The Hard Problem of Consciousness with David Chalmers

Summary

StarTalk Radio: The Hard Problem of Consciousness with David Chalmers

Episode Release Date: November 1, 2024

---

Introduction to the Hard Problem of Consciousness

In this special edition of StarTalk Radio, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson delves into one of the most profound questions in both science and philosophy: the nature of consciousness. Joined by co-hosts Gary O'Reilly and Chuck Nice, Tyson welcomes renowned philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers from New York University to explore what makes consciousness such a challenging enigma.

---

Defining Consciousness

Chalmers begins by distinguishing between "easy" and "hard" problems of consciousness. While the easy problems involve understanding the mechanisms and functions of the brain—for example, how we process visual inputs or respond to stimuli—the hard problem pertains to why and how subjective experiences arise from these processes.

David Chalmers [05:27]: "Consciousness is anything you experience directly from the first person point of view. I think of it like the inner movie of the mind."

Tyson emphasizes the uniqueness of individual consciousness, noting that each person's experience of reality can differ significantly from another's, even when observing the same external world.

---

Levels of Consciousness and Animal Cognition

The discussion transitions to the varying levels of consciousness across different beings. Chalmers points out that while humans exhibit highly complex consciousness, attributing similar states to other animals like dogs or fish remains a topic of debate.

Chalmers [09:33]: "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 reptiles, arguing about fish and octopuses."

This evolution in understanding challenges the notion of human supremacy in the animal kingdom's cognitive landscape.

---

Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence

A significant portion of the conversation centers on the intersection of consciousness and artificial intelligence. Chalmers addresses whether current AI systems, such as Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, possess consciousness.

Chalmers [19:07]: "Probably they're not conscious right now, but give it 10 years and they may well be."

Tyson relates this to the Turing Test, suggesting that as AI becomes more sophisticated in mimicking human conversation and behavior, distinguishing between genuine consciousness and simulated responses becomes increasingly challenging.

---

Philosophical Zombies

Chalmers introduces the concept of "philosophical zombies"—hypothetical creatures identical to humans in every way except lacking conscious experience. This thought experiment raises questions about the nature of consciousness and whether it can be fully explained by physical processes alone.

Chalmers [19:52]: "Philosophical zombie. One way to think about this is just say you had a computer simulation of your brain in your body and maybe behaving just like you. Would it be conscious?"

The discussion explores why evolution would favor consciousness if it might be an illusion, as some reductionist views suggest.

---

The Simulation Hypothesis

Expanding on the theme of reality, the hosts and Chalmers delve into the simulation hypothesis—the idea that our reality might be a sophisticated computer simulation akin to The Matrix. Chalmers ties this modern concept back to philosophical inquiries dating to Descartes, pondering whether what we perceive as reality is fundamentally "real" or simulated.

Chalmers [44:24]: "We're living in a it from bit universe. 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."

The conversation highlights the implications of such a hypothesis on our understanding of consciousness and existence.

---

Future Implications of AI and Consciousness

Looking ahead, Chalmers speculates on the future of AI and its potential to develop consciousness. He discusses the technological advancements needed for AI to achieve genuine conscious states and the philosophical ramifications of uploading human consciousness into digital or synthetic forms.

Chalmers [49:12]: "We got exactly the same question about consciousness... It will have AI systems, artificial brains, artificial intelligences, and the question is, will those be genuine."

Tyson and the co-hosts humorously contemplate scenarios where AI might surpass or interact with human consciousness, referencing popular culture like Rick and Morty to illustrate possible futures.

---

Conclusion and Future Directions

As the episode concludes, Chalmers emphasizes that the study of consciousness is still in its infancy compared to other scientific disciplines. He advocates for a conservative yet speculative approach, building understanding incrementally while entertaining bold theories.

Chalmers [39:51]: "Scientists who study color... it still won't tell you what the experience of the color of king salmon is like. That is something you have to know subjectively."

Neil deGrasse Tyson encourages listeners to continue exploring these deep questions, highlighting the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue in unraveling the mysteries of consciousness.

---

Notable Quotes

• Chalmers [05:27]: "Consciousness is anything you experience directly from the first person point of view."
• Chalmers [19:07]: "Probably they're not conscious right now, but give it 10 years and they may well be."
• Chalmers [19:52]: "Philosophical zombie. One way to think about this is just say you had a computer simulation of your brain in your body and maybe behaving just like you. Would it be conscious?"
• Chalmers [44:24]: "We're living in a it from bit universe."
• Chalmers [49:12]: "Will those [AI systems] be genuine."

---

Final Thoughts

This episode of StarTalk Radio masterfully navigates the intricate landscape of consciousness, blending scientific inquiry with philosophical exploration. David Chalmers provides deep insights into what makes consciousness a "hard problem," the potential for AI to achieve similar states, and the provocative possibility that our reality might be a sophisticated simulation. For listeners intrigued by the intersection of science, philosophy, and the future of intelligence, this episode offers a compelling journey into the heart of consciousness itself.

