339 | Ned Block on Whether Consciousness Requires Biology

It's become increasingly clear that the Turing Test -- determining whether human interlocutors can tell whether a conversation is being carried out by a human or a machine -- is not a good way to think about consciousness. Modern LLMs can mimic human conversation with extraordinary verisimilitude, but most people would not judge them to be conscious. What would it take? Is it even possible for a computer program to achieve consciousness, or must consciousness be fundamentally "meat-based"? Philosopher Ned Block has long argued that consciousness involves something more than simply the "functional" aspects of inputs and outputs. Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/01/05/339-ned-block-on-whether-consciousness-requires-biology/ Support Mindscape on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll. Ned Block received his Ph. D. in philosophy from Harvard University. He is currently Silver Professor in the Department of Philosophy at New York University, with secondary appointments in Psychology and Neural Science. He is also co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness https://wp.nyu.edu/consciousness/. He is Past President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Web site https://www.nedblock.us/ NYU web page https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/ned-block.html PhilPeople profile https://philpeople.org/profiles/ned-block Google Scholar publications https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=0pZiZ7wAAAAJ&hl=en Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ned_Block

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 0:57Sean Carroll?

  Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the kinds of questions that I get a lot, whether in Ask Me Anything episodes or just more generally, is can you tell me something that you've changed your mind about? Of course, I've changed my mind about lots of things. I try not to be too dogmatic or stuck, but I actually struggle to answer that question because there's some trivial examples where I changed my mind because we got better data or I got better information, right? I've changed my mind about the acceleration of the universe. I used to think it was decelerating. In 1998, we found it's accelerating, and I instantly changed my mind about that. Right now, I think the best candidate for what's causing that acceleration is the cosmological constant.

• 1:40Sean Carroll?

  I'm open to changing my mind if we get better data that says it's something dynamical rather than a constant vacuum energy. But more vague questions, philosophical, cultural, political, aesthetic questions, I have trouble pinpointing when I changed my mind, even though I certainly did it, because my... Process tends to be fairly gradual and I've forgotten what it was that started me down the road of changing my mind. So maybe I did change my mind, but to me, what my opinions are now seem like they must have always been that way, even though I know that's not true. I mention all this because I think I might be in the process of changing my mind about something, not something like super dramatic about my feelings about how

• 2:21Sean Carroll?

  the world works, but something nevertheless, pretty important. The question of what does it mean to be conscious? In other words, what are the requirements for something to be conscious? There's a point of view towards consciousness, which we all know is a complicated subject. We've talked about it here on the podcast many times. There's plenty we don't know about consciousness. And mostly I stick to saying, we don't have to change the laws of physics in order to explain consciousness. I still think that, okay? I'm not gonna, not in any danger of changing my mind about that anytime soon, although, you know, eventually, who knows? But okay, even if the world is made of physical stuff, doing physical things, when does that stuff, doing some processes, count as conscious, right? There's a point

• 3:04Sean Carroll?

  of view that really puts the emphasis on kind of an input-output mechanism. This would go back to the Turing test with Alan Turing, right? Turing suggested that if you had a computer program that could have a conversation with a human and trick them into thinking that it was conscious, then it should count as conscious. What really matters, in other words, is the output of the computation going on. And this grew into a view called computational functionalism. What matters is the function of various things going on in, and how they are embodied in some kind of computation. You get input as a conscious creature, both from words and from vision or whatever, whatever sensory input you have, you do a

• 3:48Sean Carroll?

  computation on it, and there's an output. This is saying that what doesn't matter is the way in which the computation gets done. A pocket calculator is different than an abacus, but they both do the same calculation, even though they're made of different things doing different processes. So I would have, not too long ago, more or less signed on to a point of view like this, but I've been pushed away from that point of view. And not because anything new has truly happened, although some people have been articulating the alternative in ways that I get better. It's just that, you know, I'm learning more about what people say about consciousness and appreciating more what the different subtleties are. So Anil Seth, former Mindscape guest,

• 4:33Sean Carroll?

  and also today's guest, Ned Block, have been pushing a point of view that says computational functionalism is not up to the task. It's not just about what you compute, it's how you compute it that really matters. Now, Anil wants to go further than that and say that it's not just how you compute it, but what is physically doing the computing. And he wants to put an emphasis on biology. I think that Ned, well, he'll speak for himself, but I think that he's a little bit more open-minded about what the substance is that is doing the computing. But he does think that there's more to consciousness than simply computation. There's other processes that matter as well. And so he has written an article recently, I'll link to it in the show notes,

• 5:15Sean Carroll?

  but it's simply entitled "Can Only Meat Machines Be Conscious?" Meat is, of course, a casual term for what we're made of, biological organisms of that form. And even though, despite the title, it's not mostly about substrate dependence, like he's open to, you know, if different chemical reactions did the same sort of physiology, that would still count as conscious, even though there's different stuff doing the processes. But the sort of subconscious processing that is going on contributes, in his view, to our experiences, what he calls phenomenal consciousness. Ned is actually a super well-respected philosopher

• 6:00Sean Carroll?

  in the field of consciousness. Consciousness, I quote him in The Big Picture, mentioning his distinction between access consciousness, which is what, more or less, what David Chalmers classifies as the easy problem. It's sort of your ability to access different pieces of information globally in your cognition versus phenomenal consciousness, which is the feeling of experiencing something, and that is what is hard to explain. So Ned wants to argue that maybe, at least, he's very open-minded, he's a good philosopher, is like, just suggesting possibilities we should take seriously, maybe these things that we think of as experiences of conscious

• 6:39Sean Carroll?

  states have something to do with the subconscious processes that are going on in our biological manifestation or instantiation. And maybe therefore, you could build a computer program that was arbitrarily good at tricking you, at giving all of the output that you might expect a conscious creature to give you, and nevertheless, it would not qualify as what we think of as conscious. And I'm actually becoming very open to this possibility. It's not in any sense a repudiation of physicalism. Neil Seth and Ned Block and I all agree, the world is made of physical stuff, doing physical things, obeying the laws of physics.

• 7:23Sean Carroll?

  But how consciousness fits into that picture is still a controversial topic that we have a lot to learn about. And of course, becoming super-duper relevant, because we're building computer programs that act a little bit conscious, at what point will we be ready to say that they truly are? I think we also all agree, the point is not yet, but it might be coming. It might be coming sooner rather than later. Maybe those AIs are going to get the right to vote at some point, who knows? But this is where philosophy needs to get on the stick, figure this out. Let us know what would really, truly qualify as conscious. We're not quite there yet, but hopefully, the kind of framework that Ned Block lays out will help us get there. So, let's go.

