The Hard Problem of Consciousness with David Chalmers

What exactly is consciousness, and why is it such a hard problem to solve? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly take you deep into the mysteries of consciousness and objective reality, David Chalmers, a philosopher and cognitive scientist.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk, special edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me Chuck Knight. Chuck, baby. Hey, what's happening? All right, all right. How you doing, sir?

• 0:26Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm good, thank you.

• 0:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary O'Reilly. Yeah, thank you.

• 0:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you.

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love to have you as my co-host here.

• 0:32Gary O'Reilly?

  It's a pleasure.

• 0:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we're doing yet another episode on consciousness.

• 0:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 0:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When will we be done?

• 0:40Gary O'Reilly?

  When we know what we need to know.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 0:42Gary O'Reilly?

  And so this could be going on for a while. I mean, it's not just consciousness, it's consciousness and reality.

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And our understanding and interpretation of reality filtered through our consciousness.

• 0:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Totally.

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what show did you cook up today?

• 0:55Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so we're heading for inner space rather than outer space.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Inner space, I love it.

• 1:00Gary O'Reilly?

  And consciousness, as we've just discussed. We continually think of it as, I suppose, a precious entity. And we feel like we're above others on the planet, other beings.

• 1:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. Say that to your cat. I was gonna say.

• 1:13Gary O'Reilly?

  No, don't, don't, don't start me on cat-itude. Please don't go there.

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we think we're in charge of the cats. It's the opposite.

• 1:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, I mean, for hundreds and thousands of years, the greatest thinkers have grappled with it. They've grappled with each other as regards to explaining it. There are handful of theories in existence, but apparently it's a hard problem, which is a clue. So what is consciousness? What makes it? Once we've conquered that particular mountain, we will dive down a rabbit hole of simulation, theory, singularity, and virtual reality. It's gonna be fun. And to join us, we have Professor of Philosophy and Neuroscience at NYU. He is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist, also an author. Reality Plus and The Conscious Mind are two of his many books.

• 2:03Gary O'Reilly?

  He gave us phrases, "The hard problem of consciousness."

• 2:08Gary O'Reilly?

  And philosophical zombies along the way. Uh, please, David Chalmers.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  David, welcome back to StarTalk. And you're just down the street at NYU, New York University.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  Just right up here on the C train.

• 2:22Gary O'Reilly?

  There you go, simplicity.

• 2:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome. Now, why do we need you to say that consciousness is a hard problem? Isn't that just obvious? So what, why do we need a decorated professor of the field to assert that?

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Totally obvious. And when I, when I first said this, I just said, okay, well, this is just giving the thing a label that, uh, everybody knows, but who was to guess that the, uh, the label would, would catch on? Sometimes it's just, uh, helpful to, uh, to say the obvious. Actually, you know, the idea that consciousness poses, poses a hard problem. We were talking about Newton before the show. You can actually find it in, uh, in Newton. At one point he says, "The way that colors mix optically and produce a certain experience is not so easy." This is, uh, this is, he says, "is not so easy, E A S I E." And he says, it's, you know, the way that all, we understand this stuff objectively and say how

• 3:25Speaker 02

  the brain processes visual inputs, but then it gives you the experience of a color. That amazing pink shirt?

• 3:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, go coral.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay.

• 3:35Chuck Nice?

  Magenta.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. Where does, where does, where does that experience of pink?

• 3:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Come from? As Newton said, "not so easy."

• 3:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  King salmon. Not, not farm-raised.

• 3:44Chuck Nice?

  King salmon.

• 3:45Gary O'Reilly?

  You've reduced me to...

• 3:46Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's kind of king salmon.

• 3:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 3:48Chuck Nice?

  Good for you.

• 3:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Wild caught.

• 3:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, wild caught.

• 3:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Reduced me to food stuff.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Where does the experience of king salmon come from? In vision, that is what Newton said, "not so easy."

• 3:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so David, had you instead called it "the easy problem of consciousness," maybe we would have all figured it out by now.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Well, the, the easy problems were the problems of things you do, like how people respond, what they say, I can say...

• 4:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is consciousness? Put it on the table.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Subjective experience. Consciousness is anything you experience directly from the first-person point of view. I think of it like the inner movie of the mind. It's a movie, but it's got images and sounds like a regular movie, but it's got sensations of your body. It's got smell, it's got taste, it's got emotions, it's got thinking, all running through this inner soundtrack of your mind.

• 4:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that allows your consciousness to be distinct and unique from others, because the world, as you receive it, will, could be very different from how someone else receives that very same world.

• 4:51Chuck Nice?

  Sounds like a problem.

• 4:56Gary O'Reilly?

  But is this where biases come in, in the terms of how you receive and accept any information that comes to you?

• 5:02Speaker 02

  We all experience it subjectively in a different way. Some things may be in common, maybe when we look at an image, the shape, maybe, you know, our experience of that rectangle might be the same, but the emotions that it brings on may be totally different for me and for you.

• 5:18Chuck Nice?

  Now suppose we're running that same input through a measurement device, and then the device comes up with a conclusion, and no matter how you put the information through, it reaches the same conclusion. Yet somehow, when we look at it, we see something different. Who do you trust then?

• 5:37Speaker 02

  The person or the device?

• 5:39Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  I don't know, if the device is like specialized, it's a thermometer. It says 79 degrees.

• 5:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm going with the device.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  I'm going with the device too.

