← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Is Reality Fake? The Startling Truth About Simulation | David Chalmers (Replay)
01:25:15
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David Chalmers
Give it time. It's coming. A few decades, a century we'll have VR, you know, virtual reality systems indistinguishable from physical reality. At that point we'll actually be able to put people into simulations like Descartes scenario indistinguishable from physical reality. At that point we can start asking, how do we know this isn't happening to us already right now? Might we have been in a simulation like that all along?
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Host
David Chalmers, welcome to the show.
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David Chalmers
Thanks. It's great to be talking with you, man.
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Host
I'm really excited about this. So for people that aren't familiar with your work, which is amazing by the way, you are a philosopher, an author, and somebody who thinks a lot about virtual worlds. And your most recent book, Reality Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, is really an exciting read that. I don't know if you timed it as you did on purpose, but the fact that it's coming out right in the middle of, you know, Facebook changing its name to Metta and what's going on in the world of NFTs and like everybody just pouring into this idea of the metaverse and where this is all going. So as somebody who's creating in that world, I was reading your book in that context. But I want to start before that and I want to start with the hard problem of consciousness and specifically why that led you to dualism, if I may put that word on it. And it'll be interesting to see if that word still feels right to you. But if you don't mind, just walk people through why it's considered the hard problem of consciousness and how that ends up leading you to the Matrix and the metaverse, which people that have been following me for a while know. I am obsessed with the Matrix.
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David Chalmers
Me too. For me, consciousness was always the big issue. My background was growing up I was at math and science geek, totally interested in explaining the world in terms of science. I used to think wow. Wouldn't it have been great to have been a physicist back around the time of Newton, when physics was just totally ill understood, Nobody understood the first thing about space and time and matter and motion. The field was just wide open. Whereas, you know, these days, science is getting to be a lot better understood. And yeah, there are some interesting open problems in physics. But I was thinking, what is it right now that's like, say physics was 400 years ago, genuinely wide open. I thought the science of the mind and especially the problem of consciousness, of subjective experience, basically it feels like something to be a conscious human being. You know, we experience.
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Host
The one thing I want to understand, why do people consider like, I actually think I'm just not smart enough to understand why people think that's so weird. Why, why is that hard? Like, why? To me, the idea of, oh, you just stack enough neurons together and eventually there is a sort of recursive loop where you can look back on yourself and. And to me it just seemed like, again, because I don't feel like I may be smart enough to understand the problem. It just feels so easy to accept that the human brain is more complicated than, let's say, an ant's brain. And therefore humans have consciousness. And it's probably some sliding scale of. There's probably mammals that have it as well. Maybe not as deep of an ability to contemplate your own existence. But why, why is it so hard to believe that if we stacked silicon chips enough, enough, enough, enough, enough that it would finally become conscious?
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David Chalmers
I mean, it sure looks like if you put enough neurons together in a brain, connect them up in the right way and get them firing in the right way, you somehow get consciousness, you get subjective experience. But the big mystery is how and why does that happen? I mean, when it comes to explaining stuff like, say, human behavior, we've kind of got a model on this. You can kind of see how it is connecting up a whole lot of neurons in the right way, performing the right computations, reacting to inputs, getting integrated, connecting up different areas of the brain, producing an output that's going to produce human behavior. Maybe it'll explain how we walk, how we talk, how we get around in the world. And science has been super successful at doing that. But when it comes to consciousness, those things are the easy problems explaining what the system does. And science is great at explaining what things do. But with consciousness, we've got this whole different aspect of how it feels. We subjectively experience it from the inside. And you can imagine taking this whole story about inputs hitting the eye and getting passed up the optic nerve to the brain. Patterns of neurons firing in the visual cortex affect other areas of the brain. Eventually frontal cortex leads to action. But that still leaves open the question, why does all that feel like something? Why is there something it's like to be you undergoing that. And you could raise that. You could program all those neural firings into a robot, into a computer, with all those patterns producing all this behavior. But would it actually feel like something from the inside? I mean, maybe it would. I'm not saying it wouldn't in a robot, but that is the mystery. How does all that, all those neural firings somehow turn into. How does the, you know, the water of neural firings in the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?
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Host
That's interesting. That's a great way to put it. Okay, so let's explore that. So I heard you say in an interview that there was a period in your career where you were being a good boy of science and you were looking at this from a materialistic standpoint, meaning, matter, things we can touch, understand. And that you said like every day you were coming up with a new sort of physical explanation for how we get consciousness, but that ultimately you threw all of those away. And I don't know if you would still use the word dualism, but that you end up at least at one point in your life feeling like we have to separate or at least explore that there may be a separation between the physical realities of the brain and this sort of how do we explain the water into wine moment of consciousness. Walk me through. What were some of the physical explanations that you had and why did you discard them?
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David Chalmers
Oh yeah, I had so many theories of consciousness when I was first starting to think about this stuff. I certainly wanted to be like a materialist or a physicalist. Let's explain everything ultimately in terms of matter, in terms of physics. I don't know. I had my theory of abstractions, that consciousness was just going to be an abstraction from complicated information processing in the brain. I had my theory of information. It's just all about the information which is encoded. And when the information looks at other information in the self reflective way, maybe that gives you consciousness. But basically for every explanation like this, it always looked like it had this little huge mystery in the middle, like the arrow that says, here's where a miracle occurs, where all this information processing somehow gives you consciousness, where these abstractions somehow give you the basic elements of consciousness. And that part always just seemed to be like this fundamental mystery. And I came to Think that all you were ever going to get from a purely physical explanation was basically the structure and dynamics of a physical system, how a system is structured, what it does. And that is perfect for explaining almost everything in science, like biology. You want to explain life, you explain reproduction and metabolism, adaptation, all these things the system does, and you've explained life. But for consciousness, we have this extra thing that needs explaining. After handling all those easy problems, you know, the walking, the talking, the behavior. Why is all that accompanied by subjective experience? And eventually it just came to seem to me that to explain that, you needed to go beyond the resources, say, of physics. And this is not unheard of in science. You know, in the 19th century, Maxwell was trying to explain electromagnetism, and it turns out you just couldn't do it using Newton's theories of space and time and mass and laws of motion and laws of gravitation and so on. It just didn't give you a theory of electromagnetism. So what Maxwell ended up doing was saying, okay, we have to take electric charge as fundamental, and we have to develop some fundamental laws of electric charge. And that's basically. That's how we came up with Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism, regarded then at least as fundamental laws of nature. So my view is what we have to do for consciousness is something akin to what Maxwell did for. For charge. Treat consciousness as a fundamental property in nature and search for the fundamental laws that govern it. So that that thing which I said was where a miracle occurs, going from, say, physical processing to consciousness. Let's find a fundamental law that tells you how it is that consciousness arises from physical. Physical systems. And that's why it sounds a little bit like dualism, because I want to say that there's, you know, there's physics, at least as we understand it now, and there's consciousness. And consciousness is an additional fundamental. It's not a dualism of spooky souls. No life after death at least comes in. Comes in directly on this way of thinking about things. But it does say consciousness is a fundamental property of these systems which is not reducible to its physical properties. Philosophers sometimes call that property dualism. For a much weaker. I sometimes call it naturalistic dualism, a kind of a scientific dualism where we can have a science of consciousness. We have to admit consciousness as fundamental.
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Host
All right, that's really intriguing to me. I don't know that it answers all of my naive questions, so let me go through some of them here. So, okay, if we. If we take in consciousness As a fundamental law of nature, what then are the. And I think there's relatively few of them. What would the fundamental laws of nature be then? So we have electromagnetism, gravity, consciousness. What's the grab bag here?
