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Christof Koch: Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #2

Lex Fridman and Christof Koch on christof Koch Dissects Consciousness, AI, Free Will, and Spirituality.

Lex FridmanhostChristof KochguestGuestguest
May 29, 201857mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 2:05

    Intelligent life in the universe and why experience still feels “special”

    1. LF

      As part of MIT course 6.099 on artificial general intelligence, I got a chance to sit down with Christof Koch, who is one of the seminal figures in, uh, neurobiology and neuroscience, and generally in the study of consciousness. He is the president, the chief scientific officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. From 1986 to 2013 he was a professor at Caltech. Before that, he was at MIT. He is extremely well-cited, over 100,000 citations. His research, his writing, his ideas have had big impact on the scientific community and the general public in the way we think about consciousness and the way see ourselves as human beings. He's the author of several books, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach, and a more recent book, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. If you enjoy this conversation, this course, subscribe, click the little bell icon to make sure you never miss a video. And in the comments, leave suggestions for any people you'd like to see be part of the course or any ideas that you would like us to explore. Thanks very much and I hope you enjoy. Okay, before we delve into the beautiful mysteries of consciousness, let's zoom out a little bit and let me ask, do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe?

    2. CK

      Uh, yes, I do believe so. We have no evidence of it, but I think the probabilities are overwhelming in favor of it, given a universe, uh, where we have 10 to the 11th galaxies and each galaxy has between 10 to the 11th, 10 to the 12th stars and we know most stars have one or more planets.

    3. LF

      So how does that make you feel?

    4. CK

      It still makes me feel special because I have experiences. I feel the world, I experience the world. And, uh, independent of whether there are other creatures o- out there, I still feel the world and I have access to this world in this very strange compelling way, and that's the core of, uh, human existence.

  2. 2:05 – 3:25

    Is consciousness uniquely human? Animals, aliens, and the limits of language

    1. LF

      Now, you said human. Do you think... If those intelligent creatures are out there, do you think they experience their world that's shared?

    2. CK

      Yes, if they are evolved, if they are a product of natural evolution as they would have to be, they will also experience their own world. So consciousness isn't just, uh, human, you're right, it's, it's much wider. It's probably... it may be spread across all of biology. We have... The only thing that we have special is we can talk about it.

    3. LF

      (laughs)

    4. CK

      Of course, not all people can talk about it. Babies and little children can't talk about it, patients who have, um, who have a stroke in the, let's say the left inferior frontal gyrus can't talk about it, but most normal adult people can talk about it and so we think that makes us special compared to, let's say, monkeys or dogs or cats or mice or all the other creatures that we share the planet with. But all the evidence seems to suggest that they too experience the world and so it's, like, overwhelmingly likely that other alien- that aliens would also experience their world. Of course differently because they have a different sensorium, they have different sensors, they have a very different environment. But the fact that... I, I would s- uh, strongly suppose that they also have experiences, they feel pain and pleasure and see in some sort of spectrum and hear and have all the other senses.

    5. LF

      Of course their language, if they have one, would be different so we might not be able to understand their poetry about the experiences that they have.

    6. CK

      That's correct.

  3. 3:25 – 5:16

    From taking experience for granted to confronting the mind–body problem

    1. LF

      Right. So in a talk, in a video I've- I've heard you mention Sapozzel, a dachshund that you came up with, that you grew up with as part of your family when you were young. Uh, first of all you're technically a Midwestern boy.

    2. CK

      Technically.

    3. LF

      (laughs)

    4. CK

      Yes.

    5. LF

      But, uh, after that you traveled around a bit, hence a little bit of the accent. You talked about Sapozzel, the dachshund, having these elements of hum- humanness, of consciousness that you discovered. So I, I just wanted to ask, can you look back on your childhood and remember when was the first time you realized you yourself, sort of from a third person perspective, are, are a conscious being? This idea of, you know, stepping outside yourself and seeing there's something special going on here in my brain.

    6. CK

      I can't really... Actually it's a good question. I'm not sure I recall a discrete moment. I mean, you take it for granted because that's the only world you know, right? The only world I know and you know is the world of seeing and hearing voices and touching and all the other things. So it's only much later at early in my undergraduate days when I became, um, when I enrolled in physics and in philosophy that I really thought about it and thought, "Well, this is really fundamentally very, very mysterious and there's nothing really in physics right now that explains this transition from the physics of the brain to feelings. Where do the feelings come in?" Right? So you can look at the foundational equation of quantum mechanics, general relativity, you can look at the periodic table of the elements, you can, you can look at the endless ATG seed chat in our genes and nowhere is consciousness, yet I wake up every morning to a world where I have experiences. And so that's the heart of the ancient mind/body problem: How do experiences get into the world?

  4. 5:16 – 6:03

    Defining consciousness: experience, qualia, and the ‘what it is like’ aspect

    1. LF

      So what is consciousness?

    2. CK

      Experience. Consciousness is any, any con- uh, any experience. Some people call it subjective feeling, some people call it phenomen- phenomenology, some people call it qualia if they're a philosopher, but they all denote the same thing. It feels like something, in the famous word of, of the philosopher Thomas Nagel, it feels like something to be a bat or to be a, you know, an, um, um, uh, an American or to be angry or to be sad or to be in love or to have pain. And that is what experience is. Any possible experience. Could be as mundane as just sitting in a chair, could be as exalted as, you know, having a mystical moment, uh, you know, in, in deep meditation. Those are just different forms of experiences.

  5. 6:03 – 9:42

    Intelligence vs. consciousness: Turing test, ‘Her,’ and the problem of subjective being

    1. LF

      Experience. So if you...... were to sit down with maybe the next, skip a couple generations of IBM Watson, something that won Jeopardy, what is the gap, I guess the question is, between Watson, uh, that might be much smarter than you, than us, than all, any human alive, but may not have experience? What is the gap?