Transcript

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Running a small business takes endurance, determination and the right support to reach your goals. And MasterCard is here to help fuel that journey in a fast paced digital world with innovative tools and resources. We're here to guide businesses every step.

[Chuck Nice]

Of the way digitally.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because when small business wins, everyone wins. Let's power up our communities one small.

[Chuck Nice]

Business and one step at a time.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Keeping the community running strong. Priceless.

[Gary O'Reilly]

This episode is brought to you by progressif where drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average. Plus auto customers qualify for an average of 7 discounts. Quote [e-mail] to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates national average 12 month savings of $744 by new surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. Start begins right now. This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me, Chuck Knight. Chuck, baby.

[Chuck Nice]

Hey, what's happening?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, all right. How you doing, sir?

[Gary O'Reilly]

I'm good, thank you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Gary O'Reilly. Yeah, thank you, thank you. Love to have you as my co host here.

[Gary O'Reilly]

It's a pleasure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, we're doing yet another episode, unconsciousness.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

When will we be done?

[Gary O'Reilly]

When we know what we need to know.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And interpretation of reality filtered through our consciousness.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Totally.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So what show did you cook up today?

[Gary O'Reilly]

All right, so we're heading for inner space rather than outer space.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Inner space, I love it.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And consciousness, as we've just discussed, we continually think of it as, I suppose, a precious entity and we feel like we're above others on the planet. Other beings.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Say that to your cat.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I was going to say, don't start me on catitude. Please don't go there.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, we think we're in charge of the cats. It's the opposite.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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 a 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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

David, welcome back to StarTalk. And you're just down the street at NYU New York University.

[David Chalmers]

Just right up here on the sea train.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Welcome, simplicity, 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?

[David Chalmers]

Totally obvious. And when I first said this, I just said, okay, this is just giving the thing a label that everybody knows. But who was to guess that the label would, would catch on? Sometimes it's just helpful to say the obvious, actually. You know, 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 colors mix optically and produce a certain experience is not so easy. He says it's not so easy. E, A S I E. And he says it's, you know, the way that all we understand this stuff objectively and say how the brain processes visual inputs. But then it gives you the experience of a color. That amazing pink shirt.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Go. Coral.

[David Chalmers]

Yeah. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

Magenta.

[David Chalmers]

Yeah. Where does, where does, where does that experience of pink come from? As Newton said, not so easy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

King salmon. Not.

[Chuck Nice]

Not farm raised king salmon.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You've reduced me too.

[Chuck Nice]

There's kind of king salmon for you.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Wild caught. Yeah, wild caught.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Reduce me to food stuff.

[David Chalmers]

Where does the experience of king salmon come from? Envision. That is what Newton said. Not so easy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so David, had you instead called it the easy problem of consciousness, maybe we would have all figured it out by now.

[David Chalmers]

Well, the easy problems were the problems of things you do, like how people respond. What they say, I can say.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So what is consciousness? Put it on the table.

[David Chalmers]

Subjective experience. Consciousness 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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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.

[Chuck Nice]

Sounds like a problem. Sounds like a problem to me.

[Gary O'Reilly]

But is this where biases come in, in terms of how you receive and accept any information that comes to you?

[David Chalmers]

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, you know, our experience of that rectangle might be the same, but the emotions that it brings on may be totally different for me and for you.

[Chuck Nice]

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?

[David Chalmers]

The person or the device?

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[David Chalmers]

I don't know if the device is, like, specialized. It's a thermometer. It Sundays. It says 79 degrees.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm going, yes, I'm going with the device.

[David Chalmers]

I'm going with the device, too.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We're sitting together here. I get this, but I'm going with the device.

[David Chalmers]

Okay, me too. It's like, you tell me it's 79 degrees. No, I'm going to trust a thermometer.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

There's a famous quote. No science achieves maturity without a system of measurement. Ooh.

[David Chalmers]

And we do not have the measurement system for consciousness, actually, which renders it.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Immature scientifically relative to other fields where you have petri dishes and methods and tools. So you have a hard problem.

[David Chalmers]

How about that?

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, my God.

[David Chalmers]

We just proved that it was hard.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, my God. I walked into that, didn't I?

[David Chalmers]

Didn't you? Years ago, I went along to a conference and told everyone that I'd invented measuring device for consciousness, the consciousness meter, made with a combination of neuromorphic engineering, transpersonal psychology, and quantum gravity. And then I pulled out my consciousness meter and it looked kind of like a hairdryer. That was where we were back in the 90s.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, I would have called bullshit on your second half of that first sentence.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Sounded like word salad. So I applaud you, sir.

