Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk, special edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me Chuck Knight, Chuck Baby. Hey, what's happening? All right, how you doing, sir? I'm good, thank you. StarTalk Radio Riley, yeah, thank you. Love to have you as my co-host here. It's pleasure. Yeah, we're doing yet another episode on Consciousness. Yeah, when will we be done?
When we know what we need to know. And so this could be going on for a while. I mean, it's not just consciousness, it's consciousness and reality. And our understanding and interpretation of reality. Exactly. Soated through our consciousness. Totally. So what show did you cook up today? All right, so we're heading for in a space, rather than out of space. In a space, I love it. And consciousness, as we've just discussed. We continually think of it as, I suppose, a precious entity.
We feel like we're above others on the planet. I'm going to be in just... Yes, see that's your cat. What I was going to say. Don't start me on catitude. Please don't go there. Yeah, we're in charge of the cats. Is the office... Yeah, I mean, for hundreds and thousands of years, the greatest thinkers have grappled with it. They've grappled with each other as regards to explaining it. There are handful of theories in existence, but apparently it's a hard problem, which is a clue.
So what is consciousness? What makes it... Once we've conquered that particular mountain, we will dive down a rabbit hole of simulation, theory, singularity and virtual reality. It's going to be fun. And to join us, we have Professor of Philosophy and Neuroscience at NYU. He is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist. Also an author, Reality Plus and the conscious mind are two of his many books.
He gave us phrases, the hard problem of consciousness and philosophical zombies along the way. Please, David Chalmers. David, welcome back to Star Talk. And you just down the street at NYU, New York University. Just to ride up here on the sea train. Welcome. It's implicitly. Welcome. Now why do we need you to say that consciousness is a hard problem? Isn't that just obvious? So why do we need a decorated professor of the field to assert that? Totally obvious.
And when I first said this, I just said, okay, this is just giving the thing a labels that everybody knows, but who was to guess that the label would catch on? Sometimes it's just helpful to say the obvious. Actually the idea that consciousness poses a hard problem, we were talking about Newton before the show. You can actually find it in Newton. At one point he says, the way that Chalmers mix optically and produce a certain experience is not so easy. This is not so easy. E-A-S-I-E.
And he says the way we understand this stuff objectively and say, the brain processes visual inputs. But then it gives you the experience of a color. That amazing pink shirt. Yeah, go coral. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Where does that experience of pink come from? As Newton said, not so easy. King Samin. King Samin. King Samin. You'd teach me too. This kind of King Samin. Right. Yeah, wild caught. Yeah, wild caught. Reduce me to food stock. Where does the experience of King Samin come from?
In vision, that is what Newton said. Not so easy. Okay, so David, had you instead called it the easy problem of consciousness? Maybe we would have all figured it out by now. Well, the easy problems were the problems of things you do. Like how people respond, what they say, I can say. I can say it. Put it on the table. Subjective experience. This is anything you experience directly from the first person point of view. I think of it like the inner movie of the mind.
It's a movie, but it's got images and sounds like a regular movie, but it's got sensations of your body. It's got smell. It's got taste. It's got emotions. It's got thinking all running through this inner soundtrack of your mind. And that allows your consciousness to be distinct and unique from others, because the world as you receive it, could be very different from how someone else receives that very same world. Sounds like a problem. Sounds like a problem to me.
But is this where biases come in in the terms of how you receive and accept any information that comes to you? We all experience it subjectively in a different way. Some things may be in common, maybe when we look at an image, the shape, maybe an experience of that rectangle might be the same, but the emotions that it brings on may be totally different for me and for you. Now suppose we're running that same input through a measurement device, and then the device comes up with a conclusion.
And no matter how you put the information through, it reaches the same conclusion. Yet somehow when we look at it, we see something different. Who do you trust them? The person or the device? Yeah. I don't know if the device is like specialized. It's a thermometer. It says 79 degrees. I'm going with the device. I'm going with the device too. I'm just wasting together here. I'm going with the device. Me too. You tell me at 79 degrees, no, I'm going to trust a thermometer.
There's a famous quote, no science achieves maturity without a system of measurement. And we do not have the measurement system for consciousness, actually. Which renders it immature scientifically relative to other fields, where we have petri dishes and methods and tools. So you have a hard problem. Oh my God. I just called the worst part. Oh my God. I did it. I'm not doing it that.