    2. CK

      Well, so that's a big, big question. That's occupied people for the last, um, certainly, uh, last 50 years since we, you know, since the advent, the birth of, um, of computers. That's a question Alan Turing tried to answer and, of course, he did it in this indirect way by proposing this test, an operational test. So, but that's not really, that's, you know, he tried to get at what does it mean for a person to think and then he had this test, right? You lock 'em away and then you have a communication with them and then you try to, to guess after a while whether that is a person or whether it's a computer system. There's no question that now or very soon, you know, Alexa or Siri or, you know, Google Now will pass this test, right? And you can game it, but, you know, ultimately, certainly in your generation, there will be machines that will speak with complete poise, that will remember everything you ever said, that will remember every email you ever had. Like, like Samantha, remember, in the movie Her?

    3. LF

      Yep.

    4. CK

      It's no question it's gonna ha- uh, happen. But, of course, the key question is does it feel like anything to be Samantha in the movie Her?

    5. LF

      That's right.

    6. CK

      Or to, or do- does it feel like anything to be Watson? And there, one has to ve- very, um, very strongly think there are two different concepts here that we commingle. There is the concept of intelligence, natural or artificial, and there is a concept of consciousness, of experience, natural or artificial. Those are very, very different things. Now historically, we associate consciousness with intelligence. Why? Because we live in a world, leaving aside computers, of, of natural selection.

    7. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    8. CK

      Where we are surrounded by creatures, either our own kin that are less or more intelligent or we go across species. Some, some are more adapted to a particular environment, others are less adapted. Whether it's a whale or a dog or you go talk about a paramecium or a little worm, all right? And, and we see the complexity of the nervous system goes from one cell to, to a specialized cells to a worm that has three net- that has 30% of its cells are nerve cells, to a creature like us or like a blue whale that have- has 100 billion even more nerve cells. And so ba- based on behavioral evidence and based on the underlying, uh, neuroscience, we believe that as these creatures become more complex, they are better adapted to a, to their particular ecological niche and they become more conscious, b- partly because their brain grows and we believe consciousness, unlike the ancient, ancient people thought most, almost every culture thought that consciousness with intelligence has to do with your heart.

    9. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    10. CK

      And you still do see that today.

    11. LF

      Yeah.

    12. CK

      You see honey, I love with all my heart.

    13. LF

      Yes.

    14. CK

      But what you should actually say is, say, "No, honey, I love you with all my lateral hypothalamus."

    15. LF

      (laughs)

    16. CK

      And for Valentine's Day you should give your sweetheart a, a, you know, a hypothalamic shaped piece of chocolate.

    17. LF

      Yeah.

    18. CK

      Not a heart-shaped chocolate, right?

    19. LF

      Yes.

    20. CK

      And, you know, so we still have this language, but now we believe it's the brain and so we see brains of different complexity and we think, "Well, they have different levels of consciousness. They're capable of different experiences." Um, but now we confront a world where we know, where we're beginning to engineer intelligence and it's g- radical unclear whether the intelligence we're engineering has anything to do with consciousness and whether it can experience anything. 'Cause fundamentally what's the difference?

  6. 9:42 – 13:52

    Dissociating function from experience: vegetative state, dreams, and sensory deprivation

    1. CK

      Intelligence is about function. Intelligence, no matter exactly how you define it, sort of adaptation to new environments, being able to learn and quickly understand, you, you know, the setup of this and what's going on and who are the actors and what's gonna happen next. That's all about function. Consciousness is not about function. Consciousness is about being. It's in some sense much fundamental. You can see for ex- you can see this in c- in several cases. You can see it, for instance, in the case of the clinic.

    2. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    3. CK

      When you're dealing with patients who are, let's say had a stroke or had, were in traffic accident, et cetera, they're pretty much immobile. Terri Schiavo, you, you may have heard historically, she was a person here in the, um, in the '90s in Florida. Sh- her heart stood still, she was reanimated, then for the next 14 years she was what's called in a vegetative state. There are thousands of people in a vegetative state, so they're, you know, they are, you know, they are like this. Occasionally they, they open their eyes for two, three, four, five, six, eight hours and then close their eyes. They have sleep-wake cycle.

    4. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    5. CK

      Occasionally they have behavior. They do like, "Ah." You know, they... But there's no way that you can establish a lawful relationship between what you say or the doctor says or the mom says and what the patient does.

    6. LF

      Right.

    7. CK

      So, so the, so the- there isn't any behavior, yet in some of these people, there is still experience. You can, you can, um, uh, design and build brain-machine interfaces where you can see there's- the- they still experience something. And, of course, there are these cases of locked-in state. There's this famous book called The, The Bu- The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

    8. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    9. CK

      Where you had an editor, a French editor, he had a stroke in the, in the brain stem. Unable to move except his vertical eyes, eye movement. He could just move his ve- eyes up and down, and he dictated an entire book.

    10. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    11. CK

      And some people even lose this at the end. Yet all the evidence seems to suggest that they're still in there. In this case you have no behavior, you have consciousness. Second case is tonight, like all of us, you're gonna go to sleep. Close your eyes, you go to sleep. You will wake up inside your sleeping body and you will have conscious experiences. They are different from everyday experience, you might fly, you might not be surprised that you're flying. You might meet a long-dead pet, childhood dog, and you're not surprised that you're meeting them, you know, but you have conscious experience of love, of hate. You know, they can be very emotional. Your body during this state, uh, t- typically to, um, states sense an active...... signal to your motor neurons to paralyze you. It's called atonia.

    12. LF

      Right.

    13. CK

      Right? Because if you don't have that, like some patients, what do you do? You act out your dreams.

    14. LF

      Right.

    15. CK

      You get, for example, REM behavioral disorder, which is a bad, which is bad juju to get.

    16. LF

      (laughs) .

    17. CK

      Okay? Third case is pure experience. So I recently had this what some people call a mystical experience. I went to Singapore and went into a flotation tank.

    18. LF

      Yeah.

    19. CK

      All right, so this is a big tub filled with e- with water that's body temperature and Epsom salt.

    20. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    21. CK

      You strip completely naked.

    22. LF

      Yeah.

    23. CK

      You lie inside of it. You close the, the, the lid.

