Making Sense with Sam Harris - #96 — The Nature of Consciousness

Episode Date: September 10, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Thomas Metzinger about the scientific and experiential understanding of consciousness. They also talk about the significance of WWII for the history of ideas, the role of intuition in science, the ethics of building conscious AI, the self as an hallucination, how we identify with our thoughts, attention as the root of the feeling of self, the place of Eastern philosophy in Western science, and the limitations of secular humanism. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I am speaking with the philosopher Thomas Metzinger. Thomas is a full professor and director of the Theoretical Philosophy Group and the Research Group on Neuroethics and Neurophilosophy at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany. He is the founder and director of the MIND Group and adjunct fellow at the Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Studies, also in Germany. His research centers on the analytic philosophy of mind and applied ethics and the philosophy of cognitive science.

And he is the editor and author of several books. He edited The Neurocorrelates of Consciousness and he wrote Being No One and The Ego Tunnel. And in addition to being a philosopher of mind, Thomas is also a long-term meditator. So as you can hear, we have many, many interests in common. Our conversation starts on a political note, the significance of World War II for the history of ideas and the connection between Nietzsche and the Holocaust. Thomas gives us the German view of current U.S. politics, but then we go deep into questions of consciousness and the self. We talk about the role of intuition in science, the ethics of building conscious AI, the self as a hallucination, how we identify with our thoughts and the

paradox of doing that, attention as the root of the felt sense of self, and the place of Eastern philosophy in Western science, as well as the limitations of secular humanism. So it's a very rich conversation, and it is a conversation that many of you asked for. Many of you have requested that I get Thomas on the podcast, so I bring you Thomas Metzinger. I am here with Thomas Metzinger. Thomas, thanks for coming on the podcast. Good to meet you. Yeah, we've never met, but I have followed you for some time now. I've been a happy reader of your books and the anthologies you've edited. You've done really great work in the philosophy of mind. And this has been an area that I've been interested in for some time.

We might have been at the same conference at some point and just didn't get a chance to meet. But it's a pleasure to meet you virtually. I've had to live with emails by people telling me, Thomas, Sam Harris, this guy is like you. I'll enter your website. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. All right. So, Thomas, tell our listeners what your focus has been in philosophy in general and what work you're doing now. And then we're going to get into, obviously, questions of consciousness and AI and the self and all your areas of interest.

But how do you summarize what you do as a philosopher at this point? Well, my core competence is in something that's called analytical philosophy of mind. That's where I come from. I've done that for about three decades. But one thing that is special about me is that I have done it in very strong cooperation with neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, AI people for about 30 years. So my job has been to open up analytical philosophy of mind for a deeper and more productive interdisciplinary cooperation. I've got a lot of resistance for this in my life. It was bad for my academic career. But now, five years younger, there were four people in Germany like myself, and now it's just like a people's movement. All of the good young

philosophers have one empirical area, like dreaming, social cognition, predictive coding, where they're really good and they combine this. But in this country, I got all the resistance. Yeah, what form did the resistance take and what specifically was it focused on? Oh, many different types. First, in Germany, philosophy has very strongly meant history of philosophy. Secondly, something like naturalism has always had a bad

press. People who thought, at least I have learned this as a student, that empirical scientists could contribute anything like bottom-up constraints for conceptual work, just hadn't understood what philosophy was in the first place because it was purely a priori theorizing. But then there's also this territorial thing. I think you have recently had, for instance, to take this example of a freedom of the will debate too. We had a very hot one a little earlier in the public. And a typical event was that prominent neuroscientists said there is no such thing as freedom of the will. And it got to a point where philosophers said, listen, this is not to be decided in the hard sciences at all.

