Kind: captions
Language: en
give it time it's coming a few decades a
century we'll have vr
you know virtual reality systems
indistinguishable from physical reality
at that point
we'll actually be able to put people
into uh into simulations like descartes
scenario
indistinguishable from physical reality
at that point we can start asking
how do we know this isn't happening to
us already right now
might we have been in a simulation like
that all along
[Music]
david chalmers welcome to the show
thanks it's great to be talking with you
man i'm really excited about this so for
people that aren't familiar with your
work which is amazing by the way
you are a philosopher an author and
somebody who thinks a lot about virtual
worlds and your most recent book reality
plus virtual worlds and the problems of
philosophy is really an exciting read
that i don't know if you
timed it as you did
on purpose but the fact that it's coming
out right in the middle of you know
facebook changing its name to meta and
what's going on in the world of nfts and
like everybody just pouring into
uh this idea of the metaverse and where
this is all going so as somebody who's
creating in that world i was reading
your book in that context but i want to
start before that and i want to start
with the hard problem of consciousness
and
specifically
why that led you to
dualism if i may put that word on it
it'll be interesting to see if that word
still feels right to you
but if you don't mind just walk people
through
why it's considered the hard problem of
consciousness and how that ends up
leading you to
the matrix and the metaverse which
people that have been following me for a
while know i am obsessed with the matrix
me too
for me consciousness was always the uh
the big issue my background was
growing up i was at math and
science geek
totally interested in explaining the
world
in terms of science and i used to think
wow wouldn't it have been great to have
been a uh a physicist back around the
time of newton when
physics was just totally ill understood
nobody understood the first thing about
space and time and matter
and motion the field was just wide open
whereas you know these days
science is getting to be a lot better
understood and there's the other some
interesting open problems in physics but
i was thinking what
is it right now that's like say physics
was
400 years ago genuinely wide open i
thought the science of the mind and
especially the problem of consciousness
of subjective
experience basically it feels like
something to be a conscious
human being you know we experienced one
thing i want to understand why do people
consider like i actually think i'm just
not smart enough to understand why
people think that's so weird why why is
that
hard
like why
to me the idea of oh you just stack
enough neurons
together and eventually there is a sort
of recursive loop where you can look
back on yourself and to me it just
seemed like again because i don't feel
like i may be smart enough to understand
the problem it just feels so easy to
accept that the human brain is more
complicated than you know let's say an
ant's brain and therefore humans have
consciousness and it's probably some
sliding scale of you know there's
probably mammals that have it as well
maybe not as you know not as deep of an
ability to contemplate your own
existence but
why why is it so hard to believe that if
we stacked silicon chips enough enough
enough enough enough that it would
finally become conscious i mean it sure
looks like if you put enough neurons
together in a brain connect them up in
the right way and get them firing in the
right way
you somehow get consciousness you get
subjective experience but the big
mystery is how and why
does that happen i mean when it comes to
explaining stuff like say human behavior
we've kind of got a model
on this you can kind of see how how it
is connecting up a whole lot of neurons
in the right way
performing the right computations
reacting to inputs
getting integrated
connecting up different areas of the
brain producing an output that's going
to produce human behavior you know maybe
it'll explain how we walk
how we talk
how we get around in the world and
science has been super successful at
doing that but when it comes to
consciousness those things are the easy
problems explaining what the system does
and science is great at explaining what
things do
but with consciousness we've got this
whole different aspect of how it feels
we subjectively experience it from the
inside and you can imagine taking this
whole story about
inputs hitting the eye and getting
passed up the optic nerve to the brain
patterns of neurons firing in the visual
cortex affect other areas of the brain
eventually frontal cortex leads to
action
but that still leaves open the question
why does all that
feel like something why do why is there
something it's like to be you undergoing
that and you could raise that quite you
could program all those neural firings
into a into a robot
into a computer
with all those patterns producing all
this behavior
but
would it actually feel like something
from the inside i mean maybe it would
i'm not saying it wouldn't in a robot
but that is the mystery how does all
that
all those mural firing somehow turn into
how does the uh you know the water of
neural firings in the brain turn into
the wine of consciousness
that's interesting that's a great way to
put it okay so let's explore that so i
heard you say in an interview that there
was a period in your career where you
were being a good boy of science and you
were looking at this from a
materialistic standpoint meaning matter
things we can touch understand
and that you said like every day you
were coming up with a new sort of
physical explanation for how we get
consciousness but that ultimately you
threw all of those away
and i don't know if you would still use
the word dualism but that you end up at
least at one point in your life
feeling like we have to separate or at
least explore that there may be a
separation between the physical
realities of the brain and this sort of
how do we explain
the water into wine moment of
consciousness
walk me through what were some of the
physical explanations that you had and
why did you discard them
oh yeah i had so many theories of
consciousness when i was first starting
to think about this stuff i certainly
wanted to be like a materialist or a
physicalist let's explain everything
ultimately in terms of matter
in terms of physics i don't know i had
my theory of
of abstractions that consciousness was
just going to be an abstraction from
from complicated information processing
in the brain i had my theory of
information it's just all about the
information which is encoded and when
the information looks at other
information in this self-reflective way
maybe that gives you consciousness but
basically every
for every explanation like this it
always looked like it had this little uh
huge mystery in the middle like the
arrow that says here's where a miracle
occurs
where all this information processing
somehow gives you consciousness where
these abstractions somehow give you the
basic elements of consciousness and that
part
always just seemed to be like this
fundamental
mystery and i came to think that all you
were ever going to get from a purely
physical explanation was basically you
know the structure and dynamics of the
physical system how a system is
structured what it does and that is
perfect for explaining almost everything
in science like you know biology you
want to explain life you explain
reproduction and metabolism adaptation
all these things the system does and
you've explained life but for
consciousness we have this extra thing
that needs explaining after
handling all those easy problems you
know the uh the walking the talking the
behavior
why is all that accompanied by
subjective experience and eventually
it just came to seem to me
that to explain that you needed to go
beyond the resources say of the physics
this is not unheard of in science you
know um
in the 19th century maxwell was trying
to explain
electromagnetism and it turns out you
could just couldn't do it using newton's
theories of space and time and mass
and laws of motion and laws of
gravitation and so it just didn't give
you a theory of electromagnetism what
maxwell ended up doing was saying okay
we have to take electric charge
as fundamental and we have to develop
some fundamental laws
of electric charge and that's basically
that's how we came up with maxwell's
laws of electromagnetism regarded then
at least as fundamental laws of nature
so my view is what we have to do for
consciousness is something akin to what
maxwell did for uh for charge
treat consciousness as a fundamental
property in nature and search for the
fundamental laws that govern it so that
that thing which i said was where a
miracle occurs
going from say physical processing to
consciousness let's find a fundamental
law
that tells you how it is that
consciousness arises from physical
systems and that's why it sounds a
little bit like dualism
because
i want to say that there's you know
there's physics
at least as we understand it now and
there's consciousness and consciousness
is an additional fundamental it's not a
dualism of spooky souls
no life after death at least comes in
comes indirectly on this way of thinking
about things but it does say
consciousness is a fundamental property
of these systems which is not reducible
to its physical properties philosophers
sometimes call that property dualism for
a much weaker
i sometimes thought naturalistic dualism
a kind of a scientific dualism where we
can have a science of consciousness we
have to admit consciousness as
fundamental this episode is sponsored by
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all right that's really intriguing to me
i don't know that it answers all of my
naive questions so let me go through
some of them here so
okay if we um if we take in
consciousness as a fundamental law of
nature what then are the
and i don't i think there's relatively
few of them what would the fundamental
laws of um nature be then so we have
electromagnetism gravity