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David Chalmers
Yeah, it's a good question. So one way that consciousness could be added to all this is via some separate laws. Some separate, I've sometimes called them, psychophysical laws for psycho, for mind, physical for physical. Basically physical to mental laws. Maybe the best example of this right now is a framework that's been developed by the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, where he basically connects consciousness to a measure of what he calls integrated information in the brain. He says when you have. He's got a certain mathematical definition of integrated information in any physical system and says, basically when you have low integrated information, low consciousness, high integrated information, high consciousness, he actually gives us a label phi. So consciousness is hi fi. Now, the old version of me might have said, okay, well, why does all this hi fi give you consciousness? That looks like saying, that's just where a miracle occurs. But in this framework, we say, okay, that's a fundamental law, just a fundamental psychophysical law that where you have high integrated information, you get consciousness of a certain type. And on one way of understanding this, that law just gets added to the laws of physics as like an extra law. So you've got your grand unified theories in physics, or the four fundamental forces or whatever it is.
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Host
Walk me through the four fundamental forces, because what I want to wrap my head around is I heard you once list them out, and it was really interesting to think of consciousness as part of that bag. And I think if we just list those out now with consciousness added, that gives us something to build on as we explore your ideas.
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David Chalmers
Yeah, well, standardly we have gravity, the fundamental force of gravity. We have the fundamental force of electromagnetism. We have the strong and weak nuclear forces. And then we have, you know, we have basically quantum mechanics that provides a grand framework for all of these things to take place. Physicists very much hope there's going to be a grand unified theory that might unify all the forces and somehow unify quantum mechanics and gravity. But that's the really hard part. They call those theories of quantum gravity. So they want a single unified theory underneath all those things. But they don't have that right now. They've unified some of the forces, but no one's been able to unify everything. But roughly, you could think of it. Forget the nuclear forces for now. You think, okay, there's there's gravitation for the. For the very large, there's quantum mechanics for the very small, there's electromagnetism for holding things together. And then. Yeah, and then there's consciousness for explaining how it is that these systems give you conscious experience. And the way I've told it there, it does kind of have the defect that consciousness sits outside those fundamental laws of physics. It's not unified with them. So a grander hope might be to actually find the grand unified theory that unifies consciousness with all of those things. And people. People have been thinking about that. Maybe quantum mechanical theories of consciousness, maybe some element of consciousness right down at the very basis of matter. So those laws of physics will themselves govern consciousness directly. But right now, that's just super speculative. That's somewhere we could hope to go maybe in 100 years.
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Host
The interesting thing for me, though, is understanding it in that way felt like a gateway to understanding how you're conceptualizing this. So the first time I had somebody on the show to talk about panpsychism, Incredibly bright woman. I mean, really, really thoughtful. And I couldn't help, though. Like, my mind just could not wrap around the idea that a rock has some, you know, I'll give it a spectrum, but like, that it falls on the spectrum of conscious because it's so different to how I perceive myself. And so walk me through. How do you make that leap of intuition into accepting that, like the particles that make up the globe behind you, or the, you know, the paper in those books that I see, or a rock? Like, how do you make the intuitive leap to saying that there is some sense of experience, to being those things?
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David Chalmers
Yeah, I'm not going to say it's somehow. It's obviously true that there's some bit of consciousness in everything. And for me, it's just one among a number of different speculative options. But it does have the attraction of somehow potentially unifying consciousness. With physics, if there turns out to be some consciousness at the very basis of matter, then consciousness could be unified. The alternative is this more dualistic picture where there's physics and their consciousness and there's consciousness, and those are separate. So if you don't want, you know, electrons to be conscious and so on, you want to think consciousness just kicks in with complex organisms, then you might want to go in that more dualistic way. But the panpsychist picture, consciousness is everywhere, does have many attractions, and many cultures have actually found it quite intuitive. If you look at various Eastern cultures and indigenous cultures, it's very common to Think there's some element of consciousness in everything now it won't be consciousness like us. It's not like a particle is thinking, oh God, I'm so bored worrying around that atom. Just get me out of here. They're not thinking, they're probably not having emotions, nothing like that. But maybe just some tiny little precursor of consciousness that somehow, when put together in these giant information processing systems, can add up to consciousness like ours. People also talk about proto consciousness. Maybe it's not full scale consciousness you find in these primitive systems, but just some primitive precursor to consciousness that we can't even imagine.
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Host
So as you think through that problem and you're discarding one after another sort of physical explanation of how this comes to be, you push what I will say you're sort of pushing the axiomatic miracle down lower and just saying, ah, it's part of physics. But as you do that, because I don't think we're going to solve the hard problem of consciousness here today, but it leads you to some incredibly fascinating places. So as you push that down and at least run the thought experiment of what if this were one of the fundamental forces, how does that end up leading you to. To hypothesis? Well, I know that you're saying that you don't necessarily think that we're living in a simulation, just that we can't rule it out. So how does that idea lead you to this realization that we can't rule it out? And then would love to hear more about how much like I have a T shirt that says the Matrix was a documentary. And it's like I say it, tongue in cheek, I don't really believe it, but. But there is so much truth to the human experience. Feeling like the Matrix is the perfect metaphor for what it's like to actually be a human. So I'm curious, as you push it down, how does that bring about this sense of we have to think through the simulation theory?
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David Chalmers
Yeah, I mean, you don't need to buy what I say about consciousness to buy into what I say about the Matrix or about simulations or vice versa. I think they're somewhat independent of each other. But that said, there are also actually a lot of links between the ideas. And one of the links you can actually find by going way back to the 17th century French philosopher Rene Descartes, who asked, how could I know anything about the reality around me? How do I know I'm not dreaming right now? How do I know that I'm not being fooled by an evil demon into thinking there's a reality out there when none of it is real? And Descartes said, I know some things about myself. I know that I'm here, I know that I'm thinking. I know that I'm conscious. And he said, I think, therefore I am. I know that I exist. And what Descartes basically said is I can be sure of my consciousness. At the very least, that's the one thing in the world that's a data point, that's a datum. But it's much harder to be sure about the external world around me. And he raised that problem by saying, yeah, how do I know I'm not dreaming, not being fooled by an evil demon? The way we raise that question today is to ask, how do I know I'm not in a simulation? How do I know I'm not in the Matrix? If I was, I'd still be here, conscious about the world around me would be utterly different from what I thought. And I think actually what this has done is taken Descartes old questions about maybe I'm dreaming, maybe it's an evil, maybe it's an evil demon actually turned it into a live concrete possibility. Because this technology is actually now coming. We can already build, you know, we can already build computer simulations of all sorts, even simple cosmic simulations. We can't yet build simulations indistinguishable from physical reality. But give it time, it's coming. A few decades, a century, we'll have VR virtual reality systems indistinguishable from physical reality. At that point, we'll actually be able to put people into simulations like Descartes scenario Indistinguishable from physical reality. At that point we can start asking, how do we know this isn't happening to us already right now, Might we have been in a simulation like that all along?
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Host
All right, so let's start getting into. It's a really, it's a really interesting question. And as you begin to peel back the layers, you, you and you do this very well in your book, you talk about the different types of potential simulations. So we have a perfect simulation and an imperfect simulation. Walk us through those differences. I think that will help people begin to answer that question for themselves.