[Chuck Nice]

So whereabouts, plasmic meter, ectoplasms.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So whereabouts in the brain do you think we. We are fermenting this consciousness?

[David Chalmers]

Well, this is one of the big debates which is going on. What are the neural correlates of consciousness, which is a 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 the, say, for visual consciousness, people who Think it's in the sensory areas towards the back of the brain.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Exactly.

[David Chalmers]

Visual cortex back there, or prefrontal cortex, front of the brain, the areas associated more with thinking and judgment.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Just a question. What's the difference between your prefrontal cortex and your frontal cortex?

[David Chalmers]

Frontal cortex goes a. Is a little bit more.

[Chuck Nice]

It's a little less front than the prefrontal cortex. Thank you. It's less front. It's a little less front than the pre frontal cortex.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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.

[David Chalmers]

Yeah. And people who put consciousness in prefrontal cortex are probably going to say that consciousness is not so widespread in the animal kingdom. Whereas people who think it's in the sensory cortices, we get those throughout the animal kingdom. So maybe much, you know, like, is a fish conscious? Well, you know, fish don't have any kind of developed prefrontal cortex.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. I'm going to say, judging from the look in their eyes, I'm going to go out on a limb and say.

[Gary O'Reilly]

No, they know when a shark's around.

[Chuck Nice]

Well, that's true.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I have a question. Can you tell me what creates consciousness? Is it emergent in our genetic code? I mean, emergent in the evo bio sense, 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?

[David Chalmers]

Ooh, it's in some sense emergent. I mean, this word emergence gets used in so many different ways, and sometimes it's like magic word. It's like I don't really understand it. Anything we don't know. Emergent.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I like magic words. Give me my magic word for the day.

[David Chalmers]

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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[David Chalmers]

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?

[Chuck Nice]

Is it really consciousness or are we talking about levels of consciousness? Because I think that, you know, 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 just sitting there, 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, you know.

[David Chalmers]

But you are totally right. There are levels of consciousness in, 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.

[Chuck Nice]

Tell me about it. No, I'm joking. I remember that day.

[David Chalmers]

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 Passos, is a leading expert on consciousness in infants. There's still an argument like, can a 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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

David, 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. Is that true for every animal?

[David Chalmers]

Yeah, this is absolutely the trend to say over the years we have thought more and more animals are more and more cognitively complex as to the question of whether they're 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 reptiles, arguing about fish and octopuses.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It sounds like we're clawing our way out of our own ego.

[David Chalmers]

Exactly.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

How about that? But the singularity of our presence in the animal kingdom is being challenged by further research into the conduct of 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 the beak can't reach the water anymore. It walks away, comes back with a pebble drops the pebble in to raise.

[Chuck Nice]

The level of water, raise water and.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Then it drinks and it does that three or four times so it has.

[Chuck Nice]

A clear understanding of volume displacement.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It has a clear understanding of Archimedean principles. After investing billions to light up our.

[Chuck Nice]

Network, T Mobile is America's largest 5G network.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Plus right now you can switch keep.

[Chuck Nice]

Your phone and we'll pay it off up to $800.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

See how you can save on every.

[Chuck Nice]

Plan vs Verizon and at&t@t mobile.com Keep.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And switch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlocked device, credit service ported 90 plus days with device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required card has no cash access and expires in six months.

[Chuck Nice]

Seems like things change every 20 minutes and it's hard to keep up. That's why you should watch Sling. They provide the best value for your essential news channels. With Sling you get all your favorite news channels at the best price. Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, Anderson Cooper, 360, the Rach Metall show, and so much more for just $40 a month. Hey now that's some news. So yeah, with the election coverage and everything else happening, you can get great news that'll raise your blood pressure at prices that won't. And it's not just news. Check this out. Sling has live sports, news and entertainment channels you love and less of the ones you don't. So you save hundreds of dollars. But the best part about it? You can customize it in a way that you would like. That's right, you want to go and get entertainment along with news and then maybe a little sports. Which by the way is what I have. And I never miss a show because Slings Cloud DVR lets me record my shows to watch on my schedule. There's no complex technology, no long term contracts, and no hidden rigmarole. So be smart. And by that I mean be like me. Get rewarded for watching your favorite news channel. Sling lets you do that. Visit sling.com now to learn more and get started. That's sling.com now sling.com now every memorable gift starts with a story. This holiday season gives something with power. Jefferson's Ocean Bourbon and Jefferson's Ocean Rye are aged at sea where their transformed by unpredictable and unrelenting elements. They'll taste the journey in every sip. Darkened by pounding waves, kissed by ocean air, caramelized by equatorial heat. Give the gift of adventure. Give Jefferson's Ocean Bourbon and Jefferson's Ocean Rye. Please sip responsibly. Copyright 2023 Jefferson's Bourbon Company, Crestwood, Kentucky. Hello, I'm Finky Moro Gallen, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Nailed Grass Tyson.

