Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org.
There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts and one can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming on. Today I'm speaking with Christophe Koch.
Christophe is a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute and at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation. He's the former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science and a former professor at Caltech. He's the author of five books. Most recently, Then I Am Myself, the World, What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It, which is the topic of today's conversation.
Christophe and I speak about his development as a neuroscientist, his collaboration with Francis Crick, their studies of the visual system, change blindness and binocular rivalry, the significance of sleep and anesthesia for consciousness studies, the limits of physicalism, non-locality, and other quantum mechanical phenomena, brains as classical systems, the possibility of conscious AI, idealism and panpsychism, integrated information theory, also known as IIT, what it means to say that something exists, the illusion of the self, the possibility of brain bridging, that is connecting two human brains in a shared experience, Christophe's recent experience with psychedelics, and other topics. Anyway, this is the deep end of the pool with respect to the scientific understanding of consciousness, and I certainly enjoyed it. And I bring you Christophe Koch. I am here with Christophe Koch.
Christophe, thanks for joining me. Thanks, Sam, for having me. So you've written a wonderful book. You've written several books, but your most recent is Then I Am Myself, the World, What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It.
And I just really want to follow the line you took in your book here, which traces the evolution of your thought as a scientist focusing on the nature of consciousness. And you've had a very productive career as a neuroscientist and you've had a very fruitful collaboration with Francis Crick, who we'll talk about. But then you, you know, kind of late in your career, you took the first-person side of things with both hands and have had some experiences with psychedelics that have put pressure on your ontology, one might say. So I would just love to talk about all of this.
Perhaps you can start somewhere near the beginning. How is it that you came to focus on consciousness and you started out more as a physicist, you know, and that was the side of science you came in, I believe, as an undergraduate. What led you to the study of consciousness? So I did get a minor in philosophy in Tübingen, which is at 550-year-old universities in Germany.
And I did go up reading Schopenhauer and Immanuel Kant. It was that sort of household. So I've always been interested in consciousness that was inside the head, right? How is that voice compatible with everything else we know?
I grew up reading physicists, including Ernst Macher and people like Schrödinger, and they all wondered. They also had similar questions. And in fact, both Schrödinger and Ernst Macher were very explicit. Before I can be a physicist, I am a conscious being that sees that things, you know, going back all the way to René Descartes.
And so before I can even read an oscilloscope or read an instrument as a physicist, I depend on my conscious sensation. And so consciousness has to be at the center of our explanation of everything in the world. And I was puzzled when I first came from physics into neuroscience. My PhD was in the 20th century in what we now would call computational neuroscience.
I was puzzled when I even became a full-time professional neuroscientist that consciousness at the time was simply not discussed. It didn't figure in the index. You know, if you got a standard textbook, you went in the index on the consciousness, nothing. It was simply ignored.
It was all about behavior and nuance, which is fine, which is what I dedicated most of my life to. But ultimately, we also have to explain the puzzle at the heart of our existence, the fact that I'm not just a behaving thing. I actually see, I hear, I dread, I fear, I dream, I desire, I want. So how do all of these things get into the world?
And then I met Francis Crick. So I did my PhD in Germany, then went to do a postdoc at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. And previously, I'd encountered Francis Crick, who at the time had shifted from molecular biology, where, you know, with Jim Watson, he decoded the molecular code for life and deciphered the double-helical shape of the DNA molecule. But then he shifted because he was also interested in consciousness.
And the two of us got together and then wrote roughly 20 papers over the next 14 years where we re-initiated sort of a modern empirical program to discover the footprints of consciousness in the brain. And the argument was very simple. Never mind about all the philosophy. We aren't going to converge anytime soon.
You know, are we a physicalist, an idealist, a dualist, a kind of cyclist, whatever? Let's just focus. We all agree today, it's not the heart, as most people thought. It's your brain.
That's sort of the organ of consciousness. So which particular bits and pieces of the brain? Is it the spinal cord? Is it the cerebellum?
Is it the retina? Is it the thalamus? Is it the cortex? And does this bit of the brain that sort of analyzes or is a subset of consciousness does it have to oscillate?
Does it have to buzz at a particular frequency? Which genes are involved? Which cell types are involved? Is there sort of a conscious mode and an unconscious mode?
These are all questions that we felt will have an answer. No matter what your philosophical predilection is, there will be an answer. Of the sort, these neurons in this state, in that part of the brain, at this time, express the fact that I see or that I hear. And it's causal.