• 5:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Listen, I'm just, we're sitting together here, I get this, but I'm going with the device.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Me too, it's like, you tell me it's 79 degrees? No, I'm gonna trust a thermometer.

• 5:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a famous quote, "No science achieves maturity without a system of measurement."

• 6:03Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  And we do not have the measurement system for consciousness, actually.

• 6:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which renders it immature scientifically, relative to other fields, where you have petri dishes and methods and tools. So you have a hard problem.

• 6:18Chuck Nice?

  Well, how about that?

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my god!

• 6:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my god, I just, I walked into that, didn't I?

• 6:25Speaker 02

  You know, years ago, I went along to a conference and told everyone that I'd invented a measuring device for consciousness, the, uh, the consciousness meter, made with a combination of, uh... Neuromorphic engineering, transpersonal psychology and quantum gravity. And then I pulled out my, uh, my consciousness meter and it looked kinda like a hairdryer. That was where we were back in the 90s.

• 6:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I would've called, I would've called bullshit on your second half of that first sentence.

• 6:53Gary O'Reilly?

  It sounded like word salad, Tom. I applaud you, sir.

• 6:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 6:56Gary O'Reilly?

  So whereabouts in the brain?

• 6:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like the ectoplasmic meter. Yeah, ectoplasm, yeah, yeah.

• 7:00Gary O'Reilly?

  So whereabouts in the brain do you think we are fermenting this consciousness?

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Well, this is one of the big debates which is going on. What are the neural correlates Yeah. of consciousness, which is the bit of the brain which is active in a way which is most directly connected to your consciousness. And there's actually, even among neuroscientists, there's a very lively debate between people who think it's in the, say, for visual consciousness, people who think it's in the sensory areas.

• 7:27Chuck Nice?

  Like the visual cortex.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Of the brain, exactly. Visual cortex back there, or prefrontal cortex, front of the brain, the areas associated more with

• 7:35Chuck Nice?

  Higher reasoning.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  thinking and judgment.

• 7:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a question, what's the difference between your prefrontal cortex and your frontal cortex?

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Uh, frontal cortex goes a, uh, is a little bit more

• 7:46Chuck Nice?

  It's a little less front than the prefrontal cortex.

• 7:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's less front.

• 7:50Chuck Nice?

  It's a little less front than the prefrontal cortex.

• 7:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, when we look at brain structures compared among other animals, let's say mammals, to keep it in the family, presumably we have a bigger frontal cortex than other mammals and we can see what's going on in that and thereby decide that we have certain capacity for thought that other animals do not. Is that a fair?

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, and people who put consciousness in prefrontal cortex are probably gonna say that consciousness is not so widespread in the animal kingdom. Whereas people who think it's in the sensory cortices, we get those throughout the animal kingdom, so maybe much, you know, like, is a fish conscious? Well, you know, fish don't have any kind of developed prefrontal cortex.

• 8:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm gonna say, uh, judging from the look in their eyes.

• 8:43Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna go out on a limb and say no.

• 8:46Gary O'Reilly?

  They know when a shark's around.

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, well, that's true. Well, I have a question. Can you tell me what creates consciousness? Is it emergent?

• 8:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In our genetic code, I mean emergent in the Evo bio sense where you have an organism that has certain properties, but only either en masse with other animals like flocking of birds or some other feature that was not really intended, it just emerged from other features that were necessary for survival. So is consciousness emergent or do you think it specifically evolved?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Oh, in some sense emergent, I mean this word emergence gets used in so many different ways and sometimes it's like magic word, it's like I don't really understand it.

• 9:36Chuck Nice?

  Anything we don't know. It's emergent. I like magic words. Give me my magic word for the day.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  In some sense, consciousness clearly emerges from the brain. You get a brain that develops and consciousness comes along. As the brain develops, consciousness gets more and more complex. So there's some kind of connection there, but can we tell a story about how consciousness was selected for in evolution? No one has a good answer to that right now. There are ideas out there, yeah, we needed consciousness for control, for decision making, for reflection, but so far, no one has told a good story about why you need to have consciousness to do those things. Why couldn't a big complicated computer do that without consciousness?

• 10:19Chuck Nice?

  Is it really consciousness or are we talking about levels of consciousness? Because I think that, you know, there are definitely animals that have consciousness. I mean, a dog, for instance, you see it has emotion, you see that it has a reaction to sensory data, just like we do. You see that it responds to commands and pain and everything. But you look at a baby and if you didn't know, if you never saw a baby before and you saw this thing, this glob of human thing, just sitting there.

• 10:52Chuck Nice?

  Like making these crazy faces, has no control of its limbs, or you wouldn't necessarily say, well, that's a conscious thing. It's actually thinking about anything. You know.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  You are totally right. There are levels of consciousness in, in babies, and we're still arguing about what they are. I mean, a long time ago, people, uh, used to not give anesthetics to babies when they were getting circumcised because they thought they couldn't feel pain.

• 11:14Chuck Nice?

  Tell me about it. No, I'm joking. I remember that day well, sir.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  These days, we think babies feel pain, and we think they can have some basic visual experience. Especially my wife, who worked on this stuff, Claudia Passos, is a leading expert on consciousness in infants. There's still an argument, like, kind of baby have the experience of thinking?

• 11:35Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Of deciding, of agency. The general moral, from what I can tell from the last few years, is babies are a whole lot more sophisticated than we thought they were.