    24. LF

      It's darkness.

    25. CK

      Complete darkness. Soundproof. So very quickly you become bodiless because you're floating and you're naked. You have no rings, no watch, no nothing. You don't feel your body anymore.

    26. LF

      Right.

    27. CK

      There's no sound, soundless. There's no s- uh, pho- photon, uh, uh, sightless, timeless because after a while early on you actually hear your heart but then that, you, you, you sort of adapt to that and then sort of the passage-

    28. LF

      (laughs) .

    29. CK

      ... of time ceases.

    30. LF

      Yeah.

  7. 13:52 – 15:08

    Why-questions, evolution, and why consciousness may not be ‘for’ anything

    1. LF

      What, what, what is the function of you being able to lay in this, uh, s- sense, sensory-free deprivation tank and still have a conscious experience? What-

    2. CK

      Evolutionary?

    3. LF

      Evolutionary.

    4. CK

      Oh, to sleep we didn't evolve with flotation tanks in our, in our environment. I mean, so biology is notoriously bad at asking why questions, teleonomical questions. Why do we have two eyes? Why don't we have four eyes like some creatures-

    5. LF

      We should do.

    6. CK

      ... or three eyes or something? Well, no, the- there's probably a, there is a function to that but it's, we're, we're not very good at answering those questions.

    7. LF

      Yeah.

    8. CK

      We can speculate endlessly where biology is very, or science is very good about mechanistic question. Why is there charge in the universe, right?

    9. LF

      Yeah.

    10. CK

      We find a certain universe where there are positive and negative charges. Why? Why does quantum mechanics hold? You know, why, why, why doesn't some other, uh, theory hold? Quantum mechanics hold in our universe. It's very unclear why. So teleonomical question, why questions are difficult to answer. Clearly there's some relationship between complexity, brain processing power and consciousness. But however, in these cases, in these three examples I ca- I gave, one is an everyday experience at night, the other one is a, you know, trauma, and third one is in principle you can, everybody can have these sort of mystical experiences. You have a dissociation of function from, of intelligence, from, um, uh, from consciousness.

  8. 15:08 – 19:12

    Measuring consciousness in humans—and why machines require a theory

    1. LF

      From consciousness. You caught me asking a why question. Uh, let me ask a question that's not a why question. You're giving a talk later today on the Turing test, uh, for intelligence and consciousness and drawing lines between the two. So is there a scientific way to say there's consciousness present in this entity or not? And, uh, uh, to anticipate your answer 'cause you, w- you also... There's a neurobiological answer. So we can test a human brain but if you take a machine brain that you don't know tests for yet, uh, how would you even begin to approach a test if there's consciousness present in this thing?

    2. CK

      Okay, that's a really good question. So let me take it in two steps. So as you point out, for, for, for, for humans, let's just stick with humans, there's now a test called a zap and zip. It's a procedure where you ping the brain using transcranial magnetic stimulation. You look at the electrical reverberations, essentially using EG. And then you can measure the complexity of this brain response and you can do this in awake people, in their sleep, normal people. You can do it in awake people and then anesthetize them. You can do it in patients and it, it, it has 100% accuracy that in all those cases when you're clear the patient or the person is either conscious or unconscious, the complexity's either high or low. And then you can adopt these techniques to similar creatures like monkeys and dogs and, and, and mice that have very similar brains. Now, of course, you, you point out that may not help you because we don't have a cortex, you know, and if I send a magnetic pulse into my iPhone or my computer, it's probably gonna break something.

    3. LF

      Yeah.

    4. CK

      So we don't have that. So what we need ultimately, we need a theory of consciousness. We can't just rely on our intuition. Our intuition is, well, yeah, if somebody talks, they're conscious.

    5. LF

      Right.

    6. CK

      However, then there are all these patie- children, babies don't talk, right? But we believe that, that th- babies also have conscious experiences, right? And then there are all these patients I mentioned, um, that, uh, and they don't talk. When you dream, you can't talk because you're paralyzed. So, so what, what we ultimately need... We can't just rely on our intuition. We need a theory of conscious that tells us what is it about a piece of matter, what is it about a piece of highly excitable matter like the brain or like a computer that gives rise to conscious experience? We all believe, none of us believes anymore in the old story it's a soul, right?

    7. LF

      Right.

    8. CK

      That used to be the most common explanation that most people accepted and still a lot of people today believe, well, there's this, there's God endowed only us with this special thing that animals don't have. Rene Descartes famously said, "A dog, if you hit it with your carriage, it may yell, it may cry, but it doesn't have this special thing." It doesn't have the magic, the magic sauce.

    9. LF

      Soul, yeah.

    10. CK

      It doesn't have ............................ The soul. Now, we believe that isn't the case anymore. So what is the difference between brains and, and these guys, silicon? And, um, in particular, once their behavior matches, so if you have Siri or t- or Alexa in 20 years from now that she can talk just as good as any possible human, what grounds do you have to say she's not conscious, in particular if she says, as of course she will...

    11. LF

      ... (laughs)

    12. CK

      Well, of course I'm conscious. You ask-

    13. LF

      So they-

    14. CK

      ... "How are you doing?" and she'll say, "Well..." You know, they, they'll generate some way to-

    15. LF

      Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

    16. CK

      Of course. She, she'll behave like a, like a person. Now there are several differences. One is... So this relates to the problem, the, the, the very hard... Why is consciousness a hard problem? It's because it's subjective, right? Only I have it, for which only I know. I have direct experience of my own consciousness. I don't have experience your consciousness. Now, I assume as a sort of a Bayesian person who believes in probability theory and all of that, you know, I can do, I can do an abduction to the, to the best available facts. I deduce your brain is very similar to mine. If I put you in a scanner, your brain is roughly gonna behave the same ways I do. If, if, if, you know, if I give you this muesli and ask you, "How does it taste?" you would tell me things that, you know, that, that I would also say more or less, right?

    17. LF

      Yeah.

    18. CK

      So I infer based on all of that that, that you're conscious. Now with theory I can't do that, so there I really need a theory that tells me what is it about, about any system, this or this, that makes it conscious. We have such a theory.

