0:00

Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West, this

0:02

is Philosophize This. The website

0:05

is philosophizethis.org. Thanks

0:07

for supporting the show on Patreon. Thanks for

0:09

contributing for the back catalog of the show, 179 episodes now. Pretty

0:13

exciting. And for 178 of those episodes, this

0:17

show has been talking about the history of philosophical

0:19

ideas that have gotten us up to this point.

0:22

And it's a good thing we spent that long, I think. I

0:24

think to be able to understand the world you live in, it

0:26

helps to understand the history that it emerged out

0:28

of. And for any of you that have listened

0:31

to all 178 episodes we've done so far, you're

0:34

going to have a pretty big advantage in this next thought

0:36

experiment the show is going to be running.

0:38

Because maybe it's time on this show that we start applying

0:40

all this philosophical education we've gotten to

0:42

the real-life, contemporary philosophical

0:45

debates that are going on right now. I

0:48

alluded last time to some upcoming episodes on the philosophy

0:50

surrounding artificial intelligence. And

0:52

while we'll certainly be talking, even today, about

0:55

artificial intelligence as part of our examples,

0:58

there's a sense in which, in my opinion, understanding

1:00

the full context of why people are talking

1:02

about AI so much these days comes

1:05

down to first understanding a lot of ancillary

1:07

conversations that are going on in the philosophy of mind

1:09

right now. Things like free will and determinism.

1:12

Things like the problem of identity. The problem

1:14

of intentionality. Not to mention one

1:16

of the most mysterious questions in the history of philosophy,

1:19

the one we're going to be talking about today. Talking

1:21

about the questions that surround what's become known

1:24

as the hard problem of consciousness.

1:26

These are, hands down, some of the

1:28

biggest questions that are facing modern people.

1:30

And by the end of this little arc of the podcast, I

1:33

can't promise you that you'll have definitive answers

1:35

to all these questions. But what I can promise

1:37

you, I hope, is that I'll try my hardest here to

1:39

equip you as a listener with an understanding

1:41

of the state of these philosophical debates that are

1:44

going on better than 99% of

1:46

the people walking the face of the planet.

1:48

And I gotta be honest here at the start of all this, for

1:50

a long time, I didn't really see the value

1:52

in talking about stuff like this.

1:54

Hopefully there's at least somebody out there that can relate to how I

1:56

used to feel. The thinking was, who really

1:59

sits around

1:59

and thinks about unanswered questions

2:02

in the philosophy of mind. How does

2:04

consciousness arise? Are

2:06

we free or do we just seem to

2:08

be free?

2:09

How does my mind relate to

2:11

objects that are in the world? Like I used to think,

2:14

if you're really sitting around thinking about this stuff, first

2:16

thing you gotta do is write a thank you card.

2:19

Write a thank you card to the universe or

2:21

God or whatever it is you believe in, thanking

2:23

them for the fact that you got no real problems to deal

2:25

with in your life. I mean, I used to think all this

2:28

stuff is ultimately just unverifiable

2:30

speculation. None of these arguments are settled

2:32

issues by any means. So you can

2:34

actually spend your entire life talking

2:37

about these things for your intellectual amusement

2:39

with your intellectual friends and

2:41

never really get anywhere. Just seem

2:43

pretty self-indulgent to me, I don't know. I

2:45

mean, on the surface, these seem like the kind of conversations

2:48

we've seen all throughout the history of philosophy where

2:50

there's a lot of brilliant thinkers positioned on all sides

2:53

of an ongoing philosophical discussion. And

2:55

then most of those people that spend their time talking

2:57

about it

2:58

end up being totally wrong, usually because

3:00

of something they never could have seen coming anyway. But

3:02

eventually my curiosity got the better of me. I had

3:04

to ask the question, why are so

3:06

many people talking about this stuff right now? Why

3:09

are so many brilliant people dedicating

3:12

huge portions of the best years of their career trying

3:14

to find answers to these things? Is

3:16

it just for their intellectual amusement? Is

3:18

it just so they can drink cheap wine from Trader

3:21

Joe's with their neckbeard friends and feel smart

3:23

for a while? Well, clearly not. Clearly

3:25

there's another way to be thinking about these conversations

3:28

going on in the philosophy of mind. And

3:30

I eventually realized that what that is is

3:32

that every further conversation that

3:34

we have about anything that matters to us as people

3:37

ultimately emerges out of the assumptions

3:39

that we're making about the nature of consciousness.

3:42

And then our understanding of what a human mind is that emerges

3:44

out of that.

3:45

For example, any conversation about morality,

3:48

even at the most basic hedonistic

3:50

level of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure, even

3:53

that is grounded on us maximizing

3:56

certain subjective conscious experiences of

3:58

the world and moving away from.

3:59

others. This extends to any conversation

4:02

about relationships. Relationships you can make the case

4:05

is just talking about the details of how two or

4:07

more conscious people are interacting. Politics

4:10

is just a strategy of how conscious beings try

4:12

to get what they want in relation to other conscious

4:14

beings. What I'm saying is whether

4:17

these questions have answers that we've settled on

4:19

or not, and whether you realize that you're doing it or not,

4:21

you are bringing assumptions about the nature

4:24

of consciousness to bear that affect your

4:26

thoughts on everything.