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David Chalmers
Yeah, there are so many different ways you can be in. You could be in a simulation. You know, in the Matrix, for example, Neo has a brain and a body that are biological, but they're connected up to this computer simulation. He's not himself part of the simulation, but he's connected to it. That's what I call a biosim, a biological creature connected to a simulation. By contrast, in the movies, the agents like, you know, Agent Smith or the Oracle, they're not biological creatures. They are actually machines themselves. They are creatures of the simulation who's actually, you know, basically simulated processes themselves. That's what I call pure sims. So we've got like a pure impure simulation where brain's connected to a simulation. That's one possibility. But another one is we could be pure simulations. We could ourselves be simulated creatures connected to the simulation. I think both of those are open possibilities. You can also distinguish between, like a perfect simulation which mirrors, say, the world it's simulating perfectly, an imperfect one which is going to be glitchy and have approximations and shortcuts maybe. It's super expensive and difficult to build really precise simulations of physics throughout the whole universe. So our simulators are going to take shortcuts and make approximations and every now and then they'll get things wrong. I guess in the Matrix they had those black cats that, those cats that crossed your path twice and that was a sign of glitch. In the Matrix, maybe our simulators are actually approximating physical laws. And if we start making measurements which are close enough, we'll be able to pick up on glitches that'll be possible. If we're in an imperfect simulation, we might be able to get evidence of that. And I think that's worth looking for. On the other hand, if we're in a perfect simulation, we'll probably never get evidence of that because a perfect simulation is designed by its nature to be indistinguishable from the world it's simulating.
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Host
So one thing that a lot of this hinges on, there's really two things. So one, information theory. And I would love to hear more about that and why more and more credible people are saying, hey, it might be that as we dive deeper into physics, we find that this is really just information. And so what that means. Exactly. And then the notion that the odds are if simulations exist, and we know they do because we're already building virtual realities now, then ultimately there would be more simulated people and environments than there would be real environments. So just playing the stats, we're probably in a simulation. So if you can walk us through those two ideas and how they connect, I think that'd be really helpful.
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David Chalmers
Sure, yeah. Let me go with the, the stats first because this is an interesting argument that comes from the philosopher Nick Bostrom and also the. Yeah, the roboticist and futuristic Hans Moravec basically put forward this idea that eventually there are going to be a whole lot of simulations of simulated universes. We've already got primitive simulations in video games, in VR and so on. Given enough time, we'll be able to actually simulate whole physical universes. We'll be able to simulate human beings. Probably will get to the point where every intelligent civilization is going to have the capacity to create these simulations of intelligent beings. Maybe they'll actually create hundreds, thousands, millions of simulated worlds each. Then you start to think, boy, well, what are the statistics here? There's going to be like one unsimulated world that could be millions of simulated worlds. For every simulated being, there could be hundreds, thousands, who knows how many beings with very similar conscious experiences. And it's going to seem just the same to the simulated beings. So then you start to ask, what are the odds that I am one of those lucky ones? Ground zero, base reality unsimulated. When there are, you know, hundreds, thousands of beings just like me who were simulated. And then you start to. That's what gets you to the conclusion. Starts to look like maybe very, very good odds that were simulated. Now, things can get. That does require some assumptions. For example, it does require the assumption that a simulated being can be conscious. Now, as we've said, we don't fully understand consciousness, so this is going to be a controversial part of the argument. If you think a simulated being can't be conscious, then will be able to, then the very fact that we're conscious will rule up, rule out the idea that we're in a simulation. At least as a pure simulation, we could still be like the biosim, like Neo, because remember, Neo was just a brain, not a simulation. So it gets. It gets complicated. You know, there's a few ways, or you could say that, you know, these civilizations aren't actually going to create simulations because they might decide it's a bad idea. So. So there's a few ways this could go wrong. But for me, thinking through it statistically is enough for me to take this hypothesis really very seriously. In the end, I think I. I'm at least 50% that simulations like this are going to be possible. And I'm at least 50% that if they're possible, a whole lot of them will eventually be created. So that ends up giving me like 25% probability that there actually will be many more simulations, simulated being, all of whom are conscious. And once I'm there, I'm like, okay, that's at least a 25% chance that I'm simulated.
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Host
That's so fascinating to me. Now, so as we drill down into that and start, because when this is all just sort of drunken frat talk, it's mildly interesting. But as we get into the ways in which it seems that it may be real, that underlying all of physics is information theory, then it's like, okay, well, wait a second now. We really can't rule this out. So what is information theory and what could we do now to either prove or disprove that it's true?
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David Chalmers
Yeah, this is really interesting. This kind of connects to how people think of the simulation hypothesis and the idea that the world is simulated. If you follow Rene Descartes, he thought that these scenarios where he's dreaming, where there's an evil demon, he thought, if we're in that kind of scenario, none of this is real. And it's the same with the Matrix. A lot of people say, even in the movies, they say, if we're in the Matrix, nothing is real. The world around us is an illusion. I actually want to resist that. I want to say that if we're in a simulation, the world around us is still perfectly real. When we see tables and chairs and trees and mountains, they're still perfectly real objects. There'll be digital objects underneath it all, but that doesn't mean they're not real. They're real digital entities.
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Host
Can you take a second to define real?
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David Chalmers
Yeah, you know, I mean, real is one of those ambiguous words, but I've got a few different criteria for being real. One is that to be real you have to have causal powers. You make a difference in the world. If something can affect things, then it's real. Second, it's got to be outside of our minds. If something is just a dream generated by our minds, then we don't usually count it as real and as strong a sense. So it's got to be independent of our minds. And third, maybe the most important to be real, we care that something is not an illusion, that is that things are roughly the way that they seem. And what I would argue is if we're in a simulation, then there are still going to be digital entities in the simulation. Say I see a tree and I'm actually in the matrix. I'm going to say, well, there is actually a digital tree out there somewhere in the computer, which is making a difference to me, making a difference to other things in the Matrix. So it has causal powers, it's independent of me. I could leave the Matrix, the tree will still be there. And I want to argue it's not an illusion. There really is a tree there, it's made of bits, it's a digital tree. But I want to say that's still a way of being real. And this is where you get the connection to these information theory ideas like the so called IT from bit hypothesis. The physicist John Wheeler speculated that underneath everything in physical theory, you know, we're used to the idea that under plants and trees are made of cells. Cells are made of molecules made of atoms made of quarks. But Wheeler speculated that underneath all that, you know, maybe quarks are somehow made of bits, that we've got a level of bits, ones and zeros, in effect a physics of ones and zeros underlying the physics that, that we know. And this is a controversial idea about real physics, but it's one that some people have taken seriously. Stephen Wolfram has written these big books like A New Kind of Science, spelling out one version of this kind of IT from bit physics. And if you take that idea seriously, then you realize that being made of bits, being digital, is not a way of being unreal. It's just another hypothesis about what reality is made of. So what I want to say is if we're in a simulation and we shouldn't say none of this is real, instead we should say, well, we're in an it from bit universe. We're in a universe where the objects around us are actually digital objects made of bits, but they're still real, they have causal powers, they're out there independent of us, and they needn't be an illusion. So I want to say basically the simulation hypothesis is a version of The IT from bit hypothesis.
- [32:51]
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- [33:22]
Host
Do you ever drive yourself crazy with the idea that you're really just pushing the miracle lower or deeper or however you want to think about it? Because here's an idea that, that drives me crazy. So as you're explaining that, I'm like, oh my God, yeah, like this makes so much sense, like there's bits. And then I'm like, but wait, where did the bits come from? And then it's like, okay, there, there was a creator. And you've said many times, you know, and God said, let there be bits. But then I'm like, where's God? Like, where does this come from? And there's always some moment where I have to say, yeah, I just don't know. Like there, there's some axiomatic sort of ground floor base assumption and we build up from that. And so I'm curious, what is your like base based base assumption? Is it simulations all the way down? Is it like if we get to the ground zero that you're talking about before the one sort of real world, where'd that come from?
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David Chalmers
It's a great question. And yeah, I don't have a definitive answer to this. There's like all kinds of different hypotheses about what the ground floor is. One idea is that, you know, bits are the basic level of reality. That's the pure it from bit hypothesis.
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Host
But even in that moment, you get to like a. They've always existed. Like it does that not just like fry your brain?
