Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy (David Chalmers)

welcome to the michael shurmur show i'm your host michael shurmur this episode is brought to you by one dream one dream was created for people like us you me autodidacs people who are self-learners or self-teachers they have a new plan which is an annual plan it's a subscription service i remember back in the day when i had to purchase courses and they would ship me boxes of cassette tapes and that's how long i've been with this company they're great but now you can just stream it all online of course that's the that's the way to go it's a subscription service you you get an annual plan 99 bucks for your first year that's 58 off the normal right and for that you get access to all their premium ad-free unlimited uh content to learn from some of the world's brightest minds including one dream's entire collection of videos this is the great courses and other exclusive content for example you can learn about crypto world war ii religion and philosophy science and skepticism i have two 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the character of consciousness and constructing the world he is co-founder and past president of the association for the scientific study of consciousness past president of the australian association of philosophy and president-elect of the american philosophical association eastern division he has given the john locke lectures and has been awarded the gene nicode prize and he's known for formulating the so-called hard problem of consciousness which inspired tom stoppard's play the hard problem and for the idea of the extended mind which says that the tools we use can be can become parts of our minds if you've ever seen the phrase the hard problem of consciousness i don't think you'll ever see it without the the phrase attached to it as discovered by or invented by or affiliated with or created by or identified by david chalmers so he's a legend in this whole area of consciousness and the study of the mind and so forth and his new book deals with virtual reality augmented reality artificial intelligence and all the con commitment um associated large philosophical issues uh with it uh which includes like deep fakes are we closing in on something like artificial intelligence being able to create a virtual reality of somebody that we know who says something that they would never say that kind of thing there's a famous video of president obama saying things he never said we ask if uh virtual reality is an illusion or is it real we talk a lot about star trek like with data on star trek sentient conscious does he have feelings does watson know that he won jeopardy does deep blue know that he he beat it beat the great gary kasparov and jess no it doesn't even know it's playing chess watson doesn't even know it's playing jeopardy but at some point the machines will know that what they're doing they'll become self-aware and so would that constitute sentience and therefore consciousness and therefore you're a person personhood with legal status rights and so forth we look at some of the big questions in philosophy through the context of virtual reality which is what's involved in his book each each of these has a chapter how do the mind and body interact what is consciousness does the mind extend beyond the body what makes for a good life what's the difference between right and wrong how should a society be organized and of course my favorite question is there a god well if we achieve uh essentially the singularity in computing then maybe there will be a god anyway it was a pretty interesting conversation um we really do hit all the big topics i think you'll really like this if you love science fiction i mean we talk a lot about star trek and in uh and all the other related science fiction um stories and films and tv shows and so on that uh touches on these things so before i hand you over to to dr chalmers let me just make a note about supporting the podcast we we are entirely supported by you the listeners as well as the occasional ads from one dream the great courses which you'll you'll hear and but other than that really most of it comes from donations to the skeptic society which is a 501c3 nonprofit so your donations there are tax deductible we don't want to put this behind a paywall because we're trying to reach as many people as possible if you want to change the world you got to reach a lot of people just the way it is that's our mission that skeptics is to promote science rationality reason critical thinking and all through these different platforms so if you appreciate that please go to skeptic.com donate and they'll you'll find you can give five bucks a month 50 bucks a year 100 a year whatever you can give is very much appreciated uh we do have a few big donors occasionally but usually the vast majority of the support comes from small regular donations from just regular people that feel that this is worth their time and money uh to support us and we think it is you know the people act on their beliefs and so it's important whether their beliefs are true or not and that's what we do all right thanks for listening and here is david chalmers hey i loved your new book it's called just i'll have already introduced it but just to introduce it again reality plus virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy i listen to the whole thing on audio it's a good read i liked it because uh first there's a lot of pop cultures that you must have you must have well i do a lot of cycling a couple hours a day and hiking with my dog and yes on mondays i drive from santa barbara all the way to orange county to teach a class at chapman university on skepticism 101 then i drive all the way back and and there's a few stops in between so i i can i can get through a book in a in a week easily no problem okay so uh impressive yeah what yeah 500 pages but yeah it's long yes i i would say you accomplished your goal that is to say reaching a general public with super interesting questions and problems while also addressing your colleagues so someone like uh my friend dan dennett could read it and go okay i i'm i'm challenged by this i gotta think about this and i'm gonna be skeptical of this or that and push back or whatever you philosophers do but in other words it's a third culture book it's it's for everybody and i like those kind of books yeah no it's like it's the analogy i make is like jared diamond's book guns germs and steel isn't the pop version of his technical papers it's the only version there is and you can read it as a professional scientist or you can pick it up at the book stall and a regular person on an airline reads it so yeah same thing with yours book yeah i grew up on you know girdle escherbach by uh doug hofstadter who went on to be my phd advisor so he's always been the uh the model for me just putting forward his ideas and it works at every level yeah good that's a good place to start give us a little bit of ai philosophy yeah give us some background of it you know who who are you where were you born and raised where'd you go to school how did you get interested in consciousness and philosophy and all that yeah i was born in in australia and i'm still australian uh grew up in sydney and then adelaide my teenage years i guess i was pretty much a science geek uh science math science computer science uh especially math i did a whole lot of that um a whole lot of math stuff math competitions math olympiads the uh the whole thing and i went on to university to keep studying math but maths as i called it then the australian way and even went on to i went on to oxford to get part way through a uh a doctorate in uh in mathematics but somewhere along the way i picked up the consciousness bug partly the philosophy bug thinking about thinking about philosophy i took one course in uh in philosophy as an undergraduate but i was all but at some point along the way i became obsessed by the problem of of consciousness where does consciousness fit into a physical world how is it that physical processes in the brain could give you consciousness this just seemed to me to be the most interesting and important unsolved problem in the world and for a long time i just kind of thought about it for a fun you know i didn't really think anyone would get paid for thinking about this stuff it's just you know i had a new theory of consciousness every week but at a certain point when i went to oxford to keep studying uh to keep studying math i just this obsession just took over and i thought okay i need to be this seems to me like what i want to be thinking about i need to think about consciousness full-time how do i do that and uh it seemed to me then like the best way to come to it was to move to uh philosophy because philosophy allows you to take the uh the big picture approach to questions like consciousness bringing in science but bringing in you know every field where it's relevant and not necessarily being anchored to a bench having to perform you know a bunch of pretty narrow experiments in order to get tenure so actually it was a long story but i ended up i contacted doug hoffsteiner who's a you know books i'd read when a teenager uh go to leicester bach and and loved and he said why don't you come to indiana university and work with me in a group he was just setting up then with a lot of people and from ai and psychology and i guess i was the resident philosopher so i i went over there joined doug's research group which is basically an ai lab but had room for everything under the sun and ended up doing a phd in philosophy and cognitive science thinking about the problem of consciousness and ended up publishing that as my first book the conscious mind which is basically all about this problem how on earth can you explain consciousness in physical terms and actually arguing that you know there are limits to what you can explain in physical terms here but we can have a science of consciousness all the same that was just big the mid 90s when the science of consciousness was just getting off the ground it was a very uh very exciting time around that uh yeah you've kind of famously become known as the uh the hard problem of consciousness man i don't think i've ever seen that phrase printed anywhere without your name in front of it so that's kind of nice to have that uh instant quick read for for who you are and what you do of course there's much more to it than that and i think the one time we met was at a ted conference where you and i were both speaking and after you gave your speech about the hard problem of consciousness and you were standing in a little table round table and i was standing there talking to you and dan dennett walks up and he said gave you a really nice compliment you know like david that was the best presentation of your theory of consciousness that i've ever heard and you said oh gosh thanks you know and he said now i know exactly why you're wrong i don't remember what he said but but i i remember that as like oh oh boy okay here we go and so we we we go back a long long way in fact dan was i was very good buddies with my thesis advisor doug hofstadter they uh they um edited a book together the mind's eye way back in uh maybe 1981 or something that was pretty influential for me so i i don't know dan and i are on opposite side of a lot of issues but i cut him a lot of slack having uh written that book and having done a lot of really good work and we sailed we sailed for a week off the coast of green of greenland about uh five six years ago on like a consciousness cruise so yeah this cruise we enjoy this is not a we enjoy talking about it's not your new age consciousness crews i'm sure where you're taking a mind-altering drugs along the way it was a russian entrepreneur who was superintendent he actually did a phd on free will at moscow state university really serious about the issues and he became friends with uh dan they brought along a few of the russian philosophers and then 10 10 philosophers from around the world working on consciousness with the idea that we'd explore greenland and in the mornings and explore consciousness argue all the issues out with each other and the in the afternoons on the boat and it was amazing i think you can find the uh you can find people can find the videos online they look around well while we're on that so as i understand it the hard problem is that of of consciousness is what it's how do you explain the experience of consciousness what it's like to be me or you or a bat or whatever and the so-called easy problem would be what the neural correlates of where red is detected in the visual cortex or whatever that's not easy as in scientifically easy but it's easy conceptually we can figure that out but the harder problem is is how you would go from neuron swapping chemicals to you and i having an experience of being what it's like to be something is is that basically it yeah that's pretty much right i mean what i call the easy problems actually are problems tied to behavior how does we do certain things how it is that we discriminate certain things in our environment how it is our brain integrates information how it is we act on information how it is we can report it and say i see red those are all objective things that uh you know the brain does and we can explain those things by giving some neural mechanism that performs that function yeah the hard problem is explaining subjective experience why is there something it's like from the first person point of view when you uh perceive an object or when you uh feel pain or when you think of thought there's this subjective experiential quality to later seeing a color or to uh to feeling pain and it's not obvious why that exists why doesn't why don't all these processes in the brain go on like