Christof Koch: Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #2

as part of MIT course success zero nine nine on artificial general intelligence I got a chance to sit down with Christophe Coe who's one of the seminal figures in neurobiology in 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 the professor at Caltech before that he was at MIT he is extremely well sited over a hundred thousand 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 in the way we see ourselves as human beings he's the author of several books the quest for consciousness and your biological approach and a more recent book consciousness confessions of a romantic reductionist if you enjoy this conversation this course subscribe click the little bell I got 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 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 yes I do believe so we have no evidence of it but I think the probabilities are overwhelming in favor of it give me a universe where we have 10 to the 11 galaxies and each galaxy is between 10 to the 11 10 to the 12 stars and we know more stars have one or more planets so how does that make you feel it still makes me feel special because I have experiences I feel the world I experience the world and independent of whether there are other creatures 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 human existence now he said human do you think if those intelligent creatures are out there do you think they experience their world yes they evolved if they are product of natural evolution if it would have to be they will also experience their own world so consciousness isn't just a human your ID 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 of course not all people can talk about the babies and little children can talk about the patients who have have a Stoke and let's see the left inferior frontal gyrus can talk about it but most normal adult people can talk about it and so we think that makes us special compared to little monkeys a 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 to experience the world and so it's overwhelmingly likely that other alien that aliens would also experience their world of course differently because they have a difference in serum they've different sense of they had a very different environment but the fact that I would strongly suppose that they also have experiences if your pain and pleasure and see in some sort of spectrum and here and have all the other sensors 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 that's correct right so in a talk in a video I've heard you mention support so a DAC sound that you came up with there you go up with as part of your family when you were young first of all you're a technically a Midwestern boy you just secondly yes after that you traveled around a bit and it's a little bit of the accent you talked about support so the DAC solid having these elements of humaneness of consciousness that he discovered so I just wanted to ask can you look back and you childhood and remember one was the first time you realized you yourself sort of from a third-person perspective or our conscious being this idea of you know stepping outside yourself and seeing well there's something special going on here in my brain 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 at the only world I know you know it's a world of seeing and hearing voices and touching and all the other things so it's only much later at early in my undergrad days when I became 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 his transition from the physics of the brain to feelings where do the feelings come in all right so you can look at the foundational equation of quantum mechanics general relativity you can look at the period table of the elements you can look at the endless 80g seat chat and our genes and no way is consciousness yet I wake up every morning to a world where I have experiences and so that's the hub of the ancient mind-body problem how do experiences get into the world so what is consciousness experience consciousness is any any conte any experience some people call it subjective feeling some people call it phenomenon phenomenology some people call it quality of their philosophy all denote the same thing it feels like something in the famous word of as if a loss at Thomas Nagel it feels like something to be a bad or to be a you know an American out 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 you know in in deep meditation those are just different forms of experiences experience so if you were to sit down with maybe the next skip a couple generations of IBM Watson something that one jeopardy what is the gap I guess the question is between Watson that might be much more smarter than you then ask then all any human alive but may not have experience what is the gap well so that's a big big question that's occupied people for the last certainly last 50 years since we you know since he happened the birth of of computers that's a question on chilling try to answer and of course he did it in this indirect way by proposing its test and operational test so but that's not really that's you know he tried to get it what does it mean for person to think and then he had this test like you lock him away and then you have a communication with him and then you try to to guess after 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 they'll remember every email you ever had like like Samantha remember in the movie her yeah it's no question it's gonna happen but of course the key questions is does it feel like anything to be Samantha in a movie home too does it feel like anything to be Watson and there one has to be very very strongly think they're two different concepts here that we call mingle 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 natural selection 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 particular environment others are less a tablet whether it's a whale or dog or you go talk about a Paramecium or a little worm alright and and we see the complexity of the nervous system goes from one cell to two specialized cells to a worm that has three net that has 30% of its cells and nerve cells to creature like also like a blue whale that ever has had a billion even more nerve