Is Consciousness Everywhere? With Anil Seth

Are we on the brink of merging with machines? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly dive into the mysteries of consciousness versus intelligence, panpsychism, and AI with neuroscientist and author Anil Seth.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The other possibility is in fact you're you're overestimating the extent to which you remain you from day to day.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Oh, you're not you, Neil. You're not you, man.

• 0:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I need further explanation on that sentence.

• 0:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk special edition. And when you hear that, you know, my two co-hosts are Gary O'Reilly. Gary.

• 0:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Nice, Neil. Good to be back.

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Former soccer pro, sports commentator, sporting a new part in his head.

• 0:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, like a neural chip. Yeah.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a surgical scar for what they installed in your brain.

• 0:55Gary O'Reilly?

  They were looking for something and it was a complete waste of time.

• 0:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got you. And of course, got Chuck Nice, comedian, actor, longtime StarTalk co-host. Absolutely. Always good to have you. And Gary, you cook up these topics.

• 1:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, 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 on consciousness. And we spoke with David Chalmers 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?

• 1:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're thinking about the future of our mind?

• 1:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm, 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? 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. And our guest is Al Seth. A professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex in England, a place I know reasonably well.

• 2:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he speaks your language.

• 2:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, he does, so you have to pay attention. 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.

• 2:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. But delighted to have you here, Neil. Neil, Neil, I say that right?

• 2:45Speaker 00

  That's exactly right. Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be on the show.

• 2:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 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?

• 3:16Speaker 00

  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. There's anything special about this thing that we call conscious experience. And I think, I think they're just wrong, frankly. And 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. And everything else is kind of inferred through it, whether it's the world around us, the self, or everything else we know in science.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  It's sort of, we, we know it because at some point we experience something. 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 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 some other animals, insects, people have to brain damage, and of course, you know, hot topic today, artificial intelligence.

• 4:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 4:58Chuck Nice?

  That makes sense.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  That, that, that doesn't make sense.

• 5:03Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna 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.

• 5:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we gotta keep moving the post.

• 5:16Chuck Nice?

  Right. So you have to raise the bar so that we can maintain our supposed preeminence.

• 5:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, and you know, how much of our definition of consciousness is just to, so that we feel special?

• 5:29Speaker 00

  Well, I think 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.

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, 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.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  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, we're related to all other animals. And so, yeah, in that sense, consciousness is the last refuge of human exceptionalism.

• 6:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Beautiful sentence.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  That we feel that human consciousness is somehow really special and it sets us apart. You know, Descartes made this very explicit. He called non-human animals beast machines or bit machine in the French. 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 the moral consideration. So we do have this track record and we've kind of got around it 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

• 7:05Speaker 00

  there's a wide consensus that we're not the only conscious creatures out there.

• 7:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just ask your cat, ask your cat, yeah.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  If you could ask a cat.

• 7:14Chuck Nice?

  You can ask a cat, they just won't answer until you've left the room.

• 7:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are there theories of consciousness? And 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?

• 7:35Speaker 00

  They're all ways of thinking about the problem or that's 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, it might 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 Chalmers called a hard problem consciousness. I know he's been on your show before.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  And the idea that they're totally unrelatable 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.

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me interject there. When someone comes up to me and says, Dr. Tyson, I have a theory. And I say, no, Einstein had a theory. You have a hypothesis, just to be clear. Because the physical science of theory is a fully tested explanation of phenomena that makes 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.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  No, I think that's right. I think a theory is the goal, isn't it? Or a well-tested and empirically well-established and explanatory powerful theory. That's the goal. And I was saying, 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 these things. I mean, they are still theories. So they make predictions and they explain observations about what happens in the brain. Because one of the amazing things about consciousness, philosophically, it seems incredibly mysterious, but it has this amazing advantage that brains

• 9:42Speaker 00

  are relatively numerous, relatively accessible, you know, compared to the Big Bang or the very small world of quantum mechanics. We can look inside a living human brain as people gain consciousness, lose consciousness, change their consciousness. So we can study it 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 improve the theories that we have.

• 10:10Gary O'Reilly?