This is a philosophical problem and there will be a philosophical solution. And then my friends from the neuroscience said, you're beginning to understand it. It's not your problem anymore. We have solved it. And then all of the humanities just rose in protest. So it's also a question who is allowed to answer which questions. So you introduced yourself as an analytic philosopher that is usually contrasted with continental philosophy. Has the European commitment to what is known perhaps mostly in the States as continental philosophy, is that part of the problem here? It's part of the problem. Now there is pretty much of a peaceful coexistence. It has gone through many stages, but you must also see the historical situation. In World War II, we have either murdered or driven out of the country

all of the Jewish intelligentsia. So many teacher-disciple relationships were completely cut off. And I'm very grateful to the generation of analytical philosophers who came before me to reconnect us, you know, to the global discussion again, to mankind's philosophical conversation. That was something that had to be established first after World War II, because there were many people who thought the hottest and most recent stuff is Heidegger. Who had more than a superficial connection with the trends that got so many people murdered and exiled. Of course. Yeah. Well, so that's a fascinating moment of intellectual history. And this is not something I'm sure someone has written about it in Germany, but in English,

I haven't read much about the way in which the war affected philosophy. But it's interesting to picture those teacher-student relationships being severed and Germany becoming isolated as a result? Well, there are many deeper dimensions to it. I mean, one is every German child at one age discovers what has happened. I still very precisely know the moment when I discovered the atrocities my tribe had connected. I don't know if you want to hear the story. Oh, I would love to. But how old are you, Thomas? I'm 59. So how old were you? I was 10. And this little scholar in me was awakening. And I was getting interested in the books in my parents' shelves. And I saw there was one book they put up very high because they didn't want me to see it. And of course, the next time

they were out, I put a chair on my father's writing desk and crept up there, and it was a photo book called The Yellow Star. And I saw bulldozers pushing piles of corpses into mass graves. And I saw photo documentation of medical experiments on Jews with phosphor burning away their flesh and stuff like this. And that was the moment when my childhood ended. Until then, I was living in a world of cowboys and Indians and fairy tales. And I didn't know that something like this existed in reality. So as you grow up, when I was 16 years old, I was still firmly and honestly convinced that I had been born in the worst country of the whole world, with that tribe, with

that history. And there's this aftermath where you ask your parents, how much did you know? And they all tell you, we didn't know anything. And then you ask the other school children in the schoolyard, and they all say, my parents also say, they didn't know anything of this. And then you ask your history teacher, and they tell you, don't let yourselves be fooled. Almost everybody knew. At what point in school do children begin to learn about the Holocaust? Is it somewhere between 10 and 16? Is there a standard year where this?

I wouldn't know the curricula. Maybe 14, 15, you get it in history at that time. And then I'm coming back to philosophy. Of course, young intellectuals, if you study philosophy, for us, the whole thing was completely different than for you because we were all trying to find out what in our own intellectual tradition made this possible. Where did this come from?

Nietzsche, the genealogy of morals. Because we have been a great philosophical nation with German idealism and everything. And then a very urgent question is how could this happen? So studying philosophy meant something else for us. Yeah, it's like an intellectual and moral autopsy. Did you come up with any answers there, or are there any answers that are agreed upon? How was it possible? Oh, well, there is a century-long European tradition of anti-Semitism. Well, there is a century-long European tradition of anti-Semitism.

And what many people don't know in this year is that Martin Luther, for instance, was a hate pundit. He was the first person to explicitly in his writings say that the synagogues have to burn. And what many people also don't know is that the Reichskristallnacht actually was a birthday present for Luther, who had his birthday. It was like celebrating a birthday party into his birthday. It was a gift the Nazis made to, you know, the founder of Protestantism. So there's a deep connection to the church over the centuries. a deep connection to the church over the centuries, but then there's also plain old racism and some philosophical contributions. The story on Nietzsche, as far as I know, is that basically he was misused by his sister and the Nazis, and that his philosophy really is only in its misinterpretation something