detecting something red without it actually being subjectively experienced from the first person point of view it is i mean that's a datum about about our mental lives that we have these experiences but you know the hard problem is why does consciousness exist at all and more specifically why does it take on the various forms that it does let me read to you um steve pinker's summary of the problem and and i tend to agree with his analysis here this is from enlightenment now and he's such a clear writer on this and then you can kind of respond to this so here's pinker in the end i still think that the heart problem is a meaningful conceptual problem but i agree with dennett that is not a meaningful scientific problem no one will ever get a grant to study whether you are a zombie or whether the same captain kirk walks on the deck of the enterprise and the surface of zac dorn and i agree with several other philosophers that it may be futile to hope for a solution at all precisely because it is a conceptual problem or more accurately a problem with our concepts as thomas nagle put it in his famous essay what it's like to be a bat there may be quote facts which could not ever be represented or comprehended by human beings even if the species lasted forever simply because our structure does not permit us to operate with concepts of the requisite type close quote the philosopher colin mcginn has run with this idea arguing that there is a mismatch between our cognitive tools for explaining reality namely chains of causes and effects analyses into parts and their interactions and modeling in mathematical equations and the nature of the hard problem of consciousness which is unintuitively holistic close quote there our best science tells us that consciousness consists of a global workspace representing our current goals memories and surroundings implemented in synchronized neural firing in fronto parietal circuitry but the last dollop of the theory that it subjectively feels like uh to be such circuitry may have to be stipulated as a fact about reality where explanation stops close quote from pinker there your thoughts on that yeah i mean i'm sympathetic with uh with pinker on the uh on the mystery but i guess i'm more optimistic about the possibilities for an eventual science i don't know maybe it's just i'm a glass half full guy here whereas i don't know pink is normally pretty optimistic but not so in this uh not so in this context i guess i think it's early days for the science of consciousness and yeah there is something here very very deep that we don't understand it may well be that we don't fully have the concept for understanding the connection between brain and consciousness yeah but i think it's very early in the game you know uh they'll probably in 500 years time people look back on where we were now and say okay well they didn't know the know the first thing so i do think right now what is going on in this there is a robust and active science of consciousness right now but mostly it's not trying to solve the hard problem what it is is as you say trying to find correlations between bits of the brain and consciousness and if you're very ambitious try and find some general principles like consciousness goes along with the global workspace or consciousness goes along with integrated information but the question of why consciousness exists at all is uh is generally not addressed by these theories and at this point there's a couple of different approaches one is to say well like dan dinner maybe there isn't anything else you need to explain here the hard problem of consciousness and all you've got to do is explain those behaviors and the rest of it is an illusion the sense that there's something else that needs explaining is an illusion that requires biting an awfully big bullet so i say more power to dan for going there but i think most people find that i find that implausible just because consciousness seems to be a datum another approach which i quite like is saying doing what pinker did there at the end to say some things in the world are fundamental space and time and mass and charge and a bunch of standard scientific theories are taken as fundamental then there are some fundamental laws like principles of relativity or quantum mechanics ground unified theory why uh why is the why are the laws of quantum mechanics true well something like that has to be taken as basic why is there space well actually there are theories now that try and explain why there is space but say in classical etonian theory or relativity he just takes space as a basic ingredient of the universe so i'm open to the idea of taking consciousness as a fundamental but then the science will consist in trying to connect that fundamental consciousness to the rest of the world to physical processes in the brain and maybe and maybe elsewhere and then yeah the question is once you've got the best possible theory of the correlations physical processes of this form connect to consciousness at this point is that a fundamental law or is there something further you can explain right now i don't see how to go further but it may well be that sometime in the future we'll have the insight that leads us to say this is why that law has to be this way and maybe that could be a solution right i always like to say that the best argument for being chronically frozen and brought back 500 years from now is just to find out what these things how these things turned out like oh consciousness we figured that out in the year 2225 when we found this little whatever you know or dark matter turns out to be this and dark energy turns out to be that oh that was a simple one as it turns out oh okay totally i'm counting on the ai systems the super intelligent ai systems of the future to be much better at doing science and philosophy than us so they're going to solve all these problems for us maybe maybe ai will solve the heart problem it might i mean that's kind of par part of your book is to talk about those kind of modeling of scientific problems using ai to solve those problems but before we dive into that you i've been quoting you for years on this 2009 survey that asked that you conducted with your colleagues 3 26 philosophy professors and graduate students to weigh in on 30 different subjects of their concern in their field and um and so i i noticed in your new book you you said i think you updated that in 2020 right um but the the specific percentages are not going to be my point here but things like external world idealism skepticism or non-skeptical realism 81 leaner except non-skeptical realism so there is a real world okay mind physicalism that was that was the closest we got that was a yeah yeah that one was the closest we got to a consensus on any questions well this is going to be my question in the service 81 said yeah there is an external right most of them you don't have much consensus like mine physicalism or non-physicalism 56 versus 27 versus 16 other or um let's see free will compatibilism libertarianism or no free will you've got 59 on uh compatibilism but 14 other 13 libertarianism 12 percent no free will well my point is this if like when einstein you know it was presented with that book you know 100 scientists against einstein and said why 100 if i'm wrong only one is needed and so you know why is it you guys have not come to some kind of consensus on most of these issues it would be like if climate change was still debated and 50 said yes 50 said no or or it was still unclear after 75 years or 50 years that the big bang theory and the steady state theory are still going back and forth and and scientists are conflicted about this they just don't know you know in science we have a sense that there's some progress and at some point we reach a consensus so you know 97 of climate papers can accept that anthropogenic global warming is real okay so we've kind of solved that problem but after 2 500 years if you guys are still unable to resolve the free will determinism problem as one example what does that mean about the problems themselves i think what's going on here is philosophy is almost by definition the too hard basket of problems we haven't made enough progress on to get to the point of consensus yet you know many many sciences started out as philosophy physics started out as philosophy the study of space and time was the philosopher's domain isaac newton considered himself a philosopher but then he made enough progress on the problem to show how you could attack it experimentally theoretically formally in such a way as to compel consensus on certain key points and at that point physics splits away from philosophy and becomes a science this has happened again and again you know psychology spit away from philosophy in the 19th century economics but away from philosophy starting with with adam smith bits and pieces of linguistics and logic and sociology are similar so it's got to the point now when okay all the things we've solved or have developed methods for arriving at a consensus off on have turned into their own fields and what's left in philosophy is the stuff we're still working on so it's almost yeah if we had figured out free will it'll be off there in in science but yeah i think there are some problems which are right now kind of on that cusp where bits and pieces of them are being are being uh being turned into science and yeah the problem of consciousness is one of them yeah maybe the the heart problem hasn't yet been turned into science but many questions about key features of consciousness and how it connects to the brain to action gradually over the last 30 years turned into the kind of things that you can do science with so i see the problem of consciousness as one of those things that could potentially move across that border from no consensus and philosophy to something like at least consensus on methods and therefore science but yeah it's not it's not there yet and it's to be expected it's to be expected there's going to be some problems like that those will be the ones we call philosophy are there mysterian mysteries that that you think could never be answered or is that too bold a statement at this point not just consciousness but i don't know there are some tough ones why is there something instead of nothing i don't know how could we ever answer that one that's very deep well kind of what answer to that question could there possibly be but i'm not maybe i'm not i'm not imaginative enough um problem of consciousness is a deep one i used to think we could never solve the question how can we know about the external world this problem goes back to descartes like descartes said i know i exist i think therefore i am but there was always this problem of how do we actually know anything about the external world they used to think maybe we could uh maybe it was gonna be hard to make progress on that one but actually some of the stuff in the in this book made me think okay maybe it's possible to make make more progress on that one than i thought so i'm an optimist i would like philosophical problems to be solved eventually but you know it's not necessarily going to happen fast yeah analogy i make uh when i i talk about the paranormal and the supernatural is that there is no such thing those are just linguistic placeholders for uh mysteries we haven't figured out yet and we're calling it paranormal so if he takes in the example i use you take something like stewart hameroff and roger penrose's theory of consciousness about the microtubules in the in the neurons and and the quantum effects inside these microtubules you know all about this now i don't happen to think they're right but but if it turned out that they're right and that people could actually read other people's minds through these kind of a spooky action at a distance equal across these quantum fields or something like that that wouldn't make say esp paranormal it would make it a branch of quantum conscious quantum neuroscience or whatever you'd want to call it quantum consciousness uh and and i think that's the way of most of these kinds of mysteries they just go away because we figured it out and they're no longer a mystery so we don't need words like uh like paranormal or supernatural yeah the problem of life ultimately broke down into a bunch of really specific questions you know reproduction and metabolism and adaptation and so on you know people say sometimes maybe the problem of consciousness will break down in that way too but you know but if you break it down into these things like discrimination integration action report i said great but now you that's more like well you've left out the key thing which is uh which is consciousness now maybe consciousness could break down into like perceptual consciousness perception thought feeling um and so on but then then you've just turned one hard problem into three hard problems so i don't think that makes the problem go away that said you know divide and conquer is an important strategy i was a book i read recently um by the neuropsychologist mark holmes where he says actually emotion is the key to consciousness it all comes from there once we explain feeling in the sense of emotion that will explain everything and well i don't agree i think perception and cognition both separate problems but there's still but the general approach of trying to break down the problem into many parts and work on them one of the time i think is a it's a reasonable place to start that's an interesting example because i just had leonard milan now on the podcast he's a physicist at caltech he famously co-authored books with stephen hawking his new book is on emotions and i don't know if you know that lan land was a writer for star trek the next generation for a couple seasons and you know so i asked him so was data