cells and so they based on behavioral evidence and based on the underlying neuroscience we believe that as these creatures become more complex they are better adapted to it to their particular ecological niche and they become more conscious probably because their brain calls and we believe consciousness unlike the ancient ancient people thought most almost every cult thought that consciousness with intelligence has to do with your heart mm-hmm and you still to see that today you see honey I love you is on my house yes but what you should actually say no honey I love you was all my lateral hypothalamus and for Valentine's Day you should give you a sweetheart you know hypothalamic same piece of chocolate another heart shaped chocolate right and you know so we still have this language but now we believe it's a 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 [Music] but now we confront a world where we know where we're beginning to engineer intelligence and it's radical unclear whether the intelligence we're engineering has anything to do with consciousness and whether it can experience anything because fundamentally what's the difference intelligence is about function intelligence no matter exactly how you define it sort of an adaptation to new environments being able to learn and quickly understand you know you know the setup of this and what's going on and who the actors and what's gonna happen next gets all about function consciousness is not about function consciousness is about being it's in some sense much fundamental you can see folks that you can see this in two in several cases you can see it for instance in the case of the clinic when you're dealing with patients who are let's say had a stroke or had were in traffic accident etc they're pretty much in mobile Terri Schiavo you may have heard historically she was a person here in the in the 90s in flora - heart Stood Still she was reanimated and for the next fourteen years she was what's called in a vegetative state so there are thousands of people in a vegetative state so they're you know they're you know they're like this occasionally they open their eyes for two three four five six eight hours and then close their eyes they have sleep-wake cycle occasionally they have behavior they do you know there but there's no way that you can establish a lawful relationship between what you see or the doctor says or the mom says and what the patient does correctly so so the so the there isn't any behavior yet in some of these people there is still experience you can you can design and build brain machine interfaces where you can see there's they still explain something and of course at these cases of locked-in state there's a famous book called that the diving bell and the butterfly well yet an editor French editor here the stroke in the in the brainstem unable to move except his vertical eyes eye movement he could just move his the eyes up and down and he dictated an entire book and some people even lose this at the end it all the evidence seems to suggest that they're still in there in this case you have no behavior your consciousness second cases 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 stage typically to them state sends an active signal to your motor neurons to paralyze you it's called atonia right because if you don't have that like some patience what do you do you act out your dreams you get proximal and behavioral disorder which is a bad which is bad juju to get 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 yeah alright so this is a big tub filled was ever with water that's a body temperature and Epsom salt you still completely naked you lie inside of it you close the layer Ignace complete darkness soundproof so very quickly you become body less because you're floating and you're naked you have no rings no watch no nothing you don't feel your body anymore it's no sound soundless there's no surf if a photon a sightless timeless because after while early on you actually hear your heart but then that you you sort of adapt to that and then sort of the passage of time ceases yeah and if you train yourself like in a meditation not to swing early on you think aloud you it's a little bit spooky you feel somewhat uncomfortable or you think well I'm gonna get bored but which I do not to think actively you become mindless so there you are body less timeless you know sound less sightless mindless but you're in a conscious experience you're not asleep you're not asleep you're you you are being of pure your pure being there isn't any function you aren't doing any computation you're not remembering you're not projecting you're not planning yet you're fully conscious you're fully conscious there's something going out there it could be just a side effect so what is the the you mean epiphenomenon so what is the salaat effect meaning why what what what what is the function of you being able to lay in this sense sensory free deprivation tank and still have a conscious experience additionally myself obviously we didn't evolve with flotation tanks in our in our environment I mean so biology is not totally bad at asking why question to the nominal question why do we have two eyes why don't we have four eyes or three eyes or something well no there's probably a there is a function to that but it's we're not very good at answering those questions we can speculate endlessly where biology is very or science is very good about mechanistic question why is that charged in the universe right we find a certain universe where there positive negative charges why why does quantum mechanics Hall you know what why doesn't some other theory hold quantum mechanics hold in our universe is very unclear why so Tillie nominal 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 RK I gave one is an everyday experience at night the other one is a young Tom on third one it's in principle you can everybody can have these sort of mystical experiences you have a dissociation of function form of intelligence from from conscious no consciousness you caught me asking a white question let me ask a question that's not a white question you're giving a talk later today on the Turing test for intelligence and consciousness drawing lines between the two so is there a