consciousness what's what's the the grab
bag here
yeah it's a good question so one way
that you know consciousness could be
added to all this is via some separate
laws some separate
i've sometimes called them
psychophysical laws for you know
for mind physical for physical basically
physical to mental
laws maybe the best example of this
right now is a framework that's been
developed by the neuroscientist giulio
tanoni where he basically connects
consciousness to a measure of what he
calls integrated information
in the brain he says when you have he's
got a certain mathematical definition
of integrated information that any
physical system and says basically when
you have low integrated information low
consciousness high integrated
information high consciousness he
actually gives us a label phi so
consciousness is hi-fi
now the old version of me might have
said okay why does all this hi-fi give
you consciousness that looks like saying
that's just where a miracle occurs but
in this framework we say okay that's a
fundamental law
it's just a fundamental psychophysical
law that where you have
high integrated information you get
consciousness of a certain type but on
one way of understanding this that law
just gets added
to the laws of physics as like an extra
law so you've got your brand unified
theories in physics or the four
fundamental forces or
whatever it is walking through the four
fundamental forces so that because what
i want to wrap my head around is i heard
you once list them out and it was really
interesting to think of consciousness as
part of that bag
and i think if if we just list those out
now with consciousness added that that
gives us something to build on as we
explore your ideas
yeah well standardly you know we have um
we have gravity
uh the
fundamental force of gravity we have the
fundamental force of
electromagnetism we have the strong and
weak
nuclear forces and then we have um you
know we have basically quantum mechanics
that provides a grand framework for all
of these things
to take place
physicists very much hope there's going
to be a brand unified theory that might
unify all the forces and somehow
unify quantum mechanics and gravity
which that's the really hard part they
call those theories of quantum gravity
so they want a single unified theory
underneath all those things but they
don't have that right now they've
unified some of the forces but no one's
been able to
unify everything but roughly you can
think of it and forget the nuclear
forces for now you think okay there's
there's gravitation for the uh for the
very large there's quantum mechanics for
the very small there's electromagnetism
for
holding things together and then yeah
and then there's consciousness for
explaining how it is that these systems
give you
conscious experience and the way i've
i've told it there
can't it does kind of have the defect
that consciousness sits outside
those fundamental laws of physics it's
not unified with them so a grander hope
might be to actually find the grand
unified theory that unifies
consciousness with all of those things
and people of people have been thinking
about that maybe quantum mechanical
theories
of
consciousness maybe some element of
consciousness right down at the very
basis
of matter so
those laws of physics will themselves
govern consciousness directly but
right now that's just super speculative
that's somewhere we could hope to go
maybe in 100 years
the interesting thing for me though is
understanding it in that way
felt like a gateway to understanding how
you're conceptualizing this so the first
time i had somebody on the show to talk
about pan psychism
um
incredibly bright woman i mean really
really uh thoughtful and
i couldn't help though like my mind just
could not wrap around
the idea that a rock has some you know
i'll give it a spectrum but like that it
falls on the spectrum of conscious
because it's so
different to how i perceive myself and
so walk me through how do you make that
leap of intuition
into accepting that like the
particles that make up the globe behind
you or the you know the paper in those
books that i see or a rock like how do
you make the intuitive leap to saying
that it
there is some sense of experience to
being those things
yeah i'm not going to say it somehow
it's obviously true that there's some
bit of consciousness in everything and
for me it's just one among a number of
different
speculative options but it does have the
attraction of somehow potentially
unifying consciousness
with physics if it turns out to be some
consciousness at the very basis
of matter then consciousness could be
unified the alternative is this more
dualistic picture where there's physics
and their consciousness and there's
consciousness and those are separate so
if you don't want you know electrons to
be conscious and so on you might think
consciousness just kicks in
with complex organisms then you might
want to go
in that uh in that more dualistic way
but the pan cyclist picture
consciousness is everywhere does have
many attractions and you know many
cultures have actually found it quite
intuitive if you uh you know look at
various eastern cultures and indigenous
cultures it's very common to think
there's some element
of consciousness in everything now it
won't be consciousness like us it's not
like a particle is thinking
oh god i'm so bored whirring around that
uh that atom just you know get me out of
here
they're not thinking they're probably
not having emotions
uh nothing like that but maybe just some
tiny little precursor of
of consciousness that somehow one when
put together in these giant
information processing systems can add
up
to uh to consciousness like ours people
also talk about proto-consciousness
maybe it's not full-scale full-scale
consciousness you find in these
primitive systems but just some
primitive precursor to consciousness
that we can't even imagine
so as you think through that problem and
you're discarding one after another sort
of physical explanation of how this
comes to be
you push what i will say you're sort of
pushing the axiomatic uh miracle down
lower and just saying ah it's part of
physics but as you do that because i
don't think we're going to solve the
hard problem of consciousness here today
but it leads you to some incredibly
fascinating places so as you push that
down and
and at least run the thought experiment
of what if this were one of the
fundamental forces how does that end up
leading you to
a hypothesis well
i know that you're saying that you don't
necessarily think that we're living in a
simulation just that we can't rule it
out so how does that idea lead you to
this realization that we can't rule it
out and then would love to hear more
about
how much like i have a t-shirt that says
the matrix was a documentary
and it's like i say it tongue-in-cheek i
don't really believe it but um
but there is so much truth
to
the human experience feeling like the
matrix is the perfect metaphor for what
it's like to actually be a human um so
i'm curious as you push it down how does
that bring about this sense of we have
to think through the simulation theory
yeah i mean you don't need to buy what i
say about consciousness to buy into what
i say about
about the matrix or about simulations or
vice versa i think you know they're
somewhat
independent of each other but that said
there are also actually a lot of links
between the ideas and one of the links
you can actually find by going way back
to uh
to the 17th century french philosopher
rene descartes
um who asked how could i know anything
about the reality
around me how do i know i'm not dreaming
right now
how do i know that i'm not being fooled
by an evil demon into thinking there's a
reality out there
when none of it is real
and you know descartes said i know some
things about myself i know
uh that i'm here i know that i'm
thinking i know that i'm conscious and
he said yeah i think
therefore i am
i know that i exist and what they
basically said is i can be sure
of my consciousness at the very least
that's the one thing in the world that's
a data point that's a datum but it's
much harder to be sure about the
external world around me and he raised
that problem by saying yeah how do i
know i'm not dreaming not being fooled
by an evil demon the way we raise that
question today is to ask how do i know
i'm not in a simulation
how do i know i'm not in the matrix if i
was i'd still be here conscious
but the world around me would be utterly
different
from
what i thought and i think actually what
this has done is taken descartes old
questions about
maybe i'm dreaming maybe it's an evil
maybe it's an evil demon it's actually
turned into a live concrete possibility
because this technology is actually now
coming we can already build
you know we can already build computer
simulations of all sorts even simple
cosmic simulations we can't yet build
simulations indistinguishable from
physical reality but give it time it's
coming a few decades a century we'll
have vr
you know virtual reality systems
indistinguishable from physical reality
at that point
we'll actually be able to put people
into uh into simulations that are like
descartes scenario indistinguishable
from physical reality and at that point
we can start asking
how do we know this isn't happening to
us already right now
might we've been in a simulation like
that all along
all right so let's start getting into
it's a really
it's a really interesting question
and as you begin to peel back the layers
you
you and you do this very well in your
book you talk about the different types
of potential simulations so we have a
perfect simulation and an imperfect
simulation
walk us through those
uh differences
i think that will help people begin to
answer that question for themselves
yeah there are so many different ways
you can be in you could be in a
simulation you know in the uh in the
matrix for example neo has a brain and a
body that are biological but they're
connected up to this computer simulation
he's not
himself part of the simulation but he's
connected to it that's what i call a
biosim a biological creature connected
to a simulation by contrast in the