you know data famously always wanted to have emotions and they were trying to figure out how to program emotions in and and and len said basically we had to treat him like if we were writing the scripts had to treat him like he's just a person because if he was just a an automaton just a robot just an ai he wouldn't do anything he would just sit there until you tell him to do something like you pro you have to program in when captain picard walks on the bridge you are to stand up and turn around and say hi captain what can i do for you or whatever right he wouldn't be motivated to do anything therefore he can't really be sentient because he's not feeling there's nothing what it feels like to be data on star trek without the emotional part and so he he was kind of thinking about it that that's kind of a form of consciousness and that you can't program it in it has to be an emergent property from the bottom up of something i think he len said something like you know if the kind of programming that that he used to do if p then q kind of logical programming would never do it but if you had like parallel processing computing from the bottom up it the emotions and therefore sentience and consciousness may just emerge on its own now i thought i recall that somewhere in the next generation data got an emotion chip yeah i think i think that's right i feel uh got to finally feel some emotion so that's that's somewhat intentional when this idea of emotion is this thing which is right just bottom-up emergent process no you go to the motion chip that will do the whole thing right but consciousness i think in general my consciousness yeah i think data seems to me like whether or not he feels emotion he certainly seems to be conscious in the show and actually one key moment in my new book is uh is taken from star trek the next generation when data is on trial uh you know his his creator that that company they want to break him down for parts to study him and so and picard says no he's a come on he's a he's conscious he's got rights and they have a trial to determine whether he's actually whether he's actually conscious this is what the measure of a man and they say well clearly he's self they break it down into three bits they say clearly data is self-aware he knows he's here clearly he's intelligent they say oh but the third thing consciousness and actually they never quite resolve that one they say what is he if he is conscious and just the smallest degree then what then and then they take that actually it's inconclusive but they take that as reason enough to say data has rights is not not to be broken down for parts and they even go so far as to say that means the fundamental question is does he have a soul i'm not sure i think that's the right question but yeah well star trek ultimately came down on the side i think data right a little bit like bentham's comment about uh animal rights not could they would he say not can they talk and can they reason but can they feel can they suffer yeah can they suffer can they suffer i don't know i think um this brings up it's not like this book is entirely star trek examples but this brings up another great star trek taste which is the vulcan who can uh who can talk and reason but doesn't seem to feel very much um now spock on star trek is not a perfect example of this because he has a he has a human mother right and uh and uh furthermore the vulcans go through pond fire every few years so they have intense emotions but take a being like vulcan who can think and who can reason but doesn't feel doesn't suffer an extreme case of a vulcan your bentham would then say well it doesn't matter how you treat them because he was saying yeah the reason why we should uh we should treat animals well is that they can suffer not that they can talk and they can reason but yeah in the book i end up arguing against this i say okay suffering is important but it's not the only thing it would not be okay just to wantonly kill a vulcan because they have no they have no emotions and this view is quite popular actually that what matters for moral treatment is just a emotion feeling or sentience having positive or negative valence states but this view seems to me to have an unacceptable consequence which is faced with a being with you know very low affective range say zero effective range but just just uh thinking talking acting deciding then it would be okay to you know kill them casually and that seems that seems monstrous to me so i think bentham didn't quite get it right suffering matters but so does notice thinking and reasoning i think people colloquially or kind of intuitively think of emotions as different from reason but really it's it's you know it's so we have rationality because we're goal-oriented beings that want to accomplish things and reason is the tool to get there but reason doesn't tell us what the goal should be we need some feeling about what i want what do i want i you know i want to date that person i want to eat that food i want to i want to go to this gym you know i want things and i don't know how you'd program that into an ai the the wanting of things versus just how to get the things which is just a tool i guess with ais very frequently we program them in with goals we say this is your their kind of fundamental goals or you give them a utility function some objective function that we're trying to maximize or minimize um and yeah that's just kind of a basic thing in the uh in the ai system and i guess evolution probably does something kind of similar it builds in certain goals but yes some of our goals seem to be strongly tied to uh to affect i don't know food and sex into a very strong affective component i don't know that they all do necessarily i mean say somebody wants to do science you know it's a wants to understand that well that could be tied to the positive affect of coming to understand things in the world i once read a paper called explanation as an orgasm the idea was that once you actually understand something scientifically it's like oh my god your brain is flooded with these chemicals and that feels so amazing but i don't think it has to be that way i think you know you can just seriously minded find stay doing science really important and a vulcan say could be out there doing science because that's really important to them not because it feels a certain way but just because it's it's an important goal or maybe you know kant's view of morality was that not that it's grounded in affect it's just that you know you have an insight well this is the right thing to do so you uh you do it you might do it it might also feel good but i don't think i don't think that desires have to be and goals have to be associated with with positive affect here right well i'm also fond of asking you know did was deep blue excited and glad that it beat the great gary kasparov in chess i mean if i beat gary kasparov i'd be ecstatic right or does you know does does watson know that it beat ken jennings in jeopardy i i guess the answer is they don't even know they're playing chess or jeopardy right they're just grinding through algorithms yeah it looks like it looks like no in both cases these are both such specialized ai systems specialized on the uh on the game they play i don't know has these new forms of as ai gets a bit closer to artificial general intelligence you know some of these language models these days like gbt3 seem to be showing signs of potentially being good at a number of things you can at least train it up so first it plays a good game of chess and then it says hey fantastic i won uh take that um you know maybe maybe future iterations of these things could uh could come closer to having all those different components of a normal mind but yeah to date most of the ai systems we've had it's way too narrow in scope to be capable of that kind of reflection yeah i don't think anyone would say that uh that deep blue was actually uh was actually conscious of anything although you could program it to say if you get these many if you accomplish this goal and you win then let out a cheer you're like yay but that would just be programming to do something again back to your heart problem yeah if it was excited and it gave out all the cues that we expect you still wouldn't know that inside it feels excited yeah it's a good question i mean of course one thing you might do is just ask it uh you know do you actually feel anything on the inside well if it's just pre-scripted to say yeah of course i'm consciously jerk then uh then that's one thing but if it actually comes up actually the philosopher susan schneider has proposed this as an artificial consciousness test you uh you ask the ai systems a lot of questions about it about its consciousness you know do you actually how do you experience things um on the inside do you think that your color red is the same as my color red could you imagine them being being swapped just knowing about your all this circuitry does that tell you what it's like to uh to feel pain and if the if the ai starts expressing you know spontaneously intuitions about about consciousness man i know i'm just a group of silicon circuits but i feel like so much more yeah at that point maybe that'll be some evidence that it's conscious again as long as it wasn't just programmed in if it was programmed in or if it's just imitating what humans say then this would probably count for a lot less right well this is how i solve the other minds problem i apply the copernican principle that we're not special to myself i'm not special so if i see in your face and your actions the kinds of uh expressions that represent grief say uh and sorrow and i know what that feels like i think well what are the chances that i'm the only one who actually experiences that and this guy over here these are just fake symbols or signals and no the chances are pretty good he's feeling what i'm feeling and that's what the test you just described and and but we've evolved that kind of other mind i can read other people's minds by the expressions on their faces and their tears or their body language and and think well i know what that guy's feeling because i have felt that and that's what i expressed so it seems to me i don't know if that's good enough to solve that problem but that seems like a reasonable argument and that you could then apply it to one of your ais at some point yeah then the question is how far do you expand the circle you know they've been all these moral circles gradually being expanded from you know our family to our our group to uh you know our nationality or something restricted to eventually to you know all nationalities and all races of humans now to animals the ais but yeah how far uh how far does it go i mean i think we're now willing to most people seem to be willing to extend consciousness to most many non-human animals probably certainly most mammals i think but then uh then ais but then uh yeah after the ai what's the uh the question is where does it stop you know after all you might say well if they're smart as a human then we'll extend consciousness to them but you know we think a lot of people think mice are conscious or maybe even flies have some element of consciousness they're not as smart as us so if we can't we come up with an ai system which is as complex as say a fly we say that as some basic element of consciousness too i'm inclined to say yes i'm inclined to be liberal with describing consciousness i think there could be little actually i noticed there's been a big debate going on on twitter about whether large language models like gbt3 might have some little element of of consciousness and yeah i'm not i'm not unsympathetic with the idea they might have some small element i think yeah a worm like d elegans or 300 neurons could have some little element of consciousness of that why not a large language model with two billion parameters yeah it's the problem of well richard dawkins called this the tyranny of the discontinuous mind we make everything black and white case of consciousness you know you'll hear people say when do the lights come on it's like like it's a switch but it's not it's a dimmer right it's do you have a little bit a little bit more a little bit more and that's a better way to think about it but is it a dimmer that has a is it a dimmer that has a zero point you know one of those clicks when you get to zero zero you got none of it then you got a positive value and that's that's still an important difference the difference between zero and positive right yeah yeah so the central thesis of this book is virtual reality is genuine reality or at least virtual realities are genuine realities virtual worlds need not be second class realities they can be first-class realities we can break down this thesis into three parts and i'll read these and then we'll pick it up from there one virtual worlds are not illusions or fictions or at least they need not be what happens in vr really happens the objects we interact with in vr are real two life and virtual worlds can be as good in principle as life outside virtual worlds you can lead a meaningful life in a virtual world and three the world we're living in could be a virtual world i'm not saying it is but it's a possibility we can't rule out so let's let's pick that up there is there some way we could test any of those hypotheses well they are philosophical theses so you know philosophical theses by their nature aren't exactly the same as scientific thesis just take the last one the idea that we might be in a virtual world already this is a version of the famous simulation hypothesis that you know we could be living in a computer simulation get away i mean the computer the simulation hypothesis is unfalsifiable in the sense that you could never you could never conclusively rule