• 11:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  David, isn't that true for every single animal that we've studied in more depth than in the past? We are recovering greater levels of neuro complexity in their conduct behavior than any previous generation thought. Is that true for every animal?

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is absolutely the trend, to say, over the years, we have thought more and more animals are more and more cognitively complex. As to the question of whether they're conscious, we used to think, okay, humans, a few primates, you know, monkeys, apes. These days, it's like, pretty much every mammal, probably birds, probably reptiles, arguing about fish and octopus.

• 12:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It sounds like we're clawing away out of our own, our own ego.

• 12:23Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. How about that?

• 12:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the singularity of our presence in the animal kingdom is, is being challenged by further research into the conduct of animals. You've seen that YouTube video of the magpie?

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bird?

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where it's got the container of water, that's filled up to the top, and it drinks the water until it can't, the beak can't reach the water anymore. It walks away, comes back with a pebble, drops the pebble in, raises the level, raises the level, and then it drinks. And it does it three or four times.

• 12:53Chuck Nice?

  So it has a clear understanding of volume displacement.

• 12:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It has a clear understanding of Archimedes and principles.

• 13:09Speaker 04

  Hello, I'm Vinky Barok Allen and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neild Grass Tyson.

• 13:25Gary O'Reilly?

  But go back to Chuck's point about levels of consciousness. When we sleep.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:30Gary O'Reilly?

  When we're unconscious, when we're in a coma. And if you put us under general anesthetic, do we not have varying levels of consciousness at different times?

• 13:41Speaker 02

  The idea behind the anesthetic is to wipe out consciousness completely.

• 13:45Gary O'Reilly?

  And does it?

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Very hard to test whether it absolutely does this. At one point in the 1970s, for example, people put some kind of a rubber band around the arm so the anesthetic didn't make it that far. And then they said, "If you hear me, please move your hand." And what do you know? The hand could move. So then it's like, that kind of anesthetic was maybe working partly just to paralyze you. These days, okay, they work a lot harder to knock out not just, not just action, not just, but pain and awareness. But it's hard to know that it's gone for sure. Even when we're asleep, when we're dreaming, there's certainly a level of consciousness.

• 14:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Absolutely.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Of consciousness there.

• 14:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Isn't our consciousness altered in our dreams?

• 14:26Speaker 02

  It's a different state of consciousness, for sure. Psychedelics, they alter your consciousness. Meditation, it alters your consciousness.

• 14:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. I'm sure we have science to obtain an objective reality of the world. If it all depend on the human brain, forget it. We'd still be in the caves. Did I just insult your entire field?

• 14:44Speaker 02

  No, it's okay. But, you know, we can study what's different in the brain and these different states of consciousness. And that is one of the most exciting advances over the last 30 years. I mean psychedelics used to just be, "Oh, my God, it's all just, you know, mystical wondrousness." Now, now we can actually see what's happening in the brain when you take a psychedelic.

• 15:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So David, you published a paper recently on AI and consciousness. What was that?

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I got invited to give a, to give a talk, actually, to all the AI people at their big annual conference on this controversial issue of whether current AI systems could be conscious. I called it, "Could a large language model be conscious?" And I argued that even if it-

• 15:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Language model like ChatGPT?

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah. And I argued, probably they're not conscious right now, but give it 10 years and they may well be.

• 15:32Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, or they're conscious right now and they're just not letting us know.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Just waiting to take over the world.

• 15:39Chuck Nice?

  Waiting to take it over, babe.

• 15:40Gary O'Reilly?

  What are we if we don't have consciousness, but we're still doing and being and you've coined the term philosophical zombies? Is that what that's?

• 15:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I think therefore I brains.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  This is a philosophical thought experiment about a creature which is as much like us as possible, but lacks consciousness entirely. Not quite like the zombies in the Hollywood movies, because you know, they behave quite unlike us and, you know, maybe they even have some conscious experiences when they eat their victims' brains. I love the taste of those brains. But so the philosophical zombie, one way to think about this is just say you had a computer simulation of your brain in your body and maybe behaving just like you. Would it be conscious? It's not obvious. Many people think that such a creature would have no conscious experience at all. And then that kind of is a way to, it's a hypothetical thought experiment.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  But what it does is raises the question, why aren't we zombies? Evolution produced us based on all the smart and sophisticated things we can do. Why couldn't evolution just have produced philosophical zombies that act like us?

• 16:52Chuck Nice?

  Well, we actually have produced, we have produced the zombies, the way you're talking about, in AI. When you, you can speak to an AI now via computer, like, so you know, you don't know you're talking to an actual computer. And it will speak to you as if it were a person. You would not know that the thing you're talking to doesn't have.

• 17:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it's the Turing test.

• 17:11Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is precisely the Turing.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  AI systems are getting very, very close to passing the Turing test.

• 17:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, 50 years ago, they already set it past the Turing test and then moved the goal lines. So the goal lines have been systematically getting moved to greater and greater complexity before anyone decides that AI has achieved consciousness. But it would have blown away Alan Turing, even the first round, because I'm old and we're maybe the same age-ish. Eliza, remember Eliza was one of the first computer programs that understood language.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Simulated a psychotherapist.

• 17:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yeah, basically, a therapist. You type in the commands, there was no audio back then, so you just type it in. Say, hi, Eliza, how are you? I'm fine. Tell me about yourself. Well, you know, I left home, you know. Five years ago, tell me about your parents. So Eliza would come back to you with these questions to get you to loosen up and talk about your psychological state.

