David Chalmers: The Hard Problem of Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #69

1. 0:00 – 2:23

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with David Chalmers. He's a philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and consciousness. He's perhaps best known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness, which could be stated as, "Why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?" Consciousness is almost entirely a mystery. Many people who worry about AI safety and ethics believe that, in some form, consciousness can and should be engineered into AI systems of the future. So while there's much mystery, disagreement, and discoveries yet to be made about consciousness, these conversations, while fundamentally philosophical in nature, may nevertheless be very important for engineers of modern AI systems to engage in. This is the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give it five stars on Apple Podcast, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter, @LexFridman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. As usual, I'll do one or two minutes of ads now, and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. I hope that works for you and doesn't hurt the listening experience. This show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use code LEXPODCAST. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as one dollar. Brokerage services are provided by Cash App Investing, a subsidiary of Square and member SIPC. Since Cash App does fractional share trading, let me mention that the order execution algorithm that works behind the scenes to create the abstraction of fractional orders is an algorithmic marvel. So big props to the Cash App engineers for solving a hard problem that, in the end, provides an easy interface that takes a step up to the next layer of abstraction over the stock market, making trading more accessible for new investors and diversification much easier. If you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play and use the code LEXPODCAST, you'll get ten dollars, and Cash App will also donate ten dollars to FIRST, one of my favorite organizations that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with David Chalmers.

2. 2:23 – 19:19

   Nature of reality: Are we living in a simulation?

   1. LFLex Fridman2:23

      Do you think we're living in a simulation?

   2. DCDavid Chalmers2:26

      I don't rule it out. There's probably gonna be a lot of simulations in the history of the cosmos. If the simulation is designed well enough, it'll be indistinguishable from a non-simulated reality. And although we could keep searching for evidence that we're not in a simulation, any of that evidence in principle could be simulated. So, uh, I think it's a possibility.

   3. LFLex Fridman2:50

      But do you think the thought experiment is interesting or useful to calibrate how we think about the nature of reality?

   4. DCDavid Chalmers2:58

      Yeah, I definitely think it's interesting and useful. In fact, I'm actually writing a book about this right now, all about the simulation idea, using it to shed light on a whole bunch of philosophical questions. So, uh, you know, the big one is, how do we know anything about the external world? Uh, Descartes said, you know, maybe you're being fooled by an evil demon that's stimulating your brain into thinking all this stuff is real when, in fact, it's all made up. Well, the modern, the modern version of that is, how do you know you're not in a simulation? Then the thought is, if you're in a simulation, none of this is real. So that's teaching you something about, about knowledge. How do you know about the external world? I think there's also really interesting questions about the nature of reality right here. I mean, if we are in a simulation, is all this real? Is there really a table here? Is there really a microphone? Do I really have a body? The standard view would be, no, uh, we don't. None of this would be real. My view is, actually, that's wrong, and even if we are in a simulation, all of this is real. That's why I call this Reality 2.0. New version of reality, different version of reality, still reality.

   5. LFLex Fridman4:05

      So, so what's the difference between, quote-unquote, "real world" and the world that we perceive? So, we interact with the world, to the, with the world by perceiving it. It only really exists through the window of our perception system and in our mind. So what's the difference between something that's, quote-unquote, "real," that exists perhaps without us being there, and, and, uh, the, the world, uh, as you perceive it?

   6. DCDavid Chalmers4:36

      Well, the world as we perceive it is a very simplified and distorted version of what's going on underneath. We already know that from just thinking about science. You know, you don't see too many, obviously, quantum mechanical effects in what we, uh, what we perceive, but we still know quantum mechanics is going on under all things. We like to think the world we perceive is this very kind of simplified picture of colors and shapes existing in, in space and so on. And we know there's a... That's what the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars called the manifest image, the world as it seems to us. We already know underneath all that is a very different scientific image with atoms or quantum wave functions or super strings or whatever the, uh, the latest thing is. And that's the ultimate scientific reality. So I think of the simulation idea as basically another hypothesis about what the ultimate, say, quasi-scientific or metaphysical reality is going on underneath the world or the manifest image. The world or the manifest image is this very simple thing that we interact with that's neutral on the underlying stuff of reality. Science can help tell us about that. Maybe philosophy can help tell us about that too. And if we eventually take the red pill and find out we're in a simulation, my view is that's just another view about what reality is made of. You know, the philosopher Immanuel Kant said, "What is the nature of the thing in itself?" You know, I've got a glass here and it's got all these... It appears to me a certain way, a certain shape, it's liquid, it's clear.... and he said, "What is the nature of the thing and itself?" Well, I think of the simulation idea. It's a hypothesis about the nature of the thing and itself. It turns out if we're in a simulation, the thing and itself, nature of this glass, it's okay, it's actually a bunch of data structures running on a, uh, on a computer in the next universe up.

   7. LFLex Fridman6:28

      Yeah. Eh, th- that's what people tend to do when they think about simulation. They think about our modern computers and somehow, uh, trivially, crudely just scaled up in some sense. But do you think, uh, the simulation... I, I mean, in order to actually simulate something as complicated as our universe that's made up of molecules and atoms and particles and quarks and maybe even strings, all of that would require something just infinitely many orders of magnitude more of, of, um, scale and complexity. Do y- do you think we're even able to even, like, conceptualize what it would take to simulate our universe or does it just, uh, slip into this idea that, uh, you basically have to build a universe, something so big to simulate it? Is, is the, does it get this, into this fuzzy area that's not useful at all?

   8. DCDavid Chalmers7:29

      Yeah, well, I mean, there's obvious... I mean, our universe is obviously incredibly complicated and for us within our universe to build a simulation of a universe as complicated as ours is gonna have obvious problems here. If the universe is finite, there's just no way that's gonna work. Maybe there's some cute way to make it work if the universe is, uh, is, uh, is infinite, maybe an infinite universe could somehow simulate a copy of itself but that's, uh, that's gonna be hard. Nonetheless, just say we are in a simulation, I think there's no particular reason why we have to think the simulating universe has to be anything like ours.

   9. LFLex Fridman8:06

      You've said before that, uh, it might be... So you, you c- you could think of it turtles all the way down. You c- you could think of, uh, the simulating universe different than ours, but we ourselves could also create another simulating universe, so you said that there could be these kind of levels of universes and you've also mentioned this hilarious idea, maybe tongue in cheek, maybe not, that there may be simulations within simulations, arbitrarily stacked levels-

   10. DCDavid Chalmers8:33

       Mm-hmm.

   11. LFLex Fridman8:33

       ... and that there may be, that we may be in level 42-

   12. DCDavid Chalmers8:37

       Oh, yeah.

   13. LFLex Fridman8:38

       ... along those stacks, referencing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe. If we're indeed in a simulation within a simulation at level 42, what do you think level zero looks like? The originating universe.

   14. DCDavid Chalmers8:52

       I would expect that level zero is truly enormous. I mean, not just, uh, if it's finite, it's some extraordinarily large finite capacity. Much more likely it's infinite. Maybe it's a, maybe it's got some very high set theory of cardinality that enables it to support just any number of, um, any number of simulations. So high degree of infinity at level zero, slightly l- slightly smaller degree of infinity at, uh, at level one, so by the time you get down to us at level 42, maybe there's plenty of room for lots of simulations of finite capacity. Um, if the top universe is only a small finite capacity, then obviously that's gonna put very, very serious limits on how many simulations you're gonna be able to, be able to get running, so I, I think we can certainly confidently say that if we're at level 42, then the top level's pretty, pretty damn big.