  You talk about it as a mystery. Is consciousness broken down into different kinds of types, segments, or is it just one big thing?

• 10:20Speaker 00

  I prefer that kind of divide and conquer approach, actually. Because if you treat it as one big scary mystery in need of one massive eureka solution, it can be very resistant. It can be resistant even in the sense of what would a satisfying answer look like? You know, what would we be content with in terms of an explanation? And in many other areas of science, this kind of divide and conquer approach has paid dividends. There's a good parallel, I think, with the history of life.

• 10:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's reductionism.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me add something here. 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 among you. And it 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?

• 11:33Speaker 00

  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 the dialogue between philosophy and science has become richer. Certain things that may have started purely philosophical have now become the realm of the lab. And that's great.

• 11:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how most things would be. But once it's in the lab, the philosopher is a little less useful, is all I'm saying. Because your answers are coming from the lab.

• 11:58Speaker 00

  I think the point, right, 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 are and how to interpret the answers. And the theories that are coming up still have quite a philosophical flavour. And also, 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 and 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 brain-injured humans, and indeed, what we do with AI? It's always going to be.

• 12:38Chuck Nice?

  All right. So from that last bit that you just said, what is the difference between the function of, or something that functions like consciousness?

• 12:50Chuck Nice?

  And what we feel, because 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.

• 13:31Chuck Nice?

  So where do you find the balance and difference to make that differentiation?

• 13:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's a really tricky, 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, 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, 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?

• 14:19Speaker 00

  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 like 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.

• 14:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 15:00Chuck Nice?

  That's because you're not in the quantum leap.

• 15:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, I'm in the wrong show.

• 15:07Chuck Nice?

  You're in the wrong show, buddy.

• 15:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Get out of here.

• 15:10Speaker 00

  Well, why would you, why would you expect to be someone else when you woke up?

• 15:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 eight billion people in the world. Why am I persistently me? What is it about me that makes me me every day I wake up?

• 15:29Speaker 00

  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, if you think about-

• 15:39Chuck Nice?

  You're not you, bud, you're not you, Neil. You're not you, man.

• 15:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I need further explanation on that sentence.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  But just think about Neil deGrasse Tyson at the age of 10, something, you know, is, is that really the same person?

• 15:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I have memories from that, from that age, I have memory.

• 15:58Gary O'Reilly?

  But our experiences will alter us, if you like, microscopically, to the point where a decade later, we aren't quite that same person.

• 16:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I, I get that, but I have the same memories of events that occurred.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  Well, you think you do, but actually, the more often you, you recall something, the less accurate that memory is.

• 16:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what they say, but I work hard to avoid that.

• 16:20Gary O'Reilly?

  So we can wear a memory out? Is that what you're saying?

• 16:24Chuck Nice?

  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.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  It might be slightly better. It might be slightly better.

• 16:41Chuck Nice?

  Well, it could be a better cell, it could be slightly, slightly worse.

• 16:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As they say, there are 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.

• 17:02Chuck Nice?

  And you forgot the third, which is you remember that a black man did it.

• 17:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 17:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the police lineup, yeah.

• 17:21Speaker 05

  I'm Nicholas Costella and I'm a proud supporter of StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  But I just wanted to return to what Gary said because he's absolutely right that the thing is, if 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 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 we do so only when we compare it like, oh, what was I like 10 years ago, 20 years ago? And we think, ah, I'm actually maybe quite different.

• 18:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so therapists are paid a lot of money to speed up that process.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  Well, I think they can, I mean, they can certainly, that's one way of thinking about it. They can certainly bring out aspects that we have forgotten to point out how different we are, how different we can be as well.

• 18:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why else go to a therapist unless there's something you want to change?

• 18:37Speaker 00

  That's right. There's a potential for change.

• 18:39Chuck Nice?

  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.

• 18:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More billing cycles.

• 18:55Chuck Nice?

  That's all I'm saying, that, yeah.

• 18:57Gary O'Reilly?

  So, and Neil, what Chuck was saying about the tree, if we kind of roll that out.

• 19:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you referring to the mycelium, the network, the fungal network?