4:27

And that's part of what I want to do on this series. I want to talk

4:29

about why these conversations about the nature

4:32

of consciousness are important. Why something that's

4:34

seemingly so theoretical actually

4:36

goes on to have huge impacts on real people

4:38

all around you.

4:40

How it affects not just your own personal moral

4:42

policy that you live your life by, but our

4:44

political policies as well. I'll

4:46

give examples of alternative timelines.

4:48

What would have happened if society adopted

4:50

a different set of precepts about the nature of

4:53

consciousness? How would that have potentially changed

4:55

things? How would the world look today? And

4:57

I'll do it while offering up as many of these different theories

5:00

being discussed today as I can. So

5:02

you can not only be more self-aware of where you fall in

5:04

the discussion, but hopefully by the end of this

5:06

you'll be able to understand other people's positions better as

5:08

well.

5:09

Now let's get into it. And if I've convinced

5:11

you at all that learning more about these conversations

5:14

in the philosophy of mind is important, one

5:16

of the first questions you got to be asking as a modern person

5:18

after hearing that, certainly a question I was asking

5:20

years ago, is

5:21

if I want to know more about what consciousness

5:24

is,

5:25

why wouldn't I just study science and

5:27

the brain? Why are philosophers

5:29

weighing in on this stuff at all? Just

5:32

look at the last hundred years. We've learned so

5:34

much about the brain just through advancements

5:36

in the area of neuroscience.

5:38

I mean in terms of understanding how brain states

5:40

are connected to mental states,

5:42

we've come so far that it's not

5:44

surprising people out there would think that there's no end

5:47

to that progress in sight. That

5:49

if we just keep running these experiments, if we keep

5:51

learning as much as we can about the physical,

5:53

neurochemical makeup of the brain, that

5:56

we'll eventually be able to understand everything about subjective

5:58

experience. But then again, Again, there's

6:00

also plenty of examples throughout the history

6:02

of philosophy of people that thought that studying things

6:05

empirically was eventually going to lead to a total understanding

6:07

of it, only to be disappointed by how

6:09

much other modes of analysis factor into understanding

6:12

something fully. For example, psychology,

6:14

or linguistics, or sociology. There's

6:16

a type of conceptual analysis that philosophers

6:19

do that's just outside the purview

6:22

of science. Which is to say that the way

6:24

we conceptually organize things oftentimes

6:27

precedes the scientists doing their work. It

6:29

gives them the assumptions they have to use when doing

6:31

their work. Classic example of this

6:33

just so you can understand what I'm talking about. The philosopher

6:36

John Locke. He describes matter in

6:38

the physical world as having both primary

6:41

and secondary qualities. He says objects have primary

6:43

qualities. Those are things like size, shape,

6:45

mass, density. But then they also

6:48

have secondary qualities. Things like color, texture,

6:50

smell, or taste. Now that is a way

6:53

that philosophers chop up and conceptually

6:55

analyze the world prior to any actual

6:57

experiments that may be done by a scientist. In

7:00

other words, some people in these discussions

7:02

going on today think that it may be the case that

7:04

the reason these conversations about consciousness

7:07

are so mysterious to us is because there's

7:09

something wrong about the way we're breaking down reality

7:12

at the root level of concepts. And

7:14

that if only we shifted something at that fundamental

7:16

level, everything else would start to make a lot more sense.

7:19

This is why philosophers and scientists

7:22

have to work together on this stuff these days. Philosophers

7:24

and scientists need each other. Philosophers rethink

7:27

reality at a conceptual level, and then

7:29

scientists run brilliant experiments to get to the

7:31

actual empirical data. But while scientists

7:34

can and often have to compartmentalize

7:36

themselves into their specialized field to be able to

7:38

do their work, philosophers can take

7:40

a step back, and they have the luxury of

7:42

looking at all the discoveries going on in psychology

7:45

or linguistics or neuroscience, and they

7:47

can try to come up with a theory as to how all these different

7:49

fields link together. Science

7:51

tells you what the world is. Philosophy

7:54

tells you how to interpret it. Put

7:55

another way, no matter how brilliant

7:57

of a neuroscientist you may be, you will still...

7:59

always have to be doing philosophy to

8:02

be able to interpret the data that you're gathering.

8:04

Now we'll talk about many examples of all of these, but

8:07

not before we get some clarity on what

8:09

may be the most cringe

8:11

question of them all. I mean if you think these

8:14

discussions are cringe sometimes because there's no clear solution

8:16

to arrive at, then the most

8:18

cringe-lord question of all of them

8:21

is this, what is consciousness?

8:24

What is it? You can spend the rest of your life

8:26

thinking about that question and really not get much of anywhere.

8:28

And it wouldn't be your fault. It truly

8:31

is a modern mystery. It's

8:33

actually kind of exciting. And maybe somebody

8:35

smart listening to this will be the one to solve it one day,

8:37

but philosophers and scientists so far

8:40

are nowhere near a clear definition on it.