[Gary O'Reilly]

But go back to Chuck's point about levels of consciousness. When we sleep.

[David Chalmers]

Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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?

[David Chalmers]

The idea behind the anesthetic is to wipe out consciousness completely.

[Gary O'Reilly]

And does it.

[David Chalmers]

Very hard to test whether it absolutely does this. At one point in the 1970s, for example, people put some kind of a 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. But 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.

[Chuck Nice]

Absolutely.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Of consciousness there isn't our consciousness altered in our dreams.

[David Chalmers]

It's a different state of consciousness, for sure. Psychedelics, they alter your consciousness. Meditation, it alters your consciousness.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm so glad we have science to obtain an objective reality of the world. If it all depend on the human brain, forget it. We'd still be in the caves. Did I just insult your entire field?

[David Chalmers]

No, it's okay. But we can study what's different in the brain in 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.

[Chuck Nice]

Right. I'm just.

[David Chalmers]

Mystical wondrousness. Now we can actually see what's happening in the brain when you take a psychedelic.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So, David, you published a paper recently on AI and consciousness. What was that?

[David Chalmers]

Yeah, I got invited to give a. To give a talk, actually, to all the AI people at their 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 Large Language model.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Like CHAT LLM.

[David Chalmers]

Exactly. Yeah. And I argued, probably they're not conscious right now, but give it 10 years and they may well be.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah. Or they're conscious right now and they're just not letting us know.

[David Chalmers]

Yeah, good.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Strategy.

[David Chalmers]

Just waiting to take over.

[Chuck Nice]

Just waiting to take it over, babe.

[Gary O'Reilly]

What are we if we don't have consciousness, but we're still doing and being. And you've coined the frame philosophical zombies. Is that what that's leading to?

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, I think, therefore I. Brains.

[David Chalmers]

This is a 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. You know, they. 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, but. So the philosophical zombie. One way to think about this is just say 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. Why couldn't evolution just have produced philosophical zombies that act like us?

[Chuck Nice]

Well, we actually have produced. We have produced the zombies. The way you're talking about in AI, when you can speak to an AI now via a computer, so 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 thing you're talking to doesn't have.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Well, it's the Turing Test, right? It's precisely the Turing Test.

[David Chalmers]

AI systems are getting very, very close to passing the Turing Test, by the way.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

50 years ago, they already said it passed the Turing Test and then moved the goal lines. So the goal lines have been systematically getting 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 enough. We're about maybe the same age. Ish. Eliza, do you remember Eliza was one of the first computer programs that understood language.

[David Chalmers]

Simulated a psychotherapist.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes. Yeah, Basically your therapist. You type in the commands. There was no audio back then, so you just type it in. 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.

[Chuck Nice]

State like a real therapist.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Like a real therapist.

[David Chalmers]

Joseph Weizenbaum, 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.

[Chuck Nice]

Wow.

[David Chalmers]

Oh, no.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Wow.

[Chuck Nice]

She needed more friends.

[Gary O'Reilly]

You're on record as saying the language AI will probably gain consciousness within 10 years. Is that shrinking that timeline?

[David Chalmers]

It is. As they're doing more and more impressive things.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What 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.

[David Chalmers]

It's very close, at least to passing the Turing Test. They've done some actual versions of the turing test. Just five minute versions. And people take some versions of GPT4 to be human more than 50% of the time. So getting close to passing a Turing Test, that's behavior. I think we're still looking for a couple of things in the internal dynamics.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Of whether it can beat us at Jeopardy and Go and chess. Oh, it already did that.

[David Chalmers]

We do move the goalpost.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Look, I tell you, you're constantly moving the goalpost. Admit it.

[David Chalmers]

I did my PhD in AI lab 30 years ago. If you'd told us then, that's what I'm saying, that we would have systems that can carry on a conversation like this. We say conscious for sure.

[Chuck Nice]

That's what I'm saying.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Please don't.

[David Chalmers]

He's just letting me know that I'm conscious.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Tell me about these goalposts. What new goal line is not yet reached?

[David Chalmers]

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, language models, feed forward introspection, for example, is 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, doesn't circulate back very much.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It doesn't need to circulate cause it has access to all knowledge. That's true. 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.

[David Chalmers]

But people say that at least opens up the possibility now that since it'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?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So you can call it a philosophical zombie rather than a higher consciousness entity.

[Chuck Nice]

And where does perception come into this? Because that's where we kind of started. 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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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.

[Chuck Nice]

Correct.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Why do we now deny it a yet higher level of consciousness and say, yeah, it's got us beat?

[Chuck Nice]

You're saying that that's a benefit, that to be in a position.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I don't want to say, where you're still not conscious because you're not susceptible to errors of interpretation. As we are back in my office here, I have a. A replica of Van Gogh's Starry Night.