   15. LFLex Fridman9:47

       So it gets more and more constrained as we get down the levels, more and more, uh, simplified and constrained and limited in resources and

   16. DCDavid Chalmers9:54

       Yeah, we still have plenty of capacity here. What was it, uh, Feynman said? He said, "There's plenty of room at the bottom." (laughs) You know, we're still, uh, you know, we're still a number of levels above the degree of where there's room for fundamental computing, physical computing capacity, quantum computing capacity at the bottom level, so we got plenty of room to play with and make... We probably have plenty of room for simulations of pretty sophisticated universes. Perhaps none as complicated as our universe unless our universe is, is infinite, but still, at the very least, they're pretty serious finite universes, but maybe universes somewhat simpler than ours unless, of course, we're prepared to take certain shortcuts in the simulation which might then increase the capacity significantly.

   17. LFLex Fridman10:38

       Do you think the, the human mind, us people, in terms of the complexity of simulation is at the height of what the simulation might be able to achieve? Like, if- if you look at incredible entities that could be created in this universe of ours, do you have an intuition about how incredible human beings are on that scale?

   18. DCDavid Chalmers11:00

       I think we're pretty impressive, but we're not that impressive.

   19. LFLex Fridman11:03

       Are we above average?

   20. DCDavid Chalmers11:06

       I mean, I think-

   21. LFLex Fridman11:06

       (laughs)

   22. DCDavid Chalmers11:07

       ... kinda human beings are at a certain point in the scale of intelligence which made many things possible. You know, you get through, um, evolution through single cell organisms, through, you know, fish and mammals and primates, and something happens once you get to human beings. We've just reached that level where we get to develop language and we get to develop certain kinds of culture and we get to develop certain kinds of collective thinking that has enabled all this amazing stuff to happen, science and literature and engineering and, and culture and, uh, and so on. Still, we are just at the beginning of that on the evolutionary threshold. It's kinda like we just got there, you know, who knows, a few thousand or tens of thousands of years ago, so we're probably just at the very beginning for what's possible there, so I'm inclined to think among the scale of intelligent beings, we're somewhere very near the bottom. I would expect that, for example, if we're in a, if we're in a simulation and the simulators who created us have got the capacity to be far more sophisticated, if we're at level 42, who knows what the ones at level zero are like?

   23. LFLex Fridman12:19

       It's also possible that this is the epitome of what is possible to achieve. So we, as human beings, see ourselves maybe as flawed, see all the constraints, all the limitations. But maybe that's the magical, the beautiful thing. Maybe those limitations are the essential elements for an interesting, sort of that edge of chaos, that interesting existence. That if you make us much more intelligent, if-

   24. DCDavid Chalmers12:43

       Mm-hmm.

   25. LFLex Fridman12:43

       ... if you, uh, make us more, much more powerful in any kind of dimension of performance, maybe you lose something fundamental that makes life worth living. So you kind of have this optimistic view that we're this little baby that, and there's so much growth and potential. But this could also be it.

   26. DCDavid Chalmers13:05

       Well-

   27. LFLex Fridman13:05

       The most, this is the most amazing thing is us. (laughs)

   28. DCDavid Chalmers13:09

       Maybe what you're saying is consistent with what I'm saying. I mean, we could still have levels of intelligence far beyond us, but maybe those levels of intelligence on-

   29. LFLex Fridman13:16

       I just-

   30. DCDavid Chalmers13:16

       ... on your view would be kind of boring.
3. 19:19 – 27:46

   Consciousness in virtual reality

   1. LFLex Fridman19:19

      what do you think of the, the experience of self, just the experience of the world in a, in a virtual world, in virtual reality? Is it possible that we can create sort of, um, offsprings of our consciousness by existing in a virtual world long enough? So yeah. C- can we be conscious in, in the same kind of deep way that we are in this real world by hanging out in a virtual world?

   2. DCDavid Chalmers19:51

      Yeah, well the kind of virtual worlds we have now are, you know, are interesting but limited in certain ways. In particular, they rely on us having a brain and so on, which is outside the virtual world. Maybe I'll strap on my VR headset or just hang out in a, in a virtual world on a, on a screen, but my brain and then the physi- my physical environment might be simulated if I'm in a virtual world. But right now, there's no attempt to simulate my brain. I might hank there might be some non-player characters...

   3. LFLex Fridman20:24

      (laughs)

   4. DCDavid Chalmers20:24

      ... in these, uh, in these virtual worlds that have simulated cognitive systems of certain kinds that dictate their behavior, but you know, mostly they're pretty simple right now. I mean, some people are trying to combine, put a bit of AI in their non-player characters to make them, uh, to make them, uh, them smarter. But for now, um, inside virtual worlds, the actual thinking is interestingly distinct from the physics of those virtual worlds. In a way actually, I like to think this is kind of reminiscent of the way that Descartes thought our physical world was. There's physics and there's a mind, and they're separate. Now we d- now we think the mind is somehow, somehow connected to physics pretty deeply. But in these virtual worlds, there's a physics of a virtual world and then there's this brain which is totally outside the virtual world that controls it and interacts it when anyone, anyone exercises agency in a video game when, you know, that's actually somebody outside the virtual world moving a controller, controlling the interaction of things inside the virtual world. So right now in virtual worlds, the mind is somehow outside the world, but you could imagine in the future once we get, once we have developed serious AI, artificial general intelligence and so on, then we could come to virtual worlds which have enough sophistication you could actually simulate a brain or have a genuine AGI which would then presumably be able to act in s- equally sophisticated ways, maybe even more sophisticated ways, inside the virtual world how it might in the physical world. And then the question's gonna come along, that'll be kind of a, a VR inter- a virtual world internal, um, intelligence, and then the question is could they have consciousness, experience, intelligence, free will...

   5. LFLex Fridman22:04

      Yes.

   6. DCDavid Chalmers22:04

      ... all the things that we have? And again, my view is...

   7. LFLex Fridman22:07

      Yes.

   8. DCDavid Chalmers22:07

      ... I don't see why not.

   9. LFLex Fridman22:08

      To linger on it a little bit, I, I find virtual reality really incredibly powerful, just even the crude virtual reality we have now of perhaps there's a s- there's a psychological effects that makes some people more amenable to virtual worlds than others, but I find myself wanting to stay in virtual worlds for...

   10. DCDavid Chalmers22:28

       You do?

   11. LFLex Fridman22:28

       ... for long periods. Yes, uh-

   12. DCDavid Chalmers22:29

       With, with a headset or on a, on a desktop?

   13. LFLex Fridman22:32

       No, with a headset.

   14. DCDavid Chalmers22:33

       Really? Interesting, 'cause I-

   15. LFLex Fridman22:34

       So-

   16. DCDavid Chalmers22:34

       ... I am totally addicted to, yeah, using the internet and things on a, uh, on a desktop, but when it comes to VR for the headset, I don't typically use it for more than 10 or 20 minutes.

   17. LFLex Fridman22:46

       (laughs)

   18. DCDavid Chalmers22:46

       There's something just slightly aversive about it I find, so I don't, right now, even though I have Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest and HTC Vive and Samsung this and that. Um...

   19. LFLex Fridman22:55

       You just don't want to stay in that world for long.

   20. DCDavid Chalmers22:57

       Not for extended periods. You, you actually find yourself hanging out in that?

   21. LFLex Fridman23:01

       The s- something about, um, like it's a, both a combination of just imagination and considering the possibilities of where this goes in, in the future. It, it feels like I want to, um, almost prepare my brain for it, like it, I want to explore sort of Disneyland when it's first being built. (laughs)

   22. DCDavid Chalmers23:21

       Mm-hmm. Yeah.