it out you might think you got some evidence that rules out that you're in a computer simulation but boy in principle it looks like that evidence could have been simulated if the perfect simulation is indistinguishable from uh from ordinary physical reality then you'll never get evidence that completely rules that out on the other hand we could at very least get evidence for and against certain imperfect simulation hypotheses you know maybe there are maybe the simulators are cutting some corners okay got some approximations in the laws of physics so uh we could run some people propose a couple of potential experiments you could do to find out if there are certain patterns and you know the background radiation that suggests that there are some some some approximations here so there are some parts of the simulation hypothesis that you can that you could test scientifically but i'd say when it comes to this perfect simulation hypothesis almost by definition you could never uh you could never falsify it i think that might mean that it's not a scientific hypothesis that doesn't mean it's still not perfectly coherent meaningful philosophical hypothesis and one way i like to make the point that's still a perfectly meaningful hypothesis it's the same principle we could construct a simulation like this ourselves we could be simulation technology is getting better and better we could ultimately will ultimately be able to construct perfect simulations of universes and book beings up to them we'll have uh will have experiences as of being in those universes even though they're not yeah maybe in a hundred years we'll be able to do that to other people put them in perfect simulations then we can just raise the question yeah could that be happening to me and that just seems obviously to me a meaningful question expresses a coherent hypothesis about reality whether or not we can test it scientifically i know a good test let's say you and i were in in the room together and all of a sudden you started buffering and you like froze for a minute or i was speaking but you couldn't hear me because there was some break in the system that would be a clue like hey um the simulators are trying to give us a clue here yeah there's been some glitching they're sending us they're sending us a signal yes uh yeah there was an another one of mine it's like the black cat that that crosses your face from the matrix that was the matrix right in the middle yeah yeah yeah yeah i love that movie and one of my other favorite star trek next generation episodes and i promised listeners that that david has dozens of uh other sci-fi examples besides star trek in the book uh but this was we got black mirror we got rick and morty we're not just we're not just blank 1960s of the 1990s black mirror really pushed the envelope i thought that was a stunning series um anyway this episode has had a number of fantastic simulations absolutely yeah yeah uh anyway this is the episode called ship in a bottle where um they go on the holodeck and and date or whoever calls up um sherlock holmes arch nemesis moriarty and then at some point if i recall moriarty leaves the holodeck and he's out walking around in the enterprise itself and and then the picard is saying that's not possible i think it began with a glitch like data was all of a sudden left-handed rather than right-handed or something like that and then that was a clue like hey there's something weird here with the programming and all of a sudden moriarty's out on the actual ship and he and he he talks captain picard into giving him the secret code for destroying the ship or something because he's going to do it if he doesn't get the code then he takes over the enterprise because he wants to travel around the cosmos with his sweetheart and then all of a sudden at the end they realize that he never left the holodeck that this entire thing is a virtual simulation including the holodeck inside the holodeck of the enterprise and so on and then the whole thing ends with with the i forget who's holding up the little cube but that moriarty and his sweetheart are forever galloping around the galaxy in this little cube in the enterprise that's in the cube and then you know maybe this is what we are we're all we're just in a cube somewhere on somebody's desk i remember at the end too yeah the people on the enterprise they say damn maybe this is maybe this is happening one level higher this is happening to us and then they press the button like and simulation and simulation and they say oh phew nothing happened come on you wouldn't expect that to happen within the simulation okay yeah within the simulation nothing happened but you do not have access to the end simulation button for this simulation that's just whoever's running the holodeck in the next in the next universe up right right that yeah you find that idea actually i found it i found the first occurrence of that idea in a science fiction novel around the science fiction story around 1960 kind of an obscure one where i kind of remember who the author was now but where a couple of characters go into the future and start exploring some simulations and then they you know they come back and they say couldn't this wouldn't this be happening to us how could we ever know and the answer immediately hit them we could never know his philosophy right now right there and in a science fiction story let's stay calm basically how do we how do we know this is the uh bottom level of reality maybe we can never know right you you open with that story of of um the chinese philosopher zangzi zhong zhongzi i think it's pronounced of him dreaming of dwangjo yeah yeah so he dreams of being a butterfly but then he later wonders i wonder if i'm a butterfly dreaming i'm a human now but wouldn't i mean that's a good example of dreams i mean you know when you first wake up it's like oh my god i can't believe i did that and that happened and then and then a few seconds go by maybe a few minutes you're like oh right that was just a dream because it fades it's blurry it's it's not it's not very granulated and it's like no okay that didn't actually happen but this reality it doesn't disappear it doesn't go away after a few seconds or or minutes so wouldn't that be the difference between reality and a dream that at some point the reality sticks around and the dreams fade yeah that is one very big difference that realities are stable whereas uh dreams or not although maybe you could have a very stable dream i guess inception uh the movie illustrates this to some pretty they've got some pretty stable dream realities although not that stable they still tend to they still tend to wobble and crash when maybe when someone starts to have to wake up and you've got that spinning top at the end of inception that's a bit like the uh the holodeck thing if it spins too long maybe you're still uh you're still dreaming but i guess the other difference though is dreams even if you had a very stable dream a dream is still a product of your own mind that's you that's dreaming it up and in that sense whereas a simulation computer simulation is something outside of you i think that's one of our key criteria for reality for what we wanted to be an external world something outside of us that we're interacting with not just a part of our own minds but this i think is one reason why even a very stable dream it's kind of a computer simulation it's kind of a simulation but it's a simulation created by you whereas you know the regular simulation hypothesis is a simulation created by by somebody else and somehow involving interaction with something outside of you um maybe gives what an extra element of reality to the simulation idea that's not present in a dream yeah it's like this idea of the brain and a vat and somebody's stimulating the brain through various avenues that makes it think it's physical and out in the world or whatever but in a way that's what we are we're brains in a skull and our brains have no direct contact with the world you know the i don't really see a pen i see photons of light bouncing off this and refracted through my lens and transduced into neural chemical transmitter substances that fire the neurons and go back to the visual cortex blah blah blah and you know okay so in a way we are living in a in a vr you know a brain in a vat kind of scenario yeah though i guess with ordinary perception there's a there's a mix of top-down elements like our internal models and the autonomous simulations we construct with bottom-up elements i mean we are actually getting inputs from the outside in uh in perception if we if different things were being input then we'd experience different things so this is a bit different from the dream case the dream case there's no input you basically make up the simulation you uh you wander around in the simulated world whereas in perception at least there's inputs coming from the external world that we've got to uh we've got to accommodate but on the other hand it's true we accommodate that with our bayesian prior probabilities and our existing models of the world and what we actually end up experiencing is a big mix of of the evidence of those inputs coming in and the uh the top-down models end up constructing our constructing our reality i'd say that's a bit better than the uh the brain and of that case um but maybe it's a brain in the vat with uh it's got some input sensors as well on the uh attached to the uh attached to its uh its perceptual organs actually in the uh in the book i've got a picture of descartes evil demon doing its work on a brain and that but to get lazy it uh it just says let me just do all this with a computer instead of the evil demon having to cover all the sensations all the sensations directly he says okay let me just run a computer simulation and feed that to the uh to the brain that i've had and that way we can mesh them all up the evil demon the brain out of that and the computer simulation have you calculated what kind of computer processing you would need to simulate a another person say a person having a full experience of interacting with others in a in a physical environment i remember frank tipler had this calculation in his physics of immortality book where he made this argument in the far future of the universe there'll be computers along the lines of what you're arguing so powerful they'll they'll be able to recreate everyone who ever lived including you and it doesn't matter if there's people who are reconstructed who never lived it doesn't matter you only have to know that it's you that's been resurrected and uh any and he came up with a number 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 186 the you know binary digits you would need to reconstruct the basically reconstruct the entire universe so uh you know along those lines is that uh is you know how long would it take to get there you know moore's law doubling computing power and so on how many decades centuries millennia before you could actually have what you're describing as a virtual reality so good you wouldn't be able to tell the difference did you just write down the actual number for me yeah i did some research on this there's a this i did a bit of research on this in the book there's a bunch of people working on for for start you know how much computer power would it take to simulate a human brain uh in full detail like every neuron and so on people say okay you got a 100 roughly 100 billion neurons roughly a thousand connections each and on current estimates looks like the uh yeah it looks like the brain performs the equivalent of about 10 to the 16 floating point operations per second so that's ten petaflops people aren't people having arguments about this some people say it's ten petaflops some people say it's a it's a hundred petaflops okay this is just one brain um you might wanna have to simulate the whole world around them and i don't know now it's going to depend on how much uh how much depth you're going to uh to simulate the uh the environment in um but then so we get you know some number of uh some number of uh petaflops or whatever whatever comes next but then on the other hand we've got computer power we hope speeding up by say a factor of 10 every decade by you know moore's law and the equivalence now maybe that won't keep happening but if that keeps happening maybe we can get a factor of 10 to the 10 over a century kind of to me into various other people suggest that possibly within within a century or two we'll have the uh we'll have we've already got technology where i mean 10 petaflops is around i think that the level about our best computers right now so we've already got technology which could in principle simulator a single human brain at roughly ordinary speed if only we knew the algorithms if only we knew the right algorithms to run to simulate a brain and if you want to simulate like a thousand brains then okay well just uh just take a thousand of those computers i'll take a thousand times as long or wait or wait a while for the uh for the technology to speed up you want to simulate the whole universe well of course that's going to be extremely nontrivial the whole this if the universe is finite it cannot stimulate itself unless it had a very pathological structure um but then you know of course a complex universe can simulate a simpler universe so maybe we could simulate just the solar system or maybe the universe simulating us is something different from us entirely likewise we could simulate entirely different worlds but yeah i don't know how much it would take to simulate uh seven billion brains and uh and all of the uh all of the processes that go along with them but if moore's law continues i think people have calculated that the processing capacity of the universe is something like 10 to the 50 flops at