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David Chalmers
You got to take something as fundamental, though this is. This already kind of fries your brain. One of the basic questions in philosophy, why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there anything in the universe? And it just looks like some things you have to take as fundamental properties and fundamental laws. And that's not wholly satisfying. It kind of looks like it's the best we can do, but at least for now we can speculate about what that fundamental level is. Maybe it's bits. But yeah, if the bits are running on a simulation, then there's probably something underneath the bits Just as in our computers, bits are made up out of voltages in a transistor or something. If we're in a simulation, probably these bits are running on some computer in the next universe up that may have, you know, transistors of its own or some completely different physics. I call that the it from bit from it hypothesis is that the bits are made of something else. Of course, in that universe, maybe it's a simulation too. Maybe the it's are made of bits there. So we get it from bit from it from bit from it. Maybe we're three universes down or five universes down or 42 universes down. But yeah, that does just push all the questions back to presumably there's a base reality. I mean, could it be simulations all the way up? I don't know if that makes sense.
- [35:53]
Host
Maybe, but certainly as a thought experiment it makes sense. But you run into the same problem, which is, like you said, at some point you have to accept something as foundational and it's really just a question of where do you accept that? And information theory is interesting to me for one reason that I've heard you talk about and I'd love to get your sense of if this really is information theory, it feels like then I can keep going, keep going, keep going until I find, like, that the data structure. And maybe this is just not a wise way to think about it. But for me. And so as a storyteller, I'm obsessed with this idea. In fact, this character right here is a character that I created that lives in a virtual world. And. But he is both in the. He can basically pop in and out of the Matrix, if you will. And what becomes interesting to me is when we get to the point where we're. We have these simulations that are just indistinguishable from reality. And let's say that we're living in one now that you can get to the point where you get to the base code. And if you can alter the base code, then you can essentially alter physics. And, you know, I mean, maybe this is just a superhero fantasy on my part, but that to me is really interesting. And so when I look at our world and I think of all the things that we've already been able to do and manipulate and change because we've gotten to some layer of the code, right? So, like when I think about satellites and how most people don't realize GPS wouldn't work without Einstein's theory of relativity. And just by understanding that, we've been able to create these things that give us, like, pinpoint accuracy to where we are and they can lead us to our destination. I mean, it's already like physics has already transformed our worlds in ways that most of us take completely for granted. So anyway, I get super interested in this idea of, hey, if we keep digging, like, we can ultimately get to, you know, whether it's dark matter or whatever, we get to that thing that we don't yet understand, that if we can start either leveraging its predictions like we did with relativity, or actually manipulating that structure, that we can escape the Matrix, or we can manipulate the matrix even if we can't get out of it because we are of the Matrix. That, to me, is incredibly interesting. Have you thought through that? Do you have any ideas around that?
- [38:22]
David Chalmers
Yeah, you know, one way to kind of make this concrete is that, well, actually, whenever we create a virtual world, even like in a video game, you know, whoever creates the virtual world is in effect, the God of that video game. They're all powerful. They in principle can reset anything. They can be all knowing. They can know everything that's going on. They created it. So it's like they are the God of the video games. And you can give yourself, if you actually write the video game yourself, you can give yourself superpowers, you know, you can teleport anywhere. You can see whatever's going on. You can build new structures just like that. You can change the rules, you can change the laws. So, yeah, then you start thinking, well, if we're in a simulation, there's someone up there that has this kind of power over our reality. A kind of power. Not that different in some ways from those of a. From those of a traditional God. And then, yeah, then you start to think, well, could we get access to that? I mean, I guess if it's a perfect simulation, then it's going to be very hard for us to get access. Because if it's a perfect simulation, it's going to be undetectable. Maybe there are things we can do to try and at least to perform some experiments. For example, maybe we can try and overload the simulation and see what happens. See if we get any glitches, maybe start running some simulations within the simulations and really put some load on their computers and see if something happens. Or at the very least, maybe more effective, we could try and communicate with them, tempt them into communicating with us. I don't know, maybe write some books on the simulation hypothesis and put forward some hypotheses about their nature and see if they get so infuriated by this, that they reveal themselves in order to prove us wrong. Or samplers. Once we're communicating with them, then, yeah, then maybe we can get access to the controls.
- [40:15]
Host
Yeah, that's where this gets at least, as you know. I suppose your thought experiments run the nature of philosophy. Mine very much go into storytelling in a way. I guess in some ways I'm talking back to myself to describe this human condition, but to feel it in an emotional way. But I find myself intrigued by that notion. And I. I don't know that I would have been intrigued had I, you know, been in Descartes time. So, you know, certainly don't think I have any real insights. But it is growing up in the technological age as this is all unfolding and as virtual worlds become a reality, it does start to ask interesting questions of our humanity, which I find really fascinating. And so I'd love to talk about that. So you've gone into great detail about whether we can live a meaningful life inside of a virtual world. And the one thing you said that really stopped me in my tracks and I took a note on it. And so I'm building a. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's a virtual world, so building the same codename, the Avatar experience. And within that, your idea of life and death within a VR environment. And at first I thought, man, that's like the one thing you'd want to stay away from. It's like take advantage of what VR has to offer, which is the exact opposite of that. But then, I don't know, something about when you said that, I thought that loss is devastating. But it also adds something incredibly poignant to life. And while I personally want to live forever, it's an interesting mechanic to have death be available in even a virtual world. So I don't know if you've thought a lot about, as a builder, what you would want to see and create or what questions you would want to dance with to be a little poetic. But what do you think about that?
- [42:15]
David Chalmers
Yeah. Birth and death are obviously incredibly important parts of human life, maybe the most important parts in some way. And maybe they play some role in giving our lives the kinds of meaning that they have. You know, in that, in that film, Children of Men, when there's no longer. No longer any birth. And it does kind of, you get the sense of people's lives, they're not meaningless, but they've been robbed at least of one element of their meaning. So when I think about what's missing and what's potentially missing in virtual worlds, at least in any virtual world we'll have in the near term future, birth and death happens in the physical world. Whenever someone's born, they're born in the physical world. When they die, they die in the physical world. Maybe they can enter and exit virtual worlds in association with this, but it's not really where the birth and death occurs. Maybe in the long run, once they're actually simulated beings, simulated humans, maybe there'll be beings which are actually born inside the Matrix. Maybe you simulate pregnancy, simulate the development of the fetus, eventually have a simulated birth, and you'll have creatures which are born in the Matrix and likewise creatures that die in a virtual world too. Without. Remember the machines we talked about? They never had to be biological. They were purely simulated. So maybe eventually that kind of birth and death could be possible. But at least until then, it looks like, yeah, certain things are tied so deeply to our biology that it's hard to get their analog inside a virtual world until you move to the long term future where all of physics and all of biology exists within a simulation.
- [44:01]
Host
This makes me think. So going back to the first thing we were talking about with consciousness being a fundamental law, does it not seem like consciousness would be an outcropping of evolution? Because when I think about what my consciousness actually does for me. So I think a lot about directives that nature has implanted in our brains. I think a lot about how if you damage the emotional centers of the brains, people find it impossible to make a decision decision. And so there is a sense of like, consciousness is fundamental, at least in my interpretation, to future planning, to desire, to thinking about what I want and making sure that I want it. And to making sure that like, oh man, it hurts if I don't get it. And all of that requires like this sense of self awareness. Now I have a feeling you're going to take us into zombieland here, which is probably the right thing to discuss. But it seems like self awareness, and I will intentionally use a slightly different word than consciousness, but that self awareness becomes a pretty important part of the journey of accomplishment.