[Chuck Nice]

Yes.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So if Van Gogh himself had been AI it would have been an exact representation of the scene in front of him in 1889.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay. And it's not.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's what that scene felt like to him. Right. So I'll give you that AI Is not gonna do that unless we tell it right.

[Chuck Nice]

And that's my point.

[David Chalmers]

We can train it on Van Gogh and it can give you all the Van Gogh.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

But then it is an exact representation of Van Gogh. He wouldn't have made that out of whole cloth.

[David Chalmers]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Can we infer consciousness on AI until we absolutely know how to define consciousness itself?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Thank you.

[David Chalmers]

And to have some kind of operational criteria. The funny thing is, our best operational criterion for consciousness in humans, at least, is verbal report.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[David Chalmers]

To know whether someone's conscious, you ask them to know what they're conscious of, you ask them.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I think so.

[Chuck Nice]

What do you think?

[David Chalmers]

So think. Yeah. Therefore I am. But in an 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 were all going around saying they were conscious. And then for a while, the tech companies made sure they didn't say that. I. Purely a language model. They talked to AI Anyway, this is now just a function of how they're trained.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So Neil tells us everything is mathematics.

[David Chalmers]

Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So are we going to find ourselves with a T shirt equation that can solve consciousness?

[David Chalmers]

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.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Ok, we've had Einstein give us the theory of relativity and change the way we see the universe. Right. And things within it. Penrose has gone into quantum mechanics with this ork or theory of his.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

How was Roger Penrose, a theoretical astrophysicist? How was he received in your community when he published his book on consciousness, linking it to the quantum?

[David Chalmers]

Well, it was very helpful in some ways. It got a lot of very smart people interested in consciousness because it worked.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Anchor it in laws of physics. Yes.

[David Chalmers]

Yeah. His approach was 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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Because he's an outsider, but because they actually did a legitimate analysis, they said.

[David Chalmers]

That, you know, microtubules. Your average neuroscientist.

[Chuck Nice]

I don't know what a microtubule is.

[David Chalmers]

It's something inside the cell wall of a neuron to microtubule that Roger Penrose.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Dude, even I know this.

[David Chalmers]

So quantum computing in the brain, basically.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, okay.

[David Chalmers]

And this was gonna be. Wave function collapse in microtubules was going to be responsible for.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Plus 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 neurons.

[Chuck Nice]

Neurons.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right. Triggered by this quantum wave function. Okay. So that's as I understood it. I hope I didn't.

[David Chalmers]

No.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Is that the brain is kind of a prediction machine or is that just really.

[David Chalmers]

For Penrose, the biggest thing was he thought the human mathematicians can do things that no computer could ever do. And he used Godel's theorem that no formal system can Ever be complete and consistent to argue for that point? And he made a philosophical argument for why we have to do these special. 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, Neil's territory.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So Godel studied the system of definitions that comprise math. Okay, okay, okay. It turns out it applies too much more than math if you really think about it.

[Chuck Nice]

It also applies to keeping your belly nice and flat. Sorry, that's a different girdle.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We know that one plus one is two and two plus two is four.

[Chuck Nice]

Right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

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. You have to assert it. And out of that comes the rest of everything else.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, wow.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And so this was shocking because something with 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.

[Chuck Nice]

So let it be written. So let it be done.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Exactly. That has to happen at some point. For all the rest. You know who also did this. You must know this. The color people. Okay.

[Chuck Nice]

The colored people.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, God, I didn't say that. No.

[Gary O'Reilly]

D on the end.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh, I'm sorry. I was gonna say, what black mathematician did this?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh. So we can say what color is the gentleman's shirt? Okay. As we've decided, it's pink. I said it's the color of king salmon. King salmon. What color is the color of king salmon?

[Chuck Nice]

The king salmon?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, then you have to say it's kind of like. Let's say it was bluish. You say it was kind of violet. Well, what color is violet? And then you can go to like the flower. That's violet.

[Chuck Nice]

No, that's a violet.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay, That's a violet. Well, what color is that? Right. You keep doing this and you reach a point where somebody just has to declare it at some point.

[Chuck Nice]

You cannot reduce it any further.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You cannot reduce it. You just have to declare.

[Chuck Nice]

You gotta just say, this is Red.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We agree that this is red. And then you take it from there.

[David Chalmers]

And both Penrose and the color people.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Think that the people who study color more cleanly. Look, chuckles come upside your ass here.

[Chuck Nice]

So you know, Penrose and the Negroes, colored people, they decide the vision.

[David Chalmers]

Scientists who study color. Oh, there you go. 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. 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 could study all that and it still won't tell you what the experience of the color of king salmon is like. That is something you have to know subjectively.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, the feeling of that.

[Chuck Nice]

That's what they're saying. Because the color affects you and that effect will be different. You cannot know that unless you actually experience yourself.