  9. 19:12 – 22:12

    Integrated Information Theory (IIT), panpsychism, and ‘physics from the inside’

    1. LF

      Yes. So the, the integrated information theory, uh, is... But let me first, maybe as introduction for people who are not familiar, Descartes. Can you... Y- you talk a lot about pan, uh, panpsychism. Can you describe what, uh, physicalism versus dualism? This, you, you mentioned the soul. What, what is the history of that idea? What i-

    2. CK

      The idea of panpsychism?

    3. LF

      Well, no, the debate, really, uh, o- out of which pan- panpsychism can, um, emerge, of, of, of, um, dualism versus, uh, physicalism or, or do you not see p- uh, panpsychism as fitting into that

    4. CK

      No, you can argue there's some... Well, okay, so let's step back. So panpsychism is a very ancient belief that's been around, uh, I mean, Plato and Aristotle talks about it, uh, modern philosophers talk about it. Uh, of course, in Buddhism, the idea is very prevalent. That, I mean, there are different versions of it. One version says everything is ensouled. Everything. Rocks and stones and dogs and people and forests and iPhones, all of us souled, right? All matter is ensouled. That's sort of one version. Another version is that all biology, all creatures small or large, from a single cell to a giant sequoia tree, feel like something. That's the one I think is somewhat more realistic. Um, so there are different versions of-

    5. LF

      What do you mean by feel like something?

    6. CK

      Well, have-

    7. LF

      Have feeling, have some kind of experience?

    8. CK

      It feels like some... It may well be possible that it feels like something to be a paramecium. I think it's pretty likely it feels like something to be a bee or a mouse or a dog.

    9. LF

      Sure. So, okay.

    10. CK

      So, so that you can say that's also... So panpsychism is very broad, right?

    11. LF

      Yeah.

    12. CK

      And you can... So some people, for example, uh, Bertrand Russell tried to advocate this f- this idea, it's called Russellian monism, that, that panpsychism is really physics viewed from the inside. So the idea is that physics is very good at describing relationship among objects, like charges.

    13. LF

      Right.

    14. CK

      Or like gravity, right? You know, it describes the relation between curvature and mass distribution, okay? Th- that's the relationship among thing. Physics doesn't really describe the ultimate reality itself.

    15. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    16. CK

      It's just relationship among, you know, quarks or all these other stuff that Was from like a third person observer. Yes. Yes.

    17. LF

      Yeah.

    18. CK

      Yes. And consciousness is what physics feels from the inside. So my conscious experience-

    19. LF

      Yeah.

    20. CK

      ... it's the way the physics of my brain, particular my cortex, feels from the inside. And so if you're a paramecium, you gotta remember, you see a paramecium, well, that's a pretty dumb creature. It is, but it has already a billion different, uh, molecules, probably, you know, 5,000 different proteins assembled in a highly, highly complex system that no single person, no computer system so far on this planet has ever managed to accurately simulate. Its, its complexity vastly escapes us. Yes, and it may well be that that little thing feels like a tiny bit. Now, it doesn't have a voice in the head like me, it doesn't have expectations, you know, it doesn't have all that complex things, but it may well feel like something.

  10. 22:12 – 25:20

    Life, intelligence, consciousness: Aristotle’s ‘souls’ and modern definitional gaps

    1. LF

      Yeah. So this is really interesting. Can, can we draw some lines and maybe try to understand the difference between life, intelligence, and consciousness? How do you see all of those? If you had to define what is a living thing, what is a conscious thing, and what is an intelligent thing, do those intermix for you or are they totally separate?

    2. CK

      Okay, so A, that's a question that we don't have a full answer for.

    3. LF

      Right, of c- a lot of this stuff we're talking about today is full of mysteries and fascinating ones, right?

    4. CK

      Well, yeah, for example, you can go to Aristotle, who's probably the most important scientist and philosopher who's ever lived in, certainly in Western culture. He had this idea, it's called hylomorphism, it's quite popular these days, that there are different forms of soul. The soul is really the form of something. He sa- he says all biological creature have a vegetative soul. That's life principle. Today, we think we understand something more that it's biochemistry and non-linear thermodynamics, right? Then he said they have a sensitive soul. Uh, only, um, animals and humans have also a sensitive soul or an apetitive soul. They, they can see, they can smell, and they have drives.

    5. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    6. CK

      They wanna reproduce, they wanna eat, et cetera. And then only humans have what he called a rational soul.

    7. LF

      (laughs)

    8. CK

      Okay?

    9. LF

      Right.

    10. CK

      And, and that idea then made it into Christendom, and then the rational soul is the one that lives forever. He was very unclear. He wasn't really... I mean, different readings of Aristotle give different, whether did he believe that rational soul was immortal or not. I probably think he didn't. But then of course, that made it into, through Plato into Christianity, and then the soul became immortal, and then became the, the connection, uh, to God. Now, y- y- so you are asking me essentially, what is our modern conception of these three... Aristo- Aristotle would have called them different forms. Life, we think we know something about it, at least life on this planet, right? Although we don't understand how it originated, but it's, it's been difficult to rigorously pin down. You see this in modern definitions of death.... it's, in fact right now there's a conference ongoing, again, that tries to define legally and medically what is death. It used to be very simple. Death is you stop breathing, your heart stops beating, you're dead.

    11. LF

      Yeah.

    12. CK

      Right? Totally uncontroversial. If it's, if- if you're unsure, you wait another 10 minutes, if the patient doesn't breathe, you know, he's dead. Well, now we have ventilators, we have heart p- pacemakers, so it's much more difficult to define what death is. Typically, death is defined as the end of life and life is defined before death, so-

    13. LF

      (laughs) The thing before death, okay.

    14. CK

      ... okay, so we don't have really very good definitions. Intelligence, we don't have a rigorous de- definition. We know something how to measure, it's called Q- IQ or G factors, right? And- and we're beginning to build it in- in a na- narrow sense, right, like Go, AlphaGo and- and- and Watson and, you know, Google Cars and Uber Cars and all of that, that's still narrow AI and some people are thinking about artificial general intelligence. But roughly, as we said before, it's something to do with the ability to learn and to adapt to- to new environments. But that is, as I said also, it's radical difference from experience.