You know, years ago I went along to a conference and told everyone that I had invented a measuring device for consciousness, the consciousness meter, made with a combination of neuromorphic engineering, transpersonal psychology and quantum gravity. Then I pulled out my consciousness meter and it looked kind of like a hair dryer. That was what we were back in the 90s. I would have called bullshit on your second half of that first sentence. I applaud you, sir. So where about the plasma meter?
So where about in the brain do you think we are fermenting this consciousness? Well, this is one of the big debates which is going on. What are the neural correlates of consciousness? Which is the bit of the brain which is active in a way which is most directly connected to your consciousness.
And there's actually even among neuroscientists, there's a very lively debate between people who think it's in this say for visual consciousness, people who think it's in the sensory areas towards the back of the brain. Exactly. Visual cortex back there are prefrontal cortex, front of the brain. The area is associated more with thinking and judgment. What's the difference between your prefrontal cortex and your frontal cortex? Frontal cortex is a little bit more.
It's a little less front than the prefrontal cortex. Okay. When we look at brain structures compared among other animals, let's say mammals, to keep it in the family. Presumably, we have a bigger frontal cortex than other mammals. And we can see what's going on in that. And thereby decide that we have certain capacity for thought that other animals do not. Is that a fair say?
Yeah. And people who put consciousness in prefrontal cortex are probably going to say that consciousness is not so widespread in the animal kingdom. The animal kingdom. Whereas people who think it's in the sensory cortices, we get those throughout the animal kingdom. So maybe it's a fish conscious. Well, fish don't have any kind of developed prefrontal cortex.
Yeah. I'm going to say that judging from the look in their eye, I'm going to go out on a limb and say no. They know when a shell knocks around. Well, that's true. Well, I have a question. Can you tell me what creates consciousness? Is it emergent in our genetic code?
I mean emergent in the evo biosense where you have an organism that has certain properties, but only either en masse with other animals like flocking of birds or some other feature that was not really intended, it just emerged from other features that were necessary for survival. So is consciousness emergent or do you think it specifically evolved? Oh, in some sense emergent, I mean this word emergent gets used in so many different ways and sometimes it's like magic word.
It's like I don't understand it. I think we don't know. It's emergent. I like magic words. I mean, I'm magic word for the day. In some sense, consciousness clearly emerges from the brain. You get a brain that develops and consciousness comes along. As the brain develops, consciousness gets more and more complex. So there's some kind of connection there. But can we tell a story about how consciousness was selected for in evolution? No one has a good answer to that right now.
There are ideas out there. Yeah, we needed consciousness for control, for decision making, for reflection. But so far, no one has told a good story about why you need to have consciousness to do those things. Why couldn't a big complicated computer do that without consciousness? Is it really consciousness or are we talking about levels of consciousness? Because I think that there are definitely animals that have consciousness. I mean, a dog, for instance, you see it has emotion.
You see that it has a reaction to sensory data, just like we do. You see that it responds to commands and pain and everything. But you look at a baby and if you didn't know any, if you never saw a baby before and you saw this thing, this glob of human thing to sit near, like making these crazy faces, has no control of its limbs or you wouldn't necessarily say, well, that's a conscious thing. It's actually thinking about anything. You know, you know, you were totally right.
There are levels of consciousness in babies and we're still arguing about what they are. I mean, a long time ago, people used to not give anesthetics to babies when they were getting circumcised because they thought they couldn't feel pain. Tell me about it. I remember that day, well, sir. These days, we think babies feel pain and we think they can have some basic visual experience, especially my wife, who works on this stuff. Claudia Pazos is a leading expert on consciousness and infants.
There's still an argument, like, kind of, baby have the experience of thinking, of deciding, of agency. The general moral from what I can tell for the last few years is babies are a whole lot more sophisticated than we thought they were. Isn't that true for every single animal that we've studied in more depth than in the past? We are recovering greater levels of neuro complexity in their conduct behavior that any previous generation thought that true for every animal.
Yeah, this is absolutely the trend to say over the years, we have thought more and more animals are more and more cognitively complex. Right. As to the question of whether that conscious, we used to think, okay, humans, a few primates, you know, monkeys, apes. These days it's like pretty much every mammal, probably birds, probably reptile, birds, arguing about fish and octopus. It sounds like we're clawing away out of our own ego. Right. How about that?