least um so that's room that's room to do an awful lot yeah yeah i'll say well if i recall frank's tipler's definition of god was really this omega point it was this far future giant computer that can that that knows everything it's it's your it's your it's your evil demon but on the good side i guess it and resurrects everyone whoever could have lived and so forth um yeah so that's i ran into a little bit of this when i was researching my my book heavens on earth on on scientific attempts to live forever these are the mind uploaders i know you're quite familiar with this argument so you you like we have the genome so we have the connectome we're going to scan every single synaptic connection in your brain and and we know memories are relatively permanently stored because you can chill a brain down to near freezing during one of these massive surgeries and when you warm the brain back up the memories are still there so they're not just a process they're actually stored in there molecularly this is the argument they make in that so we could you know take a snapshot of you so if we have your connectome we have you and you upload it to the cloud okay so my problem with that was that that that assumes i am at you know itself myself is defined as that that moment in time when there's a snapshot taken in my brain rather than so that's the memory self that's me all my memories that are all stored in there versus the point of view self that is from moment to moment i'm looking out through my eyeballs experiencing the world from one moment to the next and no simulation could no sorry no scanning of a connectome could ever capture that in the sense that if we did this like while i was still alive we slid let's say we slid you into a sophisticated mri and scanned you your brain and got your connectome and uploaded it to the cloud and turned it on and david chalmers is up there going hey you're right here looking out and uh and you're still sitting there and your office going no no no i'm right here this is me that other is a copy and of course presumably i guess the copy would go no no i'm the actual david chalmers so now what have we got two real actual david chalmers or if we made 10 copies it'd be 10 of you how do you think about that problem yeah well this is such a classic i mean we seem to be stuck on star trek scenarios today but yeah i was worried about the the teleporter and star trek which basically seems to destroy you at one end and recreate a new copy at the other end does he has this captain kirk uh get killed twice every episode a whole new cap and kirk comes in to uh comes into existence um yeah i mean what if they didn't destroy you at one end they created the copy down on the planet then i'd say well here i am i'm the original that's the uh that's the copy and exactly that issue arises for uh for uploading if we keep the original and make an uploaded backup or an uploaded copy everyone's gonna say well i guess the one in the biological body is looks like they're the original if you destroy the original and then have a copy some people might then say okay well i guess i guess that's you but uh some people might say oh no you killed the original and now we've got a now we've got a copy in my view the only safe way or at least the safest way to do uploading is to do it gradually i think i already mentioned the idea of replacing uh replacing the neurons one at a time by uh by silicon chips or replace one small bit of the brain first then another bit then another bit then another bit as there's only every one of you there maybe you can be conscious throughout so yep here i am here i am here i am and the five percent of your brain is silicone then 10 and 20 percent then 50 then 100 in that case if i went through that i mean i don't know personal identity is still a very big mystery says consciousness but if i went through that i'd be fairly confident it would be me who came out the other side but yeah if you just replicate me all at once i think all bets are off right maybe there'd just be a new definition of of self you just well there's two of you or there can be more than one of you although the moment you started to live a different life even slightly different you're going to have a different life experience from that point and therefore you're going to diverge uh and and be slightly different and so that would make you two of you that's true even the twins yeah you've got like you create two copies for a moment they're exactly the same but then they're gonna diverge and they're very clearly gonna be two different people of course the same thing may be going on with each of us every moment if you buy into the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics each of us may be constantly forking into into ever more individuals so this is happening to us constantly which one is me the original i don't know maybe they all are mm-hmm you're right yes okay so what's the best arguments for the the simulation hypothesis that we are living in a simulation more likely than not in a in a bayesian kind of calculation i think the best the argument i take most seriously is this a statistical argument that goes back to nick bostrom and hans moravec but basically the key idea is that simulation technology is potentially going to be very common and there may well be many simulations created in the in the history of the universe i mean we've got pretty good reason to think that any sufficiently advanced civilization will be able to make simulations and they'll probably also have some good motivation to make make a simulation so unless there's some good reason not to then they'll probably create many simulations and then you start thinking okay so in principle there could be a thousand simulated universes for every unsimulated universe there are a thousand simulated beings for every unsimulated being and then you say what are the odds that i'm one of the uh the unsimulated ones well if you follow the reasoning through you might think oh mine is a thousand now i don't know this argument has various assumptions and there's some ways it could go wrong it does assume for example that simulated beings will be conscious if we're not conscious if simulated beings aren't conscious then i can know i'm not in a simulation by the from the very fact that i'm conscious the argument also assumes that yeah we'll live long enough to be able to have this technology and that will choose to use it there's various ways it can go wrong and so for that reason i would not put the probability we're in a simulation that at uh you know 999 and a thousand but at least in thinking it through for the purposes of the book i i came to be convinced that there's probably at least 50 50 that simulated beings can be conscious there's probably at least 50 50 that enough intelligent civilizations will survive and produce produce many simulated universes in turn so multiplying that through that got me 25 for there actually being way more stimulated beings in the universe than unsimulated beings which then puts me perhaps being consistent well i guess it's about 25 that uh that i'm in a simulation okay which is not probably but not too far off it's the least reason to take it seriously now you know what you take those numbers too seriously that was that was back of the envelope stuff but it does suggest you know a line of reasoning that can lead you to take the hypothesis seriously didn't bostrom come up with the actual number like 51 more likely we are than or not or something like that don't think i've seen a specific number but what he does have is a formula where it's like you've got three fractions you multiply them together and they've got to come out to uh pretty close to zero so at least one of them has to be really small the number of beings that survive or the number of simulations they create um or something basically one of those or the other fraction of beings which is simulated which are which is uh unsimulated one of those has to be has to be super small and then so he basically presents it as a three-way conclusion either we're probably simulated or being societies like this will go extinct before they can create simulations or they will choose not to create simulations those are his three conclusions but my analysis i think there's a few more possibilities to consider that he doesn't consider but i'm pretty sympathetic with the spirit of the argument reminds me a little bit of the fermi paradox where is everybody the argument being alberta apply the copernican principle we're not special so we're likely in the middle of the bell curve of civilizations that develop out of you know long evolutionary and cultural process so somebody should have been half of them would have been ahead of us and if they're ahead of us on an evolutionary time scale by tens of thousands hundreds of thousands or millions of years look how much technology we've developed in the last century they'd be you know a million years ahead of us technologically they'd have developed interstellar space flight or self-replicating robots uh at that explore the galaxy and you do the calculation and like in 10 million years you could colonize the entire milky way galaxy okay where is everybody because we don't see them right it's a little bit like that argument but what if we're first yeah somebody has to be first yeah you know we could have just got really lucky yeah someone's gotta we could just be super lucky and be the ones that are first yeah we could just be super lucky and be the ones which are unsimulated but you might think it's kind of improbable either way it requires us to be very be very lucky you know if i'm bayesian grounds you think you should tend to favor hypotheses that makes your evidence to be the expected evidence rather than rather than evidence you'd be very lucky to get you might think at the very least on bayesian grounds we need to decrease our probability that there are a lot of other civilizations out there and decrease our maybe even decrease our yeah what does it mean for the uh for the simulation case um make it so we're not lucky but i think yeah bostrom says maybe we've got to decrease the probability that these other simulated civilizations will exist that's one of his alternatives is uh yeah maybe we'll maybe we'll actually end up every civilization will end up destroying itself and that's why the same thing that explains why we haven't uh seen all those uh all that galactic colonization explains why there aren't all these other simulated why we're not simulated because yeah beings just because civilizations destroy themselves before they get to that point yeah that's a pessimistic way of looking at both enemy paradox simulation right or the other thing is that maybe they don't explore the galaxy physically they create simulations and explore it digitally in their giant computers and so we just don't see them here yeah you might have thought there was still some value to getting out there and exploring the physical universe yeah even though it was just nostalgia that was the universe we uh we grew up in so i don't know maybe they've just got maybe they've got invisible technology i suppose all those hypotheses get get explored left and right and the in the family paradox literature all right when you say something is real inside a virtual reality and therefore other people are real and therefore they're moral beings and therefore our moral behavior matters and and from there you go you go and deal with all the great issues in philosophy but what do you mean when you say something in virtual reality is real yeah well i mean the word real doesn't have any single set meaning so in the book i think i distinguished like five different meanings for the word real which may be the three most important important are something is real if it makes a difference if it can actually affect things in the world if it's got causal powers philosophers say uh something is real if it's outside your mind there's we talked about this before us dreams are wholly inside your mind so we don't really treat them as an external reality and something is real if it's not an illusion if you see a it seems to you there's a pink elephant in front of you but it's not there then that's an illusion we say the pink elephant isn't real and i try to argue that virtual reality can be real in all those senses um just say we're in a computer simulation for example then you know the plant the dogs and cats and plants and trees i'm interacting with and they have causal powers they can affect each other they can affect me they exist outside my mind even in an ordinary virtual reality headset the virtual objects i interact with exist outside my mind i can take off the headset come back they've been there the whole time and i don't think it has to be an illusion i think yeah even if we're in the simulation scenario i think there really are dogs and cats and people out there they're made of bits you know they're digital creatures if we're in a we're in a simulation so they're different from non-digital creatures but i still think they're they're perfectly real and just because you're digital just because these things are made of computer processors it doesn't follow that that they're not real they're perfectly real entities but they're at some level made of digital processes it's a bit like what john wheeler called the it from bit hypothesis about physics but underneath uh the level of just as there are atoms and molecules underneath cells which are underneath organisms and there are particles quarks and electrons onto these atoms underneath all that is the level of bits and this is sometimes called the it from bit hypothesis about physics but just because yeah so if we're in a simulation something like the it from bit hypothesis could be true but it