• 8:19Sean Carroll?

  Ned Block, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Oh, thanks for having me on your podcast.

• 8:25Sean Carroll?

  I figured we could start very, very broad. You know, the audience is broad. They come with a lot of different levels of knowledge. So tell me, what is consciousness?

• 8:37Speaker 03

  Ah, so I like to distinguish between a couple of different ways people use the term. The distinction I like most is between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. Phenomenal consciousness is the, you know, so-called what it's like of experience. And, you know, the, sometimes people say things like the redness of red. But the fundamental fact about phenomenal consciousness is no one can define it. You really kind of have to point to it. And that gives rise to a lot of misunderstanding in the area.

• 9:17Sean Carroll?

  I would guess.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Where, you know, people think, many people think, I don't know what you're talking about. Sometimes I like to explain it by talking about famous conundrums, like the inverted spectrum, maybe the things we both call red look to you, the way things we both call green look to me. That look is the phenomenal consciousness. Then there's, you know, Mary's famous thought, the Mary, famous Mary thought experiment. She's raised in a black and white room. She goes out of the room and sees blue for the first time. And she learns what it's like to see blue.

• 9:58Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  You know, there are all these thought experiments. Each of them has their own problems. And, but I think they do something to explain what I'm talking about when I talk about phenomenal consciousness.

• 10:15Sean Carroll?

  And then there's access consciousness.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, then there's access consciousness, some kind of global availability of information. That is what, you know, I wrote a paper in the mid 90s of making a big deal out of this distinction. And I had two opposite reviewers, one of whom says, said, you know, the access consciousness makes a lot of sense to me, but what is this phenomenal thing? I don't know what you're talking about.

• 10:43Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  And then another reviewer said the opposite, as you might imagine. And, you know, I still get both of those responses. And then there's a third, there's a third thing, which in many people's mind is even more important, which is what is sometimes expressed by consciousness of. A mental state is a state I'm conscious of myself as being in. And this idea that there's something about, that you need another state about the conscious state to make it a conscious state. So the idea is that there's, there's this thing, transitive consciousness, sometimes called consciousness of.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  And what it is for a state to be conscious is for there to be another state that amounts to consciousness of the first state. And that's a big view. Many people hold this, you know, it descends from Armstrong and Locke, before him, Locke. And many people feel like this is the main idea. So I think there are those three different strands to consciousness. I'm always talking about phenomenal consciousness.

• 12:00Sean Carroll?

  Phenomenal consciousness, yeah. How, I mean, some people very casually will think of consciousness as being related to self-awareness. I am conscious of being in a certain form, is that?

• 12:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the, that's the third thing that I just mentioned, yeah.

• 12:16Sean Carroll?

  Okay, then, then I understand access consciousness less well than I thought I did, because I thought that was the self-awareness bit, so.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  No, I think you're, I think you're on to something there, which is that, that self-awareness kind of thing is a form of access consciousness. It's a pretty sophisticated form. You know, I think young infants are conscious and they don't have that. And animals are conscious and they don't have that. So I think you can be conscious without that self-awareness.

• 12:48Sean Carroll?

  Okay, good. But, but just so as clear as I can possibly be, let's, let's do the access consciousness thing one more time. Is, is the word access doing what I think it's doing? It's what I have access to in my brain?

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I put it more in terms of global, with regard to perceptual information, global availability of that perceptual information. It's, it's very linked to the global workspace kind of idea, where, you know, you, when you're conscious of something, it's available to all your cognitive mechanisms, decision-making, thinking, betting, problem-solving, reporting.

• 13:33Sean Carroll?

  Okay, good. Actually, that does help. And then the phenomenal consciousness, of course, this is where the sexy action is, talking about, you know, how we're gonna understand it.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:43Sean Carroll?

  Let's, let's actually dig into the inverted spectrum a bit, because I never talk about it here on the podcast, so.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 13:50Sean Carroll?

  What does that mean?

• 13:53Speaker 03

  Well, as I said, it is the hypothesis that things that we agree are red look to you the way things we agree are green look to me. And the idea is that things look different to different people. Now, the, you know, to have a thorough going version of it, you need to say something about the other colors. And the simplest form is a red-green inversion.

• 14:24Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  That keeps blue and yellow the same. And then there are all kinds of technical issues about this, but, you know, they don't really matter. The, the, the key thing is that things might look different to different people. And I have to say that although this has, has a storied past where many of the conscientians thought it made no sense at all.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  It was pointed out in an article about maybe 25 years ago by the Swiss philosopher, whose name I'm forgetting, that there is this phenomenon known as pseudonormal color vision. Okay. That may be an actual case of this. Now, to understand pseudonormal color vision, you need to know a couple of things. First of all, that there are three kinds of cones. The short, medium, and long-wave cones.

• 15:30Speaker 03

  And the long and medium are mainly responsible for red and green. And they have pigments in the cones that are responsible for the signals that come out of them. And the pigments are two pigments, chloralab and erythrolab. Okay. And a very common form of red-green colorblindness is one in which genetically caused, one of those, I forget which one, chloralab, let's say,

• 16:15Speaker 03

  is in both cones instead of erythrolab in one and chloralab in the other. And that's a genetic defect, and those people have trouble telling red from green. So, there's another form of genetic red-green colorblindness. And that's where both cones have erythrolab in them. So the first kind, they both have chloralab. The second kind, they both have erythrolab in them. And it can be shown that if you had both genetic defects at once, then you would have the chloralab and erythrolab reversed. Okay.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  And making certain assumptions about how the pigments are connected to the opponent processes in color vision, you can, if you make those assumptions, you can deduce that such people would have a reversed red-green experience. The assumptions are, once, we have no way of testing, and there are many little technical issues connected with it, but, oh, I forgot to say that we can calculate that there are

• 17:41Speaker 03

  actual people, and not a small number either, who have both genetic defects, so-called genetic defects at once. So, there probably are people in the population who have this, I mean, there are, there definitely are, human beings with this pseudonormal color vision, and maybe they have genuinely red-green inverted spectra.

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• 19:03Sean Carroll?

  But we have not identified any and invited them to our philosophy conferences.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  No, because the thing about being pseudonormal is

• 19:13Sean Carroll?