movies the agents like you know agent
smith or the oracle
they're not biological creatures they
are actually machines themselves
they are
creatures of the simulation is actually
you know basically simulated
processes themselves that's what i call
pure sims so we've got like a pure
impure simulation
where we're brain's connected to a
simulation that's one possibility but
another one is we could be pure
simulations we could be uh we could
ourselves be simulated creatures
connected to the uh to the simulation i
think both of those are open
possibilities you can also distinguish
between like a perfect simulation which
mirrors say the world it's simulating
perfectly an imperfect one which is
going to be glitchy and have
approximations and shortcuts maybe it's
super expensive and difficult to build
really precise simulations of physics
throughout the whole universe so our
simulators are going to take shortcuts
and make approximations and every now
and then they'll get things wrong i
guess in the matrix they had those black
cats that those cats that crossed your
path twice and that was a sign of glitch
in the matrix
maybe our simulators are actually
approximating physical laws and if we
start making measurements which are
close enough we'll be able to pick up on
glitches
that'll be possible if we're in
an imperfect simulation we might be able
to get evidence of that and i think
that's worth looking for
on the other hand if we're in a perfect
simulation we'll probably never get
evidence of that because a perfect
simulation is designed by its nature to
be indistinguishable from the world it's
simulating
so one thing that
a lot of this hinges on there's really
two things so one information theory and
i would love to hear more about that and
why
more and more credible people are saying
hey it might be that as we dive deeper
into physics we find that this is really
just information and so what that means
exactly and then the the notion that
the odds are if simulations exist and we
know they do because we're already
building virtual realities now
then ultimately there would be more
simulated people and environments than
there would be real environments so just
playing the stats
we're probably in a simulation so if you
can walk us through those two ideas and
and how they connect i think they'll be
really helpful sure yeah let me go with
the uh the stats first because this is
an interesting argument that comes from
the philosopher nick bostrom and also
the yeah the robotic system futurist
hans moravec
basically put forward this idea that
eventually there are going to be a whole
lot
of simulations of simulated universes
we've already got primitive
simulations in video games in vr
and so on given enough time we'll be
able to actually simulate
um
whole physical universes we'll be able
to simulate human beings
probably will get to the point where
every intelligent civilization is going
to have the capacity
to create these simulations of
intelligent beings maybe they'll
actually create hundreds thousands
millions of simulated worlds each
then you start to think
boy well what are the statistics here
there's gonna be like one
unsimulated world that could be millions
of simulated worlds for every simulated
being there could be hundreds thousands
who knows how many beings with very
similar conscious experiences and it's
going to seem just the same
to the simulated beings so then you
start out to ask what are the odds
that i am one of those lucky ones
ground zero
based reality unsimulated when there are
you know hundreds thousands of beings
just like me who are simulated and then
you start to that's what gets you to the
conclusion starts to look like maybe
very very good odds that were simulated
now things can that does require some
assumptions for example it does require
the assumption that a simulated being
can be conscious now as we've said we
don't fully understand
consciousness so this is going to be a
controversial part of the argument if
you think a simulated being can't be
conscious
then
we'll be able to then the very fact that
we're conscious will rule up rule out
the idea that we're in our simulation at
least as a pure simulation we could
still be like the biosim like neo
because remember neo was just a brain
not a simulation so it gets it gets
complicated um you know there's a few
ways or you could say that
uh you know
these civilizations aren't actually
going to create simulations because they
might decide it's a bad idea so there's
a few ways this could go wrong but for
me thinking through it statistically is
enough for me to take this hypothesis
really very seriously in the end i think
i i'm at least 50 percent that
simulations like this are going to be
possible and i'm at least 50 that if
they're possible a whole lot of them
will eventually be created that ends up
giving me like 25 probability that uh
that there actually will be many more
stimulations simulated being
beings all of whom are conscious
and once i'm there i'm like okay that's
at least a 25 chance that i'm simulated
that's so fascinating to me now so as we
drill down into that and start because
when this is all just sort of drunken
frat talk it's
it's mildly interesting but as we get
into the
ways in which
it seems that it may be real that
underlying all of physics is information
theory then then it's like okay well
wait a second now we really can't rule
this out so what is information theory
and what could we do now
to either prove or disprove that it's
true
yeah this is really interesting um
you know this kind of connects to how
people think of the simulation
hypothesis and the idea that the world
is simulated
if you follow renee descartes he thought
that these scenarios
where he's dreaming where there's an
evil demon he thought if we're in that
kind of scenario none of this is real
and it's the same with the matrix
a lot of people say even in the movies
they say if we're in the matrix nothing
is real the world around us is an
illusion i actually want to resist that
i want to say that
if we're in a simulation the world
around us is still
perfectly real
when we
see tables and chairs and trees and
mountains they're still perfectly real
objects they'll be digital objects
underneath it all but that doesn't mean
they're not real they're real digital
entities can you take a second to define
real
yeah you know i mean real is
uh one of those ambiguous words but i've
got a few different criteria
for being real one is that to be real
you have to have
causal powers you make a difference in
the world if something can affect things
then it's real second it's got to be
outside of our minds if something is
just a dream generated by our minds and
we don't usually count it as real and as
strong a sense so it's got to be
independent
of our minds and third maybe the most
important to be real
um
we care that something is not an
illusion that is that things are roughly
the way that they seem and what i want
to argue is if we're in a simulation
then there are still going to be digital
entities
in the simulation say i see a uh
a tree
and i'm actually in the matrix i'm going
to say well there is actually a digital
tree out there somewhere in the computer
which is making a difference to me
making a difference to other things in
the matrix so it has causal powers it's
independent of me i could leave the
matrix
the tree will still be there and i want
to argue it's not an illusion there
really is a tree there
it's made of bits it's a digital tree
but i want to say that's
still a way of being real and this is
where you get the connection to these
information theory
ideas like the so-called it from bit
hypothesis and the physicist john
wheeler speculated that underneath
everything in physical theory you know
we're used to the idea that under you
know plants and trees are made of cells
cells are made of molecules made of
atoms made of quarks
wheeler speculated that underneath all
that you know maybe quarks are somehow
made of bits
so we've got a level of bits ones and
zeros in effect a physics of ones and
zeros underlying
the physics that uh that we know and
this is a controversial idea about real
physics but it's one that some people
have taken seriously um
stephen wolfram has written these big
books like a new kind of science
spelling out one version of this kind of
it from bit
physics
and if you take that idea seriously
then you realize that being made of bits
being digital is not a way of being
unreal it's just another hypothesis
about what reality is made of so what i
want to say is if we're in
a simulation
then we shouldn't say none of this is
real
instead we should say well we're in a
it's from bit universe we're in a
universe
where the objects around us are actually
digital objects
made of bit made of bits but they're
still real they have causal powers
they're out there independent of us and
they needn't be
an illusion so i want to say basically
the simulation hypothesis is a version
of the it from bit hypothesis
do you ever drive yourself crazy um with
the idea that you're really just pushing
the miracle
uh lower or deeper or however you want
to think about it because here is an
idea that that drives me crazy so as
you're explaining that i'm like oh my
god yeah like this makes so much sense
like there's bits and then i'm like but
wait where did the bits come from and
then it's like okay there there was a
creator and you've said many times you
know and god said let there be bits but
then i'm like where's god like where
does this come from and there's always
some moment where i have to say yeah i
just don't know like there there's some
axiomatic sort of ground floor base
assumption and we build up from that and
so
i'm curious what is your like bass bass
bass assumption is it
simulations all the way down is it like
if we get to the ground zero that you're
talking about before the one sort of
real world
where'd that come from
it's a great question then yeah i don't
have a definitive answer to this there's
like all kinds of different hypotheses
about what the ground floor is one idea
is that you know bits are the basic
level of reality that's the pure
it from bit
hypothesis but even in that moment you