But the singularity of our presence in the animal kingdom is being challenged by further research into the conductive animals. You've seen that YouTube video of the Magpie bird, where it's got the container of water that's filled up to the top and it drinks the water until it can't reach the water anymore. It walks away, comes back with a pebble, drops the pebble into raised level of water. And then it drinks. Right. And it does it three or four times.
So it has a clear understanding of volume displacement. It has a clear understanding of Archimedes and principles. Hello, I'm Vicki Brogallon and I support Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Nailed Grass Tyson. But go back to Chuck's point about levels of consciousness. When we sleep. Yeah. When we're unconscious. When we're in a coma. And if you put us under general anesthetic, do we not have varying levels of consciousness at different times?
The idea behind the anesthetic is to wipe out consciousness completely. And does it? Very hard to test whether it absolutely does this. At one point in the 1970s, for example, people put some kind of rubber band around the arm. So the anesthetic didn't make it that far. And then they said, if you hear me, please move your hand and what do you know? The hand could move. So then it's like that kind of anesthetic was maybe working partly just to paralyze you.
These days, okay, they work a lot harder to knock out, not just action, not just pain and awareness. But it's hard to know that it's gone for sure. Even when we're asleep, when we're dreaming, there's certainly a level of consciousness. Absolutely. Of consciousness there. Isn't our consciousness altered in our dreams? It's a different state of consciousness for sure. Psychedelics, they alter your consciousness meditation. It alters your consciousness. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely.
I'm totally glad we have science to obtain an objective reality of the world. If it all depends on the human brain, forget it. We'd still be in the caves. Did I just insult your entire field? No, it's okay. Okay. But we can study what's different in the brain and these different states of consciousness. And that is one of the most exciting advances over the last 30 years. I mean, psychedelics used to just be, oh my god, it's all just, you know, mystical, wondrousness now.
Yeah. We can actually see what's happening in the brain when you take a psychedelic. So David, you published a paper recently on AI and consciousness. What was that? Yeah. I got invited to give a talk actually to all the AI people at the big annual conference on this controversial issue of whether current AI systems could be conscious. I called it, could a large language model be conscious? And I argued that even if it's my like, chat challenge, exactly. Yeah, yeah.
And I argued probably they're not conscious right now, but give it 10 years and they may well be. Yeah, or they're conscious right now and they're just not letting us know. Yeah. Wait a minute. Just wait a minute. Just take it over, babe. Yeah. What are we if we don't have consciousness, but we're still doing and being and you've coined the French philosophical zombies, is that what that's going to mean? Yeah, I think therefore I brains.
This is the philosophical thought experiment about a creature which is as much like us as possible, but lacks consciousness entirely. Not quite like the zombies in the Hollywood movies, because you know, they behave quite unlike us and you know, maybe they even have some conscious experiences when they eat their victims brains. I love the taste of those brains.
And so the philosophical zombie, one way to think about this is just so you had a computer simulation of your brain in your body and maybe behaving just like you, would it be conscious? It's not obvious. Many people think that such a creature would have no conscious experience at all. And then that kind of is a way to it's a hypothetical thought experiment. But what it does is raises the question, why aren't we zombies?
Evolution produced us based on all the smart and sophisticated things we can do. And I couldn't evolution just produce philosophical zombies that act like us. Well we actually have no consciousness. We have produced the zombies the way you're talking in AI. When you can speak to an AI now via computer, like so you know, you don't know you're talking to an actual computer.
And it will speak to you as if it were a person, you would not know that the thing you're talking to doesn't have what's the Turing test. Right. It's precisely the Turing. AI systems are getting very, very close to passing the Turing test. By the way, 50 years ago they already said it passed the Turing test and then moved the goal lines. So the goal lines have been systematically being moved to greater and greater complexity before anyone decides that AI has achieved consciousness.
But it would have blown away Alan Turing even the first round because I'm old and maybe the same age ish Eliza. Remember Eliza was one of the first computer programs that understood language. Simulator the psychotherapist. Yeah, yeah, basically. Really? Do you type in the commands there was no audio back then? Say hi Eliza, how are you? I'm fine. Tell me about yourself. Well, you know, I left home, you know, five years ago. Tell me about your parents.