  You think you're normal.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  You're gonna act pretty much like anybody else. You're not gonna know you're pseudonormal. And, you know, there will no doubt be many differences between their color vision and that of so-called normal people. But the thing is, one important fact about color vision, it varies hugely from person to person. And even from, you know, between genders, between ages. Uh, you know, for example, my color vision is much yellower than yours because I'm way older. And the lens yellows. Except one of my lenses, I have cataract replacement and it isn't yellow.

• 19:52Sean Carroll?

  So you can tell the difference?

• 19:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:55Sean Carroll?

  So, but I guess the philosophy issue that I, I don't, I don't reject, but I fret about is when you say words like, "What you experience as red is what I experience as green." Um, that

• 20:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:11Sean Carroll?

  That sort of begs the question of whether there is an objective thing about what I experience.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, there is a crucial, uh, emendation, which is that, um, we wouldn't, if this kind of thing is widespread, or even if it could be widespread, it would be kind of wrong to call the, what normal people have when they see red as the experience of red.

• 20:43Sean Carroll?

  Sure.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  Because the word then won't, the word will go with the external colors, not with the internal

• 20:50Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  experience.

• 20:52Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  Um, so the, what's objective here, uh, the most obviously objective thing is the external colors.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  But I also think that the phenomenology is objective, too. It's just that we don't know how to measure it.

• 21:09Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  So that's maybe what you're saying.

• 21:12Sean Carroll?

  It is. So I mean, part of me, and again, I'm not tied to this in any, in any sense. I'm eager to understand better, but part of me wants to say, look, there's a story that I can tell about photons and electrons and neurons. And that's a definite story. And you want to say that there's an additional story, which is what we're experiencing. And I'm like, hmm, I don't know, maybe.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, well, okay. So that puts you in a certain category.

• 21:39Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 21:40Speaker 03

  You're, you have somewhat illusionist leanings.

• 21:47Sean Carroll?

  I hate that word.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  Illusionist.

• 21:48Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, illusionist, the way the term is usually used is it refers to a view that, as Dennett put it, there are conscious properties or conscious states, but they're not what you think.

• 22:06Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  So, yeah, there are all kinds of views about consciousness, including illusionism.

• 22:15Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  And, yeah, so I don't know quite what to say about illusionism. It just seems to me to be plain from personal experience. I've actually had discussions with people about this. Many people are just puzzled by illusionism. And they don't understand how somebody could be an illusionist, but maybe that's something wrong with us. Or maybe people's experiences are just different. Or maybe you're a zombie.

• 22:42Sean Carroll?

  Maybe, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna get into that. But I think these are all on the table, yes. So in fact, actually, that'll be helpful right now.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  It's Martina, it's Martina Nieder-Rublin, Nieder-Rumlin, who published the paper first on pseudonormal color vision.

• 22:57Sean Carroll?

  Good, okay.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  So I couldn't, I was blocked.

• 22:58Sean Carroll?

  Good to give her credit. So what you're saying clearly about phenomenal consciousness does resonate with things that we have talked about on the podcast, about Tom Nagel's idea about what it is like to be things, David Chalmers' idea of the hard problem. How do you put your own perspective in context of those folks? All of whom are at NYU. So you've, you've cornered the market on these people.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah, so I'm in pretty much agreement with them about the basic facts.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  Um, I mean, you know, uh, Tom has a very, uh, uh, hard to understand and, uh, interestingly different metaphysics of it that I don't agree with it. And actually Dave's metaphysics, I don't agree with you. Dave is basically a dualist.

• 23:47Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  Um, I'm not a dualist, I'm a physicalist.

• 23:50Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  So we agree on the phenomenon that there really is consciousness. We're not illusionists. We agree that there's something that's like, uh, uh, Dave and I certainly, I don't know about Tom, but I suspect Tom too, agree that there is a hard problem. It's really hard. It's different from what Dave calls the easy problems. Uh, so I, I'm on board with all of that stuff.

• 24:13Sean Carroll?

  And I guess, I, I don't want to go down a rabbit hole here, but the illusionist, uh, label, I, I think I am an illusionist, but I would never call myself that in public. And I, I argued with Dan Dennett about it. I think it's a terrible label. Like, I'm not an illusionist about tables and chairs. I think they exist.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:31Sean Carroll?

  And I think that conscious experiences exist in exactly that way. Does that, does that make me an illusionist?

• 24:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:39Speaker 03

  Um, I guess, uh, uh, the illusionism is a hard, it's just as hard to define as many other things in the consciousness sphere. And, you know, being an ism, it shares the vagueness of all isms.

• 24:58Sean Carroll?

  Sure.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  There'll be different people with different, I should say, by the way, that illusionism is not Dennett's term. That term is due to Keith Frankish.

• 25:06Sean Carroll?

  Keith Frankish gets it, but, but Dennett agreed with it. He used it, right?

• 25:10Speaker 03

  I think he did, yeah.

• 25:11Sean Carroll?

  He did, he accepted it, yeah.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  But, you know, he said in the, uh, uh, something in the preface, I think, to, um, his book from the nineties, Conscious, I guess Consciousness Explained, that there was what he regarded as a question of tactics.

• 25:30Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  Do you say there is no such thing as consciousness? Or do you say there is such a thing, but it isn't what you think? Um, you know, in his famous paper, Coin and Qualia, he says, yes, there's consciousness, but there's no qualia. And then he gives a definition of qualia that just nobody believes in.

• 25:50Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:53Sean Carroll?

  It's an endemic thing.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  The proponents of Koya don't believe that definition of Koya. And in fact, he quotes Sidney Shoemaker in the article, saying, "I don't believe in the... I'm an advocate of Koya, and I don't believe your definition. I don't accept your definition of Koya."

• 26:11Sean Carroll?

  By the way, what is your definition of Koya?

• 26:14Speaker 03

  Well, I don't really have a definition. I... I think you can only point to it. So...

• 26:23Sean Carroll?

  But it's the experience, it's the what it is like.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  It's the what it's like. It's the phenomenal consciousness, yeah.

• 26:28Sean Carroll?

  Good. And can... can these different kinds of consciousness? Let's stick with access and phenomenal consciousness. The sort of easy problem part and the hard problem part. Do they come apart? Could an organism or a being have phenomenal consciousness but not access consciousness? Or vice versa?

• 26:47Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. In fact, you know, I think that's an open empirical possibility for a lot of simple organisms that don't have much... don't have very good cognition, but may have phenomenal consciousness. And then, you know, machines. We may have machines that have access consciousness but no phenomenal consciousness. So that's another real, real possibility. And there are limited versions of these things, or possible limited versions, in ordinary phenomena involving humans.

