The Wisdom Wall

“And now we'll take everything measurable and quantifiable. And, 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-equipped to study what they left by the roadside, which…”

“I also think consciousness is really helpful in a social situation. When you're dealing with Um, 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. And you have to be able to imagine yourself into their…”

“The Turing test doesn't work for this consciousness question. It was designed for the intelligence question, uh, 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 learning are much more conscious than we thought. You know,…”

“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 the effort to reduce it to things we know, um, hasn't…”

“I think that there is some wish fulfillment that we, we have something that is immaterial that therefore might survive the mortal body. I, 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 soul? It's, it's also this immaterial essence of us…”

“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, um, that that is the, to me, the door to spiritual experience.”

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

“when you have a conversation with a bot, uh, or a computer in general, you are, um, 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, um, uh, all the subtleties of human conversation are stripped…”

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