   23. LFLex Fridman23:22

       In the early days.

   24. DCDavid Chalmers23:23

       Yeah.

   25. LFLex Fridman23:23

       And, uh, it feels like I'm walking around almost imagining the, the possibilities and something through that process allows my mind to really enter into that world. But y- you say that the brain's external to that virtual world. It is, strictly speaking, true, but...

   26. DCDavid Chalmers23:46

       If you're in VR and you do brain surgery on an avatar and you're gonna open up that skull, what are you gonna find? Sorry, nothing there.

   27. LFLex Fridman23:53

       Nothing.

   28. DCDavid Chalmers23:54

       The brain is elsewhere.

   29. LFLex Fridman23:56

       You don't think it's possible to kind of separate them? And I don't mean in a sense like Descartes, like a hard separation, but basically do you think it's possible with the brain outside of the virtual r- when you're wearing a headset, create a new consciousness for prolonged periods of time? Really...... feel, like really experi- like forget that your brain-

   30. DCDavid Chalmers24:25

       Mm-hmm.
4. 27:46 – 31:40

   Music-color synesthesia

   1. DCDavid Chalmers27:46

   2. LFLex Fridman27:46

      So you said as a child you were a music color syne-

   3. DCDavid Chalmers27:51

      Synesthete.

   4. LFLex Fridman27:52

      Synesthete. So where songs had colors for you. So what songs had what colors?

   5. DCDavid Chalmers27:59

      You know, this is funny, um, I didn't pay much attention to this at the time, but I'd listen to a piece of music and I'd get some kind of imagery of a, uh, of a kind of a- of a kind of- of color. The weird thing is mostly they were kind of murky dark greens and olive browns, and the colors weren't all that interesting. I don't know what the reason is. I mean, my theory is that maybe it's like different chords and tones provided different colors-

   6. LFLex Fridman28:27

      Mm.

   7. DCDavid Chalmers28:27

      ... and they all tended to get mixed together into these somewhat uninteresting browns and greens. But every now and then there'd be something that had a really pure color. So there's just a few that I- that I remember. There was a Here, There and Everywhere by the Beatles-

   8. LFLex Fridman28:42

      Mm-hmm.

   9. DCDavid Chalmers28:42

      ... was bright red and has this, you know, very distinctive tonality in its chord structure at the, uh, at the beginning. So that was bright red. There was this song by The Alan Parsons Project called Ammonia Avenue that was, uh, that was kind of a pure- a pure blue. Anyway, I've got no idea how all this happened. I didn't even pay that much attention until it went away when I was about 20. This synesthesia often goes away.

   10. LFLex Fridman29:07

       So is it purely just the perception of a particular color, or was there a positive or negative experience with it? Like was blue associated with a positive and red with a negative? Or is it simply the perception of color associated with some characteristic of the song?

   11. DCDavid Chalmers29:23

       For me, I don't remember a lot of association with, uh-

   12. LFLex Fridman29:26

       Positive-

   13. DCDavid Chalmers29:26

       ... with emotion or with value. It was just this kind of weird and-

   14. LFLex Fridman29:30

       Mm-hmm.

   15. DCDavid Chalmers29:30

       ... interesting fact. I mean, at the beginning I thought this was something that happened to everyone, songs have colors. Maybe I mentioned it once or twice and people said, uh, "Nope." Uh-

   16. LFLex Fridman29:40

       (laughs) Nope, not happening.

   17. DCDavid Chalmers29:40

       It was like, I thought it was kind of cool when there was one that had one of these especially pure colors. But only much later once I became, you know, a grad student thinking about the mind, did I read about this phenomenon called synesthesia. And I was like, "Hey, that's what I had."

   18. LFLex Fridman29:53

       (laughs)

   19. DCDavid Chalmers29:53

       And now I occasionally talk about it in my classes, in intro class, and it still happens sometimes. A student comes up and says, "Hey, I have that. I never knew about that. I never knew it had a name." (laughs)

   20. LFLex Fridman30:04

       (laughs) You said that it went a- went away at age 20 or so.

   21. DCDavid Chalmers30:07

       Mm-hmm.

   22. LFLex Fridman30:08

       And, uh, that you have a journal entry from around then saying, "Songs don't have colors anymore. What happened?"

   23. DCDavid Chalmers30:15

       Yeah, "What happened?" Yeah, it was definitely sad that it was gone. In retrospect it's like, "Hey, that's cool. The colors have gone."

   24. LFLex Fridman30:22

       Yeah. Do you, can you think about that for a little bit? Uh, do you miss those experiences? Because that's, um...... fundamentally different sets of experiences that you no longer have.

   25. DCDavid Chalmers30:33

       Mm-hmm.

   26. LFLex Fridman30:34

       Or do you, or is it just a nice thing to have had? You don't see them as that fundamentally different than you visiting a new country and experiencing new environments?

   27. DCDavid Chalmers30:45

       I guess for me when I had these experiences, they were somewhat marginal. They were like a little bonus kind of experience.

   28. LFLex Fridman30:51

       Mm-hmm.

   29. DCDavid Chalmers30:51

       I know there are people who have much more serious forms of synesthesia than this, for whom it's absolutely central to their lives. I know people who when they experience new people, they have colors, maybe they have tastes-

   30. LFLex Fridman31:04

       Mm-hmm.
5. 31:40 – 51:25

   What is consciousness?

   1. LFLex Fridman31:40

      let's try to go to the very simplest question that you've answered many a time, but perhaps the simplest things can help us reveal-

   2. DCDavid Chalmers31:48

      Mm-hmm.

   3. LFLex Fridman31:48

      ... even in time some, some new ideas. So what, in your view, is consciousness? What is qualia? What is the hard problem of consciousness?

   4. DCDavid Chalmers32:00

      Consciousness, I mean, the word is used many ways, but the kind of consciousness that I'm interested in is basically subjective experience, what it feels like from the inside to be a human being or any other conscious being. I mean, there's something it's like to be me right now. I have visual images that I'm experiencing, I'm hearing my voice, I've got maybe some emotional tone, I've got a stream of thoughts running through my head. These are all things that I experience from the first-person point of view. I've sometimes called this the inner movie in the mind. It's not a perfect, it's not a perfect metaphor, it's not like a movie in every ways, in every way, and it's very rich, but yeah, it's just direct subjective experience and I call that con- consciousness or sometimes philosophers use the word qualia, which you suggested. People tend to use the word qualia for things like the qualities of things like colors-

   5. LFLex Fridman33:00

      Mm.

   6. DCDavid Chalmers33:00

      ... redness, the experience of redness versus the experience of greenness, the experience of one taste or one smell versus another, the experience of the quality of pain. And yeah, a lot of consciousness is the experience of those, of those, uh, those qualities.

   7. LFLex Fridman33:16

      But consciousness is bigger, the entirety of any kinds of experience.

   8. DCDavid Chalmers33:20

      My friend, con- consciousness of thinking is not obviously qualia.

   9. LFLex Fridman33:23

      Right.

   10. DCDavid Chalmers33:23

       It's not like specific qualities like redness or greenness, but still I'm thinking about my hometown, I'm thinking about what I'm gonna do later on. Maybe there's still something running through my, my head which is subjective experience. Maybe it goes beyond those qualities or qualia. Philosophers sometimes use the word phenomenal consciousness-

   11. LFLex Fridman33:42

       Mm-hmm.