• 19:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, but just taking the fact that we roll that out from tree to table. And we say, isn't it pan-psychism that's basically, and I'll be very basic with this because that's all I can be, that there's a consciousness inferred to everything?

• 19:21Chuck Nice?

  Can you, for my sake, please? Because I've heard the term panpsychism, and I've even looked it up. And 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 a little-

• 19:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I too have heard the word, but I've never looked it up. It just sounds kind of new agey to me, that's all. But I want to get official-

• 19:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, where does Anil stand on this?

• 19:51Chuck Nice?

  What is it?

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Well, I'm not a fan of it, but it is a well-established 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 that 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

• 20:37Speaker 00

  that adheres to the table itself. And I think, I am, that's what it is. For me, it doesn't really help.

• 20:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, what you just said is why Chuck could read the explanation and still not know what the hell it is.

• 20:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, if that's your best explanation for that word, we need some work on that.

• 21:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, Anil said he wasn't a big fan anyway, so he's probably going to want to throw it under the bus.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  But what's wrong with it? I mean, consciousness is fundamental and everywhere. That's reasonable, isn't it? Yeah.

• 21:11Chuck Nice?

  As long as I'm conscious, it's reasonable.

• 21:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know what everywhere means. I guess that's my big question here.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  You know, in the same way that mass is basically pretty much everywhere, electrical charge is pretty much everywhere. These are things that they don't have lower levels.

• 21:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so consciousness is on the moon? I mean, I'm trying to understand. The universe is large, and life is only on Earth. And panpsychism is trying to declare that consciousness permeates the universe?

• 21:41Speaker 00

  Basically, yes.

• 21:43Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the only way you could look at it from what you just said, Anil, is that it's a kind of 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.

• 22:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From my readings, Rupert Sheldrake is a fan of this, if memory serves. Is that correct?

• 22:13Speaker 00

  You know, I'm not entirely sure. I had a had a long, about an eight hour train journey with Rupert Sheldrake last year. So this this should be clear to me. But he's certainly of the

• 22:22Chuck Nice?

  Come on, spill the tea.

• 22:23Gary O'Reilly?

  That's the British train system for you.

• 22:25Speaker 00

  This was in Norway.

• 22:29Speaker 00

  In Britain, it would have been 24 hours. In, yeah, so certainly, he's of the view that everything, that consciousness is everywhere, that life is, and life and consciousness are very closely tied. 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.

• 22:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anil, 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 always one for a fun idea, a fun new idea 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 panpsychism in a way that would give it some teeth here? Because you, in your role, are skeptical of it.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, panpsychism 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 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, extrasensory 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.

• 24:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Anil, 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 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?

• 24:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's gonna one day move entirely into the full animal kingdom?

• 24:55Speaker 00

  I think it's a fuzzy boundary. It's certainly a fuzzy boundary in terms of what people think. 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. It 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 all other mammals. I think, certainly I think, and most other neuroscientists I think would agree.

• 25:26Chuck Nice?

  Except the delicious ones, Dieter. The delicious ones are not conscious people. You have nothing to fear. The delicious animals are not conscious at all.

• 25:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, Chuck, for that. The world is only for Chuck.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  But then, 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 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 human-like in order to be... To be valid, or even mammalian-like, right? 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. So, what do we say?

• 26:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That it's not speaking to other bees.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  Well, bees do speak to other bees, very well.

• 26:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  But just speaking to other trees, things, speaking to other things, or communicating in some ways, 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? Can they seem very different? But when you look at, for instance, whether fish will seek out anaesthetic in a proactive way, if they've got, you know, a 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.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  And we're always going to have to walk this line between using humans as a benchmark, but not sort of assuming that everything is conscious just because it responds to its environment, or it grows, or it does something else that could be done in a way that doesn't require consciousness.

• 27:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or that there's a different category of consciousness. Like you said, maybe they just experienced their own category. Their own category, right? 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 among mammals.

• 28:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you bring in other animals, there are other animals that have a higher brain-to-body weight ratio, like mid-sized birds, like crows, this sort of thing. They have a higher brain-to-body weight ratio. And the highest brain-to-body weight ratio are certain species of ants. And we've all seen how giant ant heads can be relative to their body. So this, how much brain is in your organism calculus is...