• 27:25Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, okay, good. And the phenomenal consciousness is the target of the hard problem. And the hard problem is hard. Do you think we're making progress? Do you think that we're learning either in the philosophy side or the neuroscience side about phenomenal consciousness?

• 27:39Speaker 03

  I think on the neuro... well, look, the most basic thing that we've learned, I think, is making the right distinctions. So, however, I do think that the neuroscience side has made a little smidgen of progress, and I think it sometimes can be rather vague, whether it's the easy problems or the hard problem. You know, the thought I have is that, as Pat Churchland once said, and I've held for a long time, is that the way probably to make progress on the hard problem is by focusing on the easy problems.

• 28:22Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  And if you get enough info on the easy problems, maybe some idea will happen with regard to the hard problem. But I think there's no doubt that if we are to solve the hard problem, it will take some real breakthrough.

• 28:40Sean Carroll?

  It's a very physicist's way of thinking, that we should do the easy things first, and then maybe the hard things will take care of themselves.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  Right, yeah. Yeah. So I'll give you an example of a, something that makes a little tiny bit of progress. So my colleague, Marissa Karasco, in the psych department at NYU, discovered that attention changes slightly, changes the way things look, makes them look higher in contrast, it makes a moving thing look like it's going fast, slightly faster, and the most, the significant one is it makes something look slightly bigger.

• 29:28Sean Carroll?

  Hmm.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  And she and her colleagues found a neurological explanation of that, which is that neurons in the visual cortex have what are called receptive fields. So in early vision, the receptive fields are very small, later vision they're very big, but in early vision, the receptive fields are small, and they're aimed at a area of space. A receptive field is the area of space that that neuron processes information from.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  And what happens when you attend to a certain area of space is that the receptive fields that surround it migrate to cover the point of attention. And then you have more receptive fields trained on that space than you did before. And that by a hypothesis called the labeled line hypothesis leads to it looking slightly bigger. So that's an interesting, you know, it doesn't solve the heart problem, but it's and maybe it is just an easy problem, but it's about the way things look.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  It explains why they look the way they do. It's an odd phenomenon that you wouldn't necessarily have predicted. And, you know, I think it's pretty cool, actually. And the hope I have is that as we make progress, maybe we will set the stage for a real breakthrough.

• 31:16Sean Carroll?

  That's great because it leads right into my, my next query about what could an explanatory account of phenomenal, phenomenal consciousness possibly look like? Like, might it just end up being a better understanding of what some neurons are doing? Are you going to require something juicier than that?

• 31:38Speaker 03

  Well, I would regard the one I just mentioned as juicier than that. Because it's really about the way things look. And that is juicier than just finding out what some neurons do. It's juicier in that it has to do with the way with phenomenal consciousness, the way things look.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  So, you know, I'm cheered by results like that. And they're, you know, in vision, there's lots and lots of really interesting results that have neuroscience explanations. You know, your colleagues, like, you know, Chaz Firestone, E.J. Green, and Ian Phillips, and there, those people, and Stephen Gross, they're, those people are all very involved in studying these things. So, yeah, I'm hopeful for the future, although I won't live to see it.

• 32:40Sean Carroll?

  Well, so, but this is heartening to me. So, the, so you're happy to imagine that when we do get an explanation of phenomenal consciousness, it might take the form, when I'm experiencing what it is like to be something, here is what is happening in the brain.

• 33:01Speaker 03

  Well, here's the thing about solving the hard problem.

• 33:07Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  I don't think you can say in advance what the form of the explanation will be. But that's, the form you mentioned is certainly a candidate.

• 33:18Speaker 06

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• 33:45Sean Carroll?

  Okay. Well, that's all I'm getting at. I mean, I completely agree. We can't say what the solution is going to be. I'm just wondering what would be acceptable as a solution.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it's really hard to say without hearing the solution. You know, I'm sure, as you are well aware, physics, a lot of solutions to problems have raised more issues than they've solved and more puzzling issues than they've solved. And maybe this will do the same.

• 34:18Sean Carroll?

  That's absolutely true. That's true. But in physics, you know, if I don't have a theory for a certain physical phenomenon, I kind of know what such theories look like, right? Like, oh, there's some space of states, there's some dynamical equations. For the hard problem, I just, I just don't know. I mean, maybe, I'm not saying it's not there.

• 34:38Speaker 03

  You know, we're just much more at sea on consciousness than probably we ever have been about physics.

• 34:48Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, no, that I completely agree with.

• 34:51Speaker 03

  It's just much more, everything is so puzzling.

• 34:54Sean Carroll?

  Right. Which leads very nicely into my next query about, you've already mentioned this a little bit, but you're a physicalist, so you're not tempted, at least at the moment, by saying that the hard problem is so hard, we need to expand our ontology of the world.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  I don't see that expanding your ontology is going to help.

• 35:15Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  You know, you can be a dualist and it doesn't give you any, it just introduces some religion or mystery and doesn't solve the hard problem at all. And the same with, same with panpsychism. You know, it, you know, it just replaces the hard problem with the so-called combination problem. You know, everything is a little bit conscious, but how the hell do you put them together into a conscious human?

• 35:41Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  I don't see any solution. I don't see any solution there. It just seems like, you know, I mean, you know, my colleagues who believe this stuff have reasons for believing it and, and you know, there are some really interesting arguments about that. But solving the hard problem, I don't think so.

• 36:02Sean Carroll?

  But you've talked about... Non-reductive physicalism as something that might

• 36:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:08Sean Carroll?

  come into play here. So for other reasons, I was just thinking about reductionism today. In fact, I think, yeah, I think that you mentioned Phil Anderson in your paper that we're going to talk about.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  Oh, do I?

• 36:22Sean Carroll?

  Phil Anderson, maybe I'm not, I might be mixing up different things. But Phil Anderson wrote this famous paper saying more is different. And people, people never read the paper. They just quote the title and he's in the paper, he's super affirmative about reductionism. He loves reductionism. He just doesn't think it's useful when you're, when you care about the higher levels. But you want to be anti-reductionist a little bit.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  Actually, I want to be reductionist.

• 36:52Sean Carroll?

  Okay, good.

• 36:53Speaker 03

  Of course, it depends what you mean by reductionist.

• 36:56Sean Carroll?

  Of course.

• 36:57Speaker 03

  So, you know, the usual meaning of a non-reductive physicalism, or the one that most people have in mind, is usually a form of functionalism. It's that the right descriptions of these phenomena are at a higher functionalist level, you know, where you specify the organization of a system, and that allows for many different realizations of it.