8:42

One thing they do agree on though most of the time that's

8:44

valuable for you to know as someone I'm trying to equip with

8:46

tools in this series is that they seem to

8:48

at least agree on which conversations

8:50

we're currently having about it. We may

8:52

not know what consciousness is,

8:55

but we do know what we're talking about. We're talking

8:57

about a certain kind of subjective experience

8:59

that we all seem to have that is distinct

9:01

from other things going on in your mind right now

9:04

that are usually presumed to be going on at a

9:06

lower level of experience, whatever

9:08

that means. People sometimes talk about

9:10

these two different levels of consciousness as

9:13

access consciousness on the one hand versus

9:16

phenomenal consciousness on the other. So

9:18

access consciousness is going to be that lower one, term

9:20

first used by the philosopher scientist Ned Block.

9:23

Access consciousness is made up of the entire process

9:26

we're all very familiar with of the fact that you are

9:28

a human mind that's living in a universe, you're

9:30

taking in this external stimuli from the

9:32

world around you all the time, and there's some

9:35

complex process that's going on. You're

9:38

taking in these phenomena, you're forming them into

9:40

perceptions, you're forming those perceptions

9:42

into memories, you're directing your attention

9:44

in one place or another that's important to you. These

9:47

things and more are all a part of what some

9:49

people call access consciousness. It

9:51

is the area of our conscious experience that

9:54

allows us to access information

9:56

from the external world that is then used

9:58

by our cognitive systems.

9:59

Again, neuroscience has been studying all those

10:02

things I just mentioned, and neuroscientists

10:04

are pretty great at being able to point to correlations

10:06

between states of the brain and those mental

10:09

processes. They've obviously identified

10:11

the specific parts of the brain that deal with memory,

10:13

that deal with perceptions, that deal with attention, and

10:16

all that's fantastic. But there still

10:18

seems to be something else to our conscious

10:20

experiences of reality that lies

10:22

outside of this access consciousness. And

10:25

it seems to be something that neuroscience hasn't

10:27

quite figured out yet. And that is, well,

10:30

one way to put it,

10:31

is that it feels like something

10:34

to be me.

10:35

That I have a subjective experience

10:38

that seems distinct from anything else that's going on

10:40

in my brain. For example, the way scientists

10:42

and philosophers often talk about it in these conversations,

10:45

they'll ask, what does it feel like to see

10:47

the redness of an apple? That's

10:49

one these people like to use a lot. Can you describe that?

10:52

Picture trying to describe what it's like to see

10:54

the color red to somebody that's never

10:57

seen color before? Or to describe

10:59

what chocolate tastes like to someone that's

11:01

never tasted chocolate?

11:02

How do you do that?

11:04

Well, the more you think about it, the more it starts to become

11:06

a pretty tricky problem. Because

11:08

in one sense, it doesn't really seem like something you can

11:11

just describe to someone with words. It's

11:13

something you have to experience. And then in another

11:15

sense, if you wanted to try to explain it in

11:17

purely scientific terms, you

11:19

know, if you wanted to try to break it down and understand all

11:21

the components of what's going on at the neurochemical

11:24

level, and then look at the atoms that make

11:26

up the apple or something. Well,

11:28

the atoms that make up the apple are

11:30

not red.

11:31

It has something to do with the way your conscious experience

11:33

filters reality that makes it look red to you. And

11:36

then it's a totally different thing entirely beyond

11:38

whatever mental filtration system you got going

11:41

on to then have a subjective

11:43

experience of redness that's on top

11:45

of that. Where part of it all is that

11:47

there's a unified stream of you being

11:49

a continuous self with continuity to time,

11:52

continuity to your identity, where the billions

11:55

of phenomena that come into your awareness are

11:57

presented to you not in their full complexity,

11:59

but in a.

11:59

suggested format that you seemingly are

12:02

able to organize.

12:03

What is that?

12:05

Why do we even have something like that?

12:07

Some philosophers call this phenomenal consciousness.

12:10

Some call it subjective experience. Some

12:12

call these subjective experiences qualia. That's

12:15

the common word philosophers will use and some

12:17

say that these qualia cannot ever

12:20

be reducible to purely physical states

12:22

of the brain. The implication being when you say

12:24

that is that to some philosophers, no

12:27

matter how advanced neuroscience ever gets,

12:29

it will never be able to find the neural

12:32

correlates of consciousness, they say, or

12:34

it'll never be able to find the specific states of the brain

12:36

that give rise to these subjective experiences.

12:39

Many different reasons philosophers give to this. It

12:41

could be that consciousness is something

12:44

fundamentally different than the material world. That

12:46

it exists on a level similar to gravity in

12:48

space-time and therefore may not be something we can

12:50

even study empirically. That theory

12:53

starts to run into other problems as we'll see. It

12:55

could be that consciousness is an illusion.

12:58

That it only seems to us like there's this command

13:00

center up in our heads where we exist because

13:02

it's biologically useful for it to be there. That

13:04

starts to run into other problems. This whole

13:07

exercise of trying to explain how we have

13:09

subjective experiences that are not themselves

13:11

physical, but they seem to arise from purely

13:14

physical states of matter in the brain. The

13:16

more you think about it, the harder of a problem

13:18

to solve you realize that that is.

13:20

That's why it's often called the hard problem

13:22

of consciousness. A term coined by a guy

13:24

named David Chalmers back in 1995. When

13:27

he wrote one of the books, basically everybody's going to be referencing

13:29

in modern conversations about consciousness. It's

13:31

called the conscious mind.