• 18:06Chuck Nice?

  Like a real therapist.

• 18:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like a real therapist.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Joseph Weizenbaum, who invented Eliza, the story goes that his secretary talked to Eliza over her lunch break and at the end of it said, this is the first person who's ever really understood me.

• 18:18Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Oh, no. She needed more friends.

• 18:23Gary O'Reilly?

  You're on record as saying the language AI will probably gain consciousness within 10 years. Is that shrinking that timeline?

• 18:31Speaker 02

  It is as they're doing more and more impressive things.

• 18:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is it about it that does not count as consciousness today? That you're waiting for it to do in the future? Again, I'm tracking the goal lines that are continually moved forward. So tell me.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Very close at least to passing the Turing test. They've done some actual versions of the Turing test, just five minute versions. And people take some versions of GPT four to be human more than 50% of the time. So getting close to passing a Turing test, that's behavior. I think we're still looking for a couple of things in the internal dynamics.

• 19:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or whether it can beat us at Jeopardy and Go and chess. Oh, it already did that.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  We do move the goalposts.

• 19:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're constantly moving the goalposts. Admit it.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  I did my PhD in AI lab 30 years ago. If you'd told us then.

• 19:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  We would have systems that can carry on a conversation like this. We say conscious for sure.

• 19:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 19:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Please don't hit on goalposts.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  He's just letting me know that I'm conscious.

• 19:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me about these goalposts. What new goal line is not yet reached?

• 19:37Speaker 02

  I think people look at the internal processes in these current AI systems and they say, do they have what goes along with consciousness in a human? For humans, we think, for example, feedback processing is super important for consciousness to get some kind of reflection on your on your earlier states. And so on. Right now, these language models, it's all feed forward. Yeah, introspection, for example, is one of the good. Memory, even any form of memory would require. Basically feedback. These language models are essentially feed forward systems. Information gets passed from input to output, doesn't circulate back very much.

• 20:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It doesn't need to circulate because it's access to all knowledge.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Uh huh, that's true.

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it has bypassed even that as a need. So now you can't fault it for not needing what you need, what we need to declare ourselves conscious when it doesn't even need that.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  But people say that at least opens up the possibility now that since it's doing it in a way which is unlike the way that we do it, and that we are the one case we know of, humans are the one case we know of that are conscious, then maybe this could be doing in a sufficiently different way that it's a philosophical zombie. We have right now the benchmark for consciousness because humans are the only system we know.

• 20:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you can call it philosophical zombie rather than a higher consciousness entity.

• 20:52Chuck Nice?

  And where does perception come into this? Because that's where we kind of started. Computers don't perceive, they actually observe. So like even if we did have all the knowledge in the world, capable of running through our brains, each one of us would experience that differently based on the perceptions that we have of who we are, our relationship to the world, and our relationship to the information that we're receiving.

• 21:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I declare that we think of, I don't want to speak for you, but typically we speak of consciousness as a feature, not a bug of human existence, a feature. And so something to be praised that other animals do not have. And in the example you're giving, AI is not susceptible to perception.

• 21:38Chuck Nice?

  Correct.

• 21:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why do we now deny it a yet higher level of consciousness and say, yeah, it's got us beat?

• 21:46Chuck Nice?

  You're saying that that's a benefit, that to be in a position.

• 21:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't want to say, oh, you're still not conscious because you're not susceptible to errors of interpretation as we are. Back in my office here, I have a. A replica of Van Gogh's Starry Night. Yes. So if Van Gogh himself had been AI, it would have been an exact representation of the scene in front of him in 1889. Right. Okay, and it's not. Right. It's what that scene felt like to him. Right. So I'll give you that. AI is not going to do that unless we tell it. Right, that's my point.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  We can train it on Van Gogh and it can give you all the Van Gogh paintings you like.

• 22:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pretend it is an exact representation of Van Gogh. He wouldn't have made that out of whole cloth.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Can we infer consciousness on AI until we absolutely know how to define consciousness itself?

• 22:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  And to have some kind of operational criterion. The funny thing is, our best operational criterion for consciousness, in humans at least, is verbal report.

• 22:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  To know whether someone's conscious, you ask them.

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You ask them.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  To know what they're conscious of, you ask them.

• 22:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  I think, therefore, I am. But in an AI system, the current AI systems, unfortunately, this has become useless as a criterion. Because, yes, sure, they will tell you that for a while they're all going around saying they were conscious. And then for a while, the tech companies made sure they didn't say that. So then they say, I am purely a language model for AI. Anyway, this is now just a function of how they're trained.

• 23:20Gary O'Reilly?

  So Neil tells us everything is mathematics.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:23Gary O'Reilly?

  So are we going to find ourselves with a T-shirt equation that can solve consciousness? I mean, for a lot of people, this is one of the potential holy grails here.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Finding laws of consciousness so simple, we could write them on the front of a T-shirt and maybe with some beautiful mathematical.

• 23:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so we've had Einstein give us the theory of relativity and change the way we see the universe, right, and things within it. Penrose has gone into quantum mechanics with this OR theory of his.

• 23:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How was Roger Penrose a theoretical?

• 23:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Astrophysicist, how was he received in your community when he published his book on consciousness linking it to the quantum?

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Well, it was very helpful in some ways. It got a lot of very smart people interested in consciousness.