In other words, mechanism by a drug, by a neurosurgeon's electrode, by some external magnetic device, then you shouldn't have the experience. And so this is sort of the modern program to study the footprint of consciousness now called the neuronal college of consciousness or the NCC. In patients, in neurotypical volunteers, in animals like mice and monkeys and rats and other animals. But when I read you now, I recognize that you are someone who always took the so-called hard problem of consciousness seriously, which is to say, you thought it was a non-trivial mystery that it should be like anything at all to be associated with a certain pattern of neural firing.
Whereas in my memory of Francis Crick's approach to this, he wrote a book, The Assangeian Hypothesis, way back when. I remember him being more of an arch materialist of the sort that one met quite directly in my friend Dan Dennett or in the Churchlands, somebody who just simply tried to ram past the hard problem with the declarative statement that the mind is simply what the brain is doing. You're just a pack of neurons. And it seems like there's something left out of that.
That's just a symptom of what a bad view we have of the brain's role in producing subjectivity. But from what you just said, it sounds like you sort of tabled your philosophical differences of intuition there and just decided to go look for the neural correlates of consciousness. It must be somewhere in the brain we agree about that whether we agree about anything else in philosophy. But was that an impediment to your collaboration with Crick at all or do I have Crick wrong?
No, you don't have it wrong. That was a starting point. That was an explicit starting point that once we understand neurons and they have vast complexity of an untamed complexity that's incomprehensible for us. Humans, we deal with simple networks that we can understand but we've never been faced with the vast complexity that we find in evolved systems like biology, whether that's a brain of a simple creature like a worm that has three or two neurons or the brain of a human that has only a hundred billion neurons.
But he was also, Francis was very clear and said this hypothesis may not be true. There might be other ways we have to think about it. And he was sympathetic. So for instance, very early on we encountered Jerry Edelman another Nobel laureate who would also move from Manhattan from the Rockefeller Institute to the Scripps Institute in La Jolla and he worked with a person at the time, Giulio Tononi who's now also a very well-known consciousness researcher and he explored the possibility that maybe it has to do with the complexity.
They wrote, for example, an early influential paper called Consciousness and Complexity arguing that complexity had to be involved which is a little bit more than just saying it's just a bunch of neurons. Because the most widespread belief among neuroscientists is well, it's an emergent property just like wetness emerges from water. You don't get, if you have two H2O molecules they're not wet but if you've got 10 to the 23 like a liter of H2O molecules then it gets wet. And similar, if you have a few neurons they're not conscious but you've got 100 billion of them then somehow they're conscious.
But then we also, Francis and I realize that's inadequate because you have some structures like the cerebellum. So you have this little brain tucked underneath your big brain at the back of your head it contains in fact 80%, 4 or 5 neurons in your head are in the cerebellum. You can lose these neurons let's say due to a stroke or due to a tumor you will be impaired you can't do fast speed typing on your phone anymore you can't play violin or piano anymore you have a few other issues like that but basically you stagger about you look like you're always drunk but basically all these people these patients who have lost part or whole of their cerebellum they see, they hear, they dread they fear, they imagine their consciousness is essentially to first order unchanged. And so that tells you that it can't just be the number of neurons it has to do with at least with the way they organize same thing with the spinal cord you can be quadriplegic you've just lost all your spinal cord 200 million neurons so you can't move but again your consciousness hasn't really changed that dramatically so it can't just be the number of neurons it has to be the way they organize and Francis the hope was similar to what he had accomplished in molecular biology that if we look at the right neural mechanism in the right way then suddenly it'll become apparent just like it was apparent when you look at the W-Helical Structure of DNA that that's a natural way to copy into genetic information but we of course we didn't find such a simple explanation and he always was open to the possibility that other ways of conceiving of it may be necessary to finally understand it.
Well I should say that anyone who's seen me try to type on my phone will wonder whether I've lost my cerebellum in some terrific accident. Well you know a few number of people and you know a few people are born with other cerebellum altogether you know so-called agenesis of the cerebellum. Well I can confirm I do have one having done my fair share of MRI experiments. Oh there you go.
Actually I don't know if you're aware but you and I once met when I was doing my PhD at the Brain Mapping Center at UCLA you came and did a seminar in Mark Collins lab. Yes a long time ago with Mark. Yeah I don't think I've passed across since but no. Okay so now how has your your evolution as a neuroscientist in trying to understand consciousness as an emergent property of brain activity you know I remember the work you did with you and Craig were focusing on the visual system if memory serves and you were looking at things like bistable percepts and change blindness and binocular rivalry right right binocular rivalry that's a fascinating phenomenon maybe you could describe that and why that seemed like such a promising avenue because to experience it is that binocular rivalry and change blindness are quite wonderful to experience as a subject in an experiment.