get to like uh they've always existed
like
it does that not just like fry your
brain you've got to take something as
fundamental though this is this already
kind of fries your brain one of the
basic questions in philosophy why is
there something rather than nothing
why is there anything in the universe
and it just looks like some things you
have to take
as fundamental properties and
fundamental laws and that's not
wholly satisfying
it kind of looks like it's the best we
can do
so at least for now we can speculate
about what that fundamental level is
maybe it's bits but yeah if the bits are
running on a simulation then there's
probably something underneath the bits
just as in our computers bits are made
up out of you know voltages in a
transistor or something if we're in a
simulation probably these bits are
running on some computer in the next
universe up that may have you know
transistors of its own or some
completely different physics i call that
the it from bit from it hypothesis
because the bits are made of something
else of course in that universe maybe
it's a simulation too maybe maybe the
its are made of bits yes we get it from
bit from it from bit from it maybe we're
three universes down or five universes
down or 42 universes down
but yeah that does just push all the
questions back to presumably there's a
base reality i mean
could it be simulations all the way up i
don't know if that makes sense
maybe but i mean certainly as a thought
experiment it makes sense but you run
into the same problem which is like you
said at some point you have to accept
something as as foundational
um and it's you know really just a
question of where do you accept that and
information theory is interesting to me
for one reason that i've heard you talk
about and i'd love to get your sense of
if this really is information theory it
feels like then i can keep going keep
going keep going until i find like that
the data structure and and maybe this is
just not a a wise way to think about it
but for me and so as a storyteller i'm
obsessed with this idea in fact this
this character right here is a character
that i
created that lives in a virtual world
and
but he is both
in the he can basically pop in and out
of the matrix if you will um and
what becomes interesting to me is
when we get to the point where we're we
have these simulations that are
just indistinguishable from reality and
let's say that we're living in one now
that you can get to the point where you
get to the base code and if you can
alter the base code then you can
essentially
alter physics and you know i mean maybe
this is just a superhero fantasy on my
part but
that to me is really interesting and so
when i look at our world and i think of
all the things that we've already been
able to do and manipulate and change
because we've gotten to some layer of
the code right so
like when i think about satellites and
how most people don't realize gps
wouldn't work without einstein's theory
of relativity and just by understanding
that we've been able to create these
things that give us like pinpoint
accuracy to where we are and they can
lead us to our destination i mean it's
already like physics has already
transformed our worlds in ways that most
of us take completely for granted so
anyway i get super interested in this
idea of hey if we keep digging like we
can ultimately get to you know whether
it's dark matter or whatever we get to
that thing that we don't yet understand
that if we can start
either
leveraging its predictions like we did
with
relativity or actually manipulating that
structure that we can escape the matrix
or we can manipulate the matrix even if
we can't get out of it because we are of
the matrix um that to me is incredibly
interesting have you thought through
that do you have any um ideas around
that
yeah you know one way to kind of make
this concrete is that well actually
whenever we create a virtual world even
like a in a video game
um you know whoever creates
the virtual world is in effect the god
of that video game they they're all
powerful like in principle can
reset anything they can be a they can be
all-knowing they can know everything
that's going on they created it so it's
like they're the god of the video games
and you can give yourself if you
actually write the video game yourself
you can give yourself super powers you
know you can teleport anywhere you can
see whatever's going on you can
build new structures just like that you
can change the rules you can change the
laws
so yeah then you start thinking well if
we're in a simulation
there's someone up there that has this
kind of power over our reality a kind of
power not that different in some ways
from those of a uh from those of a
traditional god and then yeah then you
start to think well could we get uh
could we get access
to that i mean i guess if it's a perfect
simulation
then it's going to be very hard for us
to get access because if it's a perfect
simulation it's going to be undetectable
maybe there are things we can we can do
to try and uh at least to perform some
experiments for example maybe we can try
and overload the simulation
and see what happens see if we get any
glitches maybe start running some
simulations within the simulations and
really
put some load on their computers and see
if
see if something happens or at the very
least
maybe more effective we could try and
communicate with them temp them into uh
communicating with us i don't know maybe
write some books on the simulation
hypothesis
and put forward to my policies about
their nature and see if they get so
infuriated by this that they reveal
themselves in order to prove us wrong
or sensitive
communicating with them then yeah then
maybe we can get access to the controls
yeah that's where this gets at least as
um you know i suppose my your thought
experiments run the nature of um
philosophy mine very much go into
storytelling in a way i guess in some
ways i'm talking back to myself to
describe this human condition but to
feel it in an emotional way
but i find myself intrigued by
that notion and i i don't know that i
would have been intrigued had i you know
been in descartes time so um you know
certainly don't think i have any real
insights but
it is uh growing up in the technological
age as this is all unfolding and as
virtual worlds become
a reality it does start to ask
interesting questions of our humanity
which i find really fascinating and so
i'd love to
talk about that so you you've gone into
great detail about whether we can live a
meaningful life inside of a virtual
world and the one thing you said that
really stopped me my tracks and i took a
note on it and so i'm building a
yeah i mean i guess it's a virtual world
so building the same codename the avatar
experience and
within that
your idea of life and death within a vr
environment and at first i thought
man that's like the one thing you'd want
to stay away from it's like take
advantage of what vr has to offer which
is the exact opposite of that
but then i i don't know something about
when you said that i thought
the
loss is devastating but it also adds
something
incredibly poignant
to life
and while i personally want to live
forever um it's an interesting mechanic
to have death be available
in even a virtual world so
i don't know if you've thought a lot
about as a builder what you would want
to see and create or what questions you
would want to
dance with to be a little poetic um
but what do you think about that
yeah you know birth and death are
obviously incredibly important parts of
human life maybe the most
important parts in some way and
maybe they play some role in giving our
lives the kinds of meaning
that they have you know in that uh in
that film children of men when there's
no longer
no longer any birth and it does kind of
you get the sense of people's lives
they're not meaningless but they've been
robbed at least of one element
of their meaning so when i think about
yeah what's missing and
what's potentially missing
in virtual worlds i mean at least in any
virtual world we'll have in the
near-term
future yeah birth and death happens in
the physical world whenever someone's
born
they're born in the physical world when
they die
they die in the physical world maybe
they can enter and exit
virtual worlds
in association with this but it's not
really where the birth and death
occurs maybe in the long run
once they're actually simulated beings
simulated humans maybe they'll be beings
which are actually born inside the
matrix maybe you
simulate pregnancy
simulate the development of the fetus
eventually have a simulated birth and
you'll have a
creatures which are born in the matrix
and likewise creatures that uh
that die and the uh die in a virtual
world too without remembering like the
machines we talked about they never had
to be biological they were purely purely
simulated so maybe eventually that kind
of
birth and death could be possible but at
least until then it looks like yeah
certain things
tides are tied so deeply to our biology
that it's hard to get it's hard to get
their analog in the inside of virtual
world until you move to the long-term
future where all of all the physics and
all of biology is exist within a
simulation
you know this makes me think so going
back to the first thing we were talking
about with
consciousness being a
fundamental law
does it not seem like consciousness
would
be an outcropping of
evolution because when i think about
what my consciousness actually does for
me
so i think a lot about directives that
nature has implanted in our brains i
think a lot about how if you damage the
emotional centers of the brains people
find it impossible to make a decision
and so there is a sense of like
consciousness is
fundamental at least in my
interpretation to future planning
to
desire to thinking about what i want and
making sure that i want it and to making
sure that like oh man it hurts if i
don't get it and all of that requires
like this sense of self-awareness now i
have a feeling you're going to take us
into zombieland here
which is probably the right thing to
discuss but
it seems like
self-awareness and i will