• 37:27Sean Carroll?

  Yes.

• 37:27Speaker 03

  Implementations. That's not my version.

• 37:31Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 37:31Speaker 03

  My version is, you know, the meat-centric version.

• 37:36Sean Carroll?

  Good.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  You know, where I'm referring to this famous short story called They're Made of Meat. Have you read that?

• 37:44Sean Carroll?

  No, I haven't.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  Oh, it's very funny. I'll send you a link to it.

• 37:51Sean Carroll?

  We'll put it in the show notes.

• 37:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, I always do it in my undergraduate classes. So it's from the point of view of a group of machine, you know, silicon beings, machines made by other machines that were themselves made by other machines, and the ultimate origin is lost in, in history. And they go around the universe discovering other conscious beings. And then they discover us, and they say things like, they're made of meat. And then one of them says, well, but how do they think? And and the answer is they just use meat.

• 38:35Sean Carroll?

  I have to read the story, yeah.

• 38:38Speaker 03

  And then, how do they communicate? They flap their meat.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  And they they think it's so awful that there are these these meat conscious beings that they just better suppress the information and forget about them altogether.

• 38:56Sean Carroll?

  It does have its downsides being made of meat, I gotta say.

• 38:59Speaker 03

  It does. Yes, yes, it does.

• 39:01Sean Carroll?

  But okay, you've introduced the word function or functionalism. So that is a perspective. It's a perspective you want to sort of push back against a little bit.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I think what's happened in current thinking about artificial intelligence is that a lot of very influential people are computational functionals. They think that certain computations are necessary and sufficient for consciousness. And I am, I have long been a doubter of this. In 1997, I published a paper called Biology Versus Computation in the Study of Consciousness. Actually, it wasn't real, a real paper. It was a BBS reply.

• 39:50Sean Carroll?

  Yep.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  So, but I've been pushing this line for quite a while. But, you know, things are getting hot now and, you know, it really matters now. It used to be that it was kind of just philosophers, but now it's a lot of other people. And, you know, as you may know, there's a big issue of AI safety.

• 40:13Sean Carroll?

  Yes.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  Which is the extent to which machines have feelings and they can be damaged and their welfare has to be taken into account. And one of the large language models, Claude, made by Anthropic, has now allowed its AI to opt out of a conversation if it's too unpleasant.

• 40:37Sean Carroll?

  Hmm, better safe than sorry, I guess.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's the idea.

• 40:44Sean Carroll?

  So the idea of, well, sorry, is there a difference between, a distinction between just functionalism and computational functionalism?

• 40:53Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah, functionalism is a much broader doctrine that encompasses a lot of other kinds of functions and, you know, functional roles, basically, you know, what philosophers have talked to under the heading of, you know, functional roles, they can be, they're basically causal, causal map of states and how they affect one another and that kind of thing. But the version that has really become important now is computational functionalism because the question is in people's minds is, do the computations that these AIs make, or some future AIs, determine conscious states?

• 41:36Speaker 03

  Or, as I think, is there some kind of a biological necessary condition?

• 41:42Sean Carroll?

  Right, right. So the idea-

• 41:44Speaker 03

  I should say, when I say, when I say, "I think that," I mean, I think that that is equally plausible. I don't mean I have really strong evidence for that.

• 41:54Sean Carroll?

  So the idea of, the sales pitch, I guess, for computational functionalism would be, look, the brain clearly computes some things. You can at some level think of how you communicate with a human being as it gets some input, it gives some output. Clearly, there is a computation underlying that.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 42:14Sean Carroll?

  And the computational functionalist view is, that is what it is. There's nothing really extra going on.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, so what I think is, if you want the machine to be conscious, you may need a certain kind of implementation of those computations.

• 42:35Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, you have a nice distinction in the paper about roles versus realizers. And I know that it's always hard to explain jargon words in an audio format, but why don't you give that a try? Explain the difference?

• 42:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the idea is that the role is the abstract organization of the system and what causes what. When you're talking about computational system, it's the computation is the thing- Does, and the realizer is what does those computations? So, I mean, famously, a, you know, a computational process, you know, just take a simple computational process like adding or multiplying. It can be realized in an electronic system, or a electrical system with relays and switches, or a mechanical system with gears and pulleys.

• 43:29Speaker 03

  And these are different realizers that implement the computations in different ways. And, of course, we think that they're just doing the same computation in a different way, but the question is, does the computations characteristic of consciousness require some particular form of realization?

• 43:50Sean Carroll?

  And, yeah, so, how does, this is very, very close to the discussion about substrate independence or dependence.

• 44:00Speaker 03

  Yes. Now, I am not a substrate dependence person.

• 44:05Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  My fellow traveler, Anil Seth, thinks the substrate, the material, the stuff, is what's important. I focus on the mechanisms.

• 44:17Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 44:18Speaker 03

  So, for example, you know, the, you know, our neural firing, our neurons involve certain ions, you know, calcium, potassium, chloride, et cetera. And maybe neurons could be made out of a different substrate with different ions, maybe there's some silicon way of doing it, I don't know, I'm not a chemist, so I don't know what could be put together, using a different substrate. But the mechanisms, I mean, from my ignorant point of view, maybe there could be something with similar mechanisms, but a different substrate.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  And I think it's the mechanisms that count, not the substrate.

• 45:04Sean Carroll?

  Good, okay, so, an abacus adds two numbers together using a different process than an electronic computer does, and you're going to say that that difference might matter, but whether the abacus is made of iron or wood does not matter to you?

• 45:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I should say, by the way, it's interesting that mental abacus calculations people do without the abacus are make different errors than digit than than base 10 computations because abacus are involve a I don't know quite how they work, but they involve fives. They make mistakes of five.

• 45:47Sean Carroll?

  Okay. Very interesting.

• 45:49Speaker 03

  So imagery, abacus imagery differs from digital is not digital, but decimal decimal imagery, where the key mistakes are often made in carrying.

• 46:03Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, interesting. I mean, it reminds me of the fact that when we built these wonderful large language models and they do an amazingly good job of mimicking human conversation, but they they become bad at arithmetic, even though they're computers, right? Like, because they're clearly the processes are different.

• 46:22Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. In fact, they're still bad at arithmetic. And, you know, GPT three was only about, I think, 20% accurate on three-digit multiplication. You know, the original report showed the accuracy levels.