Yeah so the general philosophy in these experiments is to create conditions where on the one hand you're looking at the stimulus and see it and then when the same stimulus is present you may not see it or you may see it differently. In other words in the two conditions you're always looking at the same thing but sometimes you see it one way and sometimes you see it the other way. So change blindness you know you have an image like there's a famous image of soldiers UN soldiers boarding a plane and then you see an image that's slightly changed with a blank in between where for example the photographer has removed using Photoshop has removed the engine of the airplane and you go back and forth between the original image a blank image and the changed image a blank original image a blank changed image and you may be staring at this for 10 or 20 or 30 seconds and your eye move about but you don't see the actual change until you know of course it's the engine that's changed and then of course you cannot not see it. So there you have a situation where for 10 or 20 seconds you're looking at the same thing but you simply not see what's in front of your eyes you can track down where are the mechanisms in your brain that respond only to the retinal input compared to where are the neurons that respond when when you actually see it.
The separate case is this binocular rivalry so there you have two different images let's say phase one and phase two let's say you're projecting phase one into one eye to make it concrete we can think about for instance you have an image you can do this and we did it 20 years ago with the two presidents at the time you can imagine on your left image you have Biden on your right eye you project the image of Donald Trump now if you don't do things correctly you can see sort of the juxtaposition of the both of the two but if you do things correctly for a while you will only see President Biden and then one or two seconds or three seconds and then Biden will fade and Trump will come in and then Trump will stay for several seconds and then Biden will come in it's sort of this never ending dance so just to clarify for listeners who may not be able to visualize this you have one image projected to one eye and a different image to the other eye and your conscious experience tends to be set up correctly as you're simply seeing one of the images and then it just randomly shifts to the other image and it's something over which you can't control you can't control the shift and what's interesting about this experimentally is that the inputs to your nervous system are completely stable and all you have are these two inputs to one to each eye and nothing is changing and yet at the level of your conscious phenomenology there is this very bizarre shifting back and forth between seeing one image and then seeing the other and then seeing one image and then seeing the other and it's a wholesale change in the contents of visual consciousness and yet there's zero change happening at the level of the bottom of your nervous system from the retina onward that's correct that's correct so something is changing it's like the nervous system wants to see what's in the left eye and then wants to sort of check what's on the right eye and goes back and forth and this can go on for you know many minutes so now you can in principle you can do what you used to do you can put people in a magnet or you can put people in a magnet like we've done at the time at UCLA it's a treat on the wall these are neurosurgical patients that for other reasons because the doctor has to know where the electric seizure originates you put a electrode into their brain you can see the same thing or you can do it in a monkey where you can attract to all the monkey's visual system where are the first stages of the neurons that actually respond to what you see not just what the left eye sees or what the input received by the right eye but what the animal sees or what the person sees that typically tends to be high up in the visual hierarchy and you can ask where are those neurons are they of a particular type are they of a particular layer and then of course what happens if I can begin to manipulate those neurons which at the time wasn't really possible but today you can do using fancy optogenetics so this was one of a number of ideas that we exploited to track or that people exploit to track the neural footprint of consciousness in this case visual consciousness and people continue to do that in all sorts of different ways is there a problem here conceptually because you're obviously conscious all the while there's a distinction we can make between consciousness itself and the fact that it's like something to use Nagel's definition of which I've always been a fan and any specific contents of consciousness so there you're really interrogating specific contents but one could argue that you could completely lose a perception of the visual field as well and yet be just as conscious and now you're no longer conscious of vision you're conscious in other sensory channels and of just you know awareness itself one might argue do you um it's a different way it's a different way to study so the other way to study is you point out the distinction between consciousness too cool and not being conscious i.e like in sleep or in anesthesia so you can take a subject normal subject here sees etc then you anesthetize them and you can see what changes and then as they wake up it's called loc loss of consciousness and then you can see what happens when they when they come out of anesthesia and each you're looking at different things and you know they're not similar and they're different concerns you have to have so for instance when you go to sleep or when you're anesthetized all sorts of other things as well as change as well for instance you don't have memory anymore you can't move anymore right because you become paralyzed in deep sleep or in anesthesia you also become paralyzed but it's much more dramatic compared to looking at something and i'm as you point out i'm still conscious it's just the content of consciousness changes so they're just different experimental techniques to track different things in one case you're specifically tracking the content of my