   12. DCDavid Chalmers33:43

       ... for consciousness in this sense. I mean, people also talk about access consciousness, being able to access information in your mind, reflective consciousness, being able to think about yourself, but it looks like the really mysterious one, the one that really gets people going is phenomenal consciousness, the fact that all this, the fact that there's subjective experience and all this feels like something at all. And then the hard problem is how is it that, why is it that there is phenomenal consciousness at all and how is it that physical processes in a brain could give you subjective experience? It looks like prime, on the face of it you could have all this big complicated physical system in a brain running and without it giving subjective experience at all, and yet we do have subjective experience. So the hard problem is just explain that.

   13. LFLex Fridman34:33

       Ex- explain how that comes about. We haven't been able to build machines where a red light goes on that says, "It's now conscious." So, uh, how does, how do, how do we actually create that? Or how do humans do it and how do we ourselves do it? But-

   14. DCDavid Chalmers34:49

       We do every now and then create machines that can do this. You know, we create babies-

   15. LFLex Fridman34:53

       Yes.

   16. DCDavid Chalmers34:53

       ... that are, that are conscious. They've got these brains-

   17. LFLex Fridman34:56

       As best as we can tell.

   18. DCDavid Chalmers34:56

       ... and that brain does produce consciousness, but even be- even though we can create it, we still don't understand why it happens. Maybe eventually we'll be able to create machines which as a matter of fact... AI machines which as a matter of fact are conscious, but that won't necessarily make the hard problem go away any more than it does with babies 'cause we still want to know how and why is it that these processes give you consciousness.

   19. LFLex Fridman35:19

       You know, you just made me realize for, for a second, maybe it's a totally dumb realization, uh, but nevertheless, that, um, that's a useful way to think about the creation of consciousness is looking at a baby-

   20. DCDavid Chalmers35:35

       Mm-hmm.

   21. LFLex Fridman35:35

       ... so that there's a certain point at which that baby is not conscious.

   22. DCDavid Chalmers35:40

       Mm-hmm.

   23. LFLex Fridman35:41

       That some- that sort of, uh, a baby starts from maybe, I don't, I don't know, from a few cells, right?

   24. DCDavid Chalmers35:49

       Mm-hmm.

   25. LFLex Fridman35:49

       There's a certain point at which it becomes consciousness arrives, it's conscious. Of course we can't know exactly that line, but that's a useful idea that we do, we do create consciousness. Again, a really dumb thing for me to say, but it... not until now did I realize we do engineer consciousness.

   26. DCDavid Chalmers36:09

       Mm-hmm.

   27. LFLex Fridman36:09

       We, we get to watch the process-

   28. DCDavid Chalmers36:11

       Mm-hmm.

   29. LFLex Fridman36:12

       ... happen. We don't know which point it-

   30. DCDavid Chalmers36:13

       Yeah.
6. 51:25 – 57:33

   Consciousness and the meaning of life

   1. DCDavid Chalmers51:25

      the cosmos.

   2. LFLex Fridman51:26

      What do you think people experience? What do they seek when they believe in God from this kind of perspective?

   3. DCDavid Chalmers51:34

      Hmm. I'm not an expert on thinking about God and religion. I'm not myself religious at all.

   4. LFLex Fridman51:43

      When people sort of pray, communicate with God, whate- which, whate- whatever form. I'm not speaking to sort of the practices and the rituals-

   5. DCDavid Chalmers51:52

      Mm-hmm.

   6. LFLex Fridman51:52

      ... of religion. I mean, the actual experience of that people really have a deep connection with God in some cases.

   7. DCDavid Chalmers51:59

      Mm-hmm.

   8. LFLex Fridman52:01

      What, what do you think that experience is? It's so common, at least throughout the history of civilization, that it seems like we all seek that.

   9. DCDavid Chalmers52:16

      At the very least, it is an interesting conscious experience that people have when they experience religious awe or prayer and so on. And neuroscientists have tried to examine what bits of the, uh, the brain are active and so on. But yeah, that, there's this deeper question of what is, what are people looking for when they're doing this? And like I said, I've got no real expertise on this, but it does seem the one thing people are after is a sense of meaning and value, a sense of connection to something greater than themselves that will give their lives meaning and value. And maybe the thought is if there is a God, and God somehow is a universal consciousness who has invested this universe with meaning, and somehow connection to God might give your life meaning. I think that's a... I can kind of see the, see the attractions of that, but still makes me wonder why is it exactly that a universal consciousness, univ- God would be needed to give the li- to give the world meaning? If, I mean if universal consciousness can give the world meaning, why can't local consciousness give the world meaning too? So I think my consciousness gives my world-

   10. LFLex Fridman53:27

       Is the thing-

   11. DCDavid Chalmers53:28

       ... meaning.

   12. LFLex Fridman53:28

       ... is the origin of, of meaning-

   13. DCDavid Chalmers53:30

       Yeah.

   14. LFLex Fridman53:30

       ... for your world.

   15. DCDavid Chalmers53:31

       Yeah. I experience things as good or bad, happy, sad, interesting, important. So my consciousness invests this world with meaning. Without any consciousness, maybe it would be a bleak, meaningless universe. But I don't see why I need someone else's consciousness or even God's consciousness to give this, uh, this universe meaning. Here we are, local creatures with our own subjective experiences. I think we can give the universe meaning ourselves. So I mean, maybe to some people that feels inadequate. Yeah. Our own local consciousness is somehow too puny and insignificant to invest any of this with cosmic significance. And maybe God gives you a sense of cosmic significance, but I'm just speculating here.

   16. LFLex Fridman54:15

       (laughs) So the, you know, it's a really interesting idea that consciousness is the thing that makes life meaningful. If you could maybe just, just briefly explore that for a second. So I suspect just from listening to you now, you mean in an almost trivial sense, just the, the day-to-day experiences of life have, because of you attach i- identity to it-

   17. DCDavid Chalmers54:46

       Mm-hmm.

   18. LFLex Fridman54:47

       ... they become...Well, (laughs) I guess I wanna ask something I would, uh, always wanted to ask a legit, wor- world-renowned philosopher. What is the meaning of life?

   19. DCDavid Chalmers55:05

       (laughs)

   20. LFLex Fridman55:05

       So I suspect you don't mean consciousness gives any kind of greater meaning to it all-

   21. DCDavid Chalmers55:10

       Yeah.

   22. LFLex Fridman55:11

       ... and more to day-to-day. But is there greater meaning to it all?

   23. DCDavid Chalmers55:16

       I think life has meaning for us because we are conscious. So without consciousness, no meaning. Consciousness invests our life with meaning. So consciousness is the source, of my view, of the meaning of life. But I wouldn't say consciousness itself is the meaning of life. I'd say what's meaningful in life is basically what we find meaningful, what we experience as meaningful. So if you find meaning and fulfillment and value in, say, intellectual work, like understanding, then that's your, that's a very significant part of the meaning of life for you. If you find that in social connections or in raising a family, then that's the meaning of life for you. The meaning kind of comes from what you value as a conscious creature. So I think there's no, on this view, there's no universal solution. You, no universal answer to the question, what is the meaning of life? The meaning of life is where you find it as a conscious creature, but it's consciousness that somehow makes value-

   24. LFLex Fridman56:17

       So-

   25. DCDavid Chalmers56:17

       ... possible. Experiencing some things as good or as bad or as meaningful-

   26. LFLex Fridman56:22

       So you-

   27. DCDavid Chalmers56:22

       ... something that comes from within consciousness.

   28. LFLex Fridman56:24

       So you think consciousness is a crucial component, ingredient of having gi- assigning value to things?