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 28:45Chuck Nice?

  Yes. But not smart, because they keep trying to move that rubber tree. And let's be honest.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  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 he makes. 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 the, it's the degree to which we have this brain in the front of our brain, the 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.

• 29:30Chuck Nice?

  But isn't, isn't that the one thing that we always are going to fall back on is language that no animal 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.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  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.

• 30:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, the whales wonder whether, just because we face each other and make sounds, they wonder if we're actually communicating.

• 30:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The whales say that to each other.

• 30:16Gary O'Reilly?

  So, and Neil, are we to the point now where we've blurred the lines between intelligence and consciousness?

• 30:23Speaker 00

  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 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 pleasure.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  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. We've asked ChatGPT, all of these kinds of questions. And of course, ChatGPT will say. And what did it tell you? Well, it depends how you prompt it. But this is one of the, you know, a couple of years ago, there was this engineer for Google, a guy called Blake Lemoine, I think. And this was a chatbot called Lambda. It 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

• 31:54Speaker 00

  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 fired. He's the guy that got fired for saying that? He got fired for saying it. Doesn't mean he was wrong. I think he was wrong. But, you know, he got fired for breaching confidentiality. But it causes big furor, right? You know, what if language models actually are conscious? 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 the statistical

• 32:37Speaker 00

  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.

• 33:02Gary O'Reilly?

  So Neil, ah Neil, as well as Neil, sorry. It's lots of Niels. ChatGPT-4 passed the Turing test.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  But that's exactly your point.

• 33:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Simply equal consciousness.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  No, but that's exactly the point.

• 33:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I'd like to think they've all passed the Turing test ever since Eliza back in 1960s. Okay, whatever anyone defined as the Turing test at the time, it passes it and they say, oh, well, maybe we have to move the goalposts tomorrow. So 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 passed the Turing test.

• 33:40Gary O'Reilly?

  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.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  That's exactly right. So the Turing test, by the way, I like to think of it more of a test of human gullibility rather than the machine intelligence.

• 34:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But either it was still a Turing test, right? Think of it, whatever you want, 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.

• 34:20Chuck Nice?

  Alan Turing was easily catfished.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  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 beautiful dialogue. The film, you've seen the film Ex Machina, Alex Garland's film. Wonderful. And there's a scene in that where, where I think the inventors called Nathan and the program is called Caleb and they're speaking and that. Nathan asked Caleb to say what the Turing test is. He says, 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.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  So what we need is a kind of Turing test for consciousness, not a Turing test for intelligence. So I think, I think you're right. We need, we need a multitude of tests.

• 35:19Gary O'Reilly?

  And that's the blurring of the line again between intelligence and consciousness.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, 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 actions 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 intelligence, that is still not sufficient evidence that it is conscious.

• 35:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 probability of words that follow other words when I speak, maybe I'm just AI, maybe I'm just ChatGPT-5.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  I think you're much more than that, much more interesting and rich than GPT-5. And 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 why a lot of things in AI, based on neural networks, and it was, you know, it was wonderful to see Jeff Hinton and John Hotfield 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 ours. 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.

• 37:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And available and searchably postable.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that, 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. Whatever we're doing, it's not, it's not the same thing, even though there might be similarities.

• 37:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good point.

• 37:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What does the future have in store for this, us here? Where are we going? What's next? Can we upload our consciousness into a jar? Can we live forever?

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Don't open that jar! It's your great-great-grandfather, you kill him!

• 38:04Speaker 00

  Meanwhile... I don't think we can upload ourselves into the cloud. I worry about that whole way of thinking. I think it's the latest manifestation of kind of tech bro hubristic singularity nonsense that we don't really need.

• 38:19Gary O'Reilly?

  So, if we're saying that somewhere in the line, Daniel, artificial intelligence will have consciousness, David Chalmers seems to think that that will be coming in a few years' time. We've got the silicon intelligence that 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?