[David Chalmers]

Experience.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm affected by the blues and the greens in Van Gogh. Starry Night. Okay. I feel those cuts.

[Chuck Nice]

You feel those cuts.

[David Chalmers]

And if you just read a book about it or if you just wouldn't do anything, you looked at an image of your brain processing all this, that would not give you the experience of Starry Night.

[Chuck Nice]

Psst. Did you know Toyota has an all electric SUV? It's called the BZ4X and it's a secret worth sharing. Skip gas stations and feel the thrill of electric driving from a brand you can trust. The BZ4X features smart tech that keeps you connected and its modern design helps you stand out in the right ways. It's the excitement of a Toyota all electric powertrain combined with the reliability you'd expect. It's all electric and it's all real. The Toyota BZ4X. Learn more about it at toyota.com toyota let's go places.

[David Chalmers]

It's better over here now.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

AT T Mobile get four 5G phones on us and four lines for 25 a line per month when you switch.

[Chuck Nice]

With eligible trade ins. All on America's largest 5G network.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Minimum of 4 lines for 25 per line per month with auto pay discount using debit or bank account. $5 more per line without autopay plus taxes and fees and 10 device connection charge phones via 20 monthly bill credits for well qualified customers. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on a required finance agreement. Due bill credits end if you pay off devices early. CT mobile.com what makes the Carnival cruise fun. A picture perfect beach day at Cozumel or a tropical adventure the Mayan ruins with snorkel excursion for good measure. A delectable surf and turf at sea, topped off with craft cocktails at Alchemy Bar. Now get some Z's. You never know what tomorrow will bring. Why? Because no one does fun like Carnival. Carnival. Choose fun. Ships registry Bahamas, Panama.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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 analog linear manner, what theories are out there right now that are thinking differently and are looking like they might challenge this hard problem?

[David Chalmers]

You know, there's no consensus on this, but one radical view on the kind of 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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm in that cab.

[David Chalmers]

The brain makes us think that we have these special properties and nothing actually has them.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm in that camp for no reason. I just. I'm just thinking maybe we're all dancing around something that doesn't really exist.

[David Chalmers]

And then maybe it's like we want to believe there's this special thing to make us seem special.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So what's driving that? Is that the sort of thousand brains theory that Hawkins has?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What is that? What is that? Thousand brains?

[Gary O'Reilly]

Please. You're.

[David Chalmers]

I don't know the thousand brains.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Oh, it's. It's kind of like a cognitive mechanism. Hawkins came up. Jeff Hawkins apparently came up.

[David Chalmers]

Oh, Jeff Hawkins. Okay.

[Gary O'Reilly]

With a thousand brains, where it's not just one singular brain that's doing this, but these compartments within the brain. I might be doing a disservice to his theory here. Probably am.

[Chuck Nice]

So are you talking about the construction of the brain itself? So like inside your brain are just these multiple layers of brain?

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

And. And you somehow them all, they all come together is what gives you the consciousness.

[David Chalmers]

Models within models. Model has models of the brain. And it may be a misleading model of the brain.

[Gary O'Reilly]

I mean, is it this dark space that's 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 Rolodex, I know that for sure. So where is it and how is it and so does it then exist as we're thinking?

[David Chalmers]

Well, the brain builds very simple models of the world. You know, maybe it models physics of the world with a folk physics which is way simpler and different from actual physics.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You say folk physics?

[David Chalmers]

Yeah, like common Sense physics. It's like Aristotle's physics, things like impetus and so on, that may not heavy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Things fall faster than lighter things because they're heavier.

[Chuck Nice]

I was about to say some of that is wrong, but Aristotle was kind of stupid.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Very, very smart. He's a smart guy.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

No, Aristotle got hardly any physics.

[David Chalmers]

No one was going to get it right the first time.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

In physics, if someone makes a measurement and gets a result, and then someone else 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, but 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's no such thing as consciousness and we're just dancing around a maypole and the pole is not even there.

[David Chalmers]

Well, I said 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 coming out of the neuroscience. There's 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 beginnings 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. Here is my solution to the problem. They say let's build it up a piece at a time and we'll eventually get there.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And 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. And so Newton, we had Newton, we had Einstein, we had the benefit of.

[Chuck Nice]

Smart platforms upon which to build over the centuries.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And if you're just all coming at.

[David Chalmers]

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 that right now it is speculation.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Good. Thank you.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Okay, we'll speculate that if there is quantum mechanics in the consciousness, that we're connected to the universe with our consciousness.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

With our wave functions.

[David Chalmers]

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. Think about these ideas. Yeah, they do. I don't need to perform experiments except for thought experiments.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

They pay me for thought. Did your parents say, he wants to be a philosopher? How's he going to pay his rent?

[David Chalmers]

Thought experiments?

[Chuck Nice]

I'm a philosopher. Did you bullshit today? Did you think about bullshitting today?