• 46:38Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  And they've gotten more and more accurate. And now the models that are hooked up to the Internet or hook up to a calculator try to send these calculations to some

• 46:48Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  other kind of computing device, but they don't do it very well. And they still make mistakes. You know, one that was circulating on the Internet for a while was, I think, GPT four was there was a certain kind of calculation where the machine regarded 5.11 as larger than 5.9.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  Because 11 is bigger than 9 and that kind of similarity. And they also make mistakes with the rules of chess.

• 47:25Speaker 03

  They, it's a fairly commonly reported thing that when you get them in unusual chessboard situations, the pieces will jump that are not knights.

• 47:37Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 47:38Speaker 03

  And, you know, the point, the basic point there is one that Gary Marcus made years and years ago, which is they don't have, actually Pinker, Steve Pinker was the first person to really make this point, which is they don't have rules.

• 47:54Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  They, they can read the rules and they can tell you the rules, but their fundamental mode of computation is not based on the rules.

• 48:04Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 48:05Speaker 03

  So while, whereas they know the rules of arithmetic, they don't use them.

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• 48:38Speaker 05

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• 49:07Sean Carroll?

  So I think that it was, talking with an ill Seth over the last year shook me out of my dogmatic computational functionalist slumbers. I would have been all in favor of it, but I think I understand the problems with it better now. But, so I still have a little bit of a worry. I'm trying to, I'm trying to make sure that I can reject computational functionalism, but still be a physicalist. And the worry would be, can't I just be expansive and think of literally every process as some kind of computation? And if so, if any physical thing is computational?

• 49:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you're thinking of the physical church Turing thesis that you mentioned in an email. Yeah, so maybe, should I say something about the church Turing thesis? Yeah, exactly, please.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, so the church Turing thesis is the thesis that a mechanically computable function is Turing computable and vice versa. The vice versa is pretty obvious. Well, I should say first, mechanical computability is an intuitive notion. Yeah, we don't know. So there can be no proof of the church Turing thesis. That's why it's a thesis. Yeah. So the, if it's Turing computable, then it's mechanical. Well, that is just obvious because everything a Turing machine does is a mechanical thing. You know, it writes on a tape, it moves the tape, it erases from the tape, you know, that kind of stuff.

• 50:42Speaker 03

  So it's, but it's, if it's mechanical, then it's Turing computable. That has been something that has raised, you know, people who are conservative about whether that's really true. My view is that that is true by stipulation. Because whenever anybody comes up with a counter example, everybody says, oh, that's not really a counter example. And then they refine the notion of computation to rule it out. The most notable case is computation mentioned actually by Turing. Computation by a truly random process, like atomic decay. You know, you can regard, you can set that up so that, you know, like a Geiger counter

• 51:26Speaker 03

  or something, it computes a series of, an infinite series of numbers. So like, in some sense, it's computing a function. And that can't be computed by a Turing machine. So what people say is, oh, that's not mechanical in the sense in which we meant it. Or it's not a computation in the sense in which we meant it because it's not reproducible. So they refine the notion of computation to rule it out. And, you know, a similar point could be made by the sense of computation in which, which

• 52:05Speaker 03

  is not random, in which a river computes the, um, uh, the, the rate of erosion of its banks.

• 52:14Sean Carroll?

  Exactly, right.

• 52:15Speaker 03

  And that's not Turing computable either. Um, well, or at least arguably, it's not Turing computable. You could, you could approximate it, but the, you know, so, and this gives, you know, there's a whole issue about the real numbers and stuff, real numbered values of things. Anyway, so I regard the Turing thesis, uh, as, as really a stipulation, certainly that, that if it's mechanical, then it's, then it's Turing computable as a bit of a stipulation, but it's a reasonable stipulation. I mean, um, so, but, okay, so, um, uh, the processes we're talking about are mechanical

• 52:59Speaker 03

  and, uh, the functions they are computing, um, you know, ignoring real numbered values, which probably you can't ignore because there's all, you know, all the things in the brain are particles. So there can be a, uh, a Turing machine that computes that function. But the problem I would raise is whether that computation is itself analog in the following sense. You can regard a, a mental process as analog if a, a computation of that process need not preserve the mental properties.

• 53:38Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 53:39Speaker 03

  So reasoning is arguably a non-analog process because if you have a machine that computes the, um, uh, the, the computations, that does the computations involved in reasoning, you know, you know, I, I, at least it's a good case that it is reasoning. But consciousness is another matter. And there, consciousness is like gravity or a rainstorm.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  A computational simulation of a rainstorm isn't wet? A computational simulation of gravity doesn't produce any gravity? I mean, the objects that do the computation have mass and so they will themselves have gravity. But the computation doesn't itself determine any gravitational attraction. So the question is whether consciousness is like that.

• 54:40Speaker 03

  And I think we just don't know. So the church during thesis doesn't help us.

• 54:47Sean Carroll?

  I've heard many times this example of simulating hurricane does not make you wet or does not create wetness. But I worry that there's some linguistic sleight of hand going on here. If part of the simulation was a person in the simulated thunderstorm, that person would say that they were getting wet if they were an accurate simulation.

• 55:15Speaker 03

  So I shouldn't have used the word simulation. What it's really about is whether an implementation of that computation has to preserve the mental properties of it. So I'm really not talking about a simulation. I'm talking about an implementation of it in computational hardware.

• 55:39Speaker 03

  You know, for many processes you might name, take for example freezing. You know, freezing is a process by which a liquid forms a crystalline solid. You can implement those computations without any actual freezing.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  So that's, many if not most processes are like that. That is, so that's the way I should really define. I didn't mean to use the word simulation.

• 56:13Sean Carroll?

  I would have used it anyway, so it's not your fault.

• 56:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:18Speaker 03

  So if I, yeah. So the real issue is about implementation.

• 56:23Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, okay. Good. And so, I mean, is part of your thesis that, well, when I was trying to understand what Anil Seth was saying, and it vibed with me a little bit when I was reading your paper, there's a black box view of how one deals with human beings, like I said, input and then output. But then there's also like a wet, green biological view, where there's a lot of processes going into it in the meantime. And I want to say that what you're saying is that those processes maybe matter to what we think of as conscious experience.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 57:05Sean Carroll?

  And so, if that's true, and actually, you know, the scales have fallen from my eyes in the last year, like I said, and I'm very open to this possibility.

• 57:14Speaker 03

  No, you're not, because you're an illusionist.

• 57:17Sean Carroll?