   29. DCDavid Chalmers56:33

       I mean, it, it's sort of, kind of a fairly strong intuition that without consciousness, there wouldn't really be any value. If we just had a purely, a universe of unconscious creatures, would anything be better or worse than anything else? Certainly when it comes to ethical dilemmas, you know, you know about the older, the old trolley problem. Do you, uh, do you kill one person or do you switch to the other track to kill, uh, kill five? Well, I've got a variant on this, the zombie trolley problem-

   30. LFLex Fridman57:03

       (laughs)
7. 57:33 – 1:01:38

   Philosophical zombies

   1. LFLex Fridman57:33

      we don't have good intuition about something like an unconscious being. So in philosophical terms, you refer to it as a zombie.

   2. DCDavid Chalmers57:46

      Mm-hmm.

   3. LFLex Fridman57:46

      It's a useful thought experiment construction in philosophical terms, but we don't yet have them. So that's kind of what we may be able to create with-

   4. DCDavid Chalmers57:59

      Yeah.

   5. LFLex Fridman57:59

      ... robots. And I don't necessarily know what that even means.

   6. DCDavid Chalmers58:05

      Yeah. They're merely-

   7. LFLex Fridman58:06

      So, so-

   8. DCDavid Chalmers58:06

      ... hypothetical for now. They're just a thought experiment. They may never be possible. I mean, the extreme case of a zombie is a being which is physically, functionally, behaviorally identical to me, but not conscious. That's a mere... I don't think that could ever be built in this universe. The question is just could we... does that hypothetically make sense? That's kind of a useful contrast class to raise questions like, "Why aren't we zombies? How does it come about that we're conscious and we're not like that?" But there are less extreme versions of this, like robots, which are maybe not physically identical to us, maybe not even functionally identical to us. Maybe they've got a different architecture, but they can do a lot of sophisticated things, maybe carry on a conversation, but they're not conscious. And that's not so far out. We've got simple computer systems at least tending in that direction now. And presumably, this is gonna get- get more and more sophisticated over, uh, years to come where we may have some pretty, at least quite straightforward to conceive of some pretty sophisticated robot systems that can use language and be fairly high functioning without consciousness at all. Then I stipulate that, I mean, we've, of course, there's this tricky question of how you would know whether they're conscious. But let's say we somehow solved that and we know that these high functioning robots aren't conscious. Then the question is, do they have moral status? Does it matter how we treat them? Um, you know, my view is if-

   9. LFLex Fridman59:33

      Now, what does moral status mean? Sorry.

   10. DCDavid Chalmers59:35

       That's basically it's that question.

   11. LFLex Fridman59:37

       In society?

   12. DCDavid Chalmers59:37

       Can they suffer? Does it matter how we treat them? Are we, for example, if we, if- if I mistreat this glass, this cup by, uh, by shattering it-

   13. LFLex Fridman59:48

       Yeah.

   14. DCDavid Chalmers59:48

       ... then that's bad. Well, why is it bad though? It's gonna make a mess. It's gonna be annoying for me and my partner, um, and so on. It's not bad for the cup. No one would say the cup itself has moral status. "Hey, you, you hurt the cup." Um, and that's, uh, that's doing it a moral harm. Um, likewise, plants. Well, again, if they're not conscious, most people think if by uprooting a plant, you're not harming it. But if a being is conscious, on the other hand, then you are harming it. So Siri or, um, I dare not say the, uh, the- the name of Alexa. (laughs)

   15. LFLex Fridman1:00:25

       (laughs)

   16. DCDavid Chalmers1:00:25

       Anyway, so we don't think we're, uh, we're morally harming Alexa by turning her off or disconnecting her or even destroying her, whether it's the system or the, uh, or the underlying software system 'cause we don't really think she's conscious. On the other hand, you move to, like, the- the disembodied being in the moving, in the movie Her, Samantha, I guess she was kind of presented as conscious. And then if you, if you destroyed her, you'd certainly be committing a serious harm. So I think our-... strong senses. If a being is conscious and can undergo subjective experiences, then it matters morally how we treat them. So if a robot is conscious, it matters, but if a robot is not conscious, then they're basically just meat or a machine and it, uh, and it, and it doesn't matter. So I think, at least, maybe how we think about this stuff is fundamentally wrong, but I get a l- a lot of people who think about this stuff seriously, including people who think about, say, the moral treatment of animals and so on, come to the view that consciousness is ultimately kind of the line between systems that, where we have to take them into account in thinking morally about how we act, and systems for which we don't.

   17. LFLex Fridman1:01:34

       And I, I think I've seen you either write or talk about

8. 1:01:38 – 1:07:03

   Creating the illusion of consciousness

   1. LFLex Fridman1:01:38

      the demonstration of consciousness from a system like that, from a system like Alexa or, or, um, a conversational agent, that, uh, what you would be looking for is kind of, at the very basic level, for the system to have an awareness that "I'm just a program, and yet why do I experience this?"

   2. DCDavid Chalmers1:02:03

      Mm-hmm.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:02:04

      Or, or not to have that experience but to communicate that to you. So that's what us humans would sound like if you all of a sudden woke up one day, uh, like Kafka, right, in, in a body of a bug or something.

   4. DCDavid Chalmers1:02:15

      Mm-hmm.

   5. LFLex Fridman1:02:15

      But in a, in a computer you all of a sudden realize you don't have a body-

   6. DCDavid Chalmers1:02:19

      Mm-hmm.

   7. LFLex Fridman1:02:19

      ... and yet you would r- feeling what you're feeling, you would probably say those kinds of things.

   8. DCDavid Chalmers1:02:25

      Mm-hmm.

   9. LFLex Fridman1:02:26

      So do you think a system essentially becomes conscious by convincing us that it's conscious?

   10. DCDavid Chalmers1:02:33

       Hmm.

   11. LFLex Fridman1:02:34

       Through the words that I just mentioned? So by d- being confused about the fact that, uh, why am I having these experiences? What... so basically-

   12. DCDavid Chalmers1:02:45

       I don't think this is what makes you conscious, but I do think being puzzled about consciousness is a very good sign that a system is conscious. So if I encountered a robot that actually seemed to be genuinely puzzled by its own mental states, and saying, "Yeah, I have all these weird experiences and I don't see how to explain them. I know I'm a, just a set of silicon circuits, but I don't see how that would give you my consciousness," I would at least take that as some evidence that there's some consciousness going on there. I don't think a system needs to be puzzled about consciousness to be conscious. Many people aren't puzzled by their consciousness. Animals don't seem to be puzzled at all. I still think they're conscious. So I don't think that's a requirement on consciousness, but I do think if we're looking for signs for consciousness, say, in AI systems, one of the things that will help convince me that a AI system is conscious is if it shows signs of... if it shows signs of introspectively recognizing something like consciousness and finding this philosophically puzzling in the way that, uh, the way that, that we do.

   13. LFLex Fridman1:03:54

       That's actually an interesting thought though, because a lot of people sort of would, uh, at the shallow level, criticize the Turing test-

   14. DCDavid Chalmers1:04:00

       Mm-hmm.

   15. LFLex Fridman1:04:01

       ... for language. That it's essentially, uh, what I heard, like, uh, Dan Dennett criticize it in this kind of way, which is it's, really puts a lot of emphasis on lying. (laughs)

   16. DCDavid Chalmers1:04:13

       Yeah.

   17. LFLex Fridman1:04:14

       And th-

   18. DCDavid Chalmers1:04:14

       From being able to, being able to imitate human beings, yeah. There's this, uh, there's this cartoon of the AI system studying for the Turing test.