that could be useful to the worldview of Nazism. I must say, I've never been totally convinced of that, given some of the ranting one encounters in Nietzsche. What's your view of that? That's, of course, a long story. But of course, he couldn't be a fascist and he couldn't be a Nazi because he couldn't be that. Of course, he couldn't be a fascist and he couldn't be a Nazi because he couldn't be that. I also technically, I don't regard him as a philosopher because he, in my view, doesn't have a serious interest in the growth of knowledge. She's more a racist writer. But if you look at the genealogy of morals and you imagine you're a young German, then what you take away from it is we are a warrior race. The Jews are

smarter than we are. The Jews have come up with something, I'm quoting, to poison our blood. They are poisoning our blood with Christian morals. And they have done this. And the only thing we can do is remember that we are stronger, not smarter, but stronger because we are a warrior race. So we have to get rid of this, you know, Christian moral of the slaves and so forth. And that was, of course, a preparation because imagine you're a young intellectual at that time

and this is presented to you as one of your best philosophers, that was dangerous, and that was not innocent. And that was certainly a preparation for what came afterwards. That's fascinating. Again, this is a topic I was not aware we were going to stumble on, but I just can't leave it. This is great. It's not often I get a direct window onto this experience or that people even have this experience. So your description of what it was like to be a child stumbling upon that book and the evidence of the Holocaust that had not yet reached you, and then the experience of talking about this with parents and friends who talk about it with their parents and getting a kind of denial, really, it sounds like a blanket denial that anyone was aware at the time what was happening. And yet the official story from

your historians and your teachers of history is no, of course, more or less everyone knew this was happening. And the whole culture is complicit on some level. How do you reconcile those two pieces? Because in terms of Germany's reputation, it is much more of the latter sort, that Germany has quite famously really lived in a kind of purgatory of self-criticism since World War II in a way that Austria hasn't and Japan hasn't. I mean, in Austria and Japan, you have a more or less official denial of just how morally dark their behavior became. But with Germany, everyone seems to acknowledge that there has been an impressive and perhaps even sufficient degree of hand-wringing over the Holocaust and over World War II.

But it sounds like your experience is one where the grown-ups are more or less living in total denial about that. How do you square those two things? Well, the last witnesses are dying right now. Many have finished their lives in denial. They have also been psychologically traumatized. For instance, my father had to go to war with 17, and he wrote a book about things he couldn't talk about. They have seen horrible things as children.

And he told me when they saw 800 American airplanes fly over the Rhine Valley in broad daylight using the Rhine Valley and counted them as children, and they came back without their bomb load. And then it was the first time that dawned on them that they might not be winning this war, like everybody told them. So actually, I didn't want to go this direction at all. But now it, of course, connects to Trump and your political situation, because I think as a German, we can bring a unique perspective onto what you are living through right now. So I'm so very grateful for the U.S., for the thousands of beautiful young men that you have sacrificed, you know, to defeat the generation of my grandfather and my father.

You brought us democracy, the Marshall Plan and everything. And now see how this has played out 70 years later. You are lying on the ground in a very serious situation. And we are one of the most stable democracies in the whole world. It's completely bizarre to be a German right now. Everybody is tapping on your shoulder and saying, hey, you are the leaders of the civilized world now. Are you aware of this? Do something. All the young people come to Germany, want to study here. The financial criminals from London are starting to relocate to Frankfurt. Even the Southern Italian mafia is in Stuttgart

and in Southern Germany. Everybody likes it. Everybody thinks this is one of the most stable countries in the world. And now on the other side of it, everything is crumbling apart 70 years later. On the other side of the Atlantic, and one of the many things I think we can bring to the table is there will be an aftermath. And you should think about this too. There will be an aftermath, and you should think about this too. Trump is not going to last very long, but there will be an aftermath to this. Children will ask their parents questions. What have you voted? Have you stood your ground?