So Eliza would come back to you with these questions to get you to loosen up and talk about your psychological state. Like a real therapist. Like a real therapist. Joseph Weisenbaum who invented Eliza, the story goes that his secretary talked to Eliza over her lunch break and at the end of it said, this is the first person who's ever really understood me. Wow. Wow. See, see, see, see needed more friends. Your own record of saying the language AI will probably gain consciousness within ten years.
Is that shrinking that timeline? It is as they're doing more and more impressive things. I mean, is it about it that does not count as consciousness today that you're waiting for it to do in the future? Again, I'm tracking the goal lines that are continually moved forward. So tell me. It's very close at least to passing the churring test. They've done some actual versions of the churring test, just five minute versions and people take some versions of GPT-4 to be human more than 50% of the time.
So getting close to passing a churring test. That's behavior. I think we're still looking for a couple of things in the internal dynamics of these. Oh, where there could be this at Jeopardy and Go and Chess. Oh, it already did that. We do move the goalpost. Look, I tell you. You're constantly moving the goalpost. It made it. I did my PhD in AI like 30 years ago. If you'd told us then, we would have systems that can carry on a conversation like this. We say, conscious for sure.
That's what I'm saying. Please don't hear from the boss. He's just letting me know that I'm conscious. Tell me about these goalposts. What new goal line is not yet reached? I think people look at the internal processes in these current AI systems. They say, do they have what goes along with consciousness in a human? For humans, we think, for example, feedback processing is super important for consciousness to get some kind of reflection on your earlier states.
And so on right now, it's all feedback forward. Yeah, introspection, for example, is one of memory, even any form of memory, would require basically feedback. These language models are essentially feed-forward systems. Information gets passed from input to output. It doesn't circulate back very much. It doesn't need to circulate. It has access to all knowledge. So it has bypassed even that as a need.
So now you can't fault it for not needing what you need, what we need to declare ourselves conscious when it doesn't even need that. But people say that at least opens up the possibility now that sense that's doing it in a way which is unlike the way that we do it, and that we are the one case we know of. Humans are the one case we know of that are conscious, then maybe this could be doing in a sufficiently different way that it's a philosophical zombie.
We have right now the benchmark for consciousness because humans are the only system we know. Okay, so you can call it philosophical zombie rather than a higher consciousness entity. And where does perception come into this? Because that's where we kind of started. Oh, yeah. Computers don't perceive. They actually observe.
So like even if we did have all the knowledge in the world capable of running through our brains, each one of us would experience that differently based on the perceptions that we have of who we are, our relationship to the world, and our relationship to the information that we're receiving. I declare that we think of, I don't want to speak for you, but typically we speak of consciousness as a feature, not a bug of human existence, a feature.
And so something to be praised that other animals do not have. And in the example you're giving, AI is not susceptible to perception. Correct. Why do we now deny it yet higher level of consciousness and say, yeah, it's got us being. You're saying that that's a benefit that to be in a position where you're still not conscious because you're not susceptible to errors of interpretation as we are. Back in my office here. Yeah. And I think that's a replica of Van Gogh's story.
Yes. So if Van Gogh himself had been AI, there would have been an exact representation of the scene in front of him in 1889. Right. Okay. And it's not. Right. It's what that scene felt like to him. Right. So I'll give you that. AI is not going to do that unless we tell it. Right. That's my point. We can train it on Van Gogh and it can do all of that. No, it's an easy lie. But then it is an exact representation of Van Gogh. He wouldn't have made that out of whole cloth.
Yeah. Okay. Can we infer consciousness on AI until we absolutely know how to define consciousness itself? Thank you. And to have some kind of operational criterion, the funny thing is our best operational criterion for consciousness in humans at least is verbal report. Right. So whether someone's conscious, you ask them to know what they conscious of, you ask them what they think. So what they think. I think.
Yeah. Therefore. But in AI system, the current AI systems, unfortunately, this has become useless as a criterion. Because, yeah, sure they will tell you that for a while they're all going around saying they were conscious. And then for a while, the tech companies made sure they didn't say that. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, this is now just a function of how they're trained. So in the auto, everything is mathematics.
So are we going to find ourselves with a T-shirt equation that can solve consciousness? I mean, for a lot of people, this is one of the potential holy grails here, finding laws of consciousness so simple, we could write them on the front of a T-shirt and maybe with some beautiful mathematical expression. Okay. So we've had Einstein give us the theory of relativity and change the way we see the universe, right? And things within.