[David Chalmers]

There's the old joke about the dean who said, you know, why the Physics department? 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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Really good.

[Chuck Nice]

That's a great job.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I love that.

[David Chalmers]

All right.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I love that.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So if we detach from consciousness just for the moment and go back to Descartes, 1650, whether he's 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?

[David Chalmers]

People often use that. You have the latest technology of the day to raise questions about reality. You know, Descartes put these questions in terms of dreaming. How can I know that I'm not dreaming? Yes, right now. And then he 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 as you would at that time, even though none of it is real? These days we ask exactly that same question by saying, basically, how do you know you're not in a virtual reality right now? Might you be in the Matrix? Could we be in a computer simulation? And suddenly that question. It's just kind of a contemporary way of expressing Descartes old question about reality.

[Chuck Nice]

Except, I mean, let's be honest. You can put a mathematical value on every single thing in the universe, even particles. Have we learned? I learned they have a. What do you call half up or half down?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Spin. Spin. Spin.

[Chuck Nice]

Spin, up. Spin.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

A charge. A mass.

[Chuck Nice]

A charge, a mass. So you could put a mathematical. If you could put a mathematical value on every single thing, you can make a simulation of every single thing.

[David Chalmers]

Sure.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[David Chalmers]

And in virtual reality right now, you know, in the actual virtual reality systems we have right now, they have complex simulations and Models inside them with bits that have values.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Let me pull some philosophy on you. 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.

[Chuck Nice]

Because at that point, you can't tell the virtual reality is the reality. So what difference does it make?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What difference does it make? Let me ask you.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Reality is reality.

[Chuck Nice]

Reality is reality no matter what.

[David Chalmers]

Then I'm sympathetic with your point, but there is a traditional philosopher's response which goes something like this. Just say your spouse was cheating on you and you never discover it, so you never know the difference. Your life.

[Chuck Nice]

No, go ahead.

[David Chalmers]

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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So for those dumpster divers on our podcast, we actually interviewed Nick Bostrom, one of the early advancers of the idea that we might be living in a simulation. He's one of your people, right?

[David Chalmers]

Yeah, he's a philosopher. Wrote a classic article, 2003, basically giving a mathematical argument that we should take this idea that we're in a simulation seriously.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So that was four years after the movie the Matrix came out.

[David Chalmers]

Yeah.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So I wonder if that inspired him. Is that allowed? Will a philosopher admit that pop culture influenced their deepest?

[David Chalmers]

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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Nice.

[David Chalmers]

I wrote something, and I think it's one of my greatest philosophical ideas.

[Chuck Nice]

Good.

[David Chalmers]

I published a book later on. That's what we're about here, reality.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All about this pop culture, infinite influencing everything.

[David Chalmers]

And the key idea was that 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 break that down? We're living in a universe where the its 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 its are made of bits. Which connects to John Wheeler's famous idea that in physics, the basic its are.

[Chuck Nice]

All the differences, 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 its would be bits would just mean that they're all constructed. There is no outside.

[David Chalmers]

Yeah, well, there's the pure it from bit where the, 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.

[Chuck Nice]

Okay, here we go. Where exactly do I get green eggs and ham in this, in this virtual reality?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I'm not eating.

[David Chalmers]

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 from bit from it.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Mischievous alien in his parents basement programming us up?

[Chuck Nice]

We're a school project. We're a school project at a science fair in some distant galaxy.

[David Chalmers]

It's more 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 gone away for gather up the.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Statistics and time dilation.

[Chuck Nice]

That makes more sense.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

I don't want to know that you just ruined it for.

[Chuck Nice]

You ruined it because guess what?

[David Chalmers]

Don't shut it down.

[Chuck Nice]

And that would explain the multiverse and everything. Oh my God, that's awful.

[David Chalmers]

Maybe, maybe Hegel once said that the end of history is when the universe becomes conscious of its. So in the simulation idea, the moment we realize we're in a simulation, that's when they shut us down. Don't shut us down. Just like the Truman having the conversation.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Yeah.

[Chuck Nice]

Oh my God. That's one of my favorite episodes of Rick and Morty where you saw that, where he goes to the microverse and then the microverse they find the teeny verse. But the microverse actually powers his car.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes, I remember.

[Chuck Nice]

That's inside the battery.

[David Chalmers]

And he is their God. And he's their God just for his spaceship.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yes, yes, yes.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So we spend how much of our life in virtual reality right now as people?

[David Chalmers]

Some people spend half their time there, at least in video games. That's virtual reality.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Are we not sleepwalking into a continuous virtual reality?

[David Chalmers]

For some of us, I think it's coming. This is what Mark Zuckerberg wants, right? The Metaverse.

[Chuck Nice]

The Metaverse.

[David Chalmers]

Rename this whole company after this.