    15. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    16. CK

      And it's very unclear if you build a machine that has AGI, it's not at all a priori, it's not at all clear that this machine will have consciousness. It may or may not.

  11. 25:20 – 29:58

    Why simulated brains may not be conscious: causal power, not imitation

    1. LF

      So let's ask it the other way. Do you think, if you were to try to build an artificial general intelligence system, do you think, uh, figuring out how to build artificial consciousness would r- help you get to- to an AGI? So, or put another way, do you think intelligent requires consciousness?

    2. CK

      In human, it goes hand in hand. In human or I think in biology, consciousness and intelligence goes hand in hand, qua solution. Because the- the brain evolved to be highly complex, complexity via this theory, integrated information theory, is sort of ultimately is- is what is closely tied to consciousness. Ultimately, its cause and power upon itself and so in evolu- in evolved systems, they go together. In artificial system, particularly in digital machines, they do not go together. And if you ask me point blank, is Alexa 20.0 in the year 2041, she can easily pass every Turing test, is she conscious? No. Even if she claims she's conscious. In fact, you could even do more radical version of this thought experiment. We can build a computer simulation of the human brain, you know, what Henry Markram in, uh, the Blue Brain Project or the Human Brain Project in Switzerland is trying to do. Let's grant him all the success, so in 10 years we have this perfect simulation of the human brain, every neuron is simulated and it has a larynx and it has motor neurons, it has a- a- a broca's area and of course it'll talk and it'll say, "Hi, I just woken up. I feel great." Okay? Even that computer simulation that can in principle map onto your brain will not be conscious. Why? Because it simulates, it's a difference between the simulated and the real.

    3. LF

      Real.

    4. CK

      So it simulates the behavior associated with consciousness. It might be, it will if it's done properly, will have all the intelligence that that particular person they're simulating has. But simulating intelligence is not the same as having conscious experiences. And I give you a really nice metaphor that engineers and physicists typically get. I can write down Einstein's field equations, nine or ten equations that describe the link in general relativity between curvature and- and mass.

    5. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    6. CK

      I can do that, I can run this on my laptop to- to predict that the central, the black hole at the center of our galaxy will be so massive that it'll twist spacetime around it so no light can escape, right? It's a black hole, right?

    7. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    8. CK

      But funny, have you ever wondered, why doesn't this computer simulation suck me in?

    9. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    10. CK

      Right? It simulates gravity, but it doesn't have the causal power of gravity. That's a huge difference. So it's a difference between the real and- and the simulated, just like it doesn't get wet inside a computer when the computer runs code that simulates a weather storm. And so in order to have- to have artificial conscience, you have to give it the same causal power as a human brain.

    11. LF

      Yes.

    12. CK

      You have to build so-called neumorphic machine that has hardware that is very similar to the human brain, not a digital, clocked phenomenon computer.

    13. LF

      So that's, just to clarify though, you think that consciousness is not required to create human-level intelligence. It seems to accompany in the human brain, but for a machine, not.

    14. CK

      That's correct.

    15. LF

      So (sighs) maybe just because this is AGI, let- let's dig in a little bit about what we mean by intelligence. So one thing is the G factor, these kind of IQ tests of intelligence. But I think if you... Look, maybe another way to say so in 2040, 2050, people will have Siri that is just really impressive. Do you think people will say Siri's intelligent?

    16. CK

      Yes.

    17. LF

      It's, intelligence is this amorphous thing, so to be intelligent, it seems like you have to have some kind of connections with other human beings in- in a sense that you have to impress them with your intelligence (laughs) . And there- there feels, y- you have to somehow operate in this world full of humans and for that, there feels like there has to be something like consciousness. So you think you can have just the world's best natural NLP system, natural language understanding and generation and that will be, that will get us happy and say, "You know what? We've created an AGI."?

    18. CK

      I don't know happy, but-

    19. LF

      (laughs) Well-

    20. CK

      ... but yes, I do believe we can get what we call high level functional intelligence, particular sort of the G, you know, this- this, um, fluid-like intelligence that we cherish, particularly at a place like MIT, right? In- in- in machines, I see a priori no reasons and I see a lot of reason to believe it's gonna happen very, you know, over the next 50 years or 30 years.

  12. 29:58 – 34:05

    AI alignment, empathy, and whether suffering is necessary for experience

    1. LF

      So for beneficial AI, for creating an AI system that's, um, so you mentioned ethics, that is exceptionally intelligent but also does not do...... does, you know, aligns its values with our values as humanity, do you think then it needs consciousness?

    2. CK

      Yes. I think that's, that is a very good argument that if we're concerned about AI and the threat of AI, a la Nick Bostrom, existential threat, I think having an intelligence that has empathy... Right? Why do we find abusing a dog, why do most of us find that abhorrent? Abusing any animal, right? Why do we find that, um, abhorrent? Because we have this thing called empathy which, if you look at the Greek really means feeling with. I feel, it comes pathos, empathy, I have feeling with you. I see somebody else suffer that isn't even my conspecific, right? It's not a, a person. It's not a love, it's not my wife or my kids, it's, it's a dog, but I feel naturally most of us, not all of us, most of us will feel empathic. And so it may well be in the long-term interest of survival of Homo sapiens sapiens that if we do build AGI and it's really becomes very powerful that it has an empathic response and doesn't just exterminate humanity.

    3. LF

      So as part of the full conscious experience, uh, to cr- to create a consciousness, artificial, or in our human consciousness, do you think fear... Maybe we're gonna get into, um, your earlier days with Nietzsche and so on, but do you think fear and suffering are essential, uh, to have consciousness? Do you have to have the full range of experience to have a, to have a system that has experience? Or can you have a system that only has a very particular kinds of very positive experiences?