intentionally use a slightly different
word than consciousness but that
self-awareness becomes a pretty
important part
of
the journey of accomplishment
yes self-consciousness is super
important i like to distinguish
ordinary consciousness from
self-consciousness you know ordinary
consciousness involves being just aware
of things in the world around us
maybe uh
in perceptual consciousness i see things
i hear things and there's something it's
like for me to see things and hear
things i've got the subjective
experience
of seeing and and hearing or feeling
pain
that i don't think needs to involve
consciousness in myself that can just
involve consciousness of the things
around me but there is a special kind of
consciousness we have which is
consciousness of ourselves i mean i
don't know whether maybe fish for
example i don't know maybe a fish has
some consciousness of the uh the of the
water around it or the fish
maybe it's conscious of itself maybe
it's not but humans
we are paradigmatically the
self-conscious
species we're conscious of ourselves we
can reflect on our own existence we can
think about our own consciousness and
that is
really special i think i mean it's one
aspect of consciousness but a
particularly
complex and crucial aspect of
consciousness and it does look like our
self-consciousness is tied
to many things
that we uh
that we do but it is an interesting
question
for anything that you think
consciousness does you mentioned zombies
so yeah for almost anything for people
anything that you want consciousness to
do
we always say couldn't you do that in
principle without consciousness
so if it's just seeing and getting
visual information couldn't a robot do
that
without consciousness or maybe um
something which i use self-consciousness
to do to make plans make decisions
reflect on my life
couldn't in principle there'd be say a
robotic version of me
that went through all this with no
subjective experience so this gets us to
yeah the philosopher's zombie uh which
is basically a creature which at least
acts a great deal like a human being
and behaves very similarly maybe is made
up of similar processes but that lacks
consciousness
entirely so there's nothing it's like to
be a zombie
on the inside everything is dark
no consciousness
and most people don't think that zombies
actually exist i don't think there are
any zombies out there but it's a great
way of posing the philosophical problems
of
consciousness i mean you can pose the
hard problem of consciousness by saying
why aren't we zombies
why couldn't we have been creatures that
did all this stuff without consciousness
we're not
we're conscious
but why and it's also a way of raising
this question of what does consciousness
actually do for us yeah why in principle
couldn't a zombie have had all this kind
of these reflective processes that led
to guiding its action in all these ways
without any subjective experience at all
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i think there might be some elements of
the
the actual natural world that give us
clues maybe worth exploring here so
there's a parasite called toxo something
i'm forgetting the exact name but
basically cats
get this parasite that
can be passed on to humans but it can
also be
passed on to mice so the the toxo
parasite prefers to
um it can
do asexual
replication or it can do sexual uh
replication and it prefers to do sexual
replication but it can only do that in
the digestive tract of a cat so what it
does is it goes and infects
mice or rats and makes them
drawn to the scent of cat urine and
completely unafraid of cats so if you
were to take a newborn rat pup and
expose it to the scent of cat urine it
gets terrified so it's not it's
instinctual so
you can inject them or infect them with
this um
this parasite and it will suddenly be
drawn to the scent of cat urine and then
the cat eats the the rat or the mouse it
then is able to uh replicate sexually
within its intestines now there's also
so to me that's like a zombie-like
behavior right you have taken control of
a very specific part of the rat brain to
get it to do and change its own behavior
then there's a fungus if i remember
right that like will uh bore into the
head of like a wasp i can't remember how
it happens but anyway the either the
wasp does it to a an ant or something
and you get these totally zombified
creatures that like
just
you know
begin to locomote
and i forget the exact behavior that
they manifest but they are totally gone
right like all the instinctual drives
they have are taken over by this fungus
or whatever
and
what that tells me is that there are
regions in the brain and just like you
can knock somebody you can remove their
consciousness with
i won't even say sleep because you know
dreams and you still have a sense of
passage of time but if you put somebody
under general anesthetic they're they're
gone like there is no sense of them you
can damage someone's brain in the sense
of them goes away so
what do you take away from those things
the fact that i can go into the brain do
things and completely change your
experience
yeah well the brain is vulnerable to all
kinds of manipulation i mean you know
what you're describing is not so
different in some ways from let's say
the the facebook algorithm
get it gets in there and gets control of
some bits of our brain and it knows what
we're going to like and what we're going
to react to and yeah we're just going to
click on those things and uh it's as if
um yep they've got into our brain does
some things very predictably if you get
a hold of it in the right way and that's
what social media for example is trying
to game all the time maybe when people
maybe if there's there are simulators
out there maybe they're performing these
experiments on us
all the time as well but yeah brain
the brain is a deeply complex machine
and some things it does are conscious
um
some of our activities are conscious
highly voluntary things but a whole lot
of what the brain does that isn't
conscious at all it just happens
unconsciously reflexively whether it's
uh
whether it's just you know breathing or
somehow where we choose to uh to
navigate
decisions are often unconscious so yeah
it's totally possible in principle to
get control
of those bits of the brain
and manipulate them once we've got you
know brain computer interfaces it's
going to be uh our brains are going to
be potentially vulnerable
to uh to all kinds of manipulation there
so i think i mean this is kind of to be
expected if consciousness is just the
tip of the iceberg
and so much of what we do
is unconscious i mean our consciousness
can be manipulated too
there are neuro there are areas of the
brain
people call them the neural correlates
of consciousness that go along with
consciousness if people found ways to
directly manipulate
those i mean what do drugs do all kinds
of drugs manipulate those areas of the
brain and they produce amazing
transformations in conscious experience
so yeah i think the more we understand
the connection between brain and
consciousness the more capacities we're
going to find for both manipulation and
transformation of consciousness
so
knowing all of that and having thought
through all of that does that adjust
your model in any way about how you
think about um
pan psychism or the fundamental nature
of consciousness
and
do you like i've said a couple times
that it's a scale but is is that the
right way to think about it um
yeah i think yeah there's a huge it's
not even like a monodimensional scale
there's a huge space of
states of consciousness which are
orderable in so many different ways from
the simple to the complex from the less
intense to the more intense
from most couple of sensory modalities
to many
sensory modalities so yeah i think it's
a massive space of states of
consciousness
and one of the big projects in this area
is to map
those states of consciousness onto
states of the brain this is like neural
correlates of consciousness in the brain
and find those dimensions of processing
in the brain that map onto dimensions of
consciousness and this is kind of the
meat and potatoes of the science of
consciousness right now which has been
you know super active now for the last
30 years or so ever since i started
getting into this field
the science of consciousness has gone
ahead by leaps and bounds and what it's
been trying to do is to
it doesn't really try and solve the hard
problem instead what it tries to do is
to find mappings correlations
between aspects of processing in the
brain and aspects of consciousness and
yeah it's still it's still primitive and
developing
in some ways but at least in some cases
we find things we can understand so for
example we know there are certain areas
of the brain that seem to go along with
spatial processing as other areas go
along with action
people have used this to
actually communicate with patients who
they thought were in some kind of
postcoma state where they couldn't
communicate maybe you thought someone
was in a vegetative state but then you
asked them imagine playing tennis and
then they imagine an action imagine
walking through your house they imagine
something spatial and you'll see
different areas of their brain
light up and people take that as pretty
strong evidence that hey these people
are conscious in different ways and then
they're going to use that for
communication
thrilling and heartbreaking so the
thought that they're
have you seen or read the book the
diving bell and the butterfly
yeah oh my god like the the whole idea
of being locked in he could blink one
eye
and that he had was completely there
mentally for anybody that doesn't know
it completely their mental he has a
stroke or something completely there
mentally but cannot move any part of his
body except for one of his eyes
and
that idea i had heard about that the
playing tennis the move through your
house thing
and
if i'm not mistaken they would they
could ask them effectively like yes or
no questions by saying okay imagine
someone playing tennis for yes imagine
walking through your house for no and
and now we ask you all these ques and i
was like oh my god like the number of
people that
there's no external sign that they're