visual consciousness in the other case you're tracking the entire physical substrate of being consciousness in the name of sense it feels like something to be me yeah the problem you always run into there which you just alluded to is that it's hard to differentiate and perhaps in principle it would be impossible to differentiate a true cessation of consciousness from merely a loss of memory right so you know i've i disagree yes let's talk about that i think it's it's hard to make this case for for general anesthesia given what we think about just the underlying state of the brain but for deep sleep it's often i've often felt that we're too quick to allege that it interrupts conscious experience because many people i count myself among them at least believe imagine that they've had an experience of of dreamless sleep now whether that's you know stage four delta sleep or not i don't know but there's a very common experience of being asleep and dreaming and there's something that it's like to be doing that but there's a more esoteric experience that people have had of being asleep and experiencing just a it's very much like a meditative you know samadhi like experience i mean it's just you know a vast experience of contentless consciousness while asleep right and that's that's certainly reported in among yogis who claim to be able to train that so so i just think you know that's the the fact that most of us most of the time don't remember a thing about what it was like to be deeply asleep could be just analogous to most of us not remembering our dreams you know i presume i dream every night but at this point in my life i rarely remember anything from my period of sleep well so there's one technique at least that ties together i can think of two techniques to try to get at that one is to put you in a magnet or probably more plausibly to put eg electrode on you as you sleep and people have done this i'm thinking of one study by on the tononi lab in fact where they did exactly that they had high density eg on these are regular people but they're trained people trained observers so they've done this for a while now and you randomly wake them up right so randomly i look at your eg and i wake you up now and i ask you you know tell me did anything was anything in your mind just the moment before you woke up and i look at the 10 seconds before i wake you up and then i can correlate and of course what they found which is if you can go back to the original report back in 53 defining rem and non-rem sleep it is true 30 percent of the time even in deep sleep people do report dream-like experiences okay so even in deep sleep you can have dream-like experiences however they're typically not this sort of elaborate narrative structure you know the emotion of episode oh i just saw a face or i just had this feeling off the head something bad was going to happen and conversely in rem sleep only about 80 percent of the time do people actually report you know have dream reports so that's one way to get around the fact that most people forget most of the dream you wake them up spontaneously during the night and you ask them do you remember anything over the last 10 seconds now of course it's also possible that if they have lost short-term memory as well then of course yes then of course you wouldn't know it all but most people can't report that they had experience the dream experience or that they didn't have dream experiences and here by the way so you can again track people have used this technique to track the footprints it is true when you have dream experiences it's really a particular part of the back of the brain the posterior hot zone that are activated in the preceding 10 or 15 seconds by eg criteria but we're talking the posterior hot zone you're not talking about visual cortex you're talking about precunious and and uh yeah exactly precunious posterior simulates uh sort of parietal areas in some higher order temporal area so behind the central fissure that goes across the brain in the back so um let's sit back for a moment and review some of the underlying philosophical controversy because there are many ways in which people think about what is here and um i want us to get to integrated information theory iit which i believe you still are a um a supporter of and contributor to i don't know if it fully captures your current view of things but um we'll get there but you express in the book a similar astonishment and frustration that i've always felt with the eliminative materialists of yes and and especially paul and patricia churchland sort so just simply say that consciousness itself is an illusion it seems to me it's always to me to be absolutely obvious that consciousness is the one thing about which you cannot say that because any illusion is as much a demonstration consciousness as any veridical perception of anything right it's the one thing the fact that something seems to be happening is the one thing we can be sure of even if we're totally confused about everything rene de cart i couldn't agree more it's the one thing i cannot doubt because in doubting i affirm it and if i call it an illusion well then anything is an illusion and the word becomes meaningless yes so i think this is the biggest feeling by far of physicalism right so physicalism you know it's a metaphysical idea that the only thing that exists is physical and let's come you know i think we have to discuss what's meant by that but sort of most people have an intuition you know it's matter and energy right good old uh materialism and then then the challenge is well if you believe that fine but then how how does how do feelings emerge and you know because we have been not able you know philosophy has been utterly unable or science has been utterly unable to explain how any sort of feelings it feels like something to be emerges out of atoms and the void that's the biggest challenge that physicalism has utterly failed to me number one yeah which is to say so you know i've spoken about the hard problem of consciousness a lot on my podcast and over at waking up in the app i've interviewed chalmers and and we've covered this around before but so the thing recognizes that the fact that there is this explanatory gap the fact that our intuitions that uh