scientific way to say there's consciousness present in this entity or not and to anticipate your answer because 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 how would you even begin to approach a test if there's consciousness present in this thing okay that's a really good question so let me take 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 the zap and zip it's a procedure where you ping the brain using transcranial magnetic stimulation you look at the electrical reverberations essentially using EEG and then you can measure the complexity of this plain response and you can do this in a way people in asleep normal people you can do it in a wake people and then anesthetize them you can do it in patients and it's it it has hundred percent accuracy that in all those cases when you're clear the patient or the person is either conscious or unconscious the complexity is 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 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 however then they're all these page children babies don't talk right but we believe that that the babies also have conscious experiences right and then there are these patients I mentioned did and they don't talk when you dream you can't talk because you're paralyzed so so what would we ultimately need we can't just rely on our intuition we need a theory of constants 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 give rise to conscious experience we all believe none of us believe anymore in the old story it's a soul but that used to be the most common explanation that most people accept that in still a lot of people today believe well there's there's God and doubt only us was a special thing that animals don't have Rene Descartes famously said a dog if he hit it with your carriage may Yelp me cry but it doesn't have this special thing it doesn't have the magic the magic salt oh yeah it doesn't have restaurants the soul now we believe that isn't the case anymore so what is the difference between brains and and these guys silicon and in particular once a behavior matches so if you have cereal of tea or Alexan 20 years from now that she can talk just as good as any possible human what counts do you have to say she's not conscious in particular if she says it's of course he well cuz I'm conscious you are sir are you doing and she'll say well you know they will generate some way to yeah she'll behave like a like a person now there are several differences one is so this relates to the problem they're very hard why is consciousness a hard problem it's because it's subjective right only I have it for only I know I've direct experience of my own consciousness I don't have experience your consciousness now I assume as a sort of 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 graphic on a behavior same with I do if if you know if I give you this muesli and ask you how does it taste you tell me things that you know that that I would also say more or less I yes so I infer based on all of that that you're conscious now we're silly I can't do that so there I really need a theory that tells me what is it about above any system this or this it makes it conscious and we have such a theory yes so the the integrator information theory is but let me first maybe his introduction for people are not familiar the car can you you talked a lot about pants psychism can you describe what physicalism versus dualism this you mentioned the soul what what is the history of that idea what the idea psychism although the debate really out of which pan site-- chasm can emerge of dualism versus physicalism or do you not see pants psychism is fitting into that and no you can argue there's some well ok so let's step back so kemp psychism is a very ancient belief that's been around I mean Plato and us talks about it modern philosophers talk about it of course in Buddhism the idea is very prevalent that I mean the different versions of it one version says everything is in sold everything arcs and stones and dogs and people and forests and iPhones all of us all right all matter is in soil that's sort of one version another version is that all biology all creatures small a large from a single cell to a giant sequoia tree feel like something that's one I think is somewhat more realistic so the different were willing me invite feel like something I have have feeling have some kind of 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 dog sure so okay so so that you can see that's also so pants item is very bored and you can to some people for example Bertrand Russell try to advocate this for this idea it's called gazelian monism that that pant psychism is really physics viewed from the inside so the idea is that physics is very good at describing relationship among objects like charges or like gravity all right you know this card the relationship between curvature and mass distribution okay that's the relationship among thing physics doesn't really describe the ultimate reality itself it's just relationship among you know quarks or all these other stuffs from like a third-person observer yeah yes and consciousness is what physics feels from the inside so my conscious experience it's a way the physics of my brain particular my cortex feel from the inside and so if you are Paramecium you gotta remember you see Paramecium well that's a pretty dumb creature this but it has already a billion different molecules probably you know five thousand 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 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 if you like something yep so this is really interesting 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 have to define what is a living thing what is a conscious thing and what is an intelligent thing do those intermix for you or they totally separate okay so a that's a question that we don't have a full answer right after a lot of this stuff we're talking about today is full of mysteries and fascinating ones right it was approximately can go to Aristotle who's probably the most important scientists and philosophers ever lived in certainly in Western culture he had this idea it's called halo morphism it's quite popular these days that there are different forms of soul the soul is really the form