• 24:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it wanted to anchor it in laws of physics.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, his approach was to bring in quantum mechanics and furthermore, non-standard quantum mechanics, non-algorithmic versions of quantum mechanics that went way beyond what was, you know, consensus even in physics. Then he combined it with some complicated biology, like the biology of microtubules in the cell walls of neurons, very controversial in neuroscience. So I would say, look, it's creative, it's brilliant because it's Penrose, but it's totally speculative, totally controversial, and ultimately not well received by neuroscientists.

• 24:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not just because he's an outsider, but because they actually did a legitimate analysis?

• 24:52Speaker 02

  They said that, you know, microtubules, your average neuroscientist doesn't think

• 24:56Gary O'Reilly?

  I don't know what a microtubule is.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  It's something inside the cell wall of a neuron.

• 25:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A microtubule.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Roger Penrose.

• 25:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dude, even I know this.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Quantum computing in the brain, basically.

• 25:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  And this was going to be wave function collapse in microtubules was going to be responsible for the quantum.

• 25:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, I think the fundamental feature of quantum physics is the probabilistic nature of the reality that it underpins. And so it would allow you even possibly to have a perception of free will, because there's a probabilistic firing of neurons.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  Neurons.

• 25:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, triggered by this quantum wave function.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 25:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's as I understood it. I hope I didn't.

• 25:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Is that the brain is kind of a prediction machine, or is that just really?

• 25:42Speaker 02

  For Penrose, the biggest thing was he thought the human mathematicians can do things that no computer could ever do, and he used Gödel's theorem that no formal system can ever be complete and consistent to argue for that point. And, you know, he made a philosophical argument for why we have to do these specials. And then he said, therefore, we need new physics that goes beyond anything computable. And he said, let's look to a theory of quantum gravity, and now we're getting to, you know, Neil's territory.

• 26:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So Gödel.

• 26:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Gödel.

• 26:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Studied. The system of definitions that comprise math, okay? Okay. Okay. It turns out it applies to much more than math, if you really think about it. It also applies to keeping your belly nice and flat. Sorry. That's a different girdle. We know that one plus one is two, and two plus two is four. Right. And there are rules that get you there, okay? So you can ask, can mathematics be constructed as a completely self-consistent set of rules? Okay. Where any rule has a rule before it that is consistent with the other rules. Can you do this? Mm-hmm. And he concluded, it's not just because he pulled it out of his ass, he can show

• 27:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that at some point in mathematics, you just have to make something up and declare it to be true, and you have no ability to prove that it's true. Okay. You have to assert it, and out of that comes the rest of everything else. Oh, wow. And so this was shocking. Because something with the logic of mathematics. Right. Yeah, this proves that, and this is only true because I can prove it. You keep doing that all the way down, you reach a point where somebody's just sitting there up on the throne saying, "This is so." So let it be written. Let it be done. Exactly. That has to happen at some point for all the rest. You know who also did this? You must know this, the colored people. What colored people? No, I didn't say colored people.

• 27:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, be on the end. Oh, I'm sorry. I was gonna say, what black mathematician did this?

• 27:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we can say, "What color is the gentleman's shirt?" Okay. As we've decided. As we've decided, and I said it's the color of- King salmon. King salmon. Well, what color is the color of king salmon? The king salmon. No, then you're gonna say it's kind of like, let's say it was blue, or she say it was kind of violet. Well, what color is violet? And then you can go to like, the flower that's violet. Okay, that's a violet. Well, what color is that? Right? You keep doing this, and you reach a point where somebody just has to declare it. You cannot reduce it any further. You cannot reduce it. You just have to declare. You gotta just say, "This is it." We agree that this is red. And then you take it from there.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  And both Penrose and the color people think that the people who study color...

• 28:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More cleanly. Chuckles come upside your ass.

• 28:38Chuck Nice?

  So, you know, Penrose and the Negroes and the colored people. They decide.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  The vision scientists who study color.

• 28:45Chuck Nice?

  Well, there you go.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  And the mathematicians who think about consistency and completeness. Both sometimes end up at this point where they argue there is something special about human consciousness. Humans can have insights into seeing that some mathematical theorem is true. Penrose thought in a way that no machine could know. The people who study color say through studying the visual processes in the brain that process colors, you could study all that and it still won't tell you what the experience of the color of King Salmon is like. That is something you have to know subjectively.

• 29:26Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 29:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The feeling of the color.

• 29:28Chuck Nice?

  That's what they're saying because the color affects you.

• 29:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 29:32Chuck Nice?

  And that effect will be different. You cannot know that unless you actually experience it yourself.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  The subjective experience.

• 29:38Chuck Nice?

  You have to have had the experience.

• 29:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm affected by the blues and the greens in Van Gogh's Starry Night.

• 29:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I feel those colors.

• 29:46Chuck Nice?

  You feel those colors.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  And if you just read a book about it, or if you just read...

• 29:49Chuck Nice?

  Wouldn't do anything.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  You read it, looked at an image of your brain processing all this, that would not give you the experience of Starry Night.

• 30:14Gary O'Reilly?

  If it's going to take different thinking, because we've spent thousands of years thinking in a certain way, and if you want an analog linear manner, what theories are out there right now that are thinking differently and are looking like they might?

• 30:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Challenge this hard problem.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  You know, there's no consensus on this, but one radical view on the kind of the reductionist side of the equation is to say there actually is no such thing as consciousness. It's all an illusion generated by the brain.