What have you done, daddy? Where were you in these decisive years? This is not going to be over when it's over. There will be a deep intergenerational rift in this society, and it will be a major threat to social cohesion that you may need decades to get over. So there will be an aftermath to this bizarre Trump episode right now, and you better think about it now, how you want to go about it. And then there will be no aftermath to climate change. Climate change is going to go on for centuries, even in the best possible scenario. This episode is not going to be over.

And, you know, the U.S. are now what I would call a climate rogue state. They're completely isolated from the rest of mankind. And, you know, your children and grandchildren will have to deal with that too. And it's difficult.

We just went through this the last 70 years. Yeah, it's interesting to hear that perspective. I can tell you that what you just said about how dire it appears from the German point of view that we have elected a person like Trump to run this country, that will seem like sheer delusion to anyone who is at all sympathetic with Trump or at least thought Clinton was terrible enough that it was just an ordinary judgment call to pick Trump over her. And it will seem hyperbolic, I think, to most people who are even worried about Trump. I don't want to spend any real time on him because I don't know how much you've listened to this podcast, but I probably have 20 hours of me shrieking about Trump on this podcast. And even those who agree with me are

probably sick of it by now. So I have to sort of pick my moments here on this topic. But I take your point. I think we're, you know, we happily, with all the chaos that we see in the U.S. government at the moment, there hasn't been much concrete consequence to Trump's tenure and his incompetence and his narcissism, the way in which he's eroded the norms of our politics and civil society. It's been a fairly quiescent period in human history, despite the fact that North Korea keeps testing ICBMs and Russia keeps hacking the electoral process of democracies throughout the West. But I completely take your point that there's no telling how bad it could get with a person like him in charge. I'm not at all complacent on that topic. And, you know, insofar as I can do anything on this podcast, I have made noise about this to the limits of even my fans' patience. But I want to

move on to topics of our mutual philosophical concern and scientific concern, because there's just so much to talk about here. Well, may I just briefly interrupt before we leave that topic all together? I mean, I went to your website when I got all these emails and said, okay, this looks good, but it's probably one of these American self-marketingots. And then I had no time to read any of your books. Now you invited me. And during workouts, I now have listened to many of your podcasts. And I think you're doing a great job.

And it's fantastic. And in bringing up this ugly hobby horse again and again. And I mean, I just want to say one thing and then we can leave the topic because we're not completely impartial and we have egotistic motives too. I don't want to insult anybody, but it's one thing if you guys wreck down your own country completely, that's one thing, it's far away. But the other thing is, of course, you know, we all know the moron is hard to predict. But the other thing is, of course, you know, we all know the moron is hard to predict.

I don't know who he will pick a fight with, but I'm very much afraid that he underestimates China when he wants to incinerate North Korea or something like this, you know. And this is a very, very dangerous situation. And I find this is the last thing I want to say, now we can leave that topic. I find myself in a, I never thought that I would have thought something like this, but my hope is actually with the higher ranks of the American military. I know that there are some very conservative people who are decent, who have some decency. And I think that's our main hope now, that if the day has come, peacefully take him out of office and do not follow that order. I think that's the people we have to hope for now, and that there are some senior persons maybe who have combat experience and who know what that really means, somebody who is not disposed to

pay attention to constitutional or democratic norms. Germany in particular is aware of just how, you know, as Timothy Snyder, the historian, said on this podcast, just how, you know, people go to the polls not knowing that they're voting away their freedom or that they're voting for the last time. And yet this is a experience that democracies have had. And we haven't had that in the U.S. There is an assumption that our institutions are strong enough and that the stakes are always low enough that, you know, nothing terrible will happen when we put a selfish imbecile of this magnitude in charge.

But I just think it's not a safe assumption. And I've expressed my worries, again, more or less ad nauseum on this podcast. But I hope he gets reined in by everything that can rein him in, and the military professionals included. So Thomas, let's start with consciousness. We have questions of intellectual and moral interest that will outlive us, and they outlived Plato, they outlived the Buddha, they outlived everyone who has touched them, and I think they will endure. But the mystery of consciousness, how do you think about consciousness?