  No, no. See, this, good. Now we're getting, now we're making money here, because I think that conscious experiences are emergent, higher level ways of talking about things that happen at a physical, purely physical level. But I'm open to the fact that what the emergence refers to depends on subconscious, subcomputational things, not just the input and the output. I mean...

• 57:51Speaker 03

  So I see. So there's a version of this that you can accept?

• 57:54Sean Carroll?

  Because, you know, my whole thing...

• 57:55Speaker 03

  Even as an illusionist?

• 57:57Sean Carroll?

  Exactly. Because my whole thing is entropy in the arrow of time. And I really feel bad that I don't remember who said it, but someone on the internet said, "LLMs do not experience the passage of time."

• 58:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:11Sean Carroll?

  And I think that's crucially important, because our cells do experience the passage of time.

• 58:17Speaker 03

  They sure do, yeah.

• 58:18Sean Carroll?

  And I wouldn't be shocked if that had something to do with conscious experience.

• 58:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. No, no, conscious experience is intrinsically temporal.

• 58:27Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 58:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree with that.

• 58:31Sean Carroll?

  So what do we know about it? I mean, you make a point in the paper distinguishing between electrochemical processes versus merely electronic processes.

• 58:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, yeah, that's really just a speculation, but it is kind of remarkable that the way our brains work translate, you know, electro, purely chemical signals into electrical signals and then back to chemical signals, you know, neurotransmitters between cells, electrical within the cell. And, you know, as I mentioned in the paper, the early theories of the synapse were electrical.

• 59:17Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 59:18Speaker 03

  And it turned out, it looks like there's some evidence that a purely electrical nervous system didn't do very well. And, you know, I tried mentioning a number of different ways in which electrochemical processing might be superior and conclude that it's kind of a mystery. But we're lucky we have it because maybe that's what led to consciousness.

• 59:46Sean Carroll?

  But would you say-

• 59:47Speaker 03

  I should say also, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

• 59:49Sean Carroll?

  I was just gonna say, when you say didn't do very well, you mean as a matter of evolutionary history?

• 59:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, that's the Tina, so-called Tina Fours that, at least at one stage, had a purely electrical nervous system. And they didn't, they didn't get more, lead to more complex animals. They were kind of an evolutionary dead end, whereas the electrochemical pathway did generate much more complex animals, including us.

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  So

• 1:00:22Sean Carroll?

  Is that a well-known fact among evolutionary biologists? Or is it something that we've noticed?

• 1:00:27Speaker 03

  Well, okay. So as I said in the paper, up to 2022,

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  it was thought that sponges were the first animals or widely thought that. Then in 2023, there were some results suggesting that actually tinaforens were the first and that they differ from all subsequent animals in an important chromosomal way. Whether all now I'm told, I haven't read the paper yet, that there's some new evidence that maybe goes against some of that. So I think the situation is in a state of flux.

• 1:01:10Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  And I don't know if they all would accept that. I think even if the tinaforens weren't first, I think would, I'm guessing it would be probably pretty widely agree that they were a dead end.

• 1:01:24Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  But I don't know for sure.

• 1:01:26Sean Carroll?

  Those scientists always changing their mind about things because of new evidence.

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, damn scientists. We philosophers never do that.

• 1:01:33Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Sean Carroll?

  So I'm wondering how accurate you would count it if I said that part of your lesson or your message is that consciousness can depend in interesting ways on subconsciousness, on things that were not.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 1:01:53Sean Carroll?

  Are there, what do I want to say? Are there, can we have subconscious experiences? Is that a thing?

• 1:02:02Speaker 03

  Well, of course, I have advocated that there might be experiences in an isolated part of the cortex that doesn't, that are completely cut off from access. And it's a more remote speculation than my other speculations. But I think it's conceivable.

• 1:02:29Sean Carroll?

  You do.

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  A lot of people feel it's not conceivable.

• 1:02:32Sean Carroll?

  Okay. You do mention the possibility that there would be something like a repressed memory that could affect our feelings, that could affect our phenomenal consciousness.

• 1:02:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, the repressed feelings, I, I, so that, I was trying to illustrate the, uh, the possibility of phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness from a Freudian point of view. And I pointed out that the Freudian picture of repression is repression in the access sense. So you, the, the case I imagined is you had a very terrible experience and you repress it, but it had very vivid, uh, phenomenal qualities to it. And maybe when it's repressed, it still has those phenomenal qualities. It's just that you don't access them. So that, that was the thought.

• 1:03:26Speaker 03

  And the Freudians regard that as unconscious because of the lack of access.

• 1:03:32Sean Carroll?

  Good, yeah, okay. They would have benefited from this distinction, definitely. Okay, so yeah, I, I had a, um, a question. Every, every month for the podcast, I do an Ask Me Anything, um, episode where just questions pour in and I try to answer them. And I got a really good one last time.

• 1:03:49Speaker 03

  Oh my, that sounds really tough.

• 1:03:52Sean Carroll?

  I get to pick which ones I answer. That's what makes it, uh, palatable, so.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:03:56Sean Carroll?

  One of them was like, how well have we done on deciding the criteria for saying when an AI will be conscious?

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:07Sean Carroll?

  And I said, not that well.

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:09Sean Carroll?

  I don't know.

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  Not that well, I agree. We're really, we're really at first base. I think the most promising suggestion is one that a lot of people have made, which is that if you could make an AI that isn't trained on people saying things about their, their first person point of view. And it nonetheless expressed a first-person point of view. That would be more convincing than what we have now. Way more convincing. So the idea is, you know, you, these LLMs are trained on a ton of human-generated stuff that involves all kinds of first-person point of view. You know, you give it a number of books and you're going to have a lot of first-person

• 1:04:54Speaker 03

  point of view. Maybe if you trained it just on, I don't know, the Encyclopedia Britannica or something or...

• 1:05:01Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:02Speaker 03

  And, and, you know, if you successfully eliminated everything in the training data that had a first-person point of view and it nonetheless developed one, you know, that would have some convincing force, I think.

• 1:05:16Sean Carroll?

  Well, that, yeah, that's interesting. I mean, but certainly still the, the realizers are still wildly different.

• 1:05:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Sean Carroll?

  Than for our biological brain.

• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  Wildly different, but maybe, but that would be some indication that maybe those different realizers do realize some kind of experience or at least a first-person point of view.

• 1:05:35Sean Carroll?

  Good. So, so there's a distinction between like the classic Turing test, really only focused on inputs and outputs, right? Like if the output sounded human, then we're going to call it consciousness. And then by now, we're, I think we're mostly sophisticated enough to say, that's not quite enough.