of something he saw he says all biological creature have a vegetative soul that's life principle today we think we understand something molded it's biochemistry nonlinear thermodynamics all right then he says they have a sensitive so only animals and humans have also a sensitive soul or an appetitive soul they they can see they can smell and they have drives they want to repeat use they want to eat etc and then only humans have what he called a rational soul okay right and that idea that made it into christen dome and then the rational soul is the one that lives forever he was very young he wasn't really I mean different readings of Aristotle give different was that did he believe that rational soul was immortal or not I probably think he didn't but then of course that made it into its who Plato in the Christianity and then this world became immortal and then became the connection where after to God now you so you ask me essentially you what does our modern conception of these free 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 to originate it but it's it's been difficult to rigorously pin down you see this in modern definition of death it's in de facto right now there's a conference ongoing again that tries to defined legally and medically what is death it used to be very simple des is you stop breathing your heart stops beating you're dead right yeah totally unconverted if you're unsure you wait another 10 minutes if the patient doesn't breathe you know he's well now we have ventilators we have half a pacemaker so it's much more difficult to define what death is typically des is defined at the end of life and life is defined before yes so before that okay so we don't have really very good definitions intelligence we don't have a rigorous data definition we know something how to measure it's called IG IQ or G factors right and and we're beginning to build it in in a narrow sense right like go alphago and and and and Watson and you know Google cars and uber cars and all of that that still narrow AI and some people are thinking about the artificial general intelligence but roughly as we said before it's something lose ability to learn and to adapt to new environments but that is as I said also it's radical difference from experience 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 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 figuring out how to build artificial consciousness would help you get to an AGI so or put another way do you think intelligent requires consciousness in human it goes hand in hand in human or I think Ambala G consciousness intelligence goes hand in hand quite a solution because the the brain evolved to be highly complex complexity via the theory integrated information theory is sort of ultimately is what is closely tied to consciousness ultimately it's causal power upon itself and so in evolution evolved systems they go together in artificial system particular in digital machines they do not go together and if you asked me point-blank is Alexa 20 point O in the year 2041 she can easily pass every Turing test is she conscious no even if she claims she's concerts in fact you could even do a more radical version of this thought experiment we can build a computer simulation of the human brain you know what Henry Markram in the Blue Brain Project or the human brain project in Switzerland is trying to do let's grant him all the success so in ten years we have this perfect simulation of the human brain every new one is simulated in hasil Amex and it has motor neurons it has a Ibaka'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 imprint some map on to your brain will not be conscious why because it simulates it's a difference between the simulated and the real so it simulates the behavior salted 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'll give you a really nice metaphor that engineers and physicists stupidly get I can write down in Stein's field equation nine or ten equations that describe the link in general relativity between curvature and and mass I can do that I can run this on my laptop to to predict that the sample the black hole at the center of our galaxy will be so massive that it will twist space-time around it so no light can escape I it's a black hole right but funny have you ever won that why doesn't this computer simulation suck me in alright it simulates gravity but it doesn't have the causal power of gravity it's a huge difference so it's a difference between the real and and the simulator just like it doesn't get wet inside the computer when the computer runs code that simulates a weather storm and so in order to have to have artificial continents you have to give it the same causal power as a human brain yes you have to build so-called a neuromorphic machine that has hardware that is very similar to the human brain not a digital clock for normal computer 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 of court so maybe just because this is AGI 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 maybe another way to say so in 2040 2050 people will have Siri that is just really impressive do you think people will say serious intelligent yes intelligence is this amorphous thing so it to be intelligent it seems like you have to have some kind of connections with other human beings in a sense that you have to impress them with your intelligence and their feels 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 a generation and that will be that will get us happy and say you know what we've created an AGI I don't know happy no well yes I do believe we can get what we call high-level functional intelligence particular sort of the G you know this this fluid like intelligence that we cherish particularly the place like MIT right in in in machines I see a boy I know reasons and I see a lot of reason to believe it's gonna happen very you know over the next 50 years of 30 years so for beneficial AI for creating an AI system that's 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 in his consciousness yes I think that that is a very good argument that if we're concerned about AI and the threat of a aisle and Nick Bostrom accidentally said I think having an intelligent that has empathy right why do we find abusing a dog why