David Chalmers on The Hard Problem of Consciousness 

David Chalmers is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the philosophy of mind and language He’s a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University Host: Lex Fridman (@lexfridman)

The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed by Christof Koch attempts to explain consciousness as a subjective experience

David doesn’t agree with the book, Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel, but says it’s “at least a beautiful speculative view”

“I don’t rule it out” – David Chalmers If a simulation were designed well enough, it would be indistinguishable from a non-simulated reality Even evidence of a nonsimulation could be simulated !

The way we experience the world is an over-simplified version of what’s actually happening (There are atoms, quantum waves functions, and superstrings that we don’t see) There’s no reason for a universe that’s simulating our universe to be similar to ours

Humans, as a species, only recently became advanced enough to develop language and culture “ We’re just at the beginning of that on the evolutionary threshold … We’re just at the very beginning for what’s possible.” – David Chalmers

One theory: A superintelligence species created our universe as a simulation for entertainment, much like we currently watch Netflix for entertainment Another theory: This superintelligence species creates simulations for enjoyment, just as humans create babies

Pondering further, if we’re talking simulations, it has to be easier to simulate the brain than the universe as a whole (because the brain is part of the universe) A question to think about: If you simulated the brain, would you get all the things that come with it (i..e, consciousness, thinking, free will, etc.)? David says yes (It’s important to note that, as advanced as humans are, we still don’t understand consciousness)

Or… Perhaps our lives are just a super complex dream in the next universe!

“Right now, in virtual worlds, the mind is somehow outside the world, but you could imagine, in the future, once we develop serious AI—artificial general intelligence—then we could come to enter virtual worlds with enough sophistication to allow one to actually stimulate a brain” – David Chalmers

Video games are already quite immersive—people feel as if they’re in another world; this feeling will only get stronger

When people play video games (whether VR is involved or not) they tend to adopt different character avatars and personalities People will likely adopt different genders, races, and social backgrounds virtual worlds become more popular

“The kind of consciousness that I’m interested in is basically subjective experience—what it feels like from the inside to be a human being” – David Chalmers

Different types of consciousness: Access consciousness: being able to access information from your mind Reflective consciousness: being able to think about yourself Phenomenal consciousness: the subjective experience that we’re feeling anything at all

Humans can create consciousness machines—they’re called babies—but we don’t know how consciousness is created

Interesting questions to think about: Do animals have consciousness? (Some people argue that insects and plants have consciousness) When did humans develop consciousness? Do particles have consciousness? “Physics tells us about how a particle relates to other particles and interacts; it doesn’t tell us about what the particle is itself” – David Chalmers

The easy problem of consciousness is behavior; the hard problem is subject experience “It’s hard to see how existing physics is going to give you a full explanation of that” – David Chalmers

If consciousness developed at a certain point in time, it would be useful to know when that event took place

“No one knows what consciousness is for functionally. So, right now, there’s no specific thing you can point to and say, ‘You need consciousness for that.’” – David Chalmers This is why consciousness needs to be taken seriously—no one understands how it works

David isn’t religious and doesn’t consider himself an expert on God by any means The deep question in religion: what are people looking for when they’re praying to God? Most likely, they’re are seeking a sense of meaning and a connection to something greater than themselves

David believes you don’t need universal consciousness (God) to give the world meaning when you have local consciousness (yourself) to give the world meaning But, without consciousness, life has no meaning “Consciousness is the source, in my view, of the meaning of life, but I wouldn’t say consciousness itself is the meaning of life. What’s meaningful in life is basically what we find meaningful or what we experience as meaningful.” – David Chalmers

Meaning comes from what you value in life—there’s no universal answer If you find meaning and value in intellectual work, then, for you, that’s the meaning of life “The meaning of life is where you find it ” – David Chalmers But: “Without consciousness, there really wouldn’t be any value”

If humans can create robots with consciousness, will how we treat them matter? Can a robot with consciousness suffer? Will robots have rights similar to animal rights? Will robots with consciousness become their own species and have civil rights?

How can humans test if a machine is conscious or not? If something is puzzled about the existence of consciousness, that’s a good sign the system is conscious, but it could also be an illusion Perhaps a robot can be designed to trick humans into believing it is conscious

Are clones conscious? Most likely, but hopefully, the original version has more rights than the clone

“It depends on what you mean … If you mean something which wasn’t determined in advance and could never have been determined, then I don’t know if we have free will” ” – David Chalmers

David believes in compatibilism: the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it’s possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent “I can’t see any reason in principle why an AI system couldn’t have a free will of that kind” – David Chalmers

David used to have synesthesia, the ability to see colors when songs are played, but it went away in his 20s A world without intelligent life would be a moral disaster—all value and meaning would likely be gone

If superintelligence or artificial general intelligence is developed, it would likely have consciousness In the future, when people can upload their brains to a computer system, the line between human and machine will be hard to draw

If David could hang out with one philosopher from the past, he’d choose René Descartes William James would be a close second