• 30:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm in that camp.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Our brain makes us think that we have these special properties and nothing actually has them.

• 30:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm in that camp. For no reason. I just, I'm just thinking, maybe we're all dancing around something that doesn't really exist.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. And then maybe it's just we want to believe there's this special thing to make us seem special.

• 31:03Gary O'Reilly?

  So what's driving that? Is that the sort of thousand brains theory that Hawkins had?

• 31:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is that? What is that, thousand brains?

• 31:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Please.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  I don't know the thousand brains.

• 31:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, it's, it's kind of like a cognitive mechanism. Hawkins came up, Jeff Hawkins apparently.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Oh, Jeff Hawkins, okay, yeah.

• 31:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Came up with a thousand brains where it's not just one singular brain that's doing this, but these compartments within the brain, and maybe doing a disservice to his theory here, probably am.

• 31:25Chuck Nice?

  Are you talking about the construction of the brain itself? So like, inside your brain are just these multiple layers of brain?

• 31:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 31:33Chuck Nice?

  And, and somehow them all, they all come together is what gives you the consciousness?

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Models within models. The brain has models of the brain, and it may be a misleading model of the brain.

• 31:43Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, is it just dark space that, this occupying up there and we shine a light because that's the thing we need to look at right now? Because it's not a Rolodex. I know that for sure. So where is it and how is it? And this, so does it then exist as we're thinking?

• 31:57Speaker 02

  The brain builds very simple models of the world, you know? Maybe it models physics of the world with a folk physics, which is way simpler and different from actual physics.

• 32:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You say folk physics?

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, like common sense physics. It's like, you know, Aristotle's physics. Things have impetus and so on. That may not actually exist.

• 32:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Heavy things fall faster than lighter things because they're heavier.

• 32:17Chuck Nice?

  I was about to say, some of that is wrong. Aristotle was kind of stupid.

• 32:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  Very, very smart.

• 32:22Chuck Nice?

  He was a smart guy.

• 32:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Aristotle got hardly any physics correct.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  No one was going to get it right the first time.

• 32:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In physics, if someone makes a measurement and gets a result, and then someone else makes the same measurement but gets a different result, and someone gets a different machine to try to measure the same phenomenon, and they yet get a different result, but everybody thinks there's a result, but none of the results agree, that's usually evidence of no phenomenon at all. And people are pulling things out of the noise of the data. When there is no agreement. And so what leads me to think maybe consciousness doesn't really exist in any way anyone thinks is because everybody's idea about consciousness is different and does not comport and does

• 33:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  not blend into a greater edifice of an understanding of consciousness, which leads me in this example of physics to possibly think that there's no such thing as consciousness and we're just dancing around a maypole and the pole is not even there.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Well, I said it's early days, but I also think there is a core of phenomena on which people agree, on which we have data.

• 33:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's good to know.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  Coming out of the neuroscience.

• 33:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  There's phenomena like, you know, blindsight where people can identify an object without consciousness, forms of contrast between conscious and unconscious perception, experiments on neural correlates of consciousness. The trouble is the agreement is not yet on the wild fundamental theory. Um, yeah, maybe that's not happening for another 50 years or 100 years. Who's to say, but there's the beginnings of a science there. There are things we can agree on and the neuroscientists tend to be conservative about this stuff. Mostly they're not the ones writing the book that says, here is my, uh, here is my solution

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here is the.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  To the problem.

• 34:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  Let's build it up a piece at a time and we'll eventually get there.

• 34:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in all fairness, you're in a very new field compared to other branches of science. Uh, we have the benefit of six centuries of.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 34:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Births of smart people, which includes Galileo, who died the same year Newton was born.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 34:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Newton, we had Newton, we had Einstein, we had, we had the benefit of smart people. Platforms upon which to build. Over the centuries. And if you're just all coming at it now.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's, let's do our conservative science and let's also do some, build some speculation on top of it, but let's realize that right now it is speculation.

• 34:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good, thank you.

• 34:48Gary O'Reilly?

  We speculate that if there is quantum mechanics in the consciousness that we're connected to the universe. Without consciousness.

• 34:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With with our wave functions.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  That is totally a speculation, but these speculations are great to think about. I'm a philosopher, I get paid to speculate, so it's like.

• 35:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Good for you.

• 35:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, they do. I don't need to inform any experiment, except for thought experiments.

• 35:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's so cool. What did your parents say? He wants to be a philosopher, how's he gonna pay his rent?

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Thought experiments.

• 35:18Chuck Nice?

  I'm a philosopher, did you bullshit today? Did you think about bullshitting today?

• 35:24Speaker 02

  There's the old joke about the dean who said, you know, why the physics department? Why are you more like the math department? All they need is pens, papers, and trash cans. Or he could be like the philosophy department, all they need is pens and paper.

• 35:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really good.

• 35:40Chuck Nice?

  That's a great joke.

• 35:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that.

• 35:42Gary O'Reilly?

  So if we detach from consciousness consciousness just for the moment, and go back to Descartes, almost 1650, whether he's questioning the reality outside of himself, and throw it into the future and ask, if reality is reality, is not virtual reality real? Whatever real may be.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  People often use that, yeah, the latest technology of the day to raise questions about reality, um, you know, Descartes put these questions in terms of dreaming. How can I know that I'm not dreaming?