do most of us find that apartment abusing any animal right why do we find that apartment because we have this thing called empathy which if you look at the Greek really means feeling with I feel a compass of empathy I have feeling with you I see somebody else suffer that isn't even my conspecific it's not a person it's not a lot but 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 emphatic 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 really becomes very powerful that it has an emphatic response and doesn't just exterminate humanity so as part of the full conscious experience to create a consciousness artificial or in our human consciousness do you think fear maybe we're gonna get into the earlier days with Mitch and so on but do you think fear and suffering are essential to have consciousness do you have to have the full range of experience of it to have a system that has experience or can you have a system that only has a very particular kinds of very positive experiences look you can have in principle you can people have done this in the rat where you implanted electrode in the hypothalamus the pleasure center of the head and the rat stimulated some above and beyond anything else it doesn't care about food or natural sex or drink anymore to stimulate 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 a priori I see no reason why you need different forever I need a great variety now clearly to survive that wouldn't work but if I'd engineered artificially I don't think I don't think you need a great variety of conscious expense 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 count cause any real creature whether artificially engineered you want to give it fear the fear of extinction that we all have and you also want to give it a positive appetitive states states that it wants to that you want the Machine encouraged to do because if they give the Machine positive feedback so you mentioned pants.i chasm to jump back a little bit you know everything having some kind of mental property how do you go from there to something like human consciousness so everything having some elements of consciousness - well is there something special about human consciousness what so so just it's not everything like a spoon there's no I the the form of Pam Jochum I think about doesn't ask I consciousness - anything like this the spoon my liver however it is the theory the integrated information theory does say that system even ones that look from the outside relatively simple Atlee if they have this internal causal power they are they it does feel like something the theory a poet doesn't see anything what's special about human biologically we know what the one thing that special about human is we speak and we have a overblown sense of our own importance right we believe we exceptional and where does God's give - - into the universe but the but behaviorally the main thing that we have we can plant 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 there the current dominant species on the planet so you mentioned God you grow up a devout Roman Catholic you know Roman Catholic family so you know 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 you've grown throughout your life and changed your views and religion as far as I understand yeah I mean I'm now much closer to so I'm not a Roman Catholic anymore I don't believe there's sort of this God the God I was I was educated to believe in you know sits somewhere in the fullness of time I'll be united in some sort of everlasting bliss I just don't see any evidence for that look the world the night is large and full of Wonders right there are many things that I don't understand I think many things that we as a cult I look we don't even understand more than four percent of all the universe right dark matter dark energy we have no idea what it is maybe it's lost socks what do I know so so all I can tell you is it's a sort of mom my current religious or spiritual sentiments much closer to some form of Buddhism can you - without the reincarnation unfortunately there's no evidence for in reincarnation so can you describe the way Buddhism sees the world a little bit well so the you know they talk about so when when I spent several meetings with with the Dalai Lama and what always impressed me about him he really unlike for example at either the Pope was 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 in an animal Jerell will have less is less capable of suffering than a then a well developed normally developed human and they think consciousness pervades in this universe and they have these techniques you know you can think of them like mindfulness etc 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 fundamentalist I think about it there's a physical and then this is inside view consciousness and those are the two aspects that's the only thing I've 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 PI to knowledge about the universe and atoms and super strings and molecules and all of that the only thing you directly are acquainted with is this world that's populated with with things in images and and sounds in your head and touches on all of that I actually have a question so and it sounds like you kind of have a rich life you talk about rock climbing and it seems like you really love literature and consciousness is all about experiencing things so do you think that has helped your research on this topic yes particular if you think about it the the various states so for example you do our climbing or now I do oink-cool going and a bike every day you can get into this thing called the zone and I've always I want to I want to Bob about a particular with respect to consciousness because it's a strangely addictive state you want to you want to appear I mean once people have it once you want to keep on going back to it and you wonder what is it so addicting about it and I think it's the experience of almost close to pure experience because in this in the zone you're not conscious over in a 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 yet this fight was your ex and all of those things are always there but when you're in the zone all of that is gone and your justice in this wonderful state while you're fully out in the world a job