there but they're still there like
when you talked about the electron being
bored out of its mind i can't fathom
like that is
so terrifying the thought that you're
still there but you can't communicate
anything just imagine that guy in the
diving bell on the butterfly but without
the control over the one eye
i've asked people a few times actually
like do we have reason to believe there
are people out there with this locked in
syndrome totally undamaged brain
functioning but just no sign of it
because how would we know
people say oh no it doesn't happen
because the eyes are independent but you
do get these things which are close like
i mean these patients with like the one
diagnosed with vegetative state where
they did the brain imaging for the
tennis and the house i mean it wasn't
quite the same as normal locked in
syndrome because there was some brain
damage
in those cases but still it's on a
continuum with this and this was a
patient it just didn't show up at all
in their behavior
and i think it's at least possible there
are some patients out there
for whom nothing no visible signs in
their behavior not even the eyelid but
who are actually
richly conscious the way that uh
you know the way that we are or the way
that the guy in the diving bell on the
butterfly is and yeah that is absolutely
tragic and i think
maybe the science of consciousness can
develop ways to help us find those
people
who man i know it's to the side of our
conversation but uh that is
very very scary to me i woke up once in
the middle of a dental i was having my
wisdom teeth removed
and i woke up in the middle of it
and i was just like yo i'm awake i'm
awake awake and then they you know and
you just drift away again but you hear
about those stories of people that don't
lose consciousness during surgery
yo like that that is uh that's not ideal
david that is not ideal yeah it's not
great especially once you once you
realize that for a long time i think at
least anesthetics consisted of
of uh three components uh paralytic to
paralyze your body
and analgesic to remove the pain and
then also an amnestic to remove your
memory
afterwards
and so you just say one of these things
doesn't work so well so you're you're
still somehow awake
um well okay there's going to be
amnestics you don't remember it
afterwards but was that was that
reassuring maybe you're awake for the
whole uh the whole operation oh my god i
found that yeah very people now say they
have better anesthetics and they have
got they've developed people actually
but the scales of consciousness they use
for anesthesia are still quite primitive
and they're trying to develop better
scales but
this is a place where the science of
consciousness has to get better to help
us actually properly remove states of
consciousness and anesthesia because
yeah anesthetists they remove and
restore consciousness for a living
they're like consciousness engineers
what's fascinating to me is that a
redhead i guess is harder to anesthetize
than any other hair color that seems so
such a bizarre correlation
have they figured out the explanation of
that not that i've heard but um the fact
that that there would be
any sort of physical um
correlation to something like that i
find extremely
strange but yeah that's uh that's very
interesting to me now one idea that you
talk about in the book that i wanted to
um go to is zhuangzi and the idea of
whether or not i'm dreaming or whether
i'm i'm the butterfly
dreaming that i'm juansa like
that to me is this like first of all
juan's uh was god knows how long ago um
and 100 bc
right so just a few days ago what what
is it do you think that makes people
like this is the question that everybody
asks over and over what is it about that
question
of whether or not i'm dreaming is this
all real why why is it why are we
obsessed with it and why is it important
enough to answer
because yeah we want to understand
reality and we want to be
in touch
with reality boy the fact that we dream
every night that really kind of makes
this real for us it's like every night
we go to these massive hallucinations
where we're in a different world and
suddenly you realize
why
could this be a dream too
and if it is then we kind of feel like
none of this is real my life is maybe
meaningless
and so on i'm just i thought that
everything was one way and actually it's
a it's another way boy it was the first
line of lines of bohemian rhapsody
by queen is this the real life or is it
just fantasy
desperately want all this
to be real i think it's the human every
ancient philosophical tradition has
versions of this question we had in
chinese philosophy we had drungja and
the butterfly and ancient greek
philosophy we had
plato with his allegory of the cave
could we just be chained up inside a
cave seeing shadows on the cave wall
while the genuine reality is outside
everybody wants to be in touch with
reality
i'm gonna give you a hypothesis on why i
think this matters so much and it quite
frankly is
i say it's my life work i might say this
is my like the very thing that i'm
trying to convey to the world so first
of all i'm always saying you're having a
biological experience
the reason i want people to understand
that is because you get trapped by your
biology and you mistake it for objective
truth so you have an emotion which is
really just neurochemistry and that
neurochemistry is triggered by your
beliefs about the situation
um versus the sort of i mean to quote
shakespeare nothing is either good or
bad but thinking makes it so so it's
like whatever happened is neutral but
you assign good or bad to it and so what
i want people to understand is that you
have a frame of reference and that frame
of reference is you live in a house full
of fun house mirrors now if you've ever
been in a room where it is nothing but
mirrors it is wildly disorienting like
you cannot tell
what's real like am i about to like you
can literally bash into something
because you're looking deeply into the
mirror and you think it's far away but
it actually isn't and so you smack into
it and now if these mirrors have
distortions in them which make you see
things not in the way that they actually
are
it can be really disorienting now as an
analogy or a metaphor for the way that
your brain works i would say that's
pretty accurate like over time based on
your hard wiring based on the
experiences that you have in life
whether you've suffered trauma whatever
you begin to form this view of yourself
and the world
that is
distorted for good or bad or neutral but
it's distorted
and when because i know juanzo was a
taoist and the whole taoist philosophy
is like unwinding that frame of
reference and being able to get outside
of it and recognize you know the dao
that can be named is not the eternal dao
it's like the mere act of trying to
enunciate something it will fall through
your fingers
and
when you step outside of it a little bit
and you realize oh my god i'm creating
my own problems the way i think about
this is the issue versus the actual
thing
i imagine at that point that leads you
to this like bigger and bigger like
how far does this frame of reference go
down to where you get into physics and
you know what i was saying earlier about
if you really understand fundamental
physics you can alter things in ways
that you otherwise would not be able to
do
it becomes this really compelling idea
of if i fully grasp
how all of this works if i fully
understand how much of what i perceive
as objective truth is actually a dream
then i can better navigate the world
because i
better understand how things actually
work does that ring true to you as the
thing that sort of drives this like i
really need to know
that's interesting yeah i mean i think
much of what we what we experience as
external reality is i think actually
it's a complicated dance between say an
external physical world and our own
consciousness
and consciousness does so much to
construct
our experience of the external world and
some of it is imposed by
top-down constraints consciousness has
its own model of the world that it fits
everything into it colors things in even
though there are maybe no colors out
there and external reality it puts
everything into this night
nice neat euclidean space even though
that might be not how it is in
external reality basically you know
consciousness is what gives all of this
you've got atoms in the void and
consciousness somehow
gives it meaning and so much about i
think our pre-theoretical model of the
world is just this mix
of the two and that's what leads some
people to say could this all be my
consciousness could this just be a dream
could it just come from me and i think
there's actually good reason to think
there's something outside our
consciousness maybe it's physics maybe
it's a simulation and so on but then we
want to kind of tease those factors
apart there's what we bring to reality
and there's what the world brings to
reality and you can think of say physics
as an attempt
to uh to do that pull consciousness out
of the world
when you know galileo or whoever founded
you know modern science it's like okay
well let's take the mind out of reality
turn reality into this complicated
system of equations and then have
consciousness
at the middle of it but still there's
this
always this sense how much of the world
is us and how much of it is out there
independent of us and the other
simulation
idea i don't know i think for some
people it's a way of saying ah actually
it's just this conscious reality that i
that i constructed that i created and
the rest is just a simulation
myself i think it's the wrong attitude
towards simulations if there's a
simulation out there well that is our
reality and that's outside our mind so
let's treat that as reality too but
either way there's a conscious being
here in the middle at the core of it and
we're always trying at least to get
outside of ourselves
[Music]
talk to me about the experience machine
and the idea that life
i think that we all have or most of us
that an intuitive sense that if the life
that i
led
is not based on truth that it makes it
worse and an example i've heard you talk