    4. CK

      Look, you can have... In principle, you can... Uh, people have done this in the rat where you implant electrode in the hypothalamus, the pleasure center of the rat and the rat stimulates itself above and beyond anything else. It doesn't care about food or natural sex or, or drink anymore, it just stimulates itself because it's- it's such a pleasurable feeling. I guess it's like an orgasm, just you have, you know, all day long. And so, uh, a priori I see no reason why you need, um, different f- why you need a great variety. Now clearly to survive, that wouldn't work, right? But if I engineer it artificially, I don't think, um, I don't think you need, uh, a great variety of conscious experience. You could have just pleasure or just fear. It might be a terrible existence but I think that's possible, at least on conceptual logical account. 'Cause any real creature, whether artificially engineered, you wanna give it fear, the fear of extinction, right? That we all have. Uh, and you also wanna give it positive, appetitive states. States that it wants to... that you want the machine encouraged to do because it- they give the machine positive feedback.

    5. LF

      So, um, you mentioned panpsychism, to jump back a little bit. You know, everything having some kind of mental property. Uh, how- how do you go from there to something like human consciousness? So everything having some elements of consciousness to... Well, is there something special about human consciousness?

    6. CK

      Well, so it's- it's... so, so just as a... It's not everything. Like a- a spoon, there's no... I... The- the form of panpsychism I think about doesn't ascribe consciousness to anything like this, the spoon or my liver. However, uh, it is, uh, the theory, the integrated information theory does say that system, even one that look from the outside relatively simple at le- if they have this internal causal power, they are... they- they- they... it does feel like something. The theory a priori doesn't say anything what's special about human. Biologically, we know what... The- the one thing that's special about human is we speak and we have an overblown sense of our own importance.

    7. LF

      (laughs) Right.

    8. CK

      We believe we're exceptional and we're just God's gift to- to-... uh, to the universe. But the... but behaviorally the main thing that we have, we can pla-... we can plan over the long term and we have language and that gives us enormous amount of power. And that's why we are the- the current dominant species on the planet.

  13. 34:05 – 38:21

    Religion, Buddhism, ‘the zone,’ and the primacy of first-person experience

    1. LF

      So you mentioned God, you grew up a devout Roman Catholic, uh, in a Re- Roman Catholic family. So, you know, w- with consciousness you're sort of exploring some really deeply fundamental human things that religion also touches on. So where does- where does religion fit into your thinking about consciousness? And you've- y- you've grown throughout your life and changed your views on religion as far as I understand.

    2. CK

      Yeah. I mean, I'm now much closer to... So I- I'm not a ca- Roman Catholic anymore. I don't believe there's sort of, um, this God, the God I was- I was educated to believe in, you know, who sits somewhere in the fullness of time, I'll be united in some sort of everlasting bliss. I- I just don't see any evidence for that. Look, the world... the night is large and full of wonders, right?

    3. LF

      (laughs)

    4. CK

      There are many things that I don't understand, there are, I think, many things that we as a cult... Look, we don't even understand more than 4% of all the u- uh, the universe, right? Dark matter, dark energy, we have no idea what it is. Maybe it's the last socks, what do I know?

    5. LF

      (laughs)

    6. CK

      So- so all I can tell you is... And so sort of my- my current, uh, religious or spiritual sentiment is much closer to some form of Buddhism.

    7. LF

      Can you describe what that-

    8. CK

      Without the reincarnation, unfortunately. There's no evidence for any reincarnation.

    9. LF

      So can you describe, um, the- the way Buddhism sees the world a little bit?

    10. CK

      Well, so the, you know, they talk about... So when- when I- I spent, uh, several meetings with, uh, with the Dalai Lama and what always impressed me about him, he really unlike, for example, let's say the- the- the Pope or some Cardinal, he always emphasized minimizing the suffering of all creatures. So they have this from the early beginning, they look at suffering in all creatures, not just in people but in- in everybody, this universal. And of course by degrees, right? An animal, generally will have le- le- is less capable of suffering than a- th- than a well-developed, uh, um, uh, normally developed human. And, um, they think consciousness pervades, uh, in this universe. Uh, and they have these techniques, you know, m- you can think of them like mindfulness, et cetera, and meditation that tries to access sort of what they claim of this more fundamental aspect of reality. I'm not sure it's more fundamental as I- I think about it. There's the physical and then there's this inside you, consciousness, and those are the two aspects. That's the only thing I have a- I have access to in my life. And you gotta remember, my conscious experience and your conscious experience comes prior to anything you know about physics, comes prior to knowledge about y- the universe and atoms and super strings and molecules and all of that.... the only thing you're directly acquainted with is this world that's populated with, with things and images and, and sounds in your head and touches and all of that.

    11. GU

      Actually, I have a question. So, um, it sounds like, um, you kind of have a, a rich life. You talk about rock climbing and it seems like you really love, uh, literature and, um, consciousness is all about experiencing things. So, do you think that has helped your research on this topic?

    12. CK

      Yes. Particularly if you think about it, the, the various states, so for example, when you do rock climbing or now I do, um, uh, rowing, crew rowing and, and I bike every day, you can get into this thing called the zone and I've always I wanna, I wondered about, about it, particularly with respect to consciousness because it's a strangely addictive state. You wanna, you wanna p- p- I mean, once people have it once, they wanna keep on going back to it and you wonder why, what is it so addicting about it? And I think it's the experience of p- of almost close to pure experience because in this, in this zone, you're not conscious of inner voice anymore, but there's always this inner voice nagging you, right? "You have to do this, you have to do that, you have to pay your taxes, you have this fight with your ex," and all of those things, they're always there. But when you're in the zone, all of that is gone and you're just this, in this wonderful state where you're fully out in the world, like you're, you're, you're climbing or you're rowing or biking or, or doing soccer what, or whatever you're doing and sort of consciousness sort of is this, you're all action or in this case of pure experience, you're not action at all, but in both cases you experience some aspect of, of con- you touch some basic part of, of, of conscious existence that is so basic and so deeply satisfying. You, I think you touch the root of being. That's really what you're touching there, you're getting close to the root of being and that's very different from intelligence.