you're climbing or you're hauling or biking or doing soccer what or whatever you're doing and sort of consciousness sort of is is your 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 can't you touch some basic part of off 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 so what do you think about the simulation hypothesis simulation theory the idea that we all live in a computer simulation have you knowit's justice for her I think it's as likely as the hypothesis had engaged hundreds of scholars for many centuries are we all just existing in the mind of God right 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 their book written is about the simulation hypothesis if that's what people want to do that's fine it seems rather esoteric it's never testable but it's not useful for you to think of in those terms so maybe connecting to the questions of free will which you've talked about I think vaguely wherever you saying that the idea that there's no free will it makes you very uncomfortable so what do you think about free will and from that you from a physics perspective or a consciousness perspective what is it all okay so from the physics perspective leaving inside quantum mechanics we believe we live in a fully deterministic world right but then comes of course quantum mechanics so now we know that certain things on principle not predictable which as you said I prefer because the idea that at the initial condition of the universe and then everything else we're just acting out the initial condition of the universe that doesn't that doesn't mean it's not a romantic notion no certainly not right now when it comes to consciousness I think we do have certain freedom we are much more constrained by a 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 we all know that our there's hundreds of experiments that show how we can be influenced but finally in the in the final analysis when you make a lifetime talk not really about critical decision what you really think should I marriage should I go to this school that could should I take this job is that job should I cheat on my taxes or not these sort of these are things what you really deliberate and I think under those conditions you are as free as you can be when you when you bring your entire being anti conscious being to that question and try to analyze it on all the the various condition and then you take 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 a will that's totally free to do anything it wants that's not possible right so as Jack mentioned yet you actually read a blog about books you've read amazing books from I'm Russian from Bulgakov cha oh 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 Nietzsche against did that spokes are twister 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 for it when it was in the air and you know he makes all these claims that people sort of under the guise or under the mask of charity actually are very non charitable so he sort of really the first discoverer of the great land of the of the unconscious and that that really struck me and what do you think what do you think about the unconscious what do you think about Freud we think about these ideas what's what's just like dark matter in the universe what's over there in that unconscious a lot I mean much more than we think this is what a lot of last hundred years of research has shown so I think he was a genius misguided towards the end but he was all he started out as a neuroscientist but he contributed he did the studies on the on the lamprey he contributed himself to the neon hypothesis the idea that there discreet units that we call nerve cells now and then he started then he he vote you know about the unconscious and I think it's to there's lots of stuff happening you feel this particular when you're in a relationship and it breaks a son alright and then you have this terrible you can have love and hate and lust and anger and all of its 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 prying eyes of conscience doesn't have access to those but they're they are made in the amygdala or you know 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 couldn't start finally a story why this happened why you love you or don't love or whatever but you don't really know whether that's actually the with that that actually happened because you simply don't have access to those parts of the brain and they're very powerful you think that's a feature or a bug of our brain the fact that we have this deep difficult to dive into subconscious I think it's a feature because otherwise look we are we are see is like any other brain or nervous system or computer we are severely band-limited if we if everything I do every emotion I feel every my movements I make if all of that had to be another control of consciousness I couldn't I I couldn't I wouldn't be here all 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 or out I think that involve basal ganglia and stratum you bear you train up different parts of your brain and then once you do it automatically like typing you can show you do it much faster without even thinking about it because you've got this highly specialized what Francis Crick and I called zombie agents that are sort of that taking care of that while your consciousness can sort of worry about the abstract sense of the text you want to write and I think that's true for many many things but for the things like all the fights you have with the ex-girlfriend things that you would think are not useful to still linger somewhere in the sub conscious so that seems like a bug that it would stay there you think it would be better if you can analyze it and then get it out of there or just forget it ever happened you know that that seems a very buggy kind of well yeah but in general we don't have and that's probably functional we don't have an ability unless it's extremely of cases clinical dissociations right when people are heavily abused when they completely repress them they the memory but that doesn't happen in in in you know in normal people if we don't have an ability to remove traumatic memories and of course we suffer from that on the other hand probably if you had the ability to constantly wipe your memory you probably do