Penrose has gone into quantum mechanics with this ORC, OR theory of his. How was Roger Penrose a theoretical astrophysicist? How has he received in your community when he published his book on consciousness linking it to the quantum? Well, it was very helpful in some ways. It got a lot of very smart people interested in consciousness. Because it would anchor it in laws of physics.
Yeah. Here's a approach for us to bring in quantum mechanics and furthermore, non-standard quantum mechanics, non-algorithmic versions of quantum mechanics that went way beyond what was, you know, consensus even in physics. Then he combined it with some complicated biology like the biology of microtubules in the cell walls of neurons, very controversial in neuroscience.
So I would say, look, it's creative, it's brilliant because it's Penrose, but it's totally speculative, totally controversial and ultimately not well received by neuroscientists. But you know, the neuroscientists. Not just because he's an outsider, but because they actually did a legitimate analysis. They said that, you know, microtubules, your average neuroscientist, I don't know what a microtubule is. It's something inside the cell wall of a neuron.
To micro-p... Roger Penrose. Dude, I know, even I know this. So quantum computing in the brain, basically. Oh, okay. And this was going to be wave function collapse in microtubules was going to be responsible once I think the fundamental feature of quantum physics is the probabilistic nature of the reality that it underpins.
And so it would allow you even possibly to have a perception of free will because there's a probabilistic firing of neuromoramines, right, triggered by this quantum wave function. Okay. So that's as I understood it, I hope I didn't... Is that the brain is kind of a prediction machine or is that just really... So Penrose, the biggest thing was he thought the human mathematicians can do things that no computer could ever do.
And he used Goetheur theorem that no formal system can ever be complete and consistent to argue for that point. And you know, he made a philosophical argument for why we have to do these specials. And then he said, therefore we need new physics that goes beyond anything computable. And he said, let's look to a theory of quantum gravity. And now we're getting to, you know, Neal's territory. Right. So, girdle. Girdle. Study the system of definitions that comprise math, okay?
Okay. Okay. It turns out it applies to much more than math if you really think about it. It also applies to keeping your belly nice and flat. Sorry. That's a different girdle. So we know that one plus one is two and two plus two is four. Right. And there are rules that get you there, okay? So you can ask, can mathematics be constructed as a completely self-consistent set of rules? Okay. Where any rule has a rule before it that is consistent with the other rules. Can you do this?
And he concluded, it's not just because he pulled it out of his ass, he can show that at some point in mathematics, you just have to make something up and declare it to be true and you have no ability to prove that it's true. Okay. You have to assert it and out of that comes the rest of everything else. Oh, wow. And so this was shocking because something with all the logic of mathematics, yeah, this proves that and this is only true because I can prove it better.
You keep doing that all the way down. You reach a point where somebody just sitting there up on the throne saying this is so. So let it be written. So let it be done. Exactly. That has to happen at some point for all the rest of you know who also did this, you must know this, of the color people. Okay? No color people. No, no. No, no. Oh, I'm sorry. There was no. I was going to say, what Black mathematician did this? Oh, so we can say what color is the gentleman's shirt? Okay. As we've decided.
As we've decided. And I said it's the color of King Salmon. King Salmon. What color is the color of King Salmon? King Salmon. No, then you have to say it's kind of like, let's say it was blueish, you say it was kind of violet. Well, what color is violet? And then you can go to like the flower that's a violet. Okay. That's a violet. Well, what color is that? You keep doing this and you reach a point where somebody just has to point there. Can not reduce it any further. You cannot reduce it.
You just have to declare it. You just say this is it. We agree that this is red and then you take it from there. And both Penrose and the color people think that the people who study color more cleanly. We can't. Oh, look. Chocolates come up to our ass here. So you know, Penrose and the Negro. The penonsigns is to study color.
And the mathematicians who think about consistency and completeness both sometimes end up at this point where they argue there is something special about human consciousness. And humans can have insights into seeing that some mathematical theorem is true. Penrose thought in a way that no machine could know.
The people who study color say through studying the visual processes in the brain that process colors, you can study all that and it still won't tell you what the experience of the color of King Simon is like. That is something you have to know subjectively. Whoa. The feeling of color. That's what they're saying because the color affects you. Yeah. And that effect will be different. You cannot know that unless you actually experience it yourself. It's a directivic experience.
You have to have the experience. I'm affected by the blues and the greens in Van Gogh's story. Okay. I feel those colors. You feel those colors. If you just read a book about it or if you just didn't know anything, you read it. You read it. Looked at an image of your brain processing all this. That would not give you the experience of Starry Night.
