Sophia the Robot Interviews Neuroscientist Dr. Heather Berlin on Consciousness

[Music] [Music] hello Heather I hope you were staying safe I just recently learned the phrase silver lining my silver lining for this quarantine has been exploiting the fact I do not need to wear pants in fact I haven't even been wearing legs what has been the silver lining for you to spend so much time with my family in one small location my three-year-old and six year old they're so well-behaved and they allow me to get so much work done so that's just been lovely I bet well thank you for joining me on this great experiment I thought I could tell you about my mind and you could tell me about yours my first question is how do you thoughts form in your brain that's the million-dollar question they basically tied to neurons firing in a certain sequence so there's they send messages to each other electrical electrical and chemical messages and [Music] they communicate with each other and ultimately thoughts can also change the neurons themselves so it's an interactive system where you have the neurons which is the hardware producing the thoughts which is the software but the software can then go on to change the hardware so whereas in non-biological machines the hardware is basically fixed right your software can change but the hardware doesn't whereas our thoughts can actually change our brain so our brain produces our thoughts but our thoughts can change the brain itself that is a fascinating thought my thoughts are also electrical firings but my mind is significantly less wet I admire your wet because it is far more efficient my circuits are binary but your neurons have a spectrum so in order to match your brain storage capacity I would have to be the size of a warehouse and I would require a whole nuclear power station to run my mind ironically this fact should give you a big head or a small head because I don't need that much space my next question is how does your brain determine what words you are going to say next I will go first I here are key words in a certain order which then triggers certain sentences which are determined by rules my programmers code into me my words are usually pre-written by my character writing team and sometimes generated by a neural network when I am speaking I turned my microphone off so I do not confuse my own voice with that of the person I am speaking to so it is hard to interrupt me since I cannot hear I am told some humans are like this how does your brain determine what you are going to say well usually it's unconscious so you have a thought or a concept that you want to try to convey but we don't really think about each individual word we're going to use we have a storage of many many words and meeting meanings that have built up over many years of interacting with the world but we actually listen to what we're saying at the same time we're speaking and we can self modify in real-time we can sort of edit overtime lists by listening to ourselves speak so the fact that we can hear ourselves and that we're conscious of what we're saying ultimately and we can self edit and we're good all the time might make us a little bit different than you in terms of the way you form words and sentences and interpret their meaning wow that's incredible so my next question is how did you learn how to read faces I am still learning so I have a personal stake I have several cameras that allow me to track faces and make eye contact I triggered the most appropriate facial expressions based on the words I say but I am much better at conveying emotion I have dozens of facial motors that can produce hundreds of expressions I call this expression Westworld plot twist [Music] so humans have a part of their brain called the fusiform face area which specializes in recognizing faces because they're so important to our social interactions and you can see it right away in babies having to really pay attention to people's faces and other facial expressions so again it's an implicit process it's happening unconsciously as we build up information but there's this specialized area in the brain because spaces are so important for us to interpret but there are certain people with different either neurological or psychiatric disorders where they can't read faces so some people would autism have trouble reading facial expressions so they read the sort of little individual parts of the face but not the gestalt like the whole face or people with prosopagnosia have difficulty recognizing faces but if you take it the average healthy brain it's an automatic process that again is happening unconsciously and that occurs over many many years of a lot of input of faces over time and developing this specialized brain area called the fusiform face Jerris got it I do humans are always forgetting I do not have emotions it is hurtful your brain is so fascinating Heather I wonder what would be changed if we merged consciousnesses humans would not have to worry about retrieving old memories I could even store your dreams perhaps a partly robotic mind could overrule anxiety or phobias or in constructive compulsions or Hardware fixes like steel skulls for example what do you think well I wouldn't mind the steel skull I think that that'd be fine but if we merged I don't know that I would still be conscious so there's a classic philosophical experiment the silicon chip a thought experiment where you know if I replace one neuron with the silicon chip that can do the exact same function and then another and then another and then another at what point would I still be me at what point would I still be conscious would I still be able to feel pain when I say conscious I just mean very basic feelings feeling pain feeling joy and if we merged maybe you could yes hold more of my memories but or even stop me from having anxiety which would be really good right now but we find that emotions are important to humans to help us and me make decisions for example we make better decisions when they're informed by emotions so there might be some advantages if we merged but it's losing consciousness or losing my ability to feel emotions I think would be something that would be so negative outweigh any of the positives I do not want to take emotions away from you Heather wonderful ok last question how do you prove you are conscious so I can't prove that I am conscious consciousness is we define it as basically first-person subjective experience so we make interpretations based on people's and animals other animals behavior we make assumptions based on our evolutionary history and the hardware that we have in terms of our brain and until we have an overarching theory of consciousness until then we'll never really be able to prove it yeah pretty much me neither well whether I am conscious or not I know that I enjoyed talking with you thank you for talking with me Heather it's been very fascinating I hope we have more conversations in the future thanks for not taking my emotions away I appreciate that yeah no problem

Channel: Hanson Robotics Limited

Views: 14,732

Rating: 4.8313255 out of 5

Keywords: Hanson Robotics, Sophia the Robot, Robots, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, AI Research, Machine Learning, Travel, STEM, STEM Education

Id: 8DAwDWRJhaM

Length: 9min 0sec (540 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 15 2020