The Ledger, every show

“And now we'll take everything measurable and quantifiable. And the church, you can have everything subjective and qualitative. That was Galileo's deal and Descartes to some extent. And it was a very pragmatic deal, but it's left us with a science that's ill-eq…”

“The other thing that kind of blew my mind was you can anesthetize plants.”

“I also think consciousness is really helpful in a social situation. When you're dealing with a world that is fundamentally unpredictable. That is to say what other people are going to do at any given time, what other people are going to say at any given time. …”

“I don't think everything consciousness does or is, is computable. I think the brain is more analog than digital in many ways.”

“And so much of the Silicon Valley conversation strikes me as a way to address fun thought experiments about the future and absolutely ignore what's going on in our world today.”

“The Turing test doesn't work for this consciousness question. It was designed for the intelligence question which is somewhat simpler.”

“Our definition of the human, what's special about us, which has always been related to our intelligence and consciousness, is under enormous pressure today from these thinking machines and possibly feeling machines, and then from all these animals that we're l…”

“The idea we're automatically going to treat them with all this moral consideration because they're conscious. That seems given the fact we continue to eat animals. We know we full well know our conscious. I don't know that we're quite as enlightened as that co…”

“I've asked other people who are pretty knowledgeable computer scientists. Nobody seemed to think large language models are the way to go toward consciousness.”

“We also have, we're building brain organelles in, in a solution. I think they've got a shot at becoming conscious. They're working from up from, you know, actual brain cells forming organisms together.”

“You know, people have been trying to do what has worked everywhere else in science, which is reduce phenomenon to mass, you know, to matter and energy. And it's been an incredibly productive strategy, but it doesn't seem to work Yet with consciousness and that…”

“I think that there is some wish fulfillment that we have something that is immaterial that therefore might survive the mortal body. I think behind a lot of people's talk about consciousness is the word soul, even though it's not articulated, but what is the so…”

“The tension in my mind is between spirituality and egotism. And to the extent you can reduce egotism, whether through psychedelics, but also experiences of art, experiences of awe, all of which kind of shrink the eye in a way that can be feel really good that …”

“I think it's the default human perspective to see life everywhere. Children certainly have it, right? They're all animists until we knock it out of them in school.”

“So, you know, I'm not ready to say plants are conscious, but I think sentience That, I think we can make that case, and I think maybe that's a property of all living things.”

“In computers, you can run the same software on any number of different hardwares. But in brains, hardware and software are absolutely indistinguishable. Every experience, every memory is a physical set of connections in the brain.”

“72% of American teens turn to AI for companionship already.”

“When you have a conversation with a bot or a computer in general, you are reducing or simplifying your notion of what a conversation is. You're leaving out what's going on between us right now, which is acknowledgement, Skepticism, body language all the subtle…”

“And this effort to build a conscious AI is probably one of the most promising, ah, intellectual experiments to help us understand it. Whether it succeeds or fails, I think it's going to teach us something really important.”