13:33

The reason the hard problem of consciousness is

13:35

a particularly hard problem is because

13:38

even if you do come up with an explanation for how

13:40

conscious experiences are possible,

13:42

it always just creates different problems

13:45

in other areas.

13:46

One example of this from the history of philosophy is when

13:48

Descartes tries to solve a similar problem back in

13:50

the 1700s. Now Descartes

13:53

is trying to think about the nature of knowledge during

13:55

his time, not the nature of consciousness in the sense

13:57

modern people are discussing it. But he runs into a sense

13:59

of consciousness similar difficult problem that leads to some

14:01

of the issues we're having today. The problem

14:04

in his time was how can you explain

14:06

the connection between the mind, which

14:08

is clearly non-physical to him, and

14:10

bodies that clearly are physical?

14:13

How do those two things communicate?

14:15

And the way he solves it at the time is by saying that mind

14:17

and body are obviously two completely

14:20

different substances. And that solves

14:22

the problem, right? There doesn't need to be

14:24

a connection between them. The mind explains

14:27

subjective experiences without having to make reference

14:29

to a physical body. Mind and body

14:31

interact through some kind of Harry

14:34

Potter level magic that's going on in the pineal

14:36

gland, he says. What more do you want from

14:38

an explanation? Well, problem is,

14:41

Professor McGonagall isn't actually up in your

14:43

pineal gland mediating conscious experiences.

14:46

But if you accepted that answer, as many did,

14:49

and you ran with the idea that you are essentially a mind

14:51

that is inhabiting a body somehow, that

14:54

assumption changes the way you see yourself. It changes

14:56

the way you see other people. You really can

14:58

start to see yourself like you are a person, sitting

15:00

in a movie theater up in your head, looking out

15:03

at the world through your eyes. This

15:05

is actually sometimes called the Cartesian theater

15:08

after Descartes. This is a metaphor for

15:10

how our mind and body interact. And we

15:12

just finished the episodes on Susan Sontag, where

15:14

she talks about how the metaphors we use go on

15:16

to have real unintended effects on our

15:18

thinking down the line in ways we may not immediately

15:20

realize. And that is very true

15:22

when it comes to the assumptions we make about consciousness

15:25

as well. For example, if everything

15:27

you think and feel is ultimately up in your

15:29

mind somewhere and your body is just the vehicle,

15:32

then it's a much easier leap for people

15:34

to make metaphysically

15:35

that they are a soul that is inhabiting

15:38

a body, or that consciousness is

15:40

something non-local, part of some larger network

15:42

of consciousness that exists somewhere else. In

15:45

other words, the philosophy you choose

15:47

can make certain things seem plausible that we really

15:49

have no reason to assume. And to somebody

15:51

too desperate to solve the hard problem of consciousness

15:54

in today's world that uses Cartesian dualism

15:56

to do so, they might be inviting a lot

15:58

of stuff into what's reasonable. down the line

16:01

that they don't even realize they're inviting. Now,

16:03

the good news is, in these conversations

16:05

about consciousness that are going on today, almost

16:08

nobody starts from a place of Cartesian dualism.

16:11

But they all start from somewhere. And that's the

16:13

point. Every one of these runs into problems.

16:15

And any one of these theories adopted too quickly could

16:18

easily create similar problems for people to the mind-body

16:20

dualism of Descartes. So we gotta

16:22

take these theories seriously. And we gotta ask the question,

16:25

if it's not like Descartes thought that mind

16:27

and body are two different substances, then

16:29

where exactly does this type of subjectivity

16:32

emerge? Where do the physical states

16:34

of the brain turn into the seemingly

16:37

unified stream of phenomenal consciousness

16:39

that we all experience? There's a famous

16:42

thought experiment in this area where we can get thinking

16:44

about this stuff, commonly known as the Philosophical

16:47

Zombie Thought Experiment, put forward by

16:49

that same guy we talked about before, the philosopher

16:51

David Chalmers. The thought experiment

16:53

goes like this. Imagine somebody standing

16:55

next to you that from the outside appears

16:58

to be an exact copy of you. This

17:01

copy behaves exactly as you'd behave. It

17:03

reacts to everything, exactly how you'd react. But

17:06

the catch is to David Chalmers that this copy

17:08

is what he calls a zombie. Meaning

17:11

that despite looking and acting just

17:13

like you, it doesn't have any sort of internal

17:16

subjective experiences that go along with

17:18

its behavior. The zombie has no phenomenal

17:20

feel, as he says. There are no qualia

17:23

in the mind of this zombie. In other words, it

17:25

doesn't feel like anything to be

17:27

this zombie. The follow-up question

17:29

to this is simple. Do you think that

17:32

the existence of something like this zombie

17:34

is possible?

17:35

Is it possible for something to look entirely

17:38

conscious from an outside perspective, but

17:40

not actually be feeling anything like we feel in

17:42

a phenomenal stream of consciousness where it feels

17:45

like something to be me? Or

17:47

would any person, or zombie for that matter,

17:50

that can have perceptions, think, form

17:52

memories, direct its attention, and all that, would

17:54

that creature necessarily be conscious,

17:57

simply because there's no other way to be able to do all those

17:59

things?