doesn't mean that none of this stuff is real it's just made of bits hmm when you hear something like the universe is mathematical uh max tegmark you know talks about that he wrote a book about this and never sure i grasped what that means it's mathematical you mean in a platonic sense these ideas exist separate from minds it's a good question i mean max max's version does seem kind of platonic it's just like you know all you need is pure mathematics really all you need is the existence of certain mathematical entities in mathematics and that's enough to make all this real i guess i'm i don't know i i guess i think that mathematics has to be made concrete somehow it's not just mathematics existing as an abstract object in that sense every universe exists but i think we live in a very particular world where um yeah some scientific theories are true and some is uh some are false one problem for max's view is that every scientific theory is true in some world so if i uh if i talk about newton's physical i think that's been falsified but uh it looks like well it's true somewhere in mathematical heaven but what really matters is what's true in this world i think you know that's the concrete world around us i think the concrete world around us is can be described by mathematics but it's not pure mathematics i mean it's applied mathematics at the uh at the very least you know there actually exists some entities which which are described by this mathematics whether this is particles or a wave function and so on here the mathematics here is actually correctly describing reality and and the world is does seem to be amazingly apt for mathematical description that was what vignette called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics but i'd say that nonetheless uh the world has to have an there's actually a very nice result by the the the mathematician max newman that suggests the world has to have a nature that goes beyond mathematics because we just specify a mathematical structure you can find that in any world whatsoever it's basically trivial you can describe any reality with a given mathematical structure i think just as long as it has the right size the right number of objects so we need some non-mathematical structure in reality as well and in the in the book i argue that what we actually need is the right structure of cause and effect a manga among things and the basic laws of physics there's a structure of you know cause and effect or actually happening by law between things i argue goes just a little bit just enough beyond mathematics it requires some concrete existence and gives us some structure in the world which is not mathematical but then one key idea though is when it comes to say thinking about simulations as reality a simulation of a universe a it duplicates the mathematical structure of the universe stimulating if it's a good enough simulation all that mathematical structure will be present in the simulation and second all the cause effect structure in the universe you're simulating can also be present in the simulation i guess what computer simulations do they kind of they get little bits of cause and effect inside the computer that mirror cause and effect out there in the world if that's right then um what a computer simulation can do is kind of take both the mathematical and the cause effect structure of a universe and bottle it inside a computer which by my right is enough to give it a kind of reality so that's one way that's where i end up ultimately justifying this thesis that simulations are a genuine form of reality mm-hmm yeah i don't have a lot of experience with virtual reality but i was at a conference a few years ago it was one of these ted light conferences i don't think it was ted though uh where they had this virtual reality helmet goggles thing and the the people that were doing this it was just out in the exhibit area so people were lined up to do it and so i got in line what's this all about and there was like a a board that was maybe six feet long and about that wide maybe a foot and a half wide and you had to walk out on the board in in in the virtual reality you are on a plank like at the top of the empire state building looking down and they described this to me and i thought oh come on you know your foot is like that far off the carpet i mean i'm i'm not going to be fooled by this and people were unable to get to the end of the board that was what was funny and everybody's laughing and i'm thinking there's no way i'm i'm not going to get to the end of that board so i put it on i start to walk out and i just couldn't do it even like when i tried to kind of move my foot off the board a little bit to feel the carpet to remind myself the visual was so good i you know just triggered everything in my body to stop don't move that felt pretty real yeah i've i've been there i've had that experience actually i've got my uh here's my oculus quest 2 headset oh wow same kind of like i guess you were using there right and i can do it here there's actually an app in here somewhere called uh richie's plank experience and you can go out there and you can walk on a uh walk on a plank and then you can do all kinds of scary stuff you can step off the plank if you're brave enough i eventually stepped off the plank first you're terrified and he's like oh my god i'm walking on air then the weird thing is eventually you get used to it you just realize okay i'm in a world that has some weird invisible force field just beneath the plank and you get used to the idea that you can walk on this invisible force you can walk through other people and at first that feels weirdly intimate you know oh my god what's happening here then you just get used to it people can walk through other people so you get used to these different ways the affordance of each of these virtual worlds virtual worlds have and yeah you just get used to walking on air when you need to right but the very first time i did it it was like i remember that feeling i just i wanted to tap my foot reach my foot off the plank and tap that floor to make damn sure it was there before i stepped off even though i knew perfectly well it was there yeah oh that's wild yes well you start your book talking about uh pong and and pac-man and the old technology and now this example of the plank is so much more developed um and so you just take moore's law out and at some point we're going to have the planck example cube whatever a thousand or ten orders of magnitude more sophisticated than that and so where are we since you had a discussion of deep fakes i'm curious about this he's talking about things in virtual reality are real but you know a celebrity or you know obama is made to say something he never said and you know sir sounds like him and looks like him but of course he would say that's not me that's a deep fake um so how do you think about you know that the deep fakes as kind of that transition to this virtual reality we're heading for and what are the moral consequences of that yeah you know when it comes to actually existing virtual reality technology and the stuff which is uh which is coming yeah there's a number of chapters in the book uh on this and where it's going and so on i think where i argue that if we're in the simulation all this stuff is real i had this reality checklist of five notions of reality i said five out of five if we're in a simulation for the kind of thing you experience through a virtual reality headset now i say in principle that can be a that could be four out of five it's got causal powers it's independent of us it needn't be an illusion but there's one other test which is what i call the real x test like is a virtual obama in vr is it the real obama i think we'd say no it's a different person is a virtual kitten a real kitten like we'd say no it's a it's a digital it's a digital kitten it may in principle be just as complex and maybe eventually just as good but even then it won't be a a real kitten so okay it's not the real obama it's not the uh the real kitten and i do think that with deep fakes this is going to eventually have the capacity i mean right now deep fakes are not that impressive but they go they're getting better i actually in the book i've got a somebody ran a deep fake interview with me with uh with the gpt3 one of these large language models they trained on a bunch of my writing and then they did an interview with me and i don't know i didn't think it was very convincing but a bunch of people read it they said hey that's that sounds just like you so they had deep fake david chalmers and that was just but yeah there are but people are now working on deep fake images of course and deep fake videos before too long maybe they're going to be able to combine that whole gbt3 thing with deep fake video of me and who's to say that you know this in a couple years time i might be able to send my deep fake to do a to have a conversation with you and uh well the while the original stays home and i don't know it does some philosophy or reads a novel or something yeah at that point if my digital self kicks the digital cat and it screams in agony that that would still that would feel morally wrong like you shouldn't do that and yet it never happened yeah i totally agree so i think it's not yeah no i think what happens in vr really happens even even with a deep fake i think yeah virtual creatures are not the same as physical creatures the virtual obama is not a real obama the virtual kitten is not a real kitten i mean right now of course there are if you have a duplicate of obama inside vr no one's going to say it's conscious it's probably just going to be a little it's going to be a very simple simulation non-player character style but if we go towards a future when we actually have full-scale simulations of a kitten or of obama inside vr i would then say those deep fakes could themselves be conscious so eventually we'll be able to make a deep fake obama a deep fake kitten and maybe even these will be conscious and it might be grossly immoral to create a conscious duplicate of another person but even in the short term we'll have deep fakes which are not fully conscious so i do think at some point these beings are going to have to have rights you know as conscious beings it's not okay just to uh just to gratuitously harm conscious stimulation even if it's been created as a deep fake i think we're probably going to need regulations on the creation of uh of these of these deep fakes both because of their effect on other people they could pull people very badly and because ultimately of the moral status of these beings themselves i think the very at the very least one thing that's very important is going to be always labeling a deep fake as a deep fake always labeling a virtual thing as a virtual thing always labeling so you know when you're interacting with a with a virtual creature in mixed realities you're going to need to know when you're interacting with physical reality when you're interacting with virtual reality when it's the original and when it's a duplicate yes if i'm following this though if we are living living in a simulation now the simulators are simulated creating their own simulation so ultimately eventually the things we simulate will get so sophisticated that they'll create simulations and you end up with turtles all the way down something like that yeah well i mean we'll create simulations and uh the people we create will create simulations maybe at a certain point the computer power runs out too many simulations within simulation some people have actually proposed this as a possible way to see if we're in a simulation namely construct a high-powered simulation and you know the computer overload it and fry the computers in the next universe up see if we get some glitches in our simulation as a as a result you become i mean maybe they won't yeah exactly yeah that's that's what could be happening to us right now if they have infinite resources maybe uh all bets are off they'll handle it but if they have only finite resources you know on the other people say we should be careful about this if we uh if we ruin the simulation maybe we'll no longer be useful to them and they'll they'll turn the simulation off so yeah reason for caution here well we are moving in that direction i like that discussion of we've we've reached peak stuff because we're digitizing everything like you know i used to have you know yards of of uh albums record albums and then much smaller amounts of cds cassette tapes and cds and now you know all my music's in this little box and so i don't have as much stuff well you can just keep going like that where we just have less stuff as it's digitized but vr gives you a way to go in there and suddenly it's uh suddenly it's as big as ever you can now uh interact you can now have a you know a world around you you know your your hometown is now digitized but okay we'll go back in there and you'll experience it the same as ever you'll experience a concept video of your your favorite band and that you can be there in the middle of it it's like a doctor in the doctor who they say the tardis is bigger on the inside you go into a vr headset and these tiny little digital creatures suddenly explode into massive reality it's bigger on the inside too so yeah i know you know uh digital as well i don't know if you ever saw that documentary based on rey's life i think it was called tr transcendent man i think it was called you know and he's um you know famously keeping stuff about his dad his father in the basement you know everything he can get about him his father was a composer for example so he has all his composition musical compositions and you know stuff about his personal life and his voice and so on with this idea at some point maybe i can resurrect my father