Well, I've been in this for 30 years now. You may know that I'm one of the people who founded the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness 22 years ago. I think the first thing we have to understand that consciousness is not one problem, but that it's a whole bundle of problems, some more conceptual, some more empirical. And that's the first step. It's not that one big mystery out there. There's a tension,

a sensory discrimination, there are conceptual issues about what may be conceivable, and so forth. And I think the consciousness community in the last two decades has really made breathtaking progress. We're getting somewhere. And in this one popular book, The Ego Tunnel, I've actually predicted that by 2050, we will have the global neural correlate of consciousness. We will isolate that in humans. And that's only a very first step. But I think it will not be a mystery. Life is not a mystery anymore.

But 150 years ago, many people thought that this is an irreducible mystery. So you're not a fan anymore, if you ever were, of the framing by David Chalmers of the hard problem of consciousness? No, that's so boring.

I mean, that's last century. You know, we all respect Dave, and we know he's very smart and has got a very fast mind. There's no debate about that. But conceivability arguments are just very, very weak. If you have an ill-defined folk psychological umbrella term like consciousness, then you can pull off all kinds of scenarios and zombie thought experiments. It doesn't really, it helped to clarify some issues in the mid-90s. But the consciousness community has listened to this and just moved on. I mean, nobody of the serious researchers in the field thinks about this anymore,

but it has taken on like a folkloristic life of its own. A lot of people talk about the heart problem who wouldn't be able to state what it consists in now. Well, maybe we should just state it just so that those listeners who didn't hear me speak with David on the podcast or haven't read my book, Waking Up, basically the issue is this, that consciousness, if you define it as, to follow Thomas Nagel here, the fact that it's like something to be what you are, the fact that a brain of sufficient complexity or a creature at a certain point in evolutionary terms has a subjective, qualitative perspective on the world. The lights go on. This formulation, I mean, there've been many variants of it, but famously the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a

paper, a very influential paper in the early seventies titled, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? And he said, you know, we may never know. A bat experience could be totally unlike our own. But if it is like something to be a bat, if you switch places with a bat, that wouldn't be synonymous with just the canceling of experience, but you would be laid bare to a different domain of experience. Well, that is the fact of consciousness in the case of a bat. Whether we ever understand it or not, the fact that the lights are on, the fact that there is a perspectival qualitative character there, that is what we mean by consciousness. And I've always thought that that is a good definition. It doesn't answer any of what Chalmers called the easy problems of consciousness. Those are separate. How does the

eye and the visual cortex transduce light energy into a visual mapping of the visual scene? The hard problem on Chalmers' account is always this bit, the fact that it's like something to do any of that, because it's the transition from unconscious seeing, which human brains do and robots do, to the conscious experience of seeing, which we know humans accomplish, and at the moment, there's no good reason to think our robots or computers do. And a corollary to this framing is that any explanation we get about consciousness, and let's just say we open the back of the book of nature and we get the right answer about consciousness, and it turns out that you need exactly 10,000 information

processing units of a certain character. They have to be wired in a certain way. They have to be firing at a certain hertz. And just lo and behold, that is what gives you consciousness. And if you change any of those parameters, well, then the lights go out. Let's say we knew that to be true. It still wouldn't explain the emergence of consciousness in a way that is intuitively graspable. It still would seem like a miracle. And that's not the way most or really any satisfying scientific explanation works out. When I give you an explanation for any higher level property, you know, the fluidity of water or the brittleness of glass in terms of its micro constituents, well, then that explanation actually does run through and conserves your intuitions about how things function at a lower level so as to appear as they do on a higher level. And so it