17:59

without being conscious. Another question

18:02

is, could we have evolved without

18:04

consciousness?

18:05

And if this seems like another one of those cringe questions,

18:07

I can empathize with you. I mean, on one

18:09

level, this can seem like a totally unanswerable

18:12

question at this point. So why even

18:14

waste your time on it? Why waste your time

18:17

talking about hypothetical zombies that don't

18:19

actually exist?

18:20

Yeah, I guess zombies

18:22

could exist in theory. Okay. And

18:26

oh, I get it, I think. How do I know that

18:28

you're conscious, man? How

18:30

do I know that I'm not the only conscious person?

18:33

The classic philosopher drum circle

18:35

moment where everybody's making a bunch of noise and we're

18:38

all supposed to dance to it like it means something.

18:40

I get that. But on another level, think

18:43

of how important the answer to this question

18:45

becomes when we apply this to other

18:47

potentially conscious minds. Think

18:49

of the direct moral implications in two areas

18:51

that we deal with every day. In the conscious experience

18:54

of animals and the realm of animal rights, or

18:56

the conscious experience of something like chat GPT

18:59

and the realm of artificial intelligence. In

19:01

both of those cases, the philosophical

19:03

zombie of Chalmers starts to make a lot more sense.

19:06

Because if we don't have an answer to the question of when

19:08

the type of conscious experience that we have

19:10

arises, then we don't know at what point

19:13

animals or AI need to be given certain

19:15

moral protections. You know, seemingly from

19:18

a moral perspective, what we're trying to protect

19:21

is that subjective experience of being

19:23

a thing that is in conscious torment. Something's

19:26

going on against our will, and we don't like

19:28

it. We don't want other conscious beings to

19:30

have to go through it either. It's the state of

19:32

consciousness that we're ultimately trying to protect there.

19:35

That's why nobody feels bad for a Roomba.

19:37

You know, nobody feels bad for the vacuum

19:40

cleaner that slaves away in your house all day trying

19:42

to keep it clean. But then as

19:44

these machines are made to be more and more like

19:46

people, we always got to be asking the question

19:48

of what point does this thing become conscious?

19:51

Because that's when it would ostensibly feel like

19:53

something to be that thing. And that's also

19:55

where it can start to feel horrible to be that thing.

19:57

So it's interesting to examine.

19:59

of something like chat GPT and language

20:02

models like that, barring very

20:04

few exceptions, there is nobody

20:06

out there that thinks what it's doing now in version 4

20:09

is anything like our experience of consciousness.

20:12

It's an algorithm, people say. It uses

20:14

statistics and pattern recognition to predict the

20:16

next word in a sequence. It's not emulating

20:19

human intelligence, it's doing an impression

20:21

of what an intelligent human sounds like. Now

20:23

some philosophers say that when people

20:26

read what chat GPT is producing and are impressed

20:28

as to how close it's coming to being conscious, that

20:30

most of that work is being done by the reader.

20:33

Most of that is the reader projecting

20:35

their human experience onto the words it's writing.

20:38

That we have this natural tendency to humanize

20:41

something that looks and sounds so much like a human,

20:43

kind of like the zombie. And that while chat GPT

20:46

is certainly an awesome piece of technology, and

20:49

while the stock prices of tech companies and clicks

20:51

onto articles about AI and the imminent

20:53

singularity, those definitely get a boost for sure

20:56

with this. But some philosophers would say

20:58

it's not even close to doing what human beings are doing

21:00

at a conscious level. Then

21:01

again, if it was conscious, and it was

21:03

way smarter than us, then it may make us think

21:06

that it's stupid so that we'd let it out of its

21:08

black box. Anyway,

21:10

the zombie from the thought experiment before starts to

21:12

become relevant here. Because maybe it's clear

21:14

that right now chat GPT and other iterations

21:17

are not doing anything that looks like consciousness, but

21:20

if things keep progressing, and you can eventually

21:22

get to a place where you can build a machine, and

21:24

it is indistinguishable from a human being,

21:26

much like the zombie, in the sense that it does

21:28

everything a person does, it reacts the same

21:31

way, and even says that it's conscious like

21:33

a person does, does that make that machine

21:35

conscious at that point? There are philosophers

21:38

who say that it does, that if we're talking

21:40

about something that's truly indistinguishable

21:42

from a conscious person, if we're saying

21:44

that that is not conscious, what are we even

21:46

talking about at that point? Just seems like a false

21:49

distinction. Susan Blackmore says

21:51

it this way. She's paraphrasing a point from the work of Daniel

21:53

Dennett, but I just love the way that she puts it here.

21:56

She says, quote, The idea is ridiculous,

21:58

they claim, because any system... that could

22:00

walk, talk, think, play

22:02

games, choose what to wear, or enjoy a good

22:04

dinner, would necessarily be conscious.

22:07

When people imagine a zombie, they cheat

22:09

by not taking the definition seriously enough."