seem to anchor every other type of scientific explanation uh you know the wetness of water the brittleness of you know any higher level material all of those physicalist reductions run through and yet with the hard problem with the fact that the lights are on subjectively something seems to be left out but the fact that there's that we have this where this intuitive impasse doesn't suggest or much less prove that it isn't simply so right that it isn't just you know we just may be in a bad position to think about how consciousness emerges and it may always seem like a miracle even if we had even if we had the answer in hand and it just was whatever 40 hertz oscillations in phallum cortical loops which i think was once a pet thesis of yours yes that's just the answer if god told us that's that is how it happens well it may always just seem like a brute fact that doesn't actually explain anything you're entirely right my dog doesn't understand general you know general relativity or the stock market or election my dog is a perfectly intelligent member of the species that survived for millions of years but certain things are cognitive beyond it and maybe this is also beyond us but now the additional evidence sites for for physicalism being inadequate namely at the bottom at the rock bottom of physicalism is how do we define the physical and if you listen to anything in the in quantum mechanics of the last 30 years right we all know it's deeply troubling and it's very difficult to define what is the physical and the fact the physical includes such bizarre things as two particles that are entangled that at opposite ends of the universe if one you know if you observe one and determine it states instantaneous you know instantaneous the state of the other one is determined right you're talking about non-locality non-locality so what sort of what i mean what sort of physicalism is that the things are entangled across the universe right that's that's certainly not my grandfather's that's certainly not you know atoms in the void and then you know it now turns out that the entire school of physics you know that does what's called contextuality or called first-person physics right where it is where they accept as a fact as an observational as an empirical fact that what exists really depends on what you measure and if you have different measurement protocols different things sort of you measure different things that weren't there before so the mere act of observing you know the participatory universe the mere act of observing creates reality well how does that sit with standard sort of physicalism right let me bring in my put on my arch materialist hat which i which i rarely wear but what about the claim that however strange quantum mechanics may be and and i guess there's two things to acknowledge one is that there are very strange versions of it that seem to move consciousness and the observer out of the out of any part of the significant picture and give us something with determinism or or or many worlds theory right where like the universe is splitting you know at every every possible choice point of which i think how do we know this is exactly so in fact i've just written a paper with hartman who runs the quantum google ai lab it may be precisely consciousness that's responsible for at the moment you create a superposition there are two or a multitude of different multiples that split off so how do we know that consciousness isn't in fact responsible for that split off i'm gonna have you fight with david about that but leaving that aside what what about the claim that at the scale of brains and even the scale of neurons kind of the wet and hot mess of goo that is in our heads quantum mechanics you know it's a perfectly classical view of physics is good enough because everything you know everything decoheres and there's just you know this is at the scale of brains none of that highfalutin physics need apply yeah so in short brains are warm and wet so this is the argument i've always made in all my previous books the brain is warm and wet so if you look at google's quantum computers they operate at 23 milli kelvin so that's about a thousand times colder than the temperature of outer space right which is the temperature background radiation couple of degrees of kelvin and of course hundred thousand times colder than right now what you and i experience here on the on the west coast right so in my belief it's always been yeah it's wet the brain as you said is warm and wet and so it's irrelevant but now we learn over the last 10 years well they can find entanglement in all sorts of soft matter system in some gas there was a paper recently out of barcelona i think that measured it in gas at sort of minus 50 celsius so people are now as they're looking as we better understand in this what some people call the second revolution in quantum mechanics it may not be true that it's only in these very extremely cold systems that entanglement and superposition may occur even in what physicists think of soft matter i.e. you know brains or bodies this is an empirical question in fact together with symbologists and with his previous mentioned hubwood naven we're now doing some experiments in um in organoids and in flies to exactly test it there's an interesting phenomena that xenon so xenon is a rare gas and it acts as an anesthetic this is well known in fact it's a pretty good anesthetic except it's expensive but there's this one paper um many years ago in mice that claimed there's this differential isotope effect of anesthetic potency in other words different isotopes of xenon so it's 129 131 132 they all have the same so chemically they're all the same they all have eight outer electrons so they none of them interact they're called nobel gases because they're so noble they don't interact with anyone okay so only what differs is the nucleus inside they have an additional one neutron or two neutrons or three neutrons and so their nucleus spin differs some of them have nucleus spin zero some of them have nucleus spin one half and it turns out those that have nucleus spin one half have a different anesthetic potency in mice now they haven't been done in people yet in mice than the ones with spin zero now if this is so this has to be