  14. 38:21 – 46:55

    Simulation hypothesis, free will, the unconscious, and why reading literature matters

    1. LF

      So, what do you think about the simulation hypothesis, simulation theory, the idea that we all live in a computer simulation? Have you given it much thought?

    2. CK

      Raptures for nerds. Raptures for nerds. I think it's-

    3. LF

      Raptures for nerds? (laughs) All right.

    4. CK

      ... I think it's, I, it's, it's as likely as the hypothesis that engaged hundreds of scholars for many centuries, are we all just existing in the mind of God?

    5. LF

      Right.

    6. CK

      Right? And this is just a modern version of it. It's, it's, it's, it's equally plausible. People love talking about these sorts of things, I know there are book writtens about the simulation hypothesis. If that's what people want to do, that's fine.

    7. LF

      (laughs)

    8. CK

      It seems rather esoteric. It's never testable.

    9. LF

      But it's not useful for you to think of it in those terms. So, maybe connecting to the questions of free will which you've talked about, um, I, I think I vaguely remember you saying that the idea that there's no free will, uh, it makes you very uncomfortable. Uh, so what do you think about free will in the, from the, y- d- from a physics perspective, from a consciousness perspective? Where does it all f- fit?

    10. CK

      Okay, so from the physics perspective, leaving aside quantum mechanics, we believe we live in a fully deterministic world, right?

    11. LF

      Right.

    12. CK

      But then comes, of course, quantum mechanics, so now we know that certain things are, in principle, not predictable which I pr- as you said, I prefer because the idea that at the ini- the initial condition of the universe and then everything else we're just acting out the initial condition of the universe that doesn't l- that doesn't m-

    13. LF

      It's not a romantic notion.

    14. CK

      (laughs) Certainly not, right? Now when it comes to consciousness, I think we do have certain freedom. We are much more constrained by physics, of course, and by our past and by our own conscious desires and what our parents told us and what our environment tells us. We all, we all know that, right? There's hundreds of experiments that show how we can be influenced. But finally in the li- in the final analysis when you make a life de- and I'm talking really about critical decision where you really think, should I marry, should I go to this school or that school, should I take this job or that job, should I cheat on my taxes or not, right?

    15. LF

      (laughs)

    16. CK

      The, sort of these are things where you really deliberate and I think under those condition, you are as free as you can be. When you, when you bring your entire being, your entire conscious, uh, uh, um, being to that question and try to anal- analyze it under all the, the various condition and then you take, uh, you make a decision, you are as free as you can ever be. That is I think what, what free will is. It's not fr- a will that's totally free to do anything it wants. That's not possible.

    17. LF

      Right. So, as Jack mentioned, you, uh, you actually write a blog about books you've read, uh, amazing books from, um, Russian, from Bulgakov to (laughs)

    18. CK

      Ah, Mother Margarita.

    19. LF

      ... Goetzli, yeah, Neil Gaiman, Carl Sagan, Murakami. So, what is a book that early in your life transformed the way you saw the world, something that changed your life?

    20. CK

      Nietzsche I guess did. Das Buch Der Altröster because he talks about some of these problems. You know, he was one of the first discoverer of the unconscious. This is, you know, a little bit before, uh, Freud when it was in the air and, you know, he makes all these, uh, claims that people sort of under the guise or under the mask of charity actually are very non-charitable.

    21. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    22. CK

      Um, so he is sort of really the first discoverer of the great land of the, of the unconscious and that, uh, that really struck me.

    23. LF

      And what do you think, what do you think about the unconscious? What, what do you think about Freud? What do you think about these ideas? What's, what's just like dark matter in the universe, what, what's over there in that unconscious?

    24. CK

      A lot. I mean, much more than we think, right? This is what lot of, last hundred years of research has shown, so I think he was a genius, misguided towards the end, but he was al- he started out as a neuroscientist, right? He contributed, he did studies on the, um, on the lamprey, he contributed himself to the, uh, neuron hypothesis, the idea that there are discrete units that we call nerve cells now and then he start, and then he, he, um, wrote, you know, about the unconscious and I think it's true. There's lots of stuff happening. You feel this particular, um, when you're in a relationship and it breaks asunder, right? And then you have this terrible, you can have love and hate and lust and anger and all of it's mixed in and when you try to analyze yourself, "Why am I so upset?" It's very, very difficult to penetrate to those basements, those caverns in your mind because...... the prime eyes of conscious doesn't have access to those.

    25. LF

      Okay.

    26. CK

      But they're there may- in the amygdala or, you know, m- in lots of other places. They make you upset or angry or sad or depressed and it's very difficult to try to actually uncover the reason. You can go to a shrink, you can talk with your friend endlessly. You construct finally a story why this happened, why you love her or don't love her or whatever, but you don't really know whether that's actually the... whether that actually happened because you simply don't have access to those parts of the brain and they're very powerful.

    27. LF

      Do you think that's a feature or a bug of our brain? The fact that we have this deep, difficult to dive into subconscious?

    28. CK

      I think it's a feature because otherwise... Look, we are, we are se- as, like any other, uh, brain or nervous system or computer, we are severely band limited. If we... if everything I do, every emotion I feel, every m- eye movements I make, if all of that had to be under the control of consciousness, I couldn't... I, I couldn't, I, I wouldn't be here. Right? So, so what you do early on, your brain, you have to be conscious when you learn things like typing or like riding on a bike but then you, what you do, you train up, uh, w- or r- routes, I think that involve basal ganglia and striatum. You b- you train up different parts of your brain and then once you do it automatically like typing, you can surely do it much faster without even thinking about it because you've got these highly specialized, what Franz Schrick and I call zombie agents that are sort of... they're taking care of that while your consciousness can sort of worry about the abstract sense of the text you wanna write. And I think that's true for many, many things.

    29. LF

      But for the things like, uh, all the fights you had with, uh, ex-girlfriend, things that you would think are not useful to still linger somewhere in the subconscious. So that seems like a bug that it would stick there. (laughs)

    30. CK

      (laughs) Yes. You think it would be better if you can analyze and then get it out of your system once and for all?