• 38:47Speaker 00

  I don't think, personally, and I am a bit, David Chalmers and I have had conversations about this, and I think we disagree a bit about this. 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 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.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  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 know, these brain organoids, they're made out of actual neurons, human neurons in many cases, derived 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.

• 40:14Speaker 00

  And so we don't, we don't think they're conscious. You know, our psychological biases are not, not exercised 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.

• 40:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I come to this as a physicist, I will not ultimately distinguish between a neuron firing electrochemically and silicon firing electric. 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.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  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.

• 40:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I, I agree, but they 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 create it in silicon, I've just duplicated your brain. And I'm doing it without carbon. I'm using, who cares?

• 41:12Speaker 00

  I care. I care. But there's a, there's a reason I care. There's a reason I care. And it's because you've, 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. If you try to make that out of cheese, you're not going to be able to do it. Now, 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. If you think all that matters are neurons that exchange spikes, action potentials, you know, in a digital

• 41:57Speaker 00

  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.

• 42:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 is perfect or whatever. 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

• 43:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  to configurations that you might need or want.

• 43:12Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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.

• 43:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And at that level, it's biological.

• 43:32Speaker 00

  At that level, it's biological because there's, there's another way to put it, which is, I think perhaps more intuitive, like computers, that the power of computers is they're 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 in general. And brains are not the kind of thing for which you can separate what they do from what they are.

• 44:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just to, just to wind this up a bit, I, as you, as you surely know, Ray Kurzweil had an updated version of his book, The Singularity is Near. And guess what the new title is called?

• 44:21Speaker 00

  Well, it's nearer.

• 44:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Golden Gate Bridge made out of cheese.

• 44:27Gary O'Reilly?

  The Parmigiano-Griffiths.

• 44:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's called the singularity is nearer.

• 44:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, wow. How many focus groups did he go through for that?

• 44:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, Aneel, 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?

• 44:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Because we're a competitive species. We have to be at the top of every table. So we're going to make the 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?

• 45:03Speaker 00

  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 about understanding the nature of exponential change. I mean, we're terrible about this during the pandemic.

• 45:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're, we're linear people.

• 45:28Speaker 00

  We're linear people. So, so if you, if you stand on 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's, 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. You know, 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 that people talk about that.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  I find that's also pretty dystopian, frankly. But there might be another threshold indeed, it's possible, where, you know, artificial intelligence becomes. Smarter than us in some ways. It's already smarter than us in some ways. But I think 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, 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

• 46:54Speaker 00

  that we create complement our 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 pyramid and all of the, all of these kinds of things. I think it's an old story we've seen many times.

• 47:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, Daniel Dennett was forced out of the box to declare with his, one of his early books called Consciousness 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.

• 47:36Speaker 00

  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.

• 47:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Neil, are we likely to enter a post-biological age and come out of our, you know, just, no, I mean total, our total existence, our species will go into.

• 47:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And 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 hear.

• 48:03Gary O'Reilly?

  No pressure.

• 48:06Speaker 00

  Oh, the short answer 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.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our exploration is cyborgian. We have a SUV-sized rover on Mars right now and it's doing our bidding for 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 emissary? Or as an actual uploaded consciousness? So that their physical form doesn't have to survive the hostile journey of space travel?

• 49:07Chuck Nice?

  Our robot is meeting their robot.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's my, that 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.

• 49:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, a movie in 1958 called The Blob, which would classify as being a goo. But it, it would come after you. So just a goo, be careful how you think about that concept.

• 49:43Speaker 00

  Not all goos are equal. It's a good point.

• 49:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 49:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 goos are created equal. And 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?

• 50:07Speaker 00

  I'm in Brighton on, on the south coast, where it's pretty dark now.

• 50:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brighton. So the sun is setting for you.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  Ironically.

• 50:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is up for us, which dare I say is evidence that we live in around Earth. And Neil, great to have you on the show. Maybe we can come back to you when we have further developments.

• 50:25Speaker 00

  I'd love that.

• 50:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the future of mine. All right, Chuck, good to have you.

• 50:29Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 50:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Gary. Pleasure, Neil. Thank you. You made all this happen. Neil deGrasse Tyson, you're a personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.