it to an extent that isn't useful to you so yeah it's a good question with the balance so on the books is Jack mentioned correct me if I'm wrong but broadly speaking in academia and the different scientific disciplines certainly an engineering reading literature seems to be a rare pursuit perhaps I'm wrong in this but that's in my experience most people are read much more technical text and do not sort of escape or seek truth in literature it seems like you do so what do you think is the value what do you think literature asks the pursuit of scientific truth do you think it's good it's useful for given access to much wider array of human experiences how valuable do you think it is well if you want to understand human nature and nature in general then I think you have to better understand wide variety of experiences not just sitting in a lab staring at a screen and having a face flashed onto you've won a million pushing a button that's what that's what I used to do that for most psychologists do there's nothing wrong with that but you need to consider lots of other strange states you know and literature is a shortcut for this well yeah as literature that's that's what literature is all about all sorts of interesting experiences that people have the you know the contingency of it the fact that you know women experience what different black people experience the world different and you know the one way to explain that is reading all these different literature and try to find out you you see everything so relative read eBooks million years ago they thought about certain problems very very differently than us today we today like any culture think we know it all that's common to every culture every culture believes that at a day they know it all and then you realize well there's other ways of viewing the universe and some of them may have lots of things in their favor so I this is a question I wanted to ask about time scale or scale in general when you with IIT or in general try to think about consciousness try to think about these ideas we kind of naturally think in human timescales do you or and also entities that are sized close to humans do you think of things that are much larger much smaller its containing consciousness and do you think of things that take you know well is this you know it ages eons to uh to operate in their conscious cause effect cause effect it's a very good question so I think a lot about small creatures because experimentally you know a lot of people work on fly then and bees alright so and most people just think they are tormented a this box for heaven's sake right but if you look at their behavior like bees they can recognize individual humans they have this very complicated 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 and bees have to do that once a year right when they swarm in this spring and then they have this very lab that way they have three nut Scouts it did they go to the individual sites they come back there this power this dance literally where they danced for several days they try to recruit other needs is that a complicated decision wait when they finally want to make a decision the entire swarm the scouts warm up the entire swarm then go to one location they don't go to fifty location they go to one location that the scouts have agreed upon by themselves that's awesome if you look at the circuit complexity it's 10 times more denser than anything we have in our brain or the only of a million neurons but then you know it's amazing 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 four workers live maybe for two months so I think IIT tells you this in principle the substrate of consciousness is the substrate that maximizes the cause-effect power over all possible space temple grains so when I think about for example do you know the science fiction story the black cloud okay it's a classic by Fred Hoyle the astronomer he has this cloud intervening between the earth and the sand the Sun and leading to some sort of to global cooling this is written in the 50s it turns out you can using the the radio dish they communicate was actually an entity it's actually an intelligent entity and they they sort of they convinced it to move away 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 time scale of month rather than enough it sort of fraction of a second yes and they would experience life where each moment is a month rather than or microsecond right rather than a fraction of a second in in the human case and so there may be forms of constants that we simply don't recognize for what they are because they are so radically different from anything you and I are used to again that's why it's good to read or to watch science fiction what we want to think about this like this is friend you know Stanislav LEM this polish science fiction writer he wrote Solaris I was turned into a Hollywood movie yes his best novel it was in the 60s if there is a very ingenious and engineering background his most interesting novel is called the victorious where 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 took or when there was a machine evolution a Darwinian evolution he talks about this very vividly and finally the dominant they're the dominant machine intelligence organism that survive they're gigantic clouds of little hexagonal Universal salata mater this is what in the Cygnus so typically they are all lying on the ground individual by themselves but in times of crisis they can't communicate the assembly into gigantic Nets into clouds trillions of these particles and then they become hyper intelligent and they can beat anything that Youmans can can control at it it's a very beautiful and compelling where you have an intelligence where finally the humans leave the planet they simply unable to understand and comprehend this creature and they can say well either we can nuke the entire plan 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 yeah actually in conversation so your talent US Steel or from brought up is that there could be his ideas you know you already have these artificial general intelligence like super smart or maybe conscious beings in the cellular Tom so we just don't know how to talk to them so it's the language the communication because you don't