   19. LFLex Fridman1:04:23

       (laughs)

   20. DCDavid Chalmers1:04:23

       It's got to read this book called Talk Like a Human. It's like, "Man, why do I have to waste my time learning how to imitate humans?" Maybe the AI system is gonna be way beyond the hard problem of consciousness and it's gonna be just like, "Why do I need to waste my time pretending that I recognize the hard problem of consciousness to, uh, in order for people to recognize me as conscious?"

   21. LFLex Fridman1:04:42

       Yeah. It just feels like... I guess the question is, do you think there's a, uh, r- we can never really create a test for consciousness? Because it, it feels like we're very human-centric and so the only way we would be convinced that something is conscious is by, is basically the thing demonstrates the illusion of consciousness. That g- we can never really know whether it's conscious or not. And in fact, that almost feels like it doesn't matter, then.

   22. DCDavid Chalmers1:05:14

       Hmm.

   23. LFLex Fridman1:05:14

       Or does it still matter to you that something is conscious or it demonstrates consciousness? You still see that fundamental distinction?

   24. DCDavid Chalmers1:05:22

       I think to a lot of people whether a system is conscious or not matters hugely for many things, like how we treat it, can it suffer, and so on. But still that leaves open the question, how can we ever know? And it's true that it's awfully hard to see how we can know for sure whether a system is conscious. I suspect that sociologically the thing that's gonna convince us that a system is conscious is in part things like social interaction, conversation and so on, where they seem to be conscious. They talk about their conscious states or just talk about being happy or sad or finding things meaningful or being in pain. That will tend to convince us. If we don't, if a system genuinely seems to be conscious, we don't treat it as such, eventually it's gonna seem like a strange form of racism or speciesism or somehow-

   25. LFLex Fridman1:06:14

       Yeah.

   26. DCDavid Chalmers1:06:14

       ... not to acknowledge them as conscious.

   27. LFLex Fridman1:06:16

       I truly believe that, by the way. I, I, I believe that there is going to be something akin to the Civil Rights movement but for robots.

   28. DCDavid Chalmers1:06:24

       Mm-hmm.

   29. LFLex Fridman1:06:25

       Um, I think the moment you have a Roomba say, "Please don't kick me. That hurts," just say it-

   30. DCDavid Chalmers1:06:32

       Yeah.
9. 1:07:03 – 1:11:35

   Conversation with a clone

   1. DCDavid Chalmers1:07:03

   2. LFLex Fridman1:07:03

      So if one day somebody clones you, another very real possibility.

   3. DCDavid Chalmers1:07:09

      Yeah.

   4. LFLex Fridman1:07:10

      Um, in fact, I find the conversation between two copies of David Chalmers-

   5. DCDavid Chalmers1:07:16

      Mm-hmm.

   6. LFLex Fridman1:07:18

      ... quite interesting. (laughs)

   7. DCDavid Chalmers1:07:21

      Scary thought, yeah.

   8. LFLex Fridman1:07:23

      (laughs) Just I think-

   9. DCDavid Chalmers1:07:23

      Who is this idiot? He's not making any sense.

   10. LFLex Fridman1:07:26

       So what, uh... Do you think he would be conscious?

   11. DCDavid Chalmers1:07:32

       I do think he would be conscious. I do think in some sense, I'm not sure it would be me, there would be two different beings at this point. I think they'd both be conscious and they'd both have many of the same mental properties. I think they both, in a way, have the same moral status. It'd be wrong to hurt either of them or to kill them and so on. Still, there's some sense in which probably their legal status would have to be different. If I'm the original and that one's just a clone, then, you know, creating a clone of me, presumably the clone doesn't, for example, automatically own the stuff that I own or, you know, um, I've got a, you know, certain connect the things that the people I interact with, my family, my partner and so on, I'm, I'm going to somehow be connected to them in a way in which the clone isn't, so.

   12. LFLex Fridman1:08:24

       Because you came slightly first?

   13. DCDavid Chalmers1:08:26

       Yeah, and because I-

   14. LFLex Fridman1:08:27

       Because a clone would argue-

   15. DCDavid Chalmers1:08:28

       Yeah.

   16. LFLex Fridman1:08:28

       ... that they have really as much of a connection.

   17. DCDavid Chalmers1:08:33

       They have all the memories of that connection.

   18. LFLex Fridman1:08:35

       Yeah.

   19. DCDavid Chalmers1:08:35

       And in a way you might say it's kind of unfair to discriminate against them, but say you've got an apartment that only one person can live in or a partner who only one person can be with.

   20. LFLex Fridman1:08:44

       But why should it be you, the original?

   21. DCDavid Chalmers1:08:47

       I think it's an interesting philosophical question, but you might say because I actually have this history, if I am the same person as the one that came before and the clone is not, then I have this history that the clone doesn't. Of course, there's also the question, isn't the clone the same person too? This is the question about personal identity. If I continue and I create a clone over there, I want to say this one is me and this one is, is someone else. But you could take the view that a clone is equally me. Of course, in a movie like Star Trek where they have a teletransport, it basically creates clones all the time. They treat the clones as if they're the original person. Of course, they destroy the original body in Star Trek. So there's only one left around and only very occasionally do things go wrong and you get two copies of Captain Kirk. But somehow our legal system, at the very least, is going to have to sort out some of these issues and that maybe that's what's moral and what's leg- what's leg- legally acceptable are going to come apart.

   22. LFLex Fridman1:09:47

       What question would you ask a clone of yourself?

   23. DCDavid Chalmers1:09:51

       Huh.

   24. LFLex Fridman1:09:52

       Is there something useful you can find out from him about the fundamentals of consciousness even?

   25. DCDavid Chalmers1:10:00

       I mean, kind of in principle, I know that if it's a perfect clone, it's going to behave just like me. So I'm not sure I'm going to be able to... I can discover whether it's a perfect clone by seeing whether it answers like me. But otherwise, I know what I'm going to find is a being which is just like me, except that it's just undergone this great shock of discovering that it's a clone. So just say you woke me up tomorrow and said, "Hey, Dave, sorry to tell you this, but you're actually the clone." And you provided me really convincing evidence, showed me the film of my being cloned and then all right to here being here, um, and, and waking up. So you proved to me I'm a clone. Well, yeah, okay, I would find that shocking and who knows how I would react to this, so. So maybe by talking to the clone, I'd find something about my own psychology that I can't find out so easily, like how I'd react upon discovering that I'm a clone, I could certainly ask the clone if it's conscious and what its consciousness is like and so on. But I guess I kind of know if it's a perfect clone, it's going to behave roughly like me. Of course, at the beginning, there'll be a question about whether a perfect clone is possible. So I may want to ask it lots of questions to see if its consciousness and the way it talks about its consciousness and the way it reacts to things in general is like me and, you know, that will occupy us for a, uh, for a long time.

   26. LFLex Fridman1:11:21

       (laughing) For a while.

   27. DCDavid Chalmers1:11:21

       Yeah.

   28. LFLex Fridman1:11:22

       Some basic unit, unit testing in the early models.

   29. DCDavid Chalmers1:11:25

       Yeah.

   30. LFLex Fridman1:11:25

       So, so if it's a perfect clone, you say that it's going to behave exactly like you. So that takes us to free will.
10. 1:11:35 – 1:16:35

    Free will

    1. LFLex Fridman1:11:35

       is there free will? Are we able to make decisions that are not predetermined from the initial conditions of the, the universe?