- [45:18]
David Chalmers
Yes, self consciousness is super important. I like to distinguish ordinary consciousness from self consciousness. Ordinary consciousness involves being just aware of things in the world around us. Maybe in perceptual consciousness I see things, I hear things, and there's something, it's like for me to see things and hear things. I've got the subjective experience of seeing and hearing or feeling pain that I don't think needs to involve consciousness of myself. That can just involve consciousness of the things around Me. But there is a special kind of consciousness we have, which is consciousness of ourselves. I mean, I don't know whether maybe fish, for example, I don't know, maybe a fish has some consciousness of the, of the water around it or the fish. Maybe it's conscious of itself, maybe it's not. But humans, we are paradigmatically the self conscious species where conscious of ourselves we can reflect on our own existence, we can think about our own consciousness. And that is really special I think. I mean it's one aspect of consciousness, but a particularly complex and crucial aspect of consciousness. And it does look like our self consciousness is tied to many things that we, that we do. But it is an interesting question for anything that you think consciousness does. You mentioned zombies. For almost anything. For pretty well anything that you want consciousness to do. We always say couldn't you do that in principle without consciousness? So even if it's just seeing and getting visual information, couldn't a robot do that without consciousness? Or maybe something which I use self consciousness to do, to make plans, make decisions, reflect on my life, couldn't in principle there be say a robotic version of me that went through all this with no subjective experience? So this gets us to the philosopher's zombie, which is basically a creature which at least acts a great deal like a human being and behaves very similarly, maybe is made up of similar processes, but that lacks consciousness entirely. So there's nothing it's like to be a zombie on the inside. Everything is dark, no consciousness. And most people don't think that zombies actually exist. I don't think there are any zombies out there. But it's a great way of posing the philosophical problems of consciousness. I mean you can pose the hard problem of consciousness by saying why aren't we zombies? Why couldn't we have been creatures that did all this stuff? Without consciousness we're not, we're conscious. But why? And it's also a way of raising this question of what does consciousness actually do for us? Why in principle couldn't a zombie have had all this kind of these reflective processes led to guiding its action in all these ways without any subjective experience at all?
- [48:13]
Host
I think there might be some elements of the actual natural world that give us clues maybe worth exploring here. So there's a parasite called Toxo something, I'm forgetting the exact name. But basically cats get this parasite that can be passed on to humans, but it can also be passed on to mice. So the toxoparasite prefers to. It can do asexual replication, or it can do sexual replication, and it prefers to do sexual replication, but it can only do that in the digestive tract of a cat. So what it does is it goes and infects mice or rats and makes them drawn to the scent of cat urine and completely unafraid of cats. So if you were to take a newborn rat pup and expose it to the scent of cat urine, it gets terrified. So it's not. It's instinctual. So you can inject them or infect them with this, this parasite and it will suddenly be drawn to the scent of cat urine and then the cat eats the, the rat or the mouse. It then is able to replicate sexually within its intestines. And now there's also. So to me, that's like a zombie like behavior, right? You have taken control of a very specific part of the rat brain to get it to do and change its own behavior. Then there's a fungus, if I remember right, that like, will bore into the head of like a wasp or I can't remember how it happens. But anyway, the. Either the wasp does it to an ant or something and you get these totally zombified creatures that, like just, you know, begin to locomote. And I forget the exact behavior that they manifest, but they are totally gone. Right. Like all the instinctual drives they have are taken over by this fungus or whatever. And what that tells me is that there are regions in the brain and just like you can knock somebody, you can remove their consciousness with, I won't even say sleep because, you know, dreams, and you still have a sense of passage, of time. But if you put somebody under general anesthetic, they're. They're gone. Like, there is no sense of them. You can damage someone's brain and the sense of them goes away. So what do you take away from those things? The fact that I can go into the brain, do things and completely change your experience.
- [50:53]
David Chalmers
Yeah, well, the brain is vulnerable to all kinds of manipulation. I mean, what you're describing is not so different in some ways from, let's say the Facebook algorithm gets in there and gets control of some bits of our brain and it knows what we're going to like and what we're going to react to. And yeah, we're just going to click on those things and it's as if, yep, they've got into our brain. Does some things very predictably if you get a hold of it in the right way. And that's what social media, for example, is trying to game all the time. Maybe when people. Maybe if there are simulators out there. Maybe they're performing these experiments on us all the time as well. But yeah, brain. The brain is a deeply complex machine and some things it does are conscious. Some of our activities are conscious, highly voluntary things. But a whole lot of what the brain does that isn't conscious at all. It just happens unconsciously, reflexively. Whether it's, whether it's just, you know, breathing or somehow where we choose to navigate decisions are often unconscious. So yeah, it's totally possible in principle to get control of those bits of the brain and manipulate them. Once we've got, you know, brain computer interfaces, it's going to be. Our brains are going to be potentially vulnerable to, to all kinds of manipulation there. So I think, I mean, this is kind of to be expected if consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg and so much of what we do is unconscious. I mean, our consciousness can be manipulated too. There are, there are areas of the brain, people call them the neural correlates of consciousness that go along with consciousness. If people found ways to directly manipulate those, I mean, what do drugs do? All kinds of drugs manipulate those areas of the brain and they produce amazing transformations in conscious experience. So yeah, I think the more we understand the connection between brain and consciousness, the more capacities we're going to find for both manipulation and transformation of consciousness.
- [52:56]
Host
So knowing all of that and having thought through all of that, does that adjust your model in any way about how you think about panpsychism or the fundamental nature of consciousness? And do you, like I've said a couple times that it's a scale, but is that the right way to think about it?
- [53:19]
David Chalmers
Yeah, I think, yeah, there's a huge, it's not even like a mono dimensional scale. There's a huge space of states of consciousness which are orderable in so many different ways, from the simple to the complex, from the less intense to the more intense, from a couple of sensory modalities to many sensory modalities. I think it's a massive space of states of consciousness. One of the big projects in this area is to map those states of consciousness onto states of the brain. This is like neural correlates of consciousness in the brain and find those dimensions of processing in the brain that map onto dimensions of consciousness. This is the meat and potatoes of the science of consciousness right now, which has been super active now over the last 30 years or so. Ever since I started getting into this field, the science of consciousness has gone ahead by leaps and bounds. And what it's been trying to do is to it doesn't really try and solve the hard problem. Instead, what it tries to do is to find mappings, correlations between aspects of processing in the brain and aspects of consciousness. And yeah, it's still, it's still primitive and developing in some ways, but at least in some cases, we find things we can understand. So, for example, we know there are certain areas of the brain that seem to go along with spatial processing as other areas go along with action. People have used this to actually communicate with patients who they thought were in some kind of post coma state where they couldn't communicate. Maybe you thought someone was in a vegetative state, but then you ask them, imagine playing tennis, and then they imagine an action. Imagine walking through your house, they imagine something spatial and you'll see different areas of their brain light up. And people take that as pretty strong evidence that, hey, these people are conscious in different ways. And then they go, use that for communication.
- [55:09]
Host
Thrilling and heartbreaking. So the thought that they're. Have you seen or read the book the Diving Bell and the Butterfly?
- [55:16]
David Chalmers
Sure, yeah.
- [55:17]
Host
Oh my God. Like, the whole idea of being locked in, he could blink one eye and that he had was completely there mentally. For anybody that doesn't know it, completely there mentally. He has a stroke or something. Completely there mentally, but cannot move any part of his body except for one of his eyes. And that idea, I had heard about that, the playing tennis, the move through your house thing. And if I'm not mistaken, they could ask them effectively, like yes or no questions by saying, okay, imagine someone playing tennis for yes. Imagine walking through your house for no. And now we ask you all these questions. And I was like, oh my God. Like the number of people that there's no external sign that they're there, but they're still there. Like when you talked about the electron being bored out of its mind, I can't fathom. Like, that is so terrifying, the thought that you're still there but you can't communicate anything.