• 36:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 36:15Speaker 02

  Right now, and then he then he built the thought experiment of an evil demon. How can I know that an evil demon isn't producing all these perceptions of the world?

• 36:23Gary O'Reilly?

  As he would at that time.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  Even though none of it is real. These days, we ask exactly that same question by saying, basically, how do you know you're not in a virtual reality right now? Might you be in The Matrix? Could we be in a computer simulation? And suddenly, that question is just it's just kind of a contemporary way of

• 36:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it is.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  of expressing Descartes' old question about reality.

• 36:44Chuck Nice?

  Except, I mean, let's be honest, you can put a mathematical value on every single thing in the universe. Even particles have, we learned, I learned, they have a, what you call half up or half down.

• 36:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spin, spin.

• 36:56Chuck Nice?

  They have a spin, spin, spin.

• 36:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A charge, a mass.

• 36:58Chuck Nice?

  A charge, a mass, so you could put a mathematical, if you could put a mathematical value on every single thing, you can make a simulation of every single thing.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 37:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  And in virtual reality right now, you know, in the actual virtual reality systems we have right now, they have complex simulations and models inside them with with bits that have values.

• 37:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me pull some philosophy on you. If we can represent reality on a computer

• 37:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we can mathematically map everything that's going on, then philosophically, does the question even matter?

• 37:32Chuck Nice?

  Ooh, because at that point-

• 37:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't tell the difference.

• 37:36Chuck Nice?

  The virtual reality is the reality, so what difference does it make?

• 37:39Speaker 02

  Yes, reality is reality.

• 37:41Chuck Nice?

  Reality is reality no matter what!

• 37:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then, then-

• 37:43Speaker 02

  I'm sympathetic with your point, but there is a traditional philosopher's response, which goes something like this: just say your spouse was cheating on you, and you never discover it. So you never know the difference. Your life goes exactly-

• 37:59Chuck Nice?

  I knew it! I'm sneaking!

• 38:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, go ahead.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  You never know, so it doesn't affect you at all. But a lot of people want to say, "Man, that would suck. That would be really bad, even though, I don't know." And they have the same attitude towards virtual reality. "Even though it seems the same to me, my beliefs about the world are totally shattered, in the same way they would be by my spouse cheating on me."

• 38:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So for those dumpster divers on our podcast, we actually interviewed Nick Boestrom-

• 38:31Speaker 02

  Oh, that's right.

• 38:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -one of the early advancers of the idea that we might be living in a simulation. He's one of your people, right?

• 38:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's a philosopher, wrote a classic article in 2003, basically giving a mathematical argument that we should take this idea that we're in a simulation seriously.

• 38:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So those four years after the movie The Matrix came out.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wonder if that inspired him? Is that allowed? Will a philosopher admit that pop culture influenced their deep thoughts?

• 38:53Speaker 02

  I wrote an article on this stuff called "The Matrix as Metaphysics", trying to... They asked me to write an article for the Matrix website back in the day.

• 39:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  I wrote something, and I think it's one of my greatest philosophical ideas.

• 39:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good!

• 39:04Speaker 02

  I published a book later on.

• 39:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what we're about here.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  Reality Plus, all about that.

• 39:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pop culture influencing everything.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  And the key idea was if we're in the Matrix, that doesn't mean everything we believe is wrong. Rather, we're living in an it-from-bit universe. Can you break that down? We're living in a universe where the its, the tables, the chairs, the plants, the planets- Yep. -are all made of bits. Processes in a computational system. If we're in a simulation, all of the its are made of bits, which connects to John Wheeler's famous idea that in physics, the basic its are all-

• 39:38Chuck Nice?

  The difference is, not the difference, the further clarification is, in The Matrix, there is-

• 39:45Chuck Nice?

  A layered reality because their consciousness is contained within them just like it is within us, but then it's connected to the matrix.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:55Chuck Nice?

  So what you're saying is if this were a virtual reality, when all of the its would be bits would just mean that they're all constructed, there is no outside.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, there's the pure it from bit where the the bits are the basic level. And then there's also what I call the it from bit from it, which is underneath the bits.

• 40:13Chuck Nice?

  Okay, here we go. Where exactly do I get green eggs and ham in this? In this virtual reality?

• 40:19Speaker 02

  You go up to the matrix, you find a computer which is running this simulation and it's got some bits and all of its bits are made of like voltages in a circuit board, so it from bit from it.

• 40:32Gary O'Reilly?

  So what is the probability that we are in a simulation? And if we are, are we nothing more than some super sophisticated ant farm for a young being somewhere?

• 40:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From a mischievous alien in his parents' basement, programming us up.

• 40:46Chuck Nice?

  We're a school project. We're a school project at a at a science fair in some distant galaxy.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  More likely it's a high-powered scientist who set up a billion simulations overnight. He's just left them running, he's gonna come back in the morning, gather up the statistics.

• 41:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh my gosh. And that makes more sense.

• 41:04Chuck Nice?

  I don't wanna know this. You just ruined it for a half a year. You ruined it, cuz guess what?

• 41:09Speaker 02

  Don't shut it down.

• 41:10Chuck Nice?

  And that would explain the multiverse and everything. Man. Oh my god, that's awful.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Maybe Hegel once said that the end of history is when the universe becomes conscious of itself. So in this simulation idea, the moment we realize we're in a simulation, that's when they shut us down.