    2. DCDavid Chalmers1:11:44

       You know, philosophers do this annoying thing of saying, "It depends what you mean." (laughs) So in this case, yeah, yeah, it really depends on what you mean by, by free will. If you mean something which was not determined in advance, could never have been determined, then I don't know if we have free will. I mean, there's quantum mechanics and who's to say if that opens up some room, but I'm not sure we have free will in that sense. I'm also not sure that's the kind of free will that really matters.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:12:13

       Mm-hmm.

    4. DCDavid Chalmers1:12:13

       You know, um, what matters to us is being able to do what we want and to create our own futures. We've got this distinction between having our lives be under our control and under someone else's control. And I think, we've got the, the sense of actions that we are responsible for versus ones that we're not. I think you can make those distinctions even in a deterministic universe. And this is what people call the compatibilist view of free will, where it's compatible with determinism. So I think for many purposes, the kind of free will that matters is something we can have in a deterministic universe. And I can't see any reason in principle why an AI system couldn't have free will of that kind. If you mean super-duper free will, the ability to violate the laws of physics and doing...... things that in principle could not be predicted, I don't know, maybe no one has that kind of free will.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:13:04

       What's the connection between the, uh, the reality of free will and the, the experience of it, the subjective experience, in your view?

    6. DCDavid Chalmers1:13:14

       Mm-hmm.

    7. LFLex Fridman1:13:15

       So, th- how does consciousness connect to this, to the experience of, uh, to- to the reality and the experience of free will?

    8. DCDavid Chalmers1:13:22

       It's certainly true that when we make decisions and when we choose and so on, we feel like we have an open future.

    9. LFLex Fridman1:13:28

       Yes.

    10. DCDavid Chalmers1:13:28

        Feel like, "I could do this, I could go into philosophy or I could go into math. I could go to a movie tonight, I could go to a restaurant." Um, so we experience these things as if the future is open and maybe we experience ourselves as exerting a kind of effect on the future, that somehow picking out one path from many paths were previously open. And you might think that actually if we're in a deterministic universe, there's a sense in which objectively those paths weren't really open all along.

    11. LFLex Fridman1:14:03

        Mm-hmm.

    12. DCDavid Chalmers1:14:03

        But subjectively they were open. And that's, I think that's what really matters in making a decision. So our experience of making a decision is choosing a path for, for ourselves. I mean, in general, uh, our introspective models of the mind, I think are generally very distorted representations of the mind. So it may well be that our experience of ourself in making a decision, our experience of what's going on doesn't terribly well mirror what's, uh, what's going on. I mean, you know, maybe there are antecedents in the brain way before anything came into consciousness, and, and, and so on. Those aren't represented in our introspective model. So, in general, our experience of, our experience of perception, you know, it's like I experience a perceptual image of the external world, it's not a terribly good model of what's actually going on-

    13. LFLex Fridman1:14:52

        Mm-hmm.

    14. DCDavid Chalmers1:14:53

        ... in the, in my visual cortex and so on, which has all these layers and so on. It's just one little snapshot of, of one bit of that. So in general, yeah, introspective models are very over- oversimplified, and it wouldn't be surprising if that was true of free will as well. This also incidentally can be applied to consciousness itself. There is this very interesting view that consciousness itself is an introspective illusion. In fact, we're not conscious, but we, uh, but we ex- the brain just has these introspective models of itself where it oversimplifies everything and represents itself as having these special properties of consciousness.

    15. LFLex Fridman1:15:30

        That's interesting.

    16. DCDavid Chalmers1:15:31

        It's this really simple way to kind of keep track of itself and so on. And then on the illusionist view, yeah, that's just a, that's just an illusion. It was a... I find this view, I find it implausible. I do find it very attractive in some ways, 'cause you could, it's easy to tell some story about how the brain would create introspective models of its own consciousness, of its own free will as a way of simplifying itself. I mean, it's similar way when we perceive the external world, we perceive it as having these colors that-

    17. LFLex Fridman1:16:00

        Mm-hmm.

    18. DCDavid Chalmers1:16:01

        ... maybe it doesn't really have, because that's a really useful way of keeping tracks, of keeping track.

    19. LFLex Fridman1:16:06

        Did you say that you find it not very plausible? 'Cause I, I fi- I find it both plausible and attractive in some sense, because it... I mean, that's, that kind of view is one that has the minimum amount of mystery around it. (laughs)

    20. DCDavid Chalmers1:16:24

        Mm-hmm.

    21. LFLex Fridman1:16:25

        You can kind of understand that kind of view. Everything else says we don't understand so much of this picture.

    22. DCDavid Chalmers1:16:33

        Yeah. No, it is very, it is very attractive.

11. 1:16:35 – 1:18:40

    Meta-problem of consciousness

    1. DCDavid Chalmers1:16:35

       I recently wrote an article about this kind of issue called The Meta-Problem of Consciousness.

    2. LFLex Fridman1:16:41

       (laughs)

    3. DCDavid Chalmers1:16:41

       The hard problem is, how does a brain give you consciousness? The meta problem is why are we puzzled by the hard problem of consciousness? And 'cause you know, our being puzzled by it, that's ultimately a bit of behavior. We might be able to explain that bit of behavior as one of the easy problems of consciousness.

    4. LFLex Fridman1:16:57

       Ah, right.

    5. DCDavid Chalmers1:16:58

       So maybe there'll be some computational model that explains why we're puzzled by consciousness. The meta-problem has come up with that model, and I've been thinking about that a lot lately. There's some interesting stories you can tell about why, uh, the right kind of computational system might develop these introspective models of itself that attributed itself these special properties. Um, so that, that meta-problem is a research-

    6. LFLex Fridman1:17:23

       That's fascinating.

    7. DCDavid Chalmers1:17:23

       ... program, program for everyone. And then if you've got attraction to sort of simple views, desert landscapes and so on, then you can go all the way with what people call illusionism and say, "In fact, consciousness itself is not real. What is real is just these, uh, these, these introspective models we have that tell us that we're conscious." Um, so the view is very simple, very attractive, very powerful. The trouble is, of course, it has to say that deep down, consciousness is not real. We're not actually experiencing right now, and it looks like it's just contradicting a fundamental datum of our existence. And this is why most people find this view crazy, just as they find panpsychism crazy in one way, people find illusionism crazy in another way. But it, I mean, but it... So yes, it has to deny this fundamental datum of our existence now, and the view, that makes the view sort of frankly unbelievable for most people. On the other hand, the view developed right might be able to explain why we find it unbelievable.

    8. LFLex Fridman1:18:30

       (laughs)

    9. DCDavid Chalmers1:18:31

       'Cause these models are-

    10. LFLex Fridman1:18:32

        Exactly.

    11. DCDavid Chalmers1:18:32

        ... so deeply hardwired into our head.

    12. LFLex Fridman1:18:34

        And they're all integrated, so-

    13. DCDavid Chalmers1:18:35

        Yeah.

    14. LFLex Fridman1:18:35

        ... it's not, you can't escape that, uh, the, the illusion. And as a crazy possibility,

12. 1:18:40 – 1:20:53

    Is reality an illusion?

    1. LFLex Fridman1:18:40

       is it possible that the entirety of the universe, our planet, all the people in New York, all the organisms on our planet, uh, including me here today, are not real in, in that sense? They're all part of an illusion inside of Dave Chalmers' head.

    2. DCDavid Chalmers1:18:59

       ... B- I think all this could be a simulation, as I said.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:19:02

       No, but not just a simulation.

    4. DCDavid Chalmers1:19:04

       Yeah?

    5. LFLex Fridman1:19:04

       'Cause a simulation kinda is outside of you.