  15. 46:55 – 57:55

    Scale and substrate of consciousness: insects, strange timescales, organoids, and the claustrum

    1. LF

      Mm-hmm. So I... This is a question I wanted to ask about timescale or scale in, in general. Uh, when you... with IIT or in general, t- try to think about consciousness, try to think about these ideas, w- we kinda naturally think in human timescales. So do you, um, or/and also s- uh, entities that are sized close to humans, do you think of things that are much larger and much smaller as containing consciousness and do you think, uh, things that take, you know, what is it? (laughs) You know, uh, ages-

    2. CK

      Eons.

    3. LF

      Yeah, eons to, uh, uh, to operate in their conscious cause-effect, uh, cause-effect?

    4. CK

      It's a very good question. So yeah, I think a lot about small creatures because experimentally, you know, a lot of people work on flies and, and bees, right? So... And most people just think they're automata, they're just bugs for heaven's sake, right? But if you look at their behavior, like bees, they can recognize individual humans. They have this very complicated, um, way to communicate. If you've ever been involved or you know your parents when they bought a house, what sort of agonizing decision that is.

    5. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    6. CK

      And bees have to do that once a year, right, when they swarm in the spring and then they have this very elaborate way. They have 300 scouts, they, they, they go to the individual sites, they come back, they have this power, this dance literally where they dance for several days. They try to recruit other leads. There's very complicated decision way. When they finally want to make a decision, the entire swarm, their scouts warm up the entire swarm and then go to one location. They don't go to 50 location, they go to one location that the scouts have agreed upon by themself. That's awesome. If you look at the circuit complexity, it's 10 times more denser than anything we have in our brain. Now, they only have a million neurons but the neurons are amazingly complex. Complex behavior, very complicated circuitry so there's no question they experience something. Their life is very different. They're tiny. They only live, you know, for, for a while. Workers live m- maybe for two months. So I think f- and, and IIT tells you this, in principle t-... the substrate of consciousness is the substrate that maximizes the cause-effect power over all possible spatial temporal grains.

    7. LF

      Mm-hmm.

    8. CK

      So when I think about, for example, do you know the science fiction story, The Black Cloud?

    9. LF

      Uh...

    10. CK

      It's a classic by Fred Hoyle, the astronomer. He has this cloud intervening between the earth and the s- and the sun and, um, leading to some sort of, to global cooling. This was written in the '50s. It turns out you can, uh, by, uh, using the, the, um, the radio dish they communicate with actually an entity. It's actually intelligent entity. And they, they, they sort of, they convince it to move away.

    11. LF

      (laughs) Yeah.

    12. CK

      So here you have a radical different entity and in principle IT says, "Well, you can measure the, the integrated information in principle at least." And yes, if that, if the maximum of that occurs at a timescale of month rather than in us it's sort of fraction of a second, yes, and they would experience life where each moment is a month rather than, um, or microsecond, right, rather than a, a fraction of a, of a second in, in the human case. And so there may be forms of conscience that we simply don't recognize for what they are because they are so radical different from anything you and I are used to. Again, that's why it's good to read-

    13. LF

      (laughs) And think about.

    14. CK

      ... or to watch science fiction movie or to think about this. Like there's this fe-... Do you know Stanislaw Lem, this Polish science fiction writer? He wrote Solaris that was turned into a Hollywood movie.

    15. LF

      Yes.

    16. CK

      His best novel, so it was in the '60s, a very s- a very engineer, is an engineering background. His most interesting novel is called The Victorious where, um, human civilization, they, they, they, they, they have this mission to this planet and everything is destroyed and they discover machines. Humans got killed and then these machines, uh, took over and there was this, uh, machine evolution, a Darwinian evolution. He talks about this very vividly. And finally the dominant, the, the dominant machine intelligence organism that survived were gigantic clouds of little hexagonal universal cell automata. This was written in the '60s.

    17. LF

      (laughs)

    18. CK

      So typically they're all lying on the ground individual by themself, but in times of crisis they con- communicate, they assemble into gigantic nets, into clouds-

    19. LF

      (laughs)

    20. CK

      ... trillions of these particles and then they become hyper intelligent and they can beat anything that hum- humans can, can, can throw at it. It's a very beautiful and compelling... Where you have an intelligence where finally the humans leave the planet, they simply e- unable to understand and comprehend this creature. And they can say, "Well, either we can nuke the entire planet and destroy it or we just have to leave because fundamentally it's an, it's an alien... it's so alien from us and our ideas that we cannot communicate with them."

    21. LF

      Yeah, actually in Conversations in Cellular Automata, S- Stephen Wolfram brought up is that there could be (laughs) his idea is that, you know, you, you already have these artificial general intelligence, like super smart or maybe conscious beings in these cellular automata, we just don't know how to talk to them. So it's the language of communication we just don't know what to do with it. So th- that's one sort of view is, uh, consciousness is only something you can m- measure. So it's not conscious if you can't measure it.

    22. CK

      But so, so you're making an ontological and an epistemic statement. One is they are, they are... It's, it's just like saying they're multiverses, that might be true-

    23. LF

      (laughs)

    24. CK

      ... but I can't communicate with them. I don't ha-

    25. LF

      Right. It's, it's-

    26. CK

      ... I can't have any knowledge of them. That's an epistemic argument, right? So those are two different things. So it may well be possible. Look, ano- another case that's happening right now, people are building these mini organoids. Do you know about this? So, you know, you can take stem cells from under your arm, put it in a dish, add full transcription factors and then you can induce them to grow, to grow into large... Well, large, they're a few millimeters, they're like a half a million neurons that look like nerve cells in a dish called mini organoids. At Harvard, at Stanford, everywhere they're building them. It may be well be possible that they're beginning to feel like something.

    27. LF

      Hmm.

    28. CK

      But we, we can't really communicate with them right now.

    29. LF

      Right.

    30. CK

      So people are beginning to think about the ethics of this.

Episode duration: 57:53

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