about before and i think may be the
perfect example
is
let's say that i live
so i've been married for almost 20 years
let's say that we're married for 80
years
and then my wife dies only for me to
then discover that she's been cheating
on me the whole time at least until the
later years
would i be better off knowing or not
knowing
would you be better off knowing or not
knowing here's one thing
one contrast is would just say you have
the same experiences
either way but in one situation your
wife has been cheating on you
and in the other situation she hasn't
she's been faithful the whole time and
let's say this is a monogamous
relationship you know you want her to be
faithful and she said that she will be
then i'd say that
it's better for you than if she's been
faithful
that if she'd been unfaithful even if
you never knew that she was unfaithful
because we value the world being a
certain way in this case by assumption
you value
your wife's being faithful and if she's
not then the world is not the way that
you want it to be even though you never
get any evidence of this and i think
i would use this to argue that
part of what matters
is how things feel for us but we also
value how things are
outside of us in this case you know you
value you care what your wife does even
when it makes no direct difference
to you
and some people have used this
to argue that
uh virtual reality
is somehow going to be uh
less good than
ordinary reality robert nozick had this
example of the experience machine which
is
this uh this machine that you get put in
that gives you all these wonderful
experiences of winning the world
championship and having amazing family
and friends even though none of it is
really happening
and then he said would you choose to
step in the experience machine and nazi
said well i wouldn't do that no way
and he you even though you have all
these amazing experiences and he used
that to argue that shows again that we
care about more than our experiences we
care about what's
outside us and some people use that to
say that's what's wrong with vr
vr will give you all these experiences
of an ordinary life but none of it will
be real
that's where i want to get off the boat
though i want to say in vr it's not
really like these cases in vr you
actually are interacting with a real
digital world you get to
make free choices you get to build your
life
you get to build relationships and so on
i think those things actually are
are real so i want to argue that you can
have a
maybe you can't have a meaningful life
in the experience machine i do want to
think you can have an experience a
meaningful life in
vr because what happens in vr is real
it's not scripted it's not
pre-programmed this is this is a you can
actually build your own life in vr
all right let's say the experience
machine was real
and
it's not a binary choice living it
forever or not it's like uh for an hour
on a friday night pop into the
experience machine and you can you know
win the championship would you do it
is it kind of a guarantee that i'm going
to win the championship
or do i have to actually it it is 100
that you will feel the full
neurochemical experience of winning the
championship
you know i might do it for fun as
escapism it might be an enjoyable
experience like yeah i'll watch the
karate kid or some movie where the kid
does well so maybe it's even better when
you get to experience in the first
person point of view but for me that
would be
escapism but contrast it with a
different case where i get to go into vr
with
100 other people and we actually have a
genuine
competition
and one of us actually wins and the
other ones lose depending on
on how it actually goes and maybe on one
occasion
i actually win then i'd say that was
real and that was in principle just as
meaningful as a corresponding thing
happening in the physical world because
yeah there was no guaranteed outcome i
had to struggle this wasn't it just
doesn't need to be
escapism and i think vr is more like
that than it is like the experience
machine
that's a really interesting distinction
and
what i find really fascinating so to me
the experience machine is exactly like
doing drugs where i could go in and i
can feel the neurochemistry that i want
to feel this is amazing oh my god and
some people will for sure get addicted
to it and they will live in it to the
detriment of everything else in their
life and it will be a total calamity
as they wither away into nothingness
chasing that next dopamine high
but i would definitely do it just not
very often i would be very careful about
how much time i spent doing that but to
your point about going in and actually
competing um that would be a lot of fun
and so and i i feel very confident in my
answer because that's already how i
structure my life i
rarely do drugs
and when i do they are not extreme and i
definitely enjoy competing in games um
video games specifically like that's a
lot of fun but those are two very
different things to me and they trigger
a different sense of like craving
because when i think about doing drugs
i'm like ah like there's something about
it that's like
one there's a
physical risk to it which is a big part
of why i don't do it but even setting
that aside if there were no physical
problems to it it still feels
like a cheat
if you will and so
um
for instance i have never once ever had
a drink alone to me it's got to work
double duty it's got to be like also
bonding with somebody that i care about
i'm the same yeah drinking is great
socially
exactly so but i could see where that
would simultaneously be this amazing
thing that i would be very glad exists
like i always tell people when it comes
to drinking i feel like i'm suppressing
the urge to dance on a table like it is
just a wonderful feeling but i rarely do
it um that would be the experience
machine for me but then going out and
doing hard things to get better and to
compete and to know that i might lose
that is far more interesting
yeah i mean experiences are great and so
i think it's okay to have just value
experiences for their own sake and
drugs can give you
amazing experiences we've got this
special kind of value for what goes on
outside our experience and if yeah all
we valued was our experience then you
get into this very narcissistic world
where you potentially
lose contact with reality
but you know you could live your life in
potentially in a virtual world how about
a we've so far we've had drugs and we've
had games but how about i don't know you
go into vr and you have a great
conversation maybe with a maybe you you
move your work into vr and you have a
great conversation with a guest for your
uh for your podcast and then i think you
know this can be just as meaningful as
having a conversation in the physical
world is or
intermediate cases like this one where
we're doing it doing it over zoom i
don't think it makes a big difference to
the meaningfulness
of the conversation if it happens in
physical reality or in virtual reality i
mean there are some differences but an
interaction between two people is
just as real
either way and yet social interaction
interacting with these two people this
is one of the primary ways that we get
outside our own consciousness because we
really value making contact with another
person's consciousness as we're doing
right now
that's a really good point
i like that we do value that and
when i think about the most valuable
thing in my life which is unquestionably
my wife
i said to her the other day this is
probably only a week ago i was like do
you ever have like this just really
weird moment of realizing that
you and i are two totally separate
people but we have decided to live our
lives like completely in sync
like every now because i've been with
her for so long now i'm oh i'm 45 i've
been with her for 22 years so we're like
coming up on that point where i've been
with her for longer than i've been
without her which is surreal to think
and certainly when you factor that
the amount of my life that i've sort of
been consciously aware of which is you
know maybe seven or eight or you know
six i guess is probably my earliest
memory um
we're really getting close so it's in in
many ways like we're
completely connected and yet there is
this part of what makes her so important
to me is like you said it's outside of
me and
getting that like connection and
feedback from someone else which as a
you know you're having a biological
experience so understanding myself in
sort of evolutionary context of nature
had to make sure that i was drawn to a
mate that i was drawn to being a part of
a group to make sure that i survive it's
no wonder but it's still experientially
it's really pretty
um
amazing
but then to put a little twist on that
gpt
where do you think one tell people what
that is
and
where does this go and does it break any
of these
mechanisms or does it make it better
boy yeah so gpt-3 is this
amazing new artificial intelligence
model that's basically trained on a
whole lot of language
from all over the uh the internet and
then it can basically given any string
of text that can continue that text and
to turn it into plausible text often
into plausible conversations so
yeah at one point when gpt3 was first
released
somebody trained
gbt3 on a bunch of stuff that i'd
written
uh some interviews with me
or something and then they said okay now
we're going to produce an interview with
david charmers and they asked it
questions it gave answers things i'd
never said before but a lot of people
read this and they said yeah that kind
of sounded like you some people thought
it uh some people thought it was me
whereas it wasn't it was just a deep
fake
version of me
yeah we've all seen already these deep
fake photos and videos you get a
politician
obama or trump or whatever and saying
something they never said by
manipulating a video well now we're
finding people can do this with
conversation and pretty soon we're going
to have like deep fake vr
where all of this is produced that way
yeah i guess it raises the question
could it be that you know your wife who
you spent all this time with was a was
actually a deep fake
deep fake vr from the beginning put into
the simulators