know what to do with it so that's one sort of view is consciousness there's only something you can measure so it's not conscious if you can't measure it but so you're making an ontological and an epistemic statement one is there they are it's it's just like seeing their multiverses that might be true but I can't communicate with them I don't have I can't have any also that's an epistemic argument right so those are two different things so may well be possible look at not in other 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 in one dish add four transcription factors and then you can induce them to code to go into large or large they're a few millimeters they're like a half a million neurons that look like matter of cells in a dish called mini organoids at Howard at Stanford everywhere they're building them it may be well be possible that they're beginning to feel like something but we we can't really communicate with them right now so people are beginning to think about the ethics of this right so yes he may be perfectly right but they made its one question are they conscious or not it's totally separate question how would I know those are two different things right if you could give advice to a young researcher sort of dreaming of understanding or creating human level intelligence or consciousness what would you say follow your dreams read widely no I mean I suppose what discipline what what is the pursuit that they should take on is it neuroscience this is a competition cognitive science is it philosophy is a computer science or products no in in a sense that okay so the only known system that have high level of intelligence is Homo sapiens so if you wanted to build it it's probably good to continue to study closely what humans do so cognitive neuroscience you know somewhere between cognitive neuroscience on the one hand and some philosophy of mind and then ai ai computer science you can look at all the original ideas in your network they all came from neuroscience right reinforcement whether it's snarky Minsky building is snarky or whether it's you know the early supalen visa experiment that how about that then gave rise to networks and then multi-layer networks so it may well be possible in fact some people argue that to make the next big step in AI once we'll realize the limits of deep convolutional net works but they can do certain things but they can't really understand but they don't they don't really can't really I can't really show them one image I can show you a single image of some knee a pickpocket who steals a wallet from a purse you immediately know that's a big pocket right now computer system will just say well it's a man it's a woman it's a purse right unless you train this machine on showing it a hundred thousand pickpockets right so it doesn't it doesn't have this easy understanding that you have right so so some people make yeah I mean in order to go to the next step or you really want to build machines that understand in a way you and I we have to go to psychology we need to understand how we do it and our brains enable us to do it and so therefore being on the cusp it's also so exciting I'd to try to understand better our nature and then to build to take some of those inside and build them so I think the most exciting thing is somewhere in the interface between cognitive science neuroscience AI computer science and philosophy of mind beautiful yeah I'd say if there is from the machine learning for from the computer science computer vision perspective many of the researchers kind of ignore the way the human brain works nor even psychology or literature or studying the brain I would hope Josh Tenenbaum talks about bringing that in more and more and that's yeah so you've worked on some amazing stuff throughout your life what's the thing that you're really excited about what's the mystery that you would love to uncover in the near term beyond beyond all the mysteries already surrounded by well so there's a structure called the Klaus poem this is structures underneath our cortex it's yay big you have one on the left am i right underneath this pie underneath a insula it's very sane it's like one millimeter it's embedded in in wiring in white matters it's very difficult to image and it has it has connection to every cortical region and Francis Crick the last paper you have of all he dictated Corrections the day he died in hospital on this paper he now we hyper hypothesize well because it has this unique Anatomy it gets input from every cortical area and projects back to every call every cortical area that the function of this structure is similar that it's just a metaphor to work the role of a conducting and symphony orchestra you've all the different cortical players you have some that do motion some they do theory of mind some that infer social interaction and color I'm hearing and all the different modules and cortex but of course what consciousness is consciousness puts it all together into one package like the binding problem all of that and this is really the function because it has a relatively few nuance compared to cortex but it it talks it is all receive the input from all of them and it projects back to all of them and so we are testing that right now we've got this beautiful neuronal reconstruction in the mouse called crown of song and town of Thal nuan said there in the closed room that if the most widespread connection of any nerve Neon I've ever seen they're very deep yeah you have individually on to sit in the clouds from tiny but then they have this very single you have this huge axonal tree that cover both FC and contralateral cortex and and trying to turn using you know fancy tools like optogenetics trying to turn those neurons on or off and study it what happens in them in the mouse so this thing is perhaps where the parts become the whole it very interface it's one of the structures it's a very good way of putting it where the the individual parts turn into the whole of the whole of the conscious experience well with that thank you very much for being here today thank you jack thank you much you

Channel: Lex Fridman

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Id: piHkfmeU7Wo

Length: 57min 54sec (3474 seconds)

Published: Tue May 29 2018