• 1:05:52Speaker 03

  Nobody talks about the Turing test anymore.

• 1:05:55Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 1:05:56Speaker 03

  It's really funny how, you know, just in three years, it's, or four years, I guess, it's completely disappeared. I mean, I think my blockhead example just conclusively refuted the Turing test.

• 1:06:10Sean Carroll?

  What is that?

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  You know that example?

• 1:06:12Sean Carroll?

  I don't know.

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  Oh, it, it's an example of a brute force Turing test passing machine. The idea is, you know, just as tic-tac-toe is just completely solvable through a tree structure where you put in, you know, you let the, say that the, the other person go first and then you put in a plausible move, the human puts in a plausible move in the program for each of those. And then for each move that the, uh, uh, the, the person, the, the, the judge makes next, the human puts in another one that is a human programmer.

• 1:06:51Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:52Speaker 03

  I mean, and you make a tree where you, where the programmer has put in every other move. And, you know, they don't have to be good ones, but anyway, for every move, you can say, I put that in there. And, you know, the idea is it's like that for a conversation. The idea is that you have, you, you, you decide how long the Turing test is going to go, like an hour, you compute the type of all strings that can be how many, how long they can be. And you put, you know, I mean, it would be very large. Stuart Cheever actually did it.

• 1:07:30Speaker 03

  Stuart Cheever is a, is a computer scientist at Harvard, and he did a calc, he published a philosophy article with a calculation of how big it would be and how long it, you know, and, you know, the answer is really big.

• 1:07:44Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:46Speaker 03

  But the point is it's conceptually possible, and it would do as well as a person on every,

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  because the people have put those numbers, those points in. And the thing about it is, is that for every clever response, some person could say, yeah, I thought of that.

• 1:08:10Sean Carroll?

  Well, I, I like this example a lot because, I mean, one might be tempted to say, well, why wouldn't that be conscious? It's just a big lookup table, but how do you know it's not conscious? Like, maybe the universe is just a big lookup table, but it points to the fact that we do, at least informally, associate consciousness with kind of some specific set of goings on in a biological organism in a way that it's not that.

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  At least, at least we rule out negative, the negative. So the point I was making with that example was maybe we don't know what internal goings on are responsible for consciousness, but something that just is a lookup table, that's not conscious.

• 1:08:53Sean Carroll?

  So it must be more than just the input output.

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  More, more than that, yeah.

• 1:08:57Sean Carroll?

  Yeah. So, I mean, does your distinction between roles and realizers, et cetera, help us even a little bit in getting an answer to when the AIs will be conscious? Like, this is an important question coming up on us.

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, well, at least it allows us to formulate the problem.

• 1:09:16Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:16Speaker 03

  Which is always a step up and, you know, I mean, the way I like to think about it is in deciding whether any alien being is conscious, you really have no choice but to extrapolate from us.

• 1:09:37Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:38Speaker 03

  And you can extrapolate on the basis of our computational properties or on the basis of our sub computational properties, and we just don't know which.

• 1:09:48Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:49Speaker 03

  So I think the distinction is important for formulating that point.

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

  We don't know which, and we don't have any reason to favor one over the other. So if I had to assign a probability, it would be 50% for each.

• 1:10:07Sean Carroll?

  Do you know if moral philosophers have started to weigh in on when we should be nice to the AIs?

• 1:10:13Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Oh, there's a huge amount of literature on this now. I went to an AI safety, which is that, it's about that, in Berkeley two weeks ago, and there are a lot of people think about it, and all the companies have people thinking about it.

• 1:10:28Sean Carroll?

  Well, they're thinking about whether the AI should be nice to us more than whether we should be, no?

• 1:10:33Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no, no.

• 1:10:35Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  They're also thinking about whether we should be nice to the AI. And, you know, one of the issues I raised with a number of people at that meeting was why the companies are thinking about this. And, you know, the answer I got from some people is, well, they want to be on top of it in case people start complaining about torturing the machines. They want to have a whole body of information.

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  The worry, what I then raised was, well, look, these, you know, what you're getting from people thinking about this is, you know, a lot of stuff that could be used against them.

• 1:11:16Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Speaker 03

  And is that really what they want to fund? Shouldn't they be just squelching it? And then, you know, the answer that occurred to me, although nobody said it, was actually very simple.

• 1:11:29Speaker 03

  And that is more than 50% of the profit that these companies make more. Sorry, take it back. More than 50% of the uses people put these things to are as companions. So the extent, to the extent that they can boost the idea that maybe the machines are conscious. That is good for the bottom line.

• 1:11:57Sean Carroll?

  I find that that community, a weird mix of people who are absolutely ruthlessly in it for the money and people who are entirely idealistic about, you know, creating a better future and creating like they're both there and they're both working hand in hand.

• 1:12:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's exactly right. It's, it is a very interesting thing.

• 1:12:17Sean Carroll?

  And we're going to see a lot of things happening on the neuroscience side, the AI side. I think that the philosophers, philosophers need to get on the stick and give us an answer to this. When we should start being nice to the AIs, it's our job.

• 1:12:29Speaker 03

  Well, what we really need is, is more people studying it. Both, both the issues we're, I think the issues we're talking about today.

• 1:12:36Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:38Speaker 03

  Are super important. You know, every philosophy department should have somebody who's working on this kind of thing.

• 1:12:45Sean Carroll?

  Well, we talked about a lot of things. Do you mean the AI in particular or consciousness or?

• 1:12:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, AI in particular, because it's such a major social issue. But, but you know, it's also true that the issues having to do with animal consciousness have become very

• 1:13:00Sean Carroll?

  But that, but yes.

• 1:13:01Speaker 03

  Significant, we didn't even talk about it. And boy, that's, you know, there's a huge, I mean, it's under the heading of, of expanding the moral circle.

• 1:13:11Speaker 03

  But a lot of people are interested in, there's a lot of stuff going on. And we really, you know, academia has to get on, on, on board with this stuff, you know? Departments are so hidebound with, you know, they don't do new things, but they really should be doing this.

• 1:13:29Sean Carroll?

  I'm on your side. I mean, we always cringe a little bit to think of what the people 500 years in the future are going to say about us. And a lot of things we're not paying attention to, maybe we should, but.

• 1:13:40Speaker 03

  If there are, if there are people.

• 1:13:42Sean Carroll?

  If there are people, what the computers will be saying about us, maybe we should be asking. But that was extremely helpful in framing us for having these discussions. So Ned Block, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

• 1:13:54Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you. It was fun.

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