replicated right two or three experiments in biology can't be replicated so we have to repeat this which is what we're doing in flies and in cerebral organoids and in primary cultures with ken kosek who's a professor at ucsb if this is replicated then it would seem to indicate that something as subtle as nuclear spin actually makes a difference at room temperature in these in these organisms so it would be weird and that's a great thing about science but if you construct if you ask nature the right question and you do you know you listen carefully you can get an answer even if the answer may be extremely unexpected so that would be cool we'll see yeah yeah well yeah keep me apprised of that because that would uh that would shake some assumptions i have working on the background here me too so let's talk about again i want us to get to iit but how would you characterize the the most common ontology of mind in neuroscience and the sciences of mind generally now i think in your book you talk about it as you describe it as computational functionalism it's certainly the view of uh that is causing people to imagine that developments in ai have some future implication for how we understand uh minds in their totality and that we may build conscious machines we may be able to upload ourselves into the matrix all this seems to suppose that that mind we already know this is true of intelligence and it's clearly intelligence on some level is a matter of information processing but the underlying thesis seems to be that consciousness itself is an emergent property of information processing and therefore really by definition is substrate independent is that an accurate view of what you think most people think in in science at the moment yeah based on some version of functionalism everything has a function clearly that's google intelligence consciousness also has a function you know enable planning or long-term planning short-term planning summary of the current situation that's ongoing in my body whatever it may be it has a fun one or more function and once you replicate those functions in particular on a turing machine right this is called turing functionality or computational functionalism then that machine will have all of the properties including consciousness so that's a deep belief particularly in the tech industry and among computational scientists and now of course with llms it's present to the level of the general public that people assume yeah these things sooner or later will be sent in will be conscious right here's what i predict is going to happen and um it worries me on some level i think i think we will probably build you know humanoid robots that fully pass the turing test you know and better because they'll be superhuman in virtually every respect and once we get out of the uncanny valley with them they'll certainly seem conscious to us because we'll build them to seem conscious to us and they'll talk about their experience and their and their emotions etc they'll certainly be very attentive to our emotions and better judges of that than probably any person we've met and we will just you know effortlessly slide into this sense of being in relationship to these entities and we will still not understand the neural basis of consciousness or the computational basis of consciousness or any or any other basis of consciousness and we'll be in the presence of these artifacts which seem conscious to us and we'll simply just lose sight of whether it's an interesting problem to wonder whether or not they are conscious we will helplessly perceive them to be conscious because they will they will seem that way did you can you imagine that we're going to stumble into that sort of west worldian future where it's just you're not going to be able to you're certainly not going to be able to mistreat these robots because you'll feel like a psychopath because you'll be only a psychopath could want to mistreat something that is so perfectly seeming to be a locus of experience it just seems like a problem may evaporate for most people and obviously somebody will still hold on to it and wonder whether these machines are conscious because obviously it'll be very important ethically to understand whether we've built machines that can suffer you know the lights are on over there and you know we're basically murdering our robots every time we turn them off that would be an interesting problem to have created ourselves but i just think if the robots are if we're out of the uncanny valley before we actually understand how consciousness is integrated with physics of things we just might lose sight of the problem for a short time for a short period this may happen yes but i don't think it's stable i don't think it's a stable it's a stable situation inherently because these intelligences will evolve at a time scale that's simply not matched the time scale that human society or human as individuals has evolved and so they rapidly will surpass us and of course if we believe they're conscious and as you point out they have all the moral attendant responsibilities in life it'll further dehumanize us and will further dehumanize nature and will become less and less relevant because you know we're building these other guys they are our successor it's obviously the next step beyond humanity they're smarter than us they're more robust than us ultimately they're more aggressive than us because we'll build them for warfare you can see that already you know happened beginning to happen in ukraine and russia and where does this leave homo sapiens sapiens yeah but for most part for most people this problem will will go away because of course they're conscious how can you not even talk to them people will have intimate relationship already now right you can talk to these uh these guys if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation you'll need to subscribe at sam harris.org once you do you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the making sense podcast the podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program so if you can't afford a subscription please request a free account on the website the making sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support and you can subscribe now at sam harris.org you