is, I would argue, even with the example you just gave of life. So you said that 100 years ago, or even less, 70 years ago, perhaps, let me get my dates right, it's more like 80 years ago, people felt that we would never have a satisfactory explanation of what life is or how life, the energy of life relates to physical structure and how heredity could be a mere mechanism and how the healing of disease or from wounds could be just a matter of chemistry. But of course, with the advent of molecular biology and other insights, we figured all of that out really without remainder and therefore vitalism or a notion that there has to be any kind of life spirit in matter, that has gone out the window. That's another analogy that doesn't really get at how mysterious consciousness is, because something

like reproduction or growth or healing from injury, that really can be explained mechanistically, and our intuitions run through there. So the conceivability issue for me with the hard problem isn't so much a statement about what is true. It's not that I doubt that consciousness can be an emergent property of information processing because it's so difficult to conceive or impossible to conceive how that works. But it is just a statement about the seeming limits of explanation. It sounds to me that whatever you put in the space provided will still sound like the restatement of a miracle, which is really analogous to how, to take an analogy to cosmology, the idea that everything, including the laws of nature, emerged out of nothing,

right? Like just things exploded into being. Now, that may in fact be true, but I would argue, or at least it seems to me, that it's inconceivable or uninterpretable or it's not understandable. It's the statement of a miracle. And so that's really my fondness for the hard problem is a matter of epistemology more than it is ontology. Beautiful, beautiful. You've now mentioned so many important points that I don't really know where to start. So maybe we should just say technically the hard problem is that phenomenal properties only nomologically supervene on functional properties, but not logically. That is, the conscious properties of sweetness or redness or whatever the bat perceives is determined by information flow in its brain in this world,

under the laws of nature holding in this world, but there are other worlds where we can imagine that the bat is a zombie with exactly that information flow in its brain, that there could always be a functional isomorph to Sam, right? Some entity that has the same functions on a certain level of granularity, but which instantiates no phenomenal properties. Thomas, I want to jump in here for one second because I want people to understand the distinctions you're making. You used some terms that will lose most people who are not philosophically trained. I think you hit upon that consciousness nomologically supervenes upon the physical or something like that. You should unpack that.

And also... Nomologically means under the laws of nature holding in our universe. Now, there could be other universes, logically possible worlds, in which these laws of nature do not hold. So the idea is that consciousness is determined from below, from the brain, may only hold in this world with these laws of nature, but it's consists in the fact that we can always imagine that Sam Harris is a zombie, that he would talk, he would even talk about his emotions and his color experiences, but he would not have any inner perspective. That's the idea. That's the mystery. Well, I would strike a slightly different emphasis here, Thomas, just to catch people up. There's this argument that is a, I don't know if it originates with Chalmers, and he certainly made good use of it in his book, but this idea that we can conceive of a zombie, which is a being that functions and appears exactly like a human being, but has no conscious experience. The lights are not on in a zombie.

It's just a perfectly humanoid robot that has no subjectivity or qualitative experience. Now, the fact that we can imagine such a thing does not even slightly suggest that such a thing is possible. It just may be that in order to get something that functions like a human being and seems like a human being from the outside, consciousness is always going to be necessary or will always come along for the ride. And I'm just agnostic as to whether or not that's the case.

And I think as we develop AI, we may learn more and more about whether or not that's the case or cease to find it intellectually interesting. or cease to find it intellectually interesting. So I'm not arguing from the side of it's conceivable that there could be a zombie Sam and therefore there's a hard problem of consciousness. It's more that whatever I imagine the explanation to be, the idea that, you know, the first the lights are not on and then they come on by virtue of some complexity in the system. Complexity doesn't explain anything. Complexity is not good.

But then you can keep changing the noun, whether it's information integration or... Sure, sure, sure. So whatever the answer is, and there have been various answers proffered in recent decades, it still sounds like just a brute fact that doesn't actually explain anything. And again, it's not the way other scientific explanations, even with respect to life, function. Well, the last point may not be right. but what you're actually getting at is what is the value of intuitions? Can we demand of a good theory of consciousness that it gives us an intuitive feeling, this

is right, now I've understood it? We would never ask this of a theoretical physicist. If they tell us something about 11 dimensions and string theory, nobody would say, this is completely counterintuitive. This has nothing to do with my life world. This is just brute facts they're stipulating. We just trust these people. They know math.