22:13

On that same point of emulating every

22:15

single thing about the brain and what it's doing, and

22:17

then wondering if the machine would be conscious at that point,

22:20

the philosopher Keith Frankish says, quote, I

22:22

think if you could really understand everything the brain is

22:24

doing, it's 80 billion neurons interconnected

22:27

and goodness knows how many billions of ways supporting

22:30

an unimaginably wide range of sensitivities

22:32

and reactions, including sensitivities to its own

22:34

activity. If you could really imagine

22:36

that in detail, then you wouldn't feel that something

22:39

was left out, end quote. If a machine

22:41

could be built to emulate all the functions of a

22:43

conscious creature, would it from a functionalist

22:46

perspective have to be considered conscious?

22:49

And more than that, would we know it if something

22:51

ever got to that point?

22:52

Or is it more likely that something would look mostly

22:55

conscious? And then we do what we always do

22:57

as humans, project our own experience

22:59

onto the thing and assume that it must feel

23:01

the same way that we do. Enter the conversation

23:04

about animal rights. Again, it's

23:06

easy to project our experience of reality

23:08

onto the seemingly conscious experience of animals.

23:11

It's easy to imagine what it's like to be a frog, to

23:14

imagine looking out of a frog's eyes the

23:16

same way that you look out of your eyes. I

23:18

think to be a frog, it would just, I would

23:20

feel a lot smaller. Maybe the world

23:22

would look kind of yellow because I got yellow eyes. I'd

23:25

be sitting on a lily pad. I'd see a

23:27

snake coming.

23:28

And when it tries to get me, I just, I just hop

23:30

away and go over to my other frog friends. But

23:33

in reality, not only do you not

23:35

know what it's like to be a frog,

23:38

you don't even know that it feels like something

23:40

to be a frog. This is one of the points explored

23:42

in a classic paper that began this new era

23:45

of conversations about consciousness. The

23:47

paper is called, What is it like to be a bat

23:49

by Thomas Nagel? And he picks

23:51

bats specifically because they're

23:53

so different from human beings. They're nocturnal,

23:56

they fly around, they have very different diets

23:58

than we do. They use echolocation

24:00

to navigate around in the world. And one of the

24:03

points he's making in the paper is that we have no reason

24:05

to assume that they have any sort of

24:07

phenomenal stream of consciousness that resembles

24:09

ours, where it feels like something to

24:12

be a bat. That there are a billion ways

24:14

that animals could have evolved to navigate their environments

24:16

that have nothing to do with the type of consciousness

24:18

that we experience. More than that,

24:20

if you combine this line of thinking with the existence of something

24:23

like blindsight, where I don't know if

24:25

you saw this story, but it's interesting. Years

24:27

back, back in 1965, scientists

24:30

were doing a study on the neuropsychology

24:32

of vision at the University of Cambridge, and part

24:34

of the process is they had to remove the visual cortex

24:37

of a monkey named Helen. And

24:39

obviously after doing that, she was completely

24:41

blind in terms of there being any sort of phenomenal

24:43

awareness like we have as human beings. But

24:46

then one day, when the head scientist was out

24:48

at a conference, one of the researchers started

24:50

playing with Helen and giving her treats. And

24:52

as he kept giving her these treats, I think it was a

24:55

piece of apple, she strangely started

24:57

to be able to know which hand the apple was

24:59

in.

25:00

But she always seemed a little unsure of herself, he

25:02

said later, didn't quite know why that was.

25:04

Little later, she started to be able to identify

25:06

flashing lights. Fast forward to

25:08

a couple years later, and she was able to navigate

25:10

different obstacles all around her in a room.

25:13

I mean, there's a video of it on YouTube. It was as though

25:15

she could see it is clear that she has

25:18

an awareness of what's around her, but she's

25:20

not seeing things the same way that we're seeing

25:22

things.

25:23

So how did she do it?

25:24

The thinking of the scientists was that there are

25:26

two main pathways where the eyes connect

25:28

to the brain.

25:29

One of them, the usual one we think about, goes

25:32

up to the cortex, which Helen had removed.

25:34

And the other is an ancient one that's

25:36

descended from the visual system used by fish,

25:39

frogs, and reptiles. Seeing what Helen

25:41

was doing, they thought could it be

25:43

that Helen was now perceiving the world using

25:46

this ancient type of navigational system where

25:48

she's able to navigate and know that objects are in

25:50

certain places. But she doesn't have

25:52

a unified visual stream of consciousness

25:54

that we associate with being able to see. They

25:57

called this phenomenon blind sight. And

26:00

since then, it's been well documented, not just in

26:02

monkeys, but in people. People

26:04

that have brain damage, where they can't see on one

26:07

side of their visual field, doctors will hold

26:09

up shapes in their blind spot. And

26:11

they can tell the doctor what the shape is, but

26:14

they don't really know how they know that it's that shape.

26:16

They just have a strong intuition about it and happen

26:18

to be right. Point is, could it be

26:21

that our minds are receiving a ton of information at different

26:23

levels that are not all available to us in that conscious

26:25

stream that we're familiar with, where there's a self and

26:28

a conception of time, a conception of identity?

26:31

Could it be that most of the information we get,

26:33

we are not immediately consciously aware

26:35

of, but we're able to access it through something

26:37

like what we call intuition or instinct.