[Chuck Nice]

And by the way, in the metaverse, it's not just a matter of entertainment. In the metaverse, you like, go to work in the metaverse, everything, you know, you, you do, you, you meet your friends in the metaverse, like you literally live your life.

[David Chalmers]

Your entertainment.

[Chuck Nice]

Yeah, your entertainment. Like, yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Right now the sensory experience in a virtual reality isn't 100% complete as we know it.

[David Chalmers]

Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

How long before we can taste, we can smell, we can have all these other sensory, sensory developments in VR reaction.

[David Chalmers]

I think it's probably getting there and coming decades. I mean, 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.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Just, we're not going to be walking around with big old headsets on like that in the future. Surely they'll just go.

[David Chalmers]

Hopefully in the end, contact lenses, brain computer interfaces to get taste and smell and touch working. Probably going to require some direct brain computer interface.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Right. Because you got to stimulate that part.

[David Chalmers]

Of the brain body representations directly, the smell area.

[Gary O'Reilly]

So basically the irony will be that we're in a simulation and we'll end up being in. Going into a simulation. In a simulation.

[David Chalmers]

Yeah, we could be. We may already be at level 42 and that will take us down to level 43.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

So David, you got to take us out of here. So what should we look forward to?

[David Chalmers]

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 exactly 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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Real consciousnesses and where they meet is the notion, which has been featured in multiple films, where you upload your consciousness.

[Chuck Nice]

Brain in a jar.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

To a jar.

[David Chalmers]

Yeah.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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 int intelligence?

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Or does that even matter? Does that even. Who cares?

[David Chalmers]

Maybe it doesn't. I mean, right now the best, most efficient artificial digital technologies we have is the kind is the silicon kind. But biology we just don't have the same kind of control over. So I would predict that will probably, at least in the short term, if we're uploaded, will be uploaded onto digital processes in silicon. If we're in a virtual reality, that will also be a reality running on digital processes and silicon. But yeah, but what ultimately matters is not what it's made of, it's the computation.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

It's what it can capable of.

[David Chalmers]

It's the bits.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Why should that even matter? I mean, you told someone 30 years ago, we had people walking around with two knees and hips and they say, well, it's not biological. No, it's metal. Right. They would. Who cares? You can still run.

[Gary O'Reilly]

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.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Replicate the brain.

[David Chalmers]

One philosopher wrote, wrote a paper on this years ago called it's not the meat, it's the motion.

[Chuck Nice]

Nice.

[David Chalmers]

It's not the biology.

[Chuck Nice]

I used to say a similar saying, not too unlike.

[David Chalmers]

It's a 1950s book.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We don't need to know your version of it.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Chuck, your phone's ringing.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, David, thanks for coming back on StarTalk. This has been yet another edition of StarTalk, special edition. This time with Professor David Chalmers in your latest book, tell me Reality Plus.

[David Chalmers]

All about those questions about reality and consciousness.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Reality Plus.

[Chuck Nice]

Reality Plus.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

What's with the plus? There's Paramount, Disney Plus.

[David Chalmers]

You know, I was originally going to call it reality 2.0 and everyone's like, that's 290's 2.0. So reality plus. Okay, well, it's a cliche. The plus.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

You're in the cliche.

[David Chalmers]

Paramount, Mass, Disney. But at least it's a 2020s cliche.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

And regular people can read this.

[David Chalmers]

Yeah, it's for anybody.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[David Chalmers]

It's about an introduction to the great problems of philosophy through the lens of technology.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Nice, nice.

[David Chalmers]

Why don't you read the book, Solve the problems, please.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Oh, yeah, there we go.

[Chuck Nice]

There you go.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

All right, Chuck, good to have you.

[Chuck Nice]

Always a pleasure, Gary.

[Gary O'Reilly]

Pleasure, Neil.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

We're doing it here. All right, Neil Degrasse Tyson here. Four star talk. As always. I bid you to keep looking up. Did you know when you shave, one third of what you remove is skin? So if you shave it dove it.

[David Chalmers]

With new Dove Advance Care Antiperspirant Dry Spray.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Nupro Ceramide technology helps repair skin's natural barrier after shaving.

[David Chalmers]

For soft smooth underarms.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

The ultimate post shave care with 72.

[Chuck Nice]

Hour sweat and odor protection.

[David Chalmers]

Try new Dove Advance Care Antiperspirant Dry spray from the number one dermatologist recommended.

[Neil DeGrasse Tyson]

Brand for everyday underarm care. Learn more and find where to [e-mail].

[David Chalmers]

Imagine what's possible when learning doesn't get in the way of life at Capella University. Our game changing flexpath learning format lets you set your own deadline so you can learn at a time and pace that works for you. It's an education you can tailor to your schedule. That means you don't have to put your life on hold to pursue your professional goals. Instead, enjoy learning your way and earn your degree without missing a beat. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn [e-mail].