stuff does it have to be made out of neurons or carbon or could you do it in another material I think it's an open question I think artificial Consciousness for me is much more likely to arise not in the circuits of some future language model but in Laboratories that are building things like organoids brain organoids which are made out of the same stuff so you these brain organoids they're made out of actual neurons human neurons in many cases derived from from stem cells so here like a whole level of

uncertainty goes out the window it's made out of the same stuff so we don't have to worry about whether the stuff matters or whether Consciousness is something that a computer could have but the reason we get less worked up about it is because you know at least to so far these organoids they don't really do anything very interesting they just sit there in a dish and so we don't we don't think they're conscious you know our psychological biases are not not exercise in the same way but as they get more complicated as they start doing

stuff I think there that's where we have the real ethical worries I if I come to this as a physicist I will not ultimately distinguish between a neuron firing electrochemically and silicon firing Electro who cares who cares what it's made of if all that matters is the electrochemical signal so this this distinction that people are making feels very needlessly artificial to me I mean you know as a physicist there's a big difference between what's happening in a silicon chip and what's happening in a brain it's not I I agree but there wouldn't have to be

in principle is all I'm saying once if I get the full electrochemical mapping of your brain and then created in Silicon I've just duplicated your brain and and I'm doing it without carbon I'm using who cares I care okay but there's a there's a reason I care there's a reason I care and it's because you you've helped yourself to this kind of thought experiment that that that you've just said well in principle it could be done like you could just duplicate everything that's going on in your brain in Silicon but actually you know it may

not be possible to do that for instance take the Golden Gate Bridge you if you try to make that out of cheese you're not going to be able to do it know the bridge has to be made out of a certain material that has certain physical properties and the stuff inside our brains have certain physical properties that silicon doesn't um if you think all that matters are neurons that exchange spikes action potential you know in a digital way then you might think well okay we've abstracted away from the messy fine details of biology so then

silicon should be fine but there's actually much more going on in the brain than just this digital exchange of spikes and if that stuff matters like things like electrical Fields neurotransmitters all of this stuff chemicals washing around then there are things that you know you just can't even in principle replicate in Silicon well I would just say we're not there yet but I wouldn't preclude it that's all because you know it's like you look at look at things mechanically brain just happens to be a more complex example of other things there are organs we have

or joints we can replace your knees your hips you know we can replace things that were functioning in your body and in another era we would have said oh the human body is unreplaceable it's got you know millions of years of evolution and it is perfect for what no get rid of it you've got cartilage missing right so I I I have more confidence in the power of physics in this equation than and it could just be a matter of how big are your tools to move around molecules to configurations that you might need or

want if you if you allow engineering at that level well then of course you can you can duplicate the brain but you might still not be able to make it yeah as a silicon chip it it might have to be made out of the same kinds of building blocks in order to have the same kind of functional properties like and at that level it's biological right it's biological because there's another way to put it which is I think perhaps more intuitive like computers that the power of computers is their designed to be the kinds of

things for which you can completely and easily separate what they do from what they are made of what they do and what they are is different that's why you know software that runs on my computer will run on somebody else's that's actually a very very special and rare property that you don't find in nature General and brains are not the kind of thing for which you can separate what they do from what they are so just to just to wind this up a bit I as you as you surely know Ray Kur had an updated

version of his book The Singularity is near and guess what the new title is called well it's nerra it's n the Golden Gate Bridge made out of cheese Theo GD uh it's called The Singularity is nearer oh wow how many focus groups did he go through for that so so Anil can you take us out with where are you on this notion that the brain machine interface will reach a singularity point and all of the future history of civilization will be different because we're a competitive species we have to be at the top of every

table so we're going to make a shortcut and put something in our own heads so as we can keep our Consciousness and be super intelligent or am I just barking up the wrong tree again I mean this this this whole idea of the singularity I find very very suspicious right I just that it's it's based on these ideas of things getting exponentially better faster bigger and the one thing we know about human psychology is that we are absolutely terrible uh about understanding um the nature of exponential change we were terrible about this during the pandemic

we are linear people so so if if you stand on an exponential everything behind you looks completely flat and everything in front of you looks incredibly Steep and it's the same wherever you are on that curve and so it's very hard to judge what what's happening so I I find our intuitions get get really unreliable when we start thinking about these kinds of things so there may be some sort of escape velocity where where we reach a threshold and Things become very different for me this is most likely to happen not necessarily with AI but

with longevity research you know there might come a time where people know enough that for each passing year they're able to extend their lifespan by more than a year so effectively you you never die so there people talk about that I find that's also pretty dystopian frankly but there might be another threshold indeed it's possible where you artificial intelligence becomes smarter than us in some ways it's already smarter than us in some ways but I think we we again see it the wrong way if we think of it in those terms as a sort of

race between us and the Machine one of my mentors the philosopher Daniel Dennett I think he put it best um he sadly died earlier this year one of the things he said I will always remember was that when it comes to AI we should always remember that we're creating tools and not colleagues and be very mindful of the difference so that the technologies that we create compliment are particular human intelligence and we should be less preoccupied with trying to replace it or upload ourselves to it or any of these things that actually when you dig

into them have for me slightly unsavory motivations about you know living forever bootstrapping oneself to the top of the societal pyramids and all of the all of these kinds of things I think it's an old story we've seen many times of course Daniel D was first out of the box to declare with his one of his early books called conscious explained that was the title of one of his books he felt we were like already there here's the book no more books need to be published on this subject and that was in 1991 that was

like more than 30 years ago yeah I remember reading that my first year of undergraduate actually it was I think even earlier than that I read it in 1991 Anil are we likely to enter a post-biological age and come out of you know just no I mean total our total exist our species will go to we got to end on that answer so make it make it a good answer because that's going to be the last thing people pressure well the short answer is is no I don't I don't think we are I think we

are likely always going to be fundamentally biological though we will become more cyborg you know we will and we already are intertwined with Technologies and these levels of dependency will get deeper and deeper brain machine interfaces are coming our exploration is cyborgian we have a SUV siiz Rover on Mars right now and it's doing our bidding for uh the search and Discovery and testing and and imagery so because that the answer to that question matters when we ask if we make alien contact will it be with some biological form or will it be with some

machine version of them either just as a robotic Neary or as an actual uh uploaded Consciousness so that their physical form doesn't have to survive the Hostile journey of space travel our robot is meeting their robot yeah that's Mo I thought the most likely thing was it would just be some sort of uninteresting goo that we're likely to encounter if we encounter alien life but if we encounter intelligent life then I agree I agree with Chuck I think it's more likely to be a robot Avatar rather than a biological creature well a movie in 1958

called The Blob which would classify as being a goo but it it would come after you so you said just a goo be careful how you think about that concept not all Goos are equal it's a good point thank you I can't believe you came on this show thinking that's a definite thing I've got to say that is how we will remember you on this show not all who are created equal and an Neil as this show went on you got darker and darker and darker evidence that you're in a different time zone than we

are and you're hailing from what what part of England I'm in Brighton on on the south coast where it's pretty dark Now Brighton so the Sun is setting for you up for us which dare I say is evidence that we live in our round earth okay Anil great to have you on the show maybe we can come back to you when we have further developments the future of mine all right Chuck good to have you always a pleasure all right Gary pleasure Neil thank you you made all this happen Neil degrass Tyson you're a personal

astrophysicist keep looking up [Music]