    6. DCDavid Chalmers1:19:08

       Hmm. A dream?

    7. LFLex Fridman1:19:10

       What if it's, what if it's all an illusion that yes, a dream that you are experiencing, that's it's all in your mind, right? Like, is that... Can you take illusionism that far?

    8. DCDavid Chalmers1:19:23

       Well, there's illusionism about the external world and illusionism about consciousness.

    9. LFLex Fridman1:19:28

       Yeah, introspective.

    10. DCDavid Chalmers1:19:29

        And these might go in different... Illusionism about the external world kind of takes you back to Descartes and, yeah, could all this be produced by an ev- evil demon? Descartes himself also had the dream argument. He said, "How do you know you're not dreaming right now?"

    11. LFLex Fridman1:19:41

        Right.

    12. DCDavid Chalmers1:19:42

        "How do you know this is not an amazing dream?" And I think it's at least a possibility that, yeah, this could be some super-duper complex dream in the next universe up. I guess though my attitude is that just as... I mean, Descartes thought that if the evil demon was doing it, it's not real. A lot of people these days say if a simulation is doing it, it's not real. As I was saying before, I think even if it's a simulation, that doesn't stop this from being real.

    13. LFLex Fridman1:20:09

        It doesn't stop.

    14. DCDavid Chalmers1:20:09

        It just tells us what the world is made of.

    15. LFLex Fridman1:20:11

        Mm-hmm.

    16. DCDavid Chalmers1:20:11

        Likewise, if it's a dream, it could turn out that all this is like my dream created by my brain in the next universe up. My own view is that wouldn't stop this physical world from being real. It would turn out this cup at the most fundamental level was made of a bit of, say, my consciousness in the dreaming mind at the next level up. Maybe that would give you a kind of weird kind of panpsychism about reality, but it wouldn't show that the cup isn't real. It would just tell us it's ultimately made of processes in my dreaming mind. So I'd resist the idea that if the physical world is a dream, then it's an illusion.

    17. LFLex Fridman1:20:50

        Uh, that it's... Right. By the way,

13. 1:20:53 – 1:23:20

    Descartes' evil demon

    1. LFLex Fridman1:20:53

       perhaps you have an interesting thought about it. Why is Descartes' demon or genius considered evil? Why it couldn't have been a, a benevolent one that had the same powers?

    2. DCDavid Chalmers1:21:06

       Yeah. I mean, Descartes called it the maligne genie, the, uh, evil genie or evil genius.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:21:12

       Yeah.

    4. DCDavid Chalmers1:21:12

       Malign, I guess, was the word, but, uh, yeah, it's interesting question. I mean, a later philosophy, Berkeley, um, said, no, in fact, um, all this is done by God. God actually suppli- supplies you all of these, uh, all of these perceptions and ideas, and that's how physical reality is sustained. And interestingly, Berkeley's God is doing something that doesn't look so different from what Descartes' evil demon was doing. It's just that Descartes thought it was deception and Berkeley thought it was not. (laughs) And I'm, I'm actually more sympathetic to Berkeley here. Um, yeah, this evil demon may be trying to deceive you, but I think, okay, well, the evil demon may just be under the, uh, working under a false philosophical theory.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:22:00

       (laughs)

    6. DCDavid Chalmers1:22:01

       It thinks it's deceiving you. It's wrong. It's like those machines in the Matrix. They thought they were-

    7. LFLex Fridman1:22:05

       Yeah.

    8. DCDavid Chalmers1:22:05

       ... deceiving you that all this stuff is real. I think, no, if we're in a matrix, it's all still, uh, it's all still real. Um, yeah, the, the philosopher O.K. Boersma had a nice story about this ab- about 50 years ago about Descartes' evil demon, where he said this demon spends all of its time trying to fool people but fails because somehow all the demon ends up doing is constructing realities for, uh, for people.

    9. LFLex Fridman1:22:30

       (laughs)

    10. DCDavid Chalmers1:22:30

        So yeah, I think that maybe, uh, it's very natural to take this view that if we're in a simulation or, or a evil demon scenario or something that none of this is real, but I think it may be ultimately a philosophical mistake.

    11. LFLex Fridman1:22:43

        Mm-hmm.

    12. DCDavid Chalmers1:22:43

        Especially if you take on board sort of the view of reality, well, what matters to reality is really its structure, something like its mathematical structure and so on, which seems to be the view that a lot of people take from contemporary physics. And it looks like you can find all that mathematical structure in a simulation, maybe even in a dream and so on. So as long as that structure is real, I would say that's enough for the physical world to be real. Yeah, the physical world may turn out to be somewhat more intangible than we had thought and have a surprising nature, but we've already gotten very used to that from, from modern science.

    13. LFLex Fridman1:23:19

        See,

14. 1:23:20 – 1:33:47

    Does AGI need conscioussness?

    1. LFLex Fridman1:23:20

       you've, you've kind of alluded that you don't have to have consciousness for high levels of intelligence, but to create truly general intelligence systems, AGI systems at human-level intelligence and perhaps superhuman-level intelligence-

    2. DCDavid Chalmers1:23:34

       Mm-hmm.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:23:35

       ... you've talked about that it, you, you feel like that kind of thing might be very far away. But, um, nevertheless, when we reach that point, do you think consciousness from an engineering perspective is needed or at least highly beneficial for creating an AGI system?

    4. DCDavid Chalmers1:23:54

       Yeah, no one knows what consciousness is for functionally. So right now there's no specific thing we can point to and say, "You need consciousness for that."

    5. LFLex Fridman1:24:04

       Mm-hmm.

    6. DCDavid Chalmers1:24:05

       Still my inclination is to believe that in principle AGI is possible. At the very least, I don't see why someone couldn't simulate a brain, ultimately have a computational system that produces all of our behavior. And if that's possible, I'm sure vastly many other computational systems of equal or greater sophistication are possible with all of our cognitive functions and more. And my inclination is to think that once you've got all these cognitive functions, you know, perception, attention, reasoning, introspection, language, emotion, and so on, it's very likely you'll have, uh, you'll have consciousness as well. At least it's very hard for me to see how you'd have a system that had all those things while bypassing somehow conscious...

    7. LFLex Fridman1:24:55

       So just naturally it's integrated quite naturally. There's a lot of overlap about the kind of function that required to achieve each of those things, that's-... the-- so you can't disentangle them even when you're-

    8. DCDavid Chalmers1:25:08

       It seems to-

    9. LFLex Fridman1:25:08

       ... recreating them.

    10. DCDavid Chalmers1:25:09

        ... at least in us. But we don't know-

    11. LFLex Fridman1:25:11

        Right.

    12. DCDavid Chalmers1:25:11

        ... what the causal role of consciousness in the physical world, what it does. I mean, just say it turns out consciousness does something very specific in the physical world, like collapsing wave functions-

    13. LFLex Fridman1:25:20

        Mm-hmm.

    14. DCDavid Chalmers1:25:20

        ... as on one common interpretation of quantum mechanics, then ultimately we might find some place where it actually makes a difference and we could say, "Ah, here is wherein collapsing wave functions, it's driving the behavior of a system." And maybe it could even turn out that for, uh, AGI, you'd need something playing that... I mean, if you wanted to connect this to free will, some people think consciousness collapsing wave functions, that would be how the conscious mind exerts effect on the physical world and exerts its free will. And maybe it could turn out that any AGI that didn't utilize that mechanism would be limited in the kinds of functionality that it had. I don't myself find that plausible. I think probably that functionality could be simulated.

Episode duration: 1:38:48