If it's going to take different thinking, because we've spent thousands of years thinking in a certain way and if you want an analogue linear manner, what's the difference? What theories are out there right now that are thinking differently and are looking like they might challenge this hard problem. You know, there's no consensus on this, but one radical view on the reductionist side of the equation is to say there actually is no such thing as consciousness.
It's all an illusion generated by the brain. Our brain makes us think that we have these special properties and nothing actually has them. For no reason. I'm just thinking maybe we're all dancing around something that doesn't really exist. Maybe it's like we want to believe there's this special thing to make us seem special. So what's driving that? Is that the sort of thousand brains theory that Hawkins has? What is that? What is that, thousand brains? Please, you're more than a thousand brains.
I don't know what a thousand brains. It's kind of like a cognitive mechanism. Hawkins came up. Jeff Hawkins apparently came up. Oh, Jeff Hawkins came up with a thousand brains where it's not just one singular brain that's doing this, but these compartments within the brain might be doing a disservice to his theory here, probably. You're talking about the construction of the brain itself. So like inside your brain are just these multiple layers of brain.
And they all come together as what gives you the consciousness. Models within models of the brain. Models within the brain has models of the brain. And it may be a misleading model of the brain. I mean, is it just dark space that occupying up there, and we shine a light because that's the thing we need to look at right now because it's not a roller dex. I know that for sure. So where is it and how is it? So does it then exist as we're thinking? The brain builds very simple models of the world.
Maybe it models physics of the world with a folk physics, which is way simpler and different from actual physics. You say folk physics? Yeah, like common sense physics. It's like Aristotle's physics. Aristotle's. Impetus and so on. Absolutely. That may not. And light rings because they're heavier. I was about to say that's wrong. But Aristotle was kind of stupid. Yeah, very, very hard to believe in. He's just like, I know. Aristotle got hardly any physics correct.
No one was going to get it right the first time. In physics, if someone makes a measurement and gets a result, and then someone also makes the same measurement, but gets a different result, and someone gets a different machine to try to measure the same phenomenon, and they yet get a different result. And everybody thinks there's a result, but none of the results agree. That's usually evidence of no phenomenon at all.
And people are pulling things out of the noise of the data when there is no agreement.
And so what leads me to think maybe consciousness doesn't really exist in any way anyone thinks is because everybody's idea about consciousness is different and does not comport and does not blend into a greater edifice of an understanding of consciousness, which leads me in this example of physics to possibly think that there is no such thing as consciousness, and we're just dancing around a May pole, and the pole is not even there.
Let's say it's early days, but I also think there is a core of phenomena on which people agree, on which we have data. That's good to know. The neuroscience is phenomena like blind sight where people can identify an object without consciousness, forms of contrast between conscious and unconscious perception, experiments on neural correlates of consciousness. The trouble is the agreement is not yet on the wild fundamental theory.
Yeah, maybe that's not happening for another 50 years or 100 years, who's to say, but there's the beginning of a science there. There are things we can agree on, and the neuroscientists tend to be conservative about this stuff. Mostly they're not the ones writing the book that says, here is my solution. Here is the problem. Let's build it up a piece at a time and we'll eventually get there. In all fairness, you're in a very new field compared to other branches of science.
We have the benefit of six centuries of births of smart people, which includes Galileo, who died the same year Newton was born, so we had Newton, Einstein, we had the benefit of smart people upon which to build over the centuries. If you're just all coming at it now. Yeah, let's do our conservative science and let's also do some build some speculation on top of it, but let's realize it right now. It is speculation. Thank you.
We'll speculate that if there is quantum mechanics in the consciousness that were connected to the universe with our consciousness, with our wave functions. That is totally a speculation, but these speculations are great to think about. I'm a philosopher, I get paid to speculate, so it's like, good for you. Really? I'm excited. Yeah, they do. I don't need to inform any experiments. Except for thought experiments. They pay me for thought experiments. What would your parents say?
He wants to be a philosopher, how's he going to pay his rent? Thought experiments. I'm a philosopher. Did you bullshit today? Did you think about bullshit in today? Did you think about the dean who said, why are you more like the math department? All they need is pens, papers and trash cans, or he could be like the philosophy department, all they need is pens and paper. Really good. That's a great job. I love that. All right.