to manipulate you or you remember the
truman show where but truman you know it
turns out it was just an actress
and and so on all these years i don't
know if you found out your wife had just
been a
actress or a deep fake all these years
how'd you feel about it
devastating that that would be
devastating devastating david i can't
like it makes me
that would
i would become a philosopher at that
point because i would need to understand
like
why that would be so upsetting but that
would be upsetting like i know it
intuitively how devastating that would
be
uh but i don't fully understand like i
wouldn't be able to articulate why but
oh my god that would be
devastating
i think again you wonder you want to be
in contact with something real
outside of you again it was not
pre-programmed like oh god you had all
those great conversations because you
had this
this
actress or
fake wife who was programmed just to say
all the things that would make you feel
great no you want to actually have a
real
experience with someone out there who
has free will and you have free will and
you actually make a real connection if
it was all guaranteed in advance that
she was being paid
to say what would make you happy then
okay that's just a different thing
it really is it's fascinating how
you know like i've said to my wife it's
really strange to me that if my wife is
traveling my
discipline drops and i have to really
focus to stay focused but when she's
here
even though we might be we might not
have hardly any contact during the day
i'm working on my thing all of that
some part of me is doing this to impress
her
and it's very interesting that even her
just traveling breaks some part of that
spell enough that i have to like dig
deeper to a different place in order to
stay focused and keep going it's uh yeah
it's very fascinating as you were saying
that i was thinking
would i feel better though if my wife
made me miserable
if you told me don't worry she's just an
actor she's been paid to be horrible to
you
then like i don't know i still think
some part of me would be traumatized
that even though part of me would be
relieved okay so
this isn't about me this is you know
some actress but even just having gone
through all of that in in something fake
would really be problematic
yeah someone you spent 20 years with
maybe if you just had like a bad
experience yesterday with someone you
met for the first time and you find out
ah they were just a bot it's like oh
okay now i feel better about it right
more it was about just programmed to act
like a jerk with everyone it's like okay
it wasn't just me thank god
maybe you'd be okay with that but yeah a
20-year relationship was something
totally different
yeah that that would be rough
rough
so where do you go from here like what
is your
you know as somebody who really thinks
about this stuff are you staying focused
on virtual worlds as that feels like
it's really just beginning or are you
exploring something new right now i am
thinking a lot about uh about virtual
worlds i mean this book just came out
and already
it's getting pushed in so many different
directions people are picking up on it
psychiatrists are thinking about it
architects
are thinking about it it's pushing me to
think about a bunch of new topics not
least you know you mentioned the
metaverse and now this technology is
actually going to become a bigger and
bigger part of our lives and i talk
about that a bit
in the book the coming technology but
it's mostly kind of the idealized lens
of what could this be
in the uh in the long run could it
eventually be meaningful
could it be as good as physical
reality but there are also questions in
the short run and i think a lot of
people who are
thinking about the metaverse are worried
about that you know if it's the tech
companies for example who build
these uh these virtual worlds is that
going to be a good thing or a bad thing
is this going to lead to
loss of privacy total manipulation
monetization
and so on what does it mean for the uh
for the physical
environment how might this actually be
integrated with things like uh
blockchain technology
cryptocurrencies and so
on i'm actually starting to think more
actually about these uh some of these
shorter term issues in philosophy we
talk about ideal theory
you know like the long term what could
it be and non-ideal theory actually how
will it actually be and i think
some of these issues in non-ideal theory
how it's actually going to be
philosophically very interesting too
like if you're in a virtual world
created by a tech company and that
world is constantly manipulating you the
way that say the facebook algorithm
might then you know manipulating you to
do to go in a certain direction to do
certain things do you still have free
will
do you still have
autonomy or might virtual worlds
actually undercut our free will there
are also questions about identity
you know people are using virtual worlds
to experiment with trying on many
different identities whether it's you
know gender identities or cultural
identities and so on quite often people
are expressing different identities in
virtual worlds
from the physical world and that raises
really deep philosophical questions
about the nature of identity
and the nature of the self so i'm
thinking about
you know
some of these more practical issues in
the
in about virtual worlds quite
intensively at the same time i never
stopped thinking about consciousness
i've always got
projects on the go on on consciousness
i'm working with neuroscientists on
developing some experiments to like test
some of the leading theories of
consciousness
right now to see if we can actually
perform experiments where the leading
theorists will make predictions and then
we'll see who comes out right so i mean
that's super exciting
and yeah
that experimentation idea of people
so that the the project code name avatar
that's what that's about for me so that
whole idea of frame of reference right
so people build this frame of reference
it is often by law of accident things
have just happened to them over their
lives and they have become someone that
was not
their intent
and so
creating the avatar experience is about
giving people agency over who you're
becoming what does that look like where
do you live how do you decorate the
space how do you signal to yourself how
do you signal to other people like
that's the whole idea behind this
project so in i think i'm way more
interested in the non-ideal version in
the non-ideal version where do you think
that experimentation leads
are there
potholes or pitfalls to watch out for
um
how do you how do you think about
how people should explore and experiment
within that the confines of a virtual
environment yeah you know avatars give
you so much to to experiment with i mean
with the physical body you can already
you know you can experiment pretty well
you can do things with your your hair or
your your clothes or your your
presentation but yeah avatars you can
well you can be a different species if
you want you can be a
you can be a plant um you can change
change everything and for a while
maybe that sometimes it can be a form of
escapism just trying things on but i
think for
increasingly this is going to be
a part of people's it's going to be
continuous
with the physical world and with
and with physical identity as people as
i think people's avatars you know when
you just have an avatar in a video game
it's okay it's temporary it's not
important to you you can discard it but
people who actually hang out in virtual
worlds
long term like even
virtual world like second life where
people
spend a whole lot of time their avatars
become really important to them and they
spend a lot of time and a lot of money
on developing these avatars to express
themselves i think at a certain point
you know the avatar can begin to play
the role many of the roles of the
physical body it's as if you have two
bodies a physical body in the physical
world
and a digital body
in the uh
in the digital world and i think
you know
for example there are these cases of
of assault you know virtual assaults in
virtual worlds
sexual assaults where uh yeah people's
virtual bodies are grouped or whatever
in a in a virtual environment and this
is quite traumatic for
the people who go through it in a way
which is continuous
with
say physical assault i think this kind
of brings out that yeah avatars can be
very very real and basically you can be
embodied in a digital avatar much as you
can be in a in a physical avatar and i
think we have people are just still
trying to figure out what this means for
identity
right now but i just think it's just
going to kind of enrich the space of
the already complex social space of
identities that we that we already have
no doubt david this whole space is just
incredibly fascinating your book was
such a cool exploration
where this goes how it interfaces with
us how to think about these huge
questions
where can people engage more with you
read the book all that good stuff yeah
well the book is called reality plus
with the plus sign the subtitle is
virtual worlds and the problems of
philosophy published in uh
in the us with wwe norton and in the uk
with uh with penguin i also got a
website uh easiest way to find is
probably just put in my name david
chalmers has a lot of my a lot of my
work there and a lot of
also an excerpt from the book if people
want to uh to try out the uh the
the the first bits of the book and hey
anyone's got any read any of this and uh
has any uh cool philosophical ideas or
questions feel free to drop me an email
you can find find my email address on
the web too
love it
man thank you so much for coming on this
conversation was a lot of fun i would
actually love to stay in contact as we
build out our avatar project i'd love to
hear more about somebody
really offer some cool insights guys you
will love the book definitely check it
out uh he is such a fascinating thinker
hopefully that came through loud and
clear in this episode and speaking of
things that will come in loud and clear
if you haven't already be sure to
subscribe and until next time my friends
be legendary take care peace