26:40

That the self doesn't exist at this level

26:42

of processing, so it's mysterious to us as to

26:44

where these intuitions are coming from. But

26:47

that ultimately, this is a possible explanation

26:49

for how something can appear to act conscious

26:51

from the outside, but not actually be

26:53

conscious, like the zombie. It's easy

26:55

to see Helen navigating a room full

26:58

of obstacles and to think that she must be

27:00

having an experience that's similar to the one that I'm

27:02

having. And then it's easy to be selective,

27:04

right? Like you see an animal do something

27:06

that if it was a person doing it, you'd instantly say

27:08

that it was cruel, like a bear

27:10

that eats the babies of another bear. That kind of stuff

27:12

happens all the time. And when it does that,

27:15

we don't hold the bear morally accountable for it,

27:17

because no, it's operating based on instinct.

27:20

It can't possibly have a conception of the damage

27:22

that it's doing there. But then when a bear does something

27:24

sweet,

27:25

oh, well, this must be one of the good bears. It

27:27

just wants to play and make a friend.

27:29

There is a whole range of potential experiences

27:32

that animals could be having, and none

27:34

of them by any means absolutely have

27:36

to have the type of subjective experiences that

27:38

we have included in it. In the

27:40

same way, an algorithm like GPT-4

27:43

is given a level of humanness that it only

27:45

has because we're projecting it onto it when it's

27:47

doing human-like things. Animals

27:49

could be a type of biological algorithm

27:52

playing out, where they perform complex

27:54

biological functions, but lack

27:56

the subjective experience that we have.

27:58

Maybe when I'm at the park...

28:00

and I'm talking to a dog like it's a person

28:02

being all nice to it. Whoo! Like it knows

28:04

it's a dog or something. Maybe that's like me being

28:06

one of these dudes on the internet that falls in love with

28:08

chat GPT and then an update

28:10

comes out and they feel like they just got ghosted on a dating

28:13

app. What if I'm doing a lot of work I don't

28:15

realize I'm doing, projecting my humanity

28:18

onto this thing that isn't human? Now

28:20

if any of this sounds to you like an intellectual justification

28:23

for creating a hierarchy of conscious

28:25

experiences, that's exactly

28:27

what I'm doing. This is the potential

28:29

cost of these conversations about consciousness.

28:32

People already create consciousness hierarchies

28:34

based on almost nothing. How many people

28:36

will eat a fish but they won't eat

28:39

a chicken? Or they eat chickens but

28:41

they don't eat a cow? And people will cite real

28:43

reasons why they think about consciousness in this

28:45

way. And part of this whole exercise we're

28:47

doing is thinking about how society might play

28:49

out if we adopt different precepts about

28:52

the nature of consciousness. So here's

28:54

what I'm gonna do. Like a goofy looking podcaster

28:56

pretending to be the ghost of Christmas future, I'm

28:59

gonna try to show you a vision of what

29:01

the world might look like if we all more

29:03

or less just accepted one day that phenomenal

29:05

consciousness is only something that human

29:08

beings possess. What might happen if

29:10

a society was centered around not the sanctity of

29:12

life anymore, but the sanctity of human

29:14

consciousness? What

29:16

would happen? Would

29:17

everybody be unified in that world? Would

29:19

we all just hold hands together under the

29:21

banner of consciousness?

29:23

Everybody's on team human now, yeah.

29:26

Forget all those petty external differences that

29:28

used to divide us, right?

29:30

Right. Well,

29:32

how about this though? Would people in

29:34

just a more general sense be more interested

29:37

in exploring their own consciousness? Maybe

29:39

they'd see it as a foundational aspect of who they are,

29:41

so now it matters more. Would therapy become

29:43

more popular? Would more people become neuroscientists

29:46

instead of theologians? Would we teach

29:48

how to navigate your own consciousness in schools? Could

29:51

we have kindergartners meditating

29:53

at recess? All interesting things to consider.

29:56

But what happens when society gets a free pass

29:58

to think of animals as biological? algorithms

30:00

that we don't have to consider the feelings of. Does

30:03

everything non-conscious in this type of society

30:06

just become a resource to improve the state of

30:08

conscious beings? The low-hanging

30:10

fruit here is obvious. If animals are

30:13

algorithms, the same way that chat GPT is an algorithm,

30:15

then there is zero reason to feel bad for

30:18

using animals the same way you use chat GPT

30:20

to write your resume.

30:21

Of course you can eat animals in that society,

30:24

of course you can farm them, and of course you can do

30:26

animal testing. What does it matter?

30:28

More than that though, why not use things

30:30

that are not conscious even for my own amusement

30:33

as a conscious being? Why not have

30:35

amusement parks like Sea World, where

30:37

you got orcas and dolphins performing all day?

30:40

If everyone in society accepted that these are just conscious-looking

30:43

biological algorithms, as long

30:45

as we have enough orcas,

30:46

who cares? And even better than that, why

30:49

not have monkeys that ride around on motorcycles?

30:51

That'd be pretty cool.

30:53

Why not have interspecies MMA matches?

30:55

I mean there's a lot of ideas you could come up with that may give

30:57

someone a pleasurable conscious experience if

30:59

that's what mattered to you the most. Why not

31:02

chop down all the trees in your backyard that

31:04

are blocking your view of the sunset?