They have theories with high predictive power. They're very smart. And we don't demand this intuition. I would say we actually do. I mean, this has been famously what has been so unsatisfying about quantum mechanics, which is that no one, not even Richard Feynman, can pretend to understand it. All the physicists can say is that the math works out and it has immense predictive value. But it's still... That is enough. Yeah, well, it could be enough. It could be enough.

And I take your point about the limit of intuition in that our intuitions were not designed by evolution for us to grasp reality as it is. Our intuitions were designed to avoid getting hit over the head by another ape or to mate with his sister. Our intuitions are very crude, but again, we use certain intuitions that we have, whether mathematical or otherwise, to leverage ourselves into areas where our intuitions, our common sense intuitions, and certainly our folk psychological intuitions, are not good. So I can certainly follow you there, but it still just seems to be the case that consciousness provides some kind of extra

impediments here. So take something like platform independence. So like, you know, if we assume that there's nothing magical about having a computer made of meat and consciousness is, as mind is, as intelligence is, clearly platform independent, and therefore we could, in principle, build conscious computers that were non-biological, how would we move, in your view, from having characterized the neural correlative consciousness in people into being confident that the computers that seem to emulate that functionally and informationally are themselves conscious? What I'm imagining the future of AI will very likely look like is that we will build computers that pass the Turing

test with flying colors. You know, whether or not we've figured out the neural correlate of consciousness in apes like ourselves, we will build computers that pass the Turing test and that seem conscious to us. But unless we fully understand how consciousness emerges, we won't know whether they're conscious. They might say they're conscious. They might seem even more conscious than we are. And we will sort of lose sight of the problem. And I know you think that, as I do, that the fact of the matter, whether or not they are conscious, is hugely important, ethically speaking. And it would be monstrous to create computers that could suffer. So let's perhaps bring the platform independence issue into this conversation.

And I know I've been talking a lot. I just, I want to kind of give you the full landscape of my prejudice and confusion so that you can run over it. No, no, no. It's all very interesting. And of course, I fully understand what you mean, but we have to, you know, have to think about intuitions a little bit. They have a long evolutionary history. If I have an intuition that an explanation is satisfactory, it is itself a kind of conscious experience. I don't know if you've ever thought about this. There's not only a phenomenology of redness. There's also a phenomenology of, I just know this, but I don't know for what reason I know it or where the knowledge comes from. And in many cases, intuitive knowledge is fantastic. It condenses

knowledge from the world of our ancestors. Just think about social cognition. If you have to set this intuition, this guy is dangerous or she is a good person. This is a way of computing itself. It doesn't generate sentences in your head, but intuitions. Now, the question is, could we ever be intuitively satisfied? I think we cannot because our theory of consciousness will also tell us what a self is and what a first person perspective is. And that is something we will not be able to ever grasp intuitively what's coming out of there. But to come back to your question, you know that for a number of years I've strictly argued against even risking phenomenal states in machines. We should in no way try, attempt to create conscious machines or even get close because we might cause a cascade of suffering.

We might just increase the overall amount of suffering in the universe. And just because of this reason, it's very important to have a theory of consciousness. We must have one. So what would we do if we had the global neural correlate of consciousness? That was your question. The hardware doesn't matter. We need to know the flow of information. What is the computation that is carried out? Then we have to describe this on the right level of conceptual granularity, meaning what corresponds to my experience of redness? What in that information flow is minimally sufficient for my intuition that we will never understand consciousness?