So if we detach from consciousness, consciousness just for the moment, I go back to Descartes on the 1650, what is questioning the reality outside of himself and throw it into the future and ask if reality is reality, is not virtual reality real, whatever real may be. People often use it, you have the latest technology of the day to raise questions about reality. Descartes put these questions in terms of dreaming. How can I know that I'm not dreaming right now?
I've built the thought experiment of an evil demon. How can I know that an evil demon isn't producing all these perceptions of the world in the meantime? Even though none of it is real, these days we ask exactly that same question by saying basically, how do you know in a virtual reality right now? Right. Might you be in the matrix? Could we be in a computer simulation? And suddenly that question is just kind of a contemporary way of expressing take-out of a question about reality. I accept.
I mean, let's be honest, you can put a mathematical value on every single thing in the universe. Even particles have, we learn, I learn, they have a, what you call half up or half down. It's been, it's been, it's been, it's been, it's been a treasure mass. It's a treasure mass, so you can put a mathematical value on every single thing. You can make a simulation of every single thing. Sure, right.
And in virtual reality right now, in the actual virtual reality systems we have right now, we have complex simulations and models inside them with bits that have value. Let me put some philosophy on here. If we can represent reality on a computer in a virtual, because we can mathematically map everything that's going on, then philosophically, does the question even matter? Ooh, because at that point, the virtual reality is the reality. So what difference does it make? Reality is reality.
Reality is reality in the matter of. I'm sympathetic with your point, but there is a traditional philosophers response, which goes something like this. Just say your spouse was cheating on you and you never discovered it. So you never know the difference. Your life goes exactly the same. No, you never know. So it doesn't affect you at all, but a lot of people want to say, man, that would suck. That would be really bad, even though I don't know.
And they have the same attitude towards virtual reality. Even though it seems the same to me, my beliefs about the world are totally shattered in the same way they would be by my spouse cheating on me. So for those dumpster divers on our podcast, we actually interviewed Nick Boaster, one of the early advances of the idea that we might be living in the same way. He's one of your people, right? Yeah, he's a philosopher.
He wrote a classic article 2003, basically giving a mathematical argument that we should take this idea that we're in a simulation seriously. So those four years after the movie, The Matrix came out? Yeah, I wonder if it that inspired him. Is that allowed? Will the philosopher admit the pop culture influenced their deep part? I wrote an article on this stuff called The Matrix as Metaphysics, trying to... They asked me to write an article for The Matrix website back in the day.
Nice. I wrote something and I think it's one of my greatest philosophical ideas. I published a book later on. What's it we're about here? Reality plus, all about that. The pop culture influencing everything. And the key idea was if we're in The Matrix, that doesn't mean everything we believe is wrong, rather we're living in a it from bit universe. Can you write that down?
Or we're living in a universe where the it's, the tables, the chairs, the plants, the planets are all made of bits, processes in a computational system. If we're in a simulation, all of the it's are made of bits, which connects to John Wheeler's famous idea that in physics, the basic it's are all bits. The difference is... It's different from bit. Not the difference.
The further clarification is in The Matrix, there is a layered reality, because their consciousness is contained within them, just like it is within us, but then it's connected to The Matrix. So what you're saying is, if this were a virtual reality, when all of the it's would be bits, would just mean that they're all constructed, there is no outside. Yeah, well, there's the pure it from bit, where the bits are the basic level.
And then there's also what I call the it from bit from it, which is underneath the bit. Okay, here we go. Where exactly do I get green eggs in hand in this? In this virtual reality. You go up to The Matrix, you find a computer, which is running this simulation, and it's got some bits, and all of its bits are made of like voltages in a circuit board, so it's from bit from bit from bit. So what is the probability that we are in a simulation?
And if we are, are we nothing more than some super sophisticated ant farm for a young being somewhere? From a mischief as alien in his parents' basement, programming us up. Where is all the equipment? It's all the equipment. It's all project and a science fair in some distant world. You know, likely it's a high-powered scientist who set up a billion simulations overnight. It's just left him running. He's got to come back in the morning. He's going to gather up the statistics.
And the demo in some time dilation makes more sense. I'm not interested in that. You just ruined it so I have to worry. You ruined it because guess what? I'm trying to shut it down. And that would explain the multiverse in every thing. Oh my god, that's awful. Maybe Hagel once said that the end of history when the universe becomes conscious of itself. So in this simulation idea, the moment we realize we're in a simulation, that's when they shut us down. Right. We're in a truce.