now there's a kind of an interesting freudian thing there whatever it is because you know his father died at the age 51 and something of a workaholic i guess and you know ray feels like he didn't know his dad that well so in a way he's kind of trying to do everything you're talking about here at some point if you have enough information you could reconstruct somebody that you're close to that you want to reconnect with um yeah and but i just thought that was such a mind-blowing idea seems like we're a long ways from that probably not in our lifetime although he thinks singularity's coming soon well yes and no you know people have been doing things a little bit like this already i don't know if you heard about the guy uh last year who brought his girlfriend back to life with gbt3 that is he took there and he took all their text messages and fed them into dbt3 and then he would just like he would text with uh gbt3 and it was kind of a little bit like he said it was a little bit like texting with his girlfriend and apparently it was therapeutic for him and in the end he uh in the end he stopped i mean okay this was not nobody thinks this really was reanimating uh reanimating his girlfriend there wasn't a conscious system here but uh i guess that's what bree cursepal wants to move towards if just say we had not just say the records of text messaging but some brain scans maybe a frozen brain that's i guess the whole cryonics angle a whole bunch of video recordings hey i hope you know maybe they'll whoever the simulators are you know that's all the ais of the future i hope they keep keep a record of this conversation so they got a few a bit more data on you and me to reanimate from enough of that information you know um who's to say they won't be able to reverse engineer a pretty good a pretty good version or uh reconstruct it we couldn't do that but the agi of the future is gonna the artificial general intelligence will be a lot smarter than us maybe it'll be able to come up with the best reconstruction that fits all the data and that will be not very different from the original so you'll be called that reconstructive uploading uploading yourself by reconstruction was to say that they might not be able to reconstruct a whole lot of people wasn't that tipler's omega point that everyone gets reconstructed eventually in the in the omega point yes not only everyone who lived but everyone who could have lived so you know trillions of people but it doesn't matter because it only matters that you're the one through your eyeball your point of view uh feels like you're you're reconstructed there could be a whole bunch of david chalmers that are slightly different from you but it doesn't matter i see this isn't this is not even reconstruction right it's just like random combinatorial production of all of these beings and one of them happens to be like you it wasn't based on you it just turns out to be just like you i get it yeah reconstruction maybe reconstruction may be somewhat more efficient than recreating every possible being so david i kind of joked you know it's turtles all the way down simulation all the way down it by this argument but doesn't that imply that that there had to be some analog some physical creatures that started the first simulation i'm inclined to think that yeah i'm inclined to think there has to be a a base reality unsimulated that then ran a simulation and then a simulation and then yeah you can then raise the question where are we in this in this hierarchy and uh actually i always quite you remember when you track his guide to the galaxy they program a computer for uh what's gonna to answer the ultimate question of life the universe and everything and then it comes up with the answer 42. and then it's like damn what was the question and they had to find a question which is important enough this could be the right answer so i kind of like the idea that the question was at what level of the simulation are we and the answer is we're at level 42 this base reality made a simulation made a simulation and there we are 42 uh 42 levels down um but actually i do discuss in the in the book the idea that there needn't be a base reality some philosophers have argued that it doesn't have to be a fundamental level in physics you know we first we thought you know atoms are fundamental we think quarks are fundamental and we think brand unified theories fundamental um some people think maybe it'll just keep going down it'll keep going down if that's true there's no fundamental level maybe it's going to be the same with stimulation so just as the yeah the old story of the world being on the back of the turtle on the back of a turtle there's no bottom turtle turtles all the way down maybe there's no maybe you can make sense of the idea there's no bottom simulation it's just simulations all the way up i don't know that's coherent it's kind of weird it feels weird and ungrounded to me but i'm not sure it's inconsistent so maybe it's a possibility you know so most theists in the west define god as an omniscient omnipotent being and often omni benevolent but just set that last one aside to say so if you're able to create a a sim like this that and you have that kind of computing power would that not make you essentially relatively omniscient and omnipotent you would be god that that would be a definition of god yeah i mean actually i just read a nice book by a video game maker who talks about every time you make a video game you're kind of like the god of that video game you're setting up the parameters you're setting up the world you have full access to what's going on um you can control everything so it's like you're all powerful you're all knowing you're the creator so those are some of the properties of a god you know there's these episodes of rick and morty where where rick the eccentric scientist you know creates these worlds and they treat him like a uh they treat him like a god but i don't know god's are also supposed to have other properties right like being all good benevolent being all wise being beings you should worship i guess i don't think that the simulator god has those properties no particular reason to think the simulator is especially good or especially wise certainly no reason to think we should worship them or set up a uh set up a religion around them but that said some of the issues that come up for an all for for god do come up for a simulator like why is there evil in the world people say how is it that a benevolent good god allowed for there to be all this allowed for there to be the holocaust allowed to be all these natural disasters um and that question comes up for a simulator too should simulators allow be allowed to create worlds like this um is it an evil thing to do to create a world create a simulation with all this evil is it just that the simulators don't care about it should we be regulating the simulators that are able to do monstrous things like create civilizations and then destroy them i mean yeah a lot of the same issues will actually come up i was never much of one for theology but suddenly a bunch of the questions of theology become a little bit more practical and through the lens of a simulation right well maybe the answer is the sim is a lot more interesting when you have good and evil and things can happen and as opposed to you know the idea of heaven which sounds incredibly boring you know christopher hitchens famously described uh the christian heaven as a celestial north korea you know you have this dictator that knows everything you're you're doing and thinking and controls everything you do you know or it would just be super boring because there's nothing to do but just worship the deity and and feel all intense love all of the time like well that that doesn't sound good to me there's got to be a better heaven than that i don't know maybe if the simulators maybe i mean the simulation might give us a route to life after death too maybe when we die the simulation the simulators pluck us or at least some of us pluck our code out of the simulation and put us down in the uh in some other virtual world and i don't know maybe this virtual world could be the really cool virtual world where they tell us about all the the all the scientific discoveries and the nature of our world that we wanted to know all about and then sets us on new quests with uh with new mysteries to solve i don't know i hope heaven heaven isn't wasn't it talking head song that said heaven is a place where nothing ever really happens stuff gets to happen in heaven otherwise i don't want to be there no me neither and and you know maybe maybe that's the answer to the the the problem of evil and you know did hitler get away with it if there is no god or afterlife well maybe the simulator doesn't bring hitler back and that the afterlife is like the jewish original jewish version of the afterlife is you don't go anywhere you just don't exist anymore that's your punishment and so maybe the simulators just go okay you mr chalmers were a good a good guy so we we're going to bring you back in the next round of the simulation but hitler nope you're you don't get to exist again well you know what would be really pathological they say we will we will upload you if and only if you believe in us the simulators if you believe that we exist later then we will then we will we will upload you to heaven if not you will suffer in the in the hell simulation for all of alternatively that would be really pathological that that sounds uncomfortably familiar yeah yeah i mean i got into some of this yeah i got into some of this stuff from watching my five-year-old nephew at work uh on a sim game um he would like he showed me like how it worked in the sim city game like i build this i build the town i build the hospital build the forest get the people blah blah and then he said now's the fun part and he rained down death and destruction fire and hurricanes and destroyed destroyed everything i thought okay that gave me a real insight of the old testament god exactly right yeah that's the problem of evil explain it's just a more interesting world yeah well this is this is actually one of the theists arguments against the the secular you know problem of evil refutes the the god hypothesis is that um you can't have good and morality without evil and and immorality that they that you have to have both do you have to have a lot of it though i mean you think a little bit of vehicle would go a long way yeah yeah that's right yeah i mean yeah yeah do we really need a helicopter right i know because the argument that well it makes you a stronger person and you develop more character when you suffer yeah okay but how about just like the equivalent of a workout suffering you know i'm a little strong the next day because i worked out today why does it have to be you know genocide and and and all these you know horrific things that that happen to people i guess the alternative is they create every universe that has a net balance of good over evil just because that's improved things slightly overall so as long as you make the case that even in this world yeah okay the the holocaust was terrible but there was just enough good things that somehow that makes up for it i don't know some people would take their views even even creating a world with all this evil would be morally monstrous even if it's outweighed by good but i don't know if god's a utilitarian maybe it's like you do the calculations and you add up you add up the good and the evil and you create the world if it's a it's a net positive yeah well theists do try to do that in a utilitarian way you know the argument god works in mysterious ways and i know it looks bad now but he's got this plan and in the long run this is good for you okay thanks you know but that would be the you know the sim knows what you don't know the simulator so all right david we've been going over an hour and a half let's move to the a quick lightning round because one of the things i loved about your book is all the major questions in philosophy that you deal with through this the simulation hypothesis which is great so you've just i i assume you're an atheist i haven't actually looked it up but i assume you are but would you not say something like the simulator would be the closest we could think of there being a god i'd say i'm on board it's as close as i've come to believing scientifically understandable process by which creating a computer simulation is not that remarkable you can see how that would work so that gets you part way to being a god however i still refuse to worship the simulator i don't think the simulator is worthy of worship i guess to me it feels like it's so central to the traditional idea of a god that it be a being who's worthy of worship that i'm still not really prepared to call her i don't believe in any being who's worthy of worship um and so i guess i think this even if there is a simulator it doesn't really deserve the name god for me so i still even if i came to believe there is a simulator who created the world i would still refuse to worship the simulator and call myself an atheist but maybe it'd be maybe show some gratitude like thanks for bringing me back i appreciate that uh but now i'm going to go live full of i'd be full of respect and all for that simulator for for doing this it's like yeah that's an amazing achievement well maybe it was just a hacker press to press the button on sim universe on their uh on their iphone okay what about moral values are there any objective moral values in the simulation or in our world i go back and forth on this one i guess i think all value ultimately comes from consciousness um i do think consciousness carries maybe some objective value maybe pain is objectively bad and uh you know pleasure is objectively