- [56:17]
David Chalmers
Just imagine that guy in the Diving bell on the butterfly, but without the control over the one eye. I've asked people a few times actually, do we have reason to believe there are people out there with this locked in syndrome, totally undamaged brain functioning, but just no sign of it. Because how would we know? People say, oh, no, it doesn't happen because the eyes are independent. But you do get these things which are close. These patients, like the one diagnosed with vegetative state, where they did the brain imaging for the tennis and the house, I mean, it wasn't quite the same as normal locked in syndrome, because there was some brain damage in those cases, but still, it's on a continuum with this. And this was a patient. It just didn't show up at all in their behavior. I think it's at least possible there are some patients out there for whom nothing, no visible signs in their behavior, not even the eyelid, but who are actually richly conscious the way that we are or the way that the guy in the diving bell and the butterfly is. And yeah, that is absolutely tragic. And I think maybe the science of consciousness can develop ways to help us find those people who.
- [57:23]
Host
Man, I know it's to the side of our conversation, but that is very, very scary to me. I woke up once in the middle of a dental. I was having my wisdom teeth removed and I woke up in the middle of it and I was just like, yo, I'm awake. I'm awake, I'm awake. And then they, you know, and you just drift away again. But you hear about those stories of people that don't lose consciousness during surgery. Yo, like that. That is. That's not ideal, David. That is not ideal.
- [57:54]
David Chalmers
Yeah, it's not great. Especially once you. Once you realize that for a long time, I think at least anesthetics consisted of three components. Paralytic to paralyze your body, an analgesic to remove the pain, and also an amnestic to remove your memory afterwards. And so you just say one of these things doesn't work so well so you're still somehow awake. Well, okay, there's going to be amnestics. You don't remember it afterwards. But was that. Was that reassuring? Maybe you're awake for the whole. The whole operation.
- [58:25]
Host
Oh, my God. I find that, yeah, very.
- [58:28]
David Chalmers
People now say they have better anesthetics and they have got. They've developed people, actually. But the scales of consciousness they use for anesthesia are still quite primitive, and they're trying to develop better scales. But this is a place where the science of consciousness has to get better to help us actually properly remove states of consciousness and anesthesia. Because, yeah, anesthetists, they remove and restore consciousness for a living. They're like consciousness engineers.
- [58:53]
Host
What's fascinating to me is that a redhead, I guess, is harder to anesthetize than any other hair color. That seems so such a bizarre correlation.
- [59:03]
David Chalmers
Have they figured out the explanation of that?
- [59:05]
Host
Not that I've heard, but the fact that there would be any sort of physical correlation to something like that I find extremely strange. But, yeah, that's very Interesting to me. Now, one idea that you talk about in the book that I wanted to go to is Zhuangzi. And the idea of whether or not I'm dreaming or whether I'm the butterfly dreaming that I'm Zhuangzi, like that, to me, is this like, first of all, Zhuangzi was God knows how long ago, 400 BC, right? So just a few days ago, what is it, do you think, that makes people like, this is the question that everybody asks over and over. What is it about that question of whether or not I'm dreaming? Is this all real? Why are we obsessed with it? And why is it important enough to answer?
- [60:01]
David Chalmers
Because, yeah, we want to understand reality and we want to be in touch with reality. Boy, the fact that we dream every night, that really kind of makes this real for us. It's like every night we go to these massive hallucinations where we're in a different world, and suddenly you realize, boy, could this be a dream, too? And if it is, then we kind of feel like none of this is real. My life is maybe meaningless and so on. I'm just. I thought that everything was one way and actually it's a. It's another way. Boy. It was the first line of lines of Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. Is this the real life or is it just fantasy? We desperately want all this to be real. I think it's the human. Every ancient philosophical tradition has versions of this question. We had in Chinese philosophy, we had Guangzhou and the butterfly, and ancient Greek philosophy, we had Plato with his allegory of the cave. Could we just be chained up inside a cave, seeing shadows on the cave wall while the genuine reality is outside? Everybody wants to be in touch with reality.
- [61:09]
Host
I'm going to give you a hypothesis on why I think this matters so much. And it, quite frankly, is, I say, is my life work. I might say this is my, like, the very thing that I'm trying to convey to the world. So first of all, I'm always saying you're having a biological experience. The reason I want people to understand that is because you get trapped by your biology and you mistake it for objective truth. So you have an emotion which is really just neurochemistry. And that neurochemistry is triggered by your beliefs about the situation versus the sort of. I mean, to quote Shakespeare, nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. So it's like whatever happened is neutral, but you assign good or bad to it. And so what I want people to understand is that you have a frame of reference and that frame of reference is you live in a house full of funhouse mirrors. Now, if you've ever been in a room where it is nothing but mirrors, it is wildly disorienting. Like, you cannot tell what's real. Like, am I about to? Like, you can literally bash into something because you're looking deeply into the mirror and you think it's far away, but it actually isn't. And so you smack into it. And now if these mirrors have distortions in them which make you see things not in the way that they actually are, it can be really disorienting. Now, as an analogy or a metaphor for the way that your brain works, I would say that's pretty accurate. Like over time, based on your hard wiring, based on the experiences that you have in life, whether you've suffered trauma, whatever, you begin to form this view of yourself and the world that is distorted for good or bad or neutral, but it's distorted. And when, because I know Zhuangzi was a daoist, and the whole Daoist philosophy is like unwinding that frame of reference and being able to get outside of it and recognize, you know, the dao that can be named is not the eternal dao. It's like the mere act of trying to enunciate something, it will fall through your fingers. And when you step outside of it a little bit and you realize, oh my God, I'm creating my own problems. The way I think about this is the issue versus the actual thing I imagine at that point that leads you to this, like, bigger and bigger. Like, how far does this frame of reference go down to where you get into physics? And you know what I was saying earlier about if you really understand fundamental physics, you can alter things in ways that you otherwise would not be able to do, it becomes this really compelling idea of if I fully grasp how all of this works, if I fully understand how much of what I perceive as objective truth is actually a dream, then I can better navigate the world because I better understand how things actually work. Does that ring true to you as the thing that sort of drives this? Like, I really need to know.
- [64:03]
David Chalmers
That's interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think much of what we experience as external reality is, I think actually it's a complicated dance between, say, an external physical world and our own consciousness. And consciousness does so much to construct our experience of the external world. And some of it is imposed by top down constraints. Consciousness has its own model of the world that it fits everything into, it colors things in. Even though there are Maybe no colors out there. And external reality, it puts everything into this nice neat Euclidean space, even though that might be not how it is in external reality. Basically, you know, consciousness is what gives all of this. You've got atoms in the void and consciousness somehow gives it meaning. And so much about. I think our pre theoretical model of the world is just this mix of the two. And that's what leads some people to say, could this all be my consciousness? Could this just be a dream? Could it just come from me? And I think there's actually good reason to think there's something outside our consciousness. Maybe it's physics, maybe it's a simulation and so on. But then we want to kind of tease those factors apart. There's what we bring to reality and there's what the world brings to reality. And you can think of say physics as an attempt to do that, pull consciousness out of the world. When Galileo or whoever founded modern science, it's like, okay, well let's take the mind out of reality, turn reality into this complicated system of equations and then have consciousness at the middle of it. But still there's this always this sense how much of the world is usually and how much of it is out there independent of us. And yeah, the simulation idea, I don't know. I think for some people it's a way of saying ah. Actually it's just this conscious reality that I, that I constructed, that I created and the rest is just a simulation myself. I think it's the wrong attitude towards simulations. If there's a simulation out there, well, that is our reality and that's outside our mind. So let's treat that as reality too. But either way, there's a conscious being here in the middle at the core of it. And we're always trying at least to get outside of ourselves.
- [66:17]
Host
Talk to me about the experience machine and the idea that life, I think that we all have, or most of us, that an intuitive sense that if the life that I led is not based on truth, that it makes it worse. And an example I've heard you talk about before and I think may be the perfect example is let's say that I live so I've been married for almost 20 years. Let's say that we're married for 80 years and then my wife dies, only for me to then discover that she's been cheating on me the whole time, at least until the later years. Would I be better off knowing or not knowing?