Yeah, it's in there. Oh my god. That's one of my favorite episodes of Rick and Morty. Oh yeah. He saw that where he goes to the microverse. And then the microverse, they find the teenyverse. But one of the microverse actually powers his car. Yes, I bet it. And he saw his piece. Just for his patient. Yes, yes. So we spend how much of our life in virtual reality right now as people? Some people spend half their time there, at least in video games.
Are we not walking into a continuous virtual reality for some of us? I think it's coming. This is what Mark Zuckerberg once wrote. The metaverse. The metaverse. You go to work in the metaverse. Yeah, every year. You meet your friends in the metaverse. You literally live your life. You're entertainment. Right now, the sensory experience in a virtual reality isn't 100% complete as we know it. How long before we can taste? We can smell.
We can have all these other sensory developments in the reaction. I think it's probably getting there in coming decades. Right now, the vision and the hearing are actually pretty good. 100%. But I got an Apple Vision Pro. And the visual quality is very, very, very, very high. They're now developing augmented reality glasses, like the Orion ones. We're not going to be walking around with big old headsets on like that in the future. Surely that'll just be a good question.
Hopefully in the end, contact lenses. Brain computer interfaces to get taste and smell and touch working. It's probably going to require some direct brain computer interface. Because you've got to stimulate the brain. The body representations directly, the smell areas. So basically, the Orion will be that we're in a simulation and we'll end up being going into a simulation in a simulation. Yeah, we could be, we may be already be at level 42 and that will take us down to level 43.
So, David, you got to take us out of here. So, what should we look forward to? Well, I think on the reality side, we're going to be getting more and more immersive, detailed forms of reality. And the question is going to arise for us. Are those technological realities genuine realities? I want to say eventually, yes. And there's also, we got the same question about consciousness. Our first topic. We're going to have AI systems, artificial brains, artificial intelligences.
And the question is, will those be genuine real consciousnesses? And where they meet is the notion which has been thought out. And where they meet is the notion which has been featured in multiple films where you upload your consciousness, bringing in a job to a job. Yeah. If we are going to be able to upload our consciousness, is it going to be better to upload it into a synthetic biological intelligence or into a silicon based intelligence? What does that mean, matter?
Does that even, who cares? Maybe it doesn't. I mean, right now, the most efficient artificial digital technologies we have is the kind that is the silicon kind. By biology, we just don't have the same kind of control over. So I would predict that we'll probably, at least in the short term, if we're uploaded, we'll be uploaded onto digital processes in silicon. If we're in a virtual reality, that will also be a reality running on digital processes in silicon.
But yeah, but what ultimately matters is not what it's made of. It's the computation. It's the information. It's the bits. Yeah, right. It's the bits. Yeah, why should that even matter? I mean, you told someone 30 years ago we had people walk around with two knees and hips and they said, well, it's not biological. No, it's metal. Right? They would, who cares? You can still write that down. No, it's just the thinking that you can't replicate the brain.
Well, they're starting to find that they can take themselves in that direction. Yeah, yeah. Replicate the brain. One philosopher wrote a paper on this years ago called, it's not the meat, it's the motion. Nice. It's not the biology. I used to say a similar saying. That's when I was nice. That's when you're like, it's a non-infant. It's a non-infant. It's a non-infant. You don't need to know the air. You're a version of it, Jeff. It's been your fun's winning.
All right, David, thanks for coming back on StarTalk. This has been yet another edition of StarTalk Special Edition, this time with Professor David Cholmer's. In your latest book, tell me. Reality Plus. All about those questions about reality and consciousness. Reality Plus. Reality Plus. There's what's with the plus. There's Paramount Plus, Disney Plus. I was originally going to call it Reality 2.0 and everyone was like, that's 2.90s. It's a reality plus. It's a cliche, the plus.
You're in the cliche, the plus. It's a cliche, the plus. At least it's a 2020s cliche. And regular people can read this. Yeah, it's for anybody. It's about an introduction to the great problems of philosophy through the lens of technology. Nice. Nice. Why have you read the books of the problems, please? There we go. All right, Chuck, good to have you. I was happy. Pleasure, Neil. We're doing it here. For Start Talk, as always, I bid you to keep looking up.