• 41:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  Don't shut us down.

• 41:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like the Truman Show.

• 41:30Chuck Nice?

  Oh my god, that's one of my favorite episodes of Rick and Morty. Where you saw that where he goes to the microverse and then the microverse, they find the teeniverse. But but one of the microverse actually powers his car.

• 41:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, I remember this, inside the battery.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  And he is their god, just for his spaceship.

• 41:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 41:51Gary O'Reilly?

  So we spend how much of our life? In virtual reality right now as as people.

• 41:58Speaker 02

  Some people spend, you know, half their time there, at least in video games.

• 42:01Gary O'Reilly?

  So are we not, are we not leap walking into a continuous virtual reality for some of us?

• 42:07Speaker 02

  I think it's coming. This is what, this is what Mark Zuckerberg wants, right? The metaverse.

• 42:11Chuck Nice?

  The metaverse.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  We renamed the whole company after.

• 42:13Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, in the metaverse, it's not just a matter of entertainment. In the metaverse, you like go to work in the metaverse.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, everything has, yeah.

• 42:19Chuck Nice?

  You know, you, you do, you, you meet your friends in the metaverse. Like you literally live your life.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  Your entertainment.

• 42:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, your entertainment, like, yeah.

• 42:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Right now, the sensory experience in a virtual reality isn't 100% complete as we know it.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:33Gary O'Reilly?

  How long before we can taste, we can smell, we can have all these other sensory, sensory developments in the.

• 42:40Chuck Nice?

  Reaction.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  I think it's probably getting there in coming decades. I mean, right now, the vision and the hearing are actually pretty good. Not 100%, but I got an Apple Vision Pro and the visual quality is very, very, very, very high. They're now developing augmented reality glasses like the Orion ones.

• 42:58Gary O'Reilly?

  We're not going to be walking around with big old headsets on like that in the future. Surely they'll dish.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  We've resisted that thus far. Hopefully in the end, contact lenses, brain computer interfaces to get, to get taste and smell and touch working. It's probably going to require some direct brain computer interface.

• 43:14Chuck Nice?

  Right, because you've got to stimulate that part of the brain.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Body representations directly, the smell areas.

• 43:18Gary O'Reilly?

  So basically, the irony will be that we're in a simulation and we'll end up being in, going into a simulation in a simulation.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, we could be, uh, we may already be at level 42 and that will take us down to level 43.

• 43:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So David, you got to take us out of here. So where, what should we look forward to?

• 43:36Speaker 02

  Well, I think on the reality side, we're going to be getting more and more immersive, detailed forms of reality. And the question is going to arise for us, are those technological realities, genuine realities? I want to say eventually, yes. And there's also, we got this exactly the same question about consciousness. Our first topic, we're going to have AI systems, artificial brains, artificial intelligences. And the question is, will those be genuine, real consciousnesses?

• 44:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and, and where they meet is the notion, which has been featured in multiple films, where you upload your consciousness.

• 44:15Chuck Nice?

  Brain in a jar.

• 44:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To a jar.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:17Gary O'Reilly?

  If we are going to be able to upload our consciousness.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Is it going to be? Better to upload it into a synthetic biological intelligence or into a silicon-based intelligence?

• 44:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or does that even matter? Does that even, who cares?

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Maybe it doesn't. I mean, right now, the best, most efficient artificial digital technologies we have is the kind, is the silicon kind. Biology, we just don't have the same kind of control over. I would predict that we'll probably, at least in the short term, if we're uploaded, we'll be uploaded onto digital processors in silicon. If we're in a virtual reality, that will also be a reality running on digital processors in silicon. But, yeah, well, what ultimately matters is not what it's made of, it's the computation.

• 44:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's what it can, right.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  It's the bits.

• 45:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, why should that even matter? I mean, if you told someone 30 years ago, we have people walking around with two knees and hips, and they'd say, well, it's not biological. No, it's metal, right? They would, who cares? You can still run.

• 45:14Gary O'Reilly?

  No, there's just the thinking that you can't replicate the brain. Well, they're starting to find that they can take themselves in that direction.

• 45:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can't replicate the brain.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  One philosopher wrote a paper on this years ago called, "It's Not the Meat, It's the Motion." Nice. It's not the biology. I used to say a similar saying. Not, not to unlike that. It's a 1950's book song.

• 45:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't need to know your version of it, Chuck.

• 45:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Your phone's ringing.

• 45:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, David, thanks for coming back on StarTalk. This has been yet another edition of StarTalk Special Edition, this time with Professor David Chalmers. And your latest book, tell me?

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Reality Plus, all about those questions about reality and consciousness.

• 45:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Reality Plus?

• 45:54Speaker 02

  Reality Plus.

• 45:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's, what's with the plus? There's Paramount Plus, Disney Plus?

• 45:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was originally gonna call it Reality 2.0, and everyone's like, that's too 90's, 90's. It's Reality Plus, okay, well, it's a cliche, the plus. Paramount Plus, Disney Plus, but at least it's a 2020's cliche.

• 46:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And regular people can read this?

• 46:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's for anybody. It's about an introduction to the great problems of philosophy through the lens of technology.

• 46:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  Nice. One of you, one of you read the book, solve the problems, please.

• 46:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, there we go.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 46:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, good to have you.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Always a pleasure, Neil.

• 46:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary. We're doing it here. All right, Neil deGrasse Tyson here for StarTalk. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.