- [67:00]
David Chalmers
Would you be better off knowing or not knowing? Here's one thing I. One contrast is just that you have the same experiences either way, but in one situation your wife has been cheating on you, and in the other situation she hasn't. She's been faithful the whole time. And let's say this is a monogamous relationship. You want her to be faithful, and she said that she will be. Then I'd say that it's better for you then if she's been faithful than if she'd been unfaithful, even if you never knew that she was unfaithful. Because we value the world being a certain way. In this case, by assumption. You value your wife's being faithful, and if she's not, then the world is not the way that you want it to be, even though you never get any evidence of this. And I think I would use this to argue that part of what matters is how things feel for us, but we also value how things are outside of us. In this case, you value you care what your wife does, even when it makes no direct difference to you. Some people have used this to argue that virtual reality is somehow going to be less good than ordinary reality. Robert Nozick had this example of the experience machine, which is this machine that you get put in that gives you all these wonderful experiences of winning the world championship and having amazing family and friends, even though none of it is really happening. And then he said, would you choose to step in the experience machine? And Nozick said, well, I wouldn't do that. No way. Even though you have all these amazing experiences. And he used that to argue that shows again that we care about more than our experiences. We care about what's outside us. And some people use that to say that's what's wrong with VR. VR will give you all these experiences of an ordinary life, but none of it will be real. That's where I want to get off the boat. Though I'm going to say in VR, it's not really like these cases. In VR you actually are interacting with a real digital world. You get to make free choices, you get to build your life, you get to build relationships and so on. I think those things actually are real. So I want to argue that you can have a. Maybe you can't have a meaningful life in the experience machine. I do want to think you can have an experience, a meaningful life in VR, because what happens in VR is real. It's not scripted, it's not pre programmed. You can actually build your own life in VR.
- [69:33]
Host
All right, let's say the experience machine was real and it's Not a binary choice. Live in it forever or not. It's like for an hour on a Friday night, pop into the experience machine and you can, you know, win the championship. Would you do it?
- [69:48]
David Chalmers
Is it kind of a guarantee that I'm going to win the championship or do I have to actually.
- [69:52]
Host
Yes, it, it, it is 100% that you will feel the full neurochemical experience of winning the championship.
- [69:59]
David Chalmers
You know, I might do it for fun as escapism. It might be an enjoyable experience. Like, yeah, I'll watch the Karate Kid or some movie where the kid does well. So maybe it's even better when you get to experience it in the first person point of view. But for me that would be escapism. But contrast it with a different case where I get to go into VR with a hundred other people and we actually have a genuine competition and one of us actually wins and the other ones lose, depending on how it actually goes. And maybe on one occasion I actually win, then I'd say that was real. And that was in principle just as meaningful as a corresponding thing happening in the physical world. Because yeah, there was no guaranteed outcome. I had to struggle. This wasn't just doesn't need to be escapism. And I think VR is more like that than it is like the experience machine.
- [70:52]
Host
That's a really interesting distinction and what I find really fascinating. So to me, the experience machine is exactly like doing drugs, where I could go in and I can feel the neurochemistry that I want to feel. This is amazing. Oh my God. And some people will for sure get addicted to it and they will live in it to the detriment of everything else in their life. And it will be a total calamity as they wither away into nothingness chasing that next dopamine high. But I would definitely do it, just not very often. I would be very careful about how much time I spent doing that. But to your point about going in and actually competing, that would be a lot of fun. And I feel very confident in my answer because that's already how I structure my life. I rarely do drugs and when I do, they are not extreme. And I definitely enjoy competing in games, video games specifically. Like that's a lot of fun. But those are two very different things to me. And they trigger a different sense of like craving. Because when I think about doing drugs I'm like, ah, like there's something about it that's like one, there's a physical risk to it, which is a big part of why I don't do it. But even setting that aside, if there were no physical problems to it, it still feels like a cheat, if you will. And so, for instance, I have never once ever had a drink alone. To me, it's gotta work double duty. It's gotta be, like, also bonding with somebody that I care about. I'm the same.
- [72:23]
David Chalmers
Yeah, drinking is great socially.
- [72:25]
Host
Exactly. So. But I could see where that would simultaneously be this amazing thing that I would be very glad exists. Like, I always tell people, when it comes to drinking, I feel like I'm suppressing the urge to dance on a table. Like, it is just a wonderful feeling, but I rarely do it. That would be the experience machine for me. But then going out and doing hard things to get better and to compete and to know that I might lose, that is far more interesting.
- [72:54]
David Chalmers
Yeah, I mean, experiences are great. And so I think it's okay to just value experiences for their own sake. And drugs can give you amazing experiences, but we've got this special kind of value for what goes on outside our experience. And if all we valued was our experience, then you get into this very narcissistic world where you potentially lose contact with reality, but you can live your life potentially in a virtual world. How about a, so far, we've had drugs and we've had games, but how about, I don't know, you go into VR and you have a great conversation, maybe with a. Maybe you move your work into VR and you have a great conversation with a guest for your podcast. And then I think, you know, this can be just as meaningful as having a conversation in the physical world is. Or intermediate cases like this one where we're doing it, doing it over zoom. I don't think it makes a big difference to the meaningfulness of the conversation if it happens in physical reality or in virtual reality. I mean, there are some differences, but an interaction between two people is just as real either way. And yet social interaction, interaction between two people, this is one of the primary ways that we get outside our own consciousness, because we really value making contact with another person's consciousness, as we're doing right now.
- [74:10]
Host
It's a really good point. I like that. We do value that. And when I think about the most valuable thing in my life, which is unquestionably my wife, I said to her the other day, this is probably only a week ago, I was like, do you ever have, like, this just really weird moment of realizing that you and I are two totally separate people, but we have decided to live our lives, like, completely in sync because I'VE been with her for so long now. I'm 45, I've been with her for 22 years. So we're like coming up on that point where I've been with her for longer than I've been without her, which is surreal to think. And certainly when you factor that the amount of my life that I've sort of been consciously aware of, which is, you know, maybe seven or eight or, you know, six I guess, is probably my earliest memory. We're really getting close. So it's in, in many ways like we're completely connected and yet there is this part of what makes her so important to me is like you said, it's outside of me and getting that like connection and feedback from someone else, which as a, you know, you're having a biological experience. So understanding myself in sort of evolutionary context of nature, had to make sure that I was drawn to a mate, that I was drawn to being a part of a group to make sure that I survive. It's no wonder. But it's still experientially, it's really pretty amazing. But then to put a little Twist on that, GPT3, where do you think one tell people what that is and where does this go and does it break any of these mechanisms or does it make it better?
- [75:52]
David Chalmers
Boy, yeah. So GPT3 is this amazing new artificial intelligence model that's basically trained on a whole lot of language from all over the Internet. And then it can basically given any string of text, it can continue that text and to turn it into plausible text, often into plausible conversations. So yeah, at one point when GPT3 was first released, somebody trained GPT3 on a bunch of stuff that I'd written some interviews with me or something. And then they said, okay, now we're going to produce an interview with David Chalmers. And they asked it questions, it gave answers, things I'd never said before. But a lot of people read this and they said, yeah, that kind of sounded like you. Some people thought it, some people thought it was me, whereas it wasn't. It was just a deep fake version of me. You know, we've all seen already these deep fake photos and videos. You get a politician, Obama or Trump or whatever, and saying something they never said by manipulating a video. Well, now we're finding people can do this with conversation and pretty soon we're going to have like deep fake VR where all of this is produced that way. Yeah, I guess it raises the question, could it be that, you know, your wife, who you spent all this time with was actually a deep fake VR from the beginning put into the simulators to manipulate you. Or you remember the Truman show where Truman turns out it was just an actress and so on all these years. I don't know if you found out your wife had just been a actress or a deep fake all these years. How'd you feel about it?