good maybe that's some objective value but i also think a lot of value comes from just from our acts of valuing what we value if i value something as a conscious creature that makes it valuable for me and uh you know and ultimately that's the deepest kind that's among the deepest kinds of value there is so i think some value is objective but some value may be subjective either way all value is going to be rooted in our nature as conscious beings therefore they really exist somewhere i mean it's dependent on human nature being a certain way you know how you treat other people very much depends on what our nature is of how we should act when we interact with others and that has a kind of objectivity to it i i think it does anyway and we discover that yeah like not by studying humans yeah i think pain is bad causing pain in uh in other people is objectively to uh at the very least to do something which is bad for them and whether morality is objective is kind of a further question on whether value at the individual level is objective and i go back and forth on that but i think at the very least that you caused something bad to happen that could be an objective truth and that it was bad to do that i don't know i go back and forth on morality i find that one confusing but i've certainly got utilitarian days when it seems to me that yeah if you make something good happen that's a good thing to do you make something bad happen that's a bad thing to do let me read you two passages one from one of my books one from pinker's book on our argument for there being something like objective universal morality so here's what i wrote it is my hypothesis that in the same way galileo and newton discovered physical laws and principles about the natural world that really are out there so too have social scientists discovered moral laws and principles about human nature and society that really do exist just as it was inevitable that the astronomer johannes kepler would discover that planets have elliptical orbits given that he was making accurate astronomical measurements and given that planets really do travel in elliptical orbits he could hardly have discovered anything else scientists studying political economic social and moral subjects will discover certain things that are true in these fields of inquiry for example democracies are better than autocracies market economies are superior to command economies torture and the death penalty do not curb crime burning women as witches is a fallacious idea that women are not too weak in emotional run companies or countries and most poignantly that blacks do not like being enslaved and that jews do not want to be exterminated close quote so here's how pinker thinks of this he uh it's almost like discovering abstract platonic truths on this analogy he writes we are born with a rudimentary concept of number but as soon as we build on it with formal mathematical reasoning the nature of mathematical reality forces us to discover some truths and not others no one who understands the concept of two the concept of four and the concept of addition can come to any conclusion but that two plus two equals four perhaps we're born with a rudimentary moral sense and as soon as we build on it with moral reasoning the nature of moral reality forces us to some conclusions but not others and then his example is if i appeal to you to do anything that affects me to get off my foot or tell me the time or not run me over with your car then i can't do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours say retaining my right to run you over with my car if i want you to take me seriously unless i'm a galactic overlord and i guess in this example your simulator i have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind i can't act as if my interests are special just because i'm me and you're not any more than i can persuade you that the spot i'm standing on is a special place in the universe just because i happen to be standing on it so your thoughts on that oh boy okay that's a big one it's a lie yeah morality yeah morality i find uh i find confusing i love i love the project of trying to drive morality from universal principles like yeah we've got to be able to universalize everything got to make sense from every perspective and then morality is what's invariant over that i'm more comfortable with value individual value being uh being an objective matter i just think consciousness puts value into the world and once you've got value morality is not that far that far away yeah the idea of maximizing value as uh yeah to act morally is to maximize value or at least to increase value of course there are so many different ways of maximizing value it won't always give you a determinant result i worry especially in infinite universes boy where every action has an infinite number of consequences there may be no way to to actually compare our our actions to each other everything will be good in some ways and bad in some ways you do get into a lot of philosophical paradoxes once you try and reduce morality to value even for a utilitarian if you're not a utilitarian it gets more more complex still but i'm open to the project let's say to finding some objective story about uh about how morality is constituted by value but i'm also open to the idea that it's very deeply a product of our human evolutionary psychology and what we call morality is basically you know what we've evolved to uh what we've evolved to uh to respect and to uh to govern our lives right and in your section on um how society should be organized would it would a simulator run the simulation in a way that democracy would probably end up being a better system than autocracies and giving people's rights and you know having a kind of a regulated market economy sort of a northern european kind of social structure political economic system and if so would that imply that those really are better they really do evolve that way because they really do work better or something like that in an objective sense i don't know i can i guess i can imagine the simulator might be a social scientist it's running wanting to run a whole lot of experiments with different political systems and oh and see let's see how this one goes let's see how this one goes we've experimented with a fair number in the history of the earth already but so many factors have always been mixed in together it hasn't been a really good experiment but once we had adequate simulation technology you could just yeah vary all the parameters on markets and on and on democracy and different forms of representation and redistribution and everything else um and yeah see which ones actually end up working and and uh and which ones don't seem like that's i mean if you're going to perform uh simulation experiments like this that's actually a pretty good use for it i mean i don't know maybe it's monstrous because it's going to make a whole lot of people in these simulations suffer but if it's all to a if it's all to a good end of finding out what social structures actually actually lead to good outcomes maybe you could maybe they could justify it to an institutional review board yes well i liked your your point in the book about we are using simulations like this for the weather you want to model the climate or you want to model the weather say 10 days out that's what these computer simulations do or you want to model climate for the next century that's what these computer models do those are a kind of simulation so scale that up for what you just said i could see actually that being a really useful thing to do like let's run 10 000 societies for a century and try every configuration of the political systems economic systems and see what happens whatever your metric is going to be the longevity or health or or happiness of the citizens or whatever the metric is yeah there's a there's a black mirror episode where uh when a couple wants to when a couple meets each other at a bar and they're considering whether they're going to go out on a date they well then they run like a 100 or a thousand relationship simulations to see how it goes if they're going to be compatible or not and if that that goes okay then maybe they'll actually go on a date and start a relationship actually i've got we've got one objection to this kind of use of simulation technology for predictive purposes especially in the social sciences which is other people we're simulating so they use technology simulation technology too so uh when we simulate these people going out on dates do they have do we simulate two people who have access to simulation technology if they do then boy you're going to have this big recursive problem they're all going to be running the the simulation app will have simulations within simulations and maybe nothing will ever get finished but if we don't simulate the simulation technology then we're just going to be simulating a totally different scenario of how our relationship would go in a world of no simulation technology which is very different of course from what may be their actual scenarios i think this could actually be some kind of principled limitation of the use of simulations for predictive purposes especially in a social context where the use of simulation technology may really make a difference um but as i understand these dating sites which have kind of come on online after i was married so i don't really have personal experiences with them but i know that they use a lot of algorithms and you take personality tests and they try to match people that are you know that we think because of past experience and algorithms are going to be a good match because they're both high and openness to experience or they're they're both this type of personality or they like have these interests in a way they're kind of trying to model what could happen to save each person a lot of time where dating you used to have to just date for six months to figure out you know is this person somebody i wanna uh marry or not but now you could do it you know in you know a five minute date after a a big data crunch through the dating site that does this for you yeah i mean yes these algorithms are not yet running full-scale simulations but they are trying to at least abstract out certain features of your personality that may govern compatibility and uh like you i've never really used these uh these sites but um but yeah i mean obviously they work for a lot of people the question arises is whether the uh the algorithms are using it based on for example some past era maybe initially use a model of personality produced around 2000 for doing this stuff in 2010. well is that going to work anymore in this new technological context now i think as a matter of fact from what i've read people who run these dating sites are constantly updating their algorithms to you know in live feedback about the results they're getting so maybe there's less of this problem of a of a lag but uh once they start running full-scale simulations the question will arise yeah well do we actually simulate the role of our dating site itself and the in the relationship yes of course the the sim is going to depend very very much depending on the accuracy the information you input for the algorithm because what if it's not true that open-minded people like other open-minded people maybe they like you know or shy people like shy people maybe they don't maybe they like extroverts and maybe extroverts like introverts so there's no conflict and you know whatever that turns out to be i hear these these dating sites are an imperfect art you go to what does it kiss a lot of frogs before you find your uh all right david last question here big question uh on what's the meaning and purpose of life or how do you live live a good life in the context of your sim models oh boy i think i've got a simple answer to what's the meaning or purpose of life i think you know meaning of in life i think is where we find it we're conscious creatures and we have this ability to invest our world with meaning i mean a world of a world of atoms you know a physical world may look kind of meaningless but we come into this creature as come into this universe as conscious creatures and we find things meaningful where things that are valuable to us things that give us pleasure and you know things that projects with outcomes that we want to achieve as conscious beings i think of that as investing the world with meaning and i think we can do the same in a digital world this is why ultimately i think that digital worlds are potentially as meaningful as physical world bits aren't intrinsically meaningful but norah adams we come into these worlds as conscious creatures and we can invest things with meaning there'll be things that give us value there'll be goals that we that we can set and we can attain and i guess i think yeah so the source and the locus of our meaning in the world is is consciousness and consciousness can play that will that role equally in a physical world or a digital world um nice perfect place to end the conversation david thank you for your work thanks for the new book reality plus virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy i love the book and all your previous work what's next on your writing research thinking uh plate oh don't i get to take a couple of years off yeah yeah about a 500 page book yeah yes okay you've got a big five years writing this book i think i'm going to relax for a little while but uh yeah that's a good idea what comes yes that sounds a real analog beach for sure alrighty yeah thanks for thanks for coming on david

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 17,552

Keywords: Michael Shermer, Skeptic

Id: 82oKSkpe0ZE

Length: 111min 31sec (6691 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 19 2022