What is minimally sufficient for my sense of selfhood and so forth? And if we have that mapping from our own phenomenology to fine-grained computational descriptions, then we can see, is this instantiated in a machine or not? The problem, rather, is that machines could have forms of suffering or forms of selfhood that we cannot even grasp because they're so alien and so different from our biological form of conscious experience or emotion. Maybe they would develop it and we wouldn't see it. Maybe it is already there and we wouldn't see it. Maybe it is already there and we wouldn't discover it.

So there's certainly a great problem across spaces, spaces of conscious experience. Just as with the bat, you're never going to understand what does it feel like to be the bat? I mean, to hear the echo of your own ultrasonic calls, is it like hearing? I've heard people say, no, it's the dominant modality for the bat. It's for the bat. It's like seeing. Other people say, no, it's scanning a surface. It must be a tactile experience for the bat. It's like feeling a surface to fly

through that echo. And that is, if it has data formats, as I call it, internal data formats that we don't have in sensory processing, that is something we will never know how it feels to instantiate these data formats. And that may be happening with your machines as well, right? Just on this point of echolocation, I don't know if this is analogous to what a bad experience is, but contrary to what most people assume, we can echolocate to some degree. If you just hold your hand in front of your face and hum

and then move your hand back and forth, you will notice that your humming reveals to you the location of your face and hum and then move your hand back and forth you'll you will notice that your humming reveals to you the location of your hand so um you can be you can be a very bad bat if you want to try this at home so let's talk about the self because you raised the the the topic of the self which is another thing that people find inscrutable. And it, of course, relates to consciousness. And yet it is quite different. And I want to, you know, you have written a lot about the self, and I haven't read everything you've written. But I feel like there's

some significant agreement here between the way we view it and the way even traditional views that one meets in the East, like in Buddhism or Advaita Vedanta, that the self as most people conceive of it is an illusion. So I just want to put that to you. I think we want to distinguish between the whole person. And I would not say that people are illusions, but most people are walking around with a sense that they have a self inside their heads, that there's a subject in the head, a thinker of thoughts, an experiencer of experience. This is kind of an unchanging rider on the horse of consciousness that just gets carried through from one moment to another and has various adventures, but is in some sense never quite changed by them. It's the center of the whole drama. How do you think about the self and in what sense are people confused about it?

Well, when I looked at the problem of consciousness, I thought if I was an anti-reductionist, the most interesting, the most pressing problem is what is a first-person perspective? And what would it mean for any information processing system to have a sense of selfhood and a first-person perspective originating from it? This is the really difficult problem to solve, I think. And I have, just as you, been guilty of this illusion talk in popular writings in the past. Of course, it is conceptual nonsense to say the self is an illusion, because as a term, illusion means that there's a sensory misrepresentation of something where an outside stimulus actually exists. A hallucination is something where there's no stimulus, and you still have a misrepresentation.

But this sense of selfhood is only partly a sensory experience. Of course, it is grounded in what I call the introceptive self model, in inner sensations in the body, in affective tone, in the emotions, in elementary bioregulation. All these are important layers, but we have this robust misrepresentation of trans-temporal identity. And I have always firmly said, you know this probably, that none of your listeners ever was or had a self and that we can explain everything we want to scientifically explain about self-consciousness

in a much more parsimonious way with much simpler explanations, assumptions, much simpler structural assumptions. So for me, the question is, in a system that very obviously has no immortal soul or no self. We don't find anything like that in the brain. How does this robust sense of selfhood emerge? Because that is really counterintuitive, right? Imagine people would try to believe that there is no such thing as a self. You cannot believe this. Even if you want to believe this there is no such thing as a self. You cannot believe this. Even if you want to believe this, nobody can believe it.

Well, let me stop you there, because I not only believe it, I experience it. I don't know if you have any significant experience with meditation or psychedelics, or have you gone down that path to see if you could confirm any of the Buddha's claim here? Oh, I thought you knew that. Well, I do. I just don't know how far it's gone. Well, I'm a great enough practitioner. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,

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