- [77:29]
Host
Devastating. That would be devastating. Devastating. David. I can't. Like, it makes me that would. I would become a philosopher at that point because I would need to understand, like, why that would be so upsetting. But that would be upsetting. Like, I know it intuitively how devastating that would be. But I don't fully understand. Like, I wouldn't be able to articulate why, but, oh, my God, that would be devastating.
- [78:00]
David Chalmers
I think, again, you want to. You want to be in contact with something real outside of you. Again, it was not pre programmed. Like, oh, God, you had all those great conversations because you had this. This actress or fake wife who was programmed just to say all the things that would make you feel great. No, you want to actually have a real experience with someone out there who has free will, and you have free will and you actually make a real connection. If it was all guaranteed in advance, if you were just being paid to say what would make you happy, then, okay, that's just a different thing.
- [78:32]
Host
It really is. It's fascinating how, you know, like I've said to my wife, it's really strange to me that if my wife is traveling, my discipline drops and I have to really focus to stay focused. But when she's here, even though we might be. We might not have hardly any contact during the day, I'm working on my thing, all of that. Some part of me is doing this to impress her. And it's very interesting that even her just traveling breaks some part of that spell enough that I have to, like, dig deeper to a different place in order to stay focused and keep going. It's. Yeah, it's very fascinating. As you were saying that, I was thinking, would I feel better, though, if my wife made me miserable if you told me, don't worry, she's just an actress. She's been paid to be horrible to you. Then, like, I don't know, I still think some part of me would be traumatized that even though part of me would be relieved. Okay, so this isn't about me. This is, you know, some actress. But even just having gone through all of that in something fake would really be problematic.
- [79:39]
David Chalmers
Yeah. Someone you spent 20 years with. Maybe if you just had like a bad experience yesterday with someone you met for the first time and you find out they were just a bot. It's like, oh, okay, now I feel better about it, right? It was a bot just programmed to act like a jerk with everyone. It's like, okay, well it wasn't just me, thank God. Maybe you'd be okay with that. But yeah, a 20 year relationship is something totally different.
- [80:01]
Host
Yeah, that, that would be rough. Rough. So where do you go from here? Like, what is your, you know, as somebody who really thinks about this stuff, are you staying focused on virtual worlds? Is that feels like it's really just beginning or are you exploring something new right now?
- [80:19]
David Chalmers
I am thinking a lot about, about virtual worlds. I mean, this book just came out and already it's getting pushed in so many different directions. People are picking up on it, psychiatrists are thinking about it, architects are thinking about it. That's pushing me to think about a bunch of new topics. Not least you mentioned the metaverse. And now this technology is actually going to become a bigger and bigger part of our lives. I talk about that a bit in the book the Coming Technology. But it's mostly through the idealized lens of what could this be in the long run? Could it eventually be meaningful? Could it be as good as physical reality? But there are also questions in the short run, and I think a lot of people who are thinking about the metaverse are worried about that. If it's the tech companies, for example, who build these virtual worlds, is that going to be a good thing or a bad thing? Is this going to lead to loss of privacy, total manipulation, monetization and so on? What does it mean for the physical environment? How might this actually be integrated with things like blockchain technology, cryptocurrencies and so on? I'm actually starting to think more actually about some of these shorter term issues. In philosophy we talk about ideal theory, like the long term, what could it be? And non ideal theory actually how will it actually be? And I think some of these issues in non ideal theory, how it's actually going to be philosophically very interesting too. Like if you're in a virtual world created by a tech company and that world is constantly manipulating you the way that say the Facebook algorithm might then manipulating you to go in a certain direction, to do certain things. Do you still have free will? Do you still have autonomy? Or might virtual worlds actually undercut our free will? There are also questions about identity. People are using virtual worlds to experiment with trying on many different identities, whether it's gender identities or cultural Identities and so on. Quite often people are expressing different identities in virtual worlds from the physical world. And that raises really deep philosophical questions about the nature of identity and the nature of the self. So I'm thinking about some of these more practical issues about virtual worlds quite intensively. At the same time, I never stop thinking about consciousness. I've always got projects on the go on consciousness. I'm working with neuroscientists on developing some experiments to test some of the leading theories of consciousness right now to see if we can actually perform experiments where the leading theorists will make predictions and then we'll see who comes out. Right. So I mean, that's super exciting.
- [83:01]
Host
And yeah, that experimentation idea of people. So that the project codename, Avatar, that's what that's about for me. So that whole idea of frame of reference, right. So people build this frame of reference. It is often by law of accident. Things have just happened to them over their lives and they have become someone that was not their intent. And so creating the avatar experience is about giving people agency over who you're becoming. What does that look like? Where do you live? How do you decorate the space? How do you signal to yourself? How do you signal to other people? Like that's the whole idea behind this project. So I think I'm way more interested in the non ideal version. In the non ideal version, where do you think that experimentation leads? Are there potholes or pitfalls to watch out for? How do you think about how people should explore and experiment within that, the confines of a virtual environment?
- [83:59]
David Chalmers
Yeah, avatars give you so much to experiment with. I mean, the physical body, you can already, you know, you can experiment pretty well. You can do things with your, your hair or your, your clothes or your, your presentation. But yeah, avatars, you can boy, you can be a different species if you want. You can be a, you can be a plant. You can change, change everything. And for a while maybe that sometimes it can be a form of escapism, just trying things on. But I think for increasingly this is going to be a part of people's. It's going to be continuous with the physical world and with physical identity as people, as I think people's avatars. When you just have an avatar in a video game, it's okay, it's temporary, it's not important to you, you can discard it. But people who actually hang out in virtual worlds long term, like even virtual world, like Second life, where people spend a whole lot of time, their avatars become really important to them and they spend a Lot of time and a lot of money on developing these avatars to express themselves. At a certain point, the avatar can begin to play many of the roles of the physical body. It's as if you have two bodies, a physical body in the physical world and a digital body in the digital world. And I think for example, there are these cases of assault assaults in virtual worlds, sexual assaults where people's virtual bodies are grouped or whatever in a virtual environment. And this is quite traumatic for the people who go through it in a way which is continuous with say, physical assault. And I think this kind of brings out that avatars can be very, very real. And basically you can be embodied in a digital avatar much as you can be in a physical avatar. And I think we have people that just still trying to figure out what this means for identity right now. But I just think it's just going to enrich the space of the already complex social space of identities that we already have.
- [86:01]
Host
No doubt, David. This whole space is just incredibly fascinating. Your book was such a cool exploration where this goes, how it interfaces with us, how to think about these huge questions. Where can people engage more with you read the book, all that good stuff.
- [86:18]
David Chalmers
Yeah, well, the book is called Reality plus with a plus sign. The subtitle is Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. Published in in the US with WW Norton and in the UK with with Penguin. I also got a website. Easiest way to to find is probably just put in my name. David Chalmers has a lot of my. A lot of my work there and a lot of also an excerpt from the book if people want to. To try out the. The. The. The first bits of the book. And hey, anyone's got any reads any of this and has any cool philosophical ideas or questions, feel free to drop me an email. You can find. Find my email address on the web too.
- [86:57]
Host
Love it man. Thank you so much for coming on. This conversation was a lot of fun. I would actually love to stay in contact as we build out our avatar project.
- [87:05]
David Chalmers
I'd love to hear more about somebody. Sounds like great.
- [87:08]
Host
Really offer some cool insights. Guys. You will love the book. Definitely check it out. He is such a fascinating thinker. Hopefully that came through loud and clear in this episode. And speaking of things that will come in loud and clear, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.
- [87:25]
David Chalmers
Peace.