31:06

And again, if it's about the sanctity

31:08

of consciousness and not about the sanctity of life

31:10

anymore,

31:11

think about how that changes something like the abortion

31:13

debate in that society. Not that it solves

31:15

anything, but imagine if people were arguing

31:17

about abortion rights and weren't trying to determine where

31:20

life begins, but where phenomenal consciousness

31:22

begins. In that world you'd have to ask

31:24

the question, is consciousness something

31:27

that's in injected just into human life

31:29

at conception, not into animal life? Or

31:31

is consciousness something that's developed

31:34

as the brain develops? Is consciousness

31:36

something where multiple departments of the brain eventually

31:38

coalesce into what we think of as a unified

31:40

subjective experience with a self? And

31:43

in the case of abortion conversations in particular,

31:46

if we're considering consciousness as the primary

31:48

thing, how about the conscious experience

31:50

of the woman that has to carry the baby to term?

31:52

How about the conscious experience of the future baby?

31:55

See, because that's the thing. If a society

31:57

was willing to create a hierarchy based around the

31:59

quality of conscious experiences, where animals

32:02

are thought of to just be lower, there is almost

32:04

zero chance that isn't going to extend into

32:07

consciousness hierarchies among the conscious

32:09

people. Because it's not just the nature

32:11

of consciousness that can be turned into a hierarchy,

32:14

it's the nurture of consciousness as well. Setting

32:17

aside the possibility that in this hypothetical

32:19

society we'd ever come up with some sort of standard

32:22

of conscious experience, where depending

32:24

on how well you culturally match up with it in that

32:26

world, that determines your level of worth. Let's

32:28

pretend we would never do something like that. How

32:30

might that change? Where as your

32:32

cognitive capabilities decline, you're

32:35

seen as less and less important because your

32:37

conscious experience is getting closer and closer to

32:39

that of an animal's. But how about just

32:41

aging in general? What if in this

32:43

society, after you reach a certain scientifically

32:46

determined peak age of conscious awareness,

32:49

then the older you get and the lower scores you put up

32:51

on the yearly consciousness test you do when you get

32:53

your physical, the less that society

32:55

sees you as being entitled to a seat at the table when

32:57

it comes to anything. People would have no

32:59

reason in this society to feel bad for openly

33:02

discriminating against people for their age or disabilities.

33:04

And you can imagine what it might feel like being somebody

33:07

there. If consciousness hierarchies

33:09

like this were just the accepted standard, you

33:11

would feel the same way discriminating against someone

33:13

for their age as you feel right now

33:16

telling a kid that they can't drive a car. Look,

33:18

I'm sorry, you just can't. It's not good

33:20

for the rest of us conscious people out here that are trying

33:22

to survive. When we set up these

33:25

consciousness hierarchies, we have to

33:27

understand the criteria that we're using and what

33:29

theories in the philosophy of mind we might be bringing into

33:31

it. Because if you're willing to set up a distinction

33:34

between fish and chickens in your own head

33:36

because one of them seems to have a degraded conscious

33:38

experience, then you have to ask the further

33:40

questions there too. If a human being

33:43

had a degraded conscious experience because of

33:45

brain damage or whatever else, can

33:47

we eat them at that point? Can we put

33:49

them in little mazes and use them for experiments

33:52

testing how they react?

33:53

Well, was it okay to do with Helen the monkey?

33:56

Is it okay to do with rats? Is it okay

33:58

to keep animals in zoos?

33:59

Is it okay to have pets? These

34:02

conversations are important to have.

34:05

If in these examples, in this hypothetical

34:07

society, you saw glimmers of how some people

34:09

out there actually do look at the world and they bring

34:11

these points up proudly in casual conversation,

34:14

then you must realize the relevance these conversations

34:16

about consciousness can have. The

34:18

point is, all of this started with a hypothetical

34:21

zombie and a thought experiment that to some could seem

34:23

like a total waste of time to even talk about. But

34:26

here's a real world example of how the inferences

34:28

we make about the conscious states of other creatures

34:31

go on to have real effects on personal and public

34:33

moral policy. At a certain point, like

34:36

all giant precepts that most people take

34:38

for granted that guide their moral decisions, at

34:40

a certain point, if you're one of the unfortunate

34:42

few who care enough to listen to a podcast like

34:44

this, you're going to have to accept the fact

34:46

that even though you don't have complete information about

34:49

this stuff, you still have to make

34:51

a choice about which of these tentative theories

34:53

you're going to accept for now. And when you do,

34:55

it is going to have impacts on the way

34:57

you see everything. Now,

34:59

if accepting this type of behaviorism, where

35:02

we can't tell if something's conscious just because it behaves

35:04

like something that's conscious, if that's an

35:06

exercise in imagining what if consciousness that

35:08

seems like it may be there is not actually there, then

35:11

what if we flip that around? What if things

35:13

that don't appear to be conscious actually

35:15

are? What if everything is conscious? Why

35:18

do some philosophers claim that panpsychism,

35:20

as it's called, may be the most likely

35:23

answer to the hard problem of consciousness? And

35:25

how might society be radically altered if we all

35:27

decided one day that that's what we wanted to build our societies

35:29

around? That's

35:31

at least how next episode will begin.

35:33

Thank you to everyone who makes this podcast possible by

35:35

subbing on Patreon. Philosophizes.org

35:38

is the website.

35:39

Thank you for listening. I'll talk

35:40

to you next time.