Give it time. It's coming. Few decades, a century. We'll have VR universal reality systems indistinguishable from physical reality.
At that point we'll actually be able to put people 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've been in a simulation like that all along. 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 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'm obsessed with the Matrix. Me too. For me, consciousness was always 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 be great to have been 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. These days science is getting a little better understood than the other problems in physics. But I was thinking, what is is it right now?
That's like say physics was 400 years ago, generally 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, the experience. 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'm maybe 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 is it so hard to believe that if we stack silicon chips 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 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? And 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 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.
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 take other areas of the brain.
Eventually, frontal cortex leads to action. But that still leads open the question, why does all that feel like something? Why is there something it's like to be you undergoing that? And you can raise that question.
You could program all those neural firings into a robot, into a computer, with all those patterns producing all this behavior. But would it actually feel like something from the inside? Maybe it would. I'm not saying it wouldn't.
A robot. But that is the mystery. How does all that, all those neural firings somehow turn into how does the, 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 dual dualism, but 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 abstractions. The consciousness was just gonna be an abstraction 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 a self reflective way, maybe that gives you consciousness. But basically every, for every explanation like this, it always looked like it had this little 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're ever going to get from a purely physical explanation was basically, you know, the structure and dynamics of a physical system, how a system is structured, what it does. And that is perfect for explaining almost everything in science. Like in a biology.
You want to explain life, you explain reproduction, metabolism, adaptation, all these things. The system doesn't, you explain life. But for consciousness we have this extra thing that needs explaining. After handling all those easy problems, you know, 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 physics. This is not unheard of in Science, you know, in the 19th century, Maxwell was trying to explain electromagnetism. And it turns out you just couldn't do it using Newton's theories of space and time and mass and laws of motion and laws of gravitation.
It just didn't give you a theory of electromagnetism. But 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 it 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 charge. Treat consciousness as a fundamental property in nature and search for the fundamental laws that govern it. So 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 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. It comes in directly on this way of thinking about things.
But 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 call it naturalistic dualism, a kind of scientific dualism.
We have a science of consciousness. We have to admit consciousness as fundamental. 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. If we take in consciousness as a fundamental law of nature, what then are the. And I think there's relatively few of them.
What would the fundamental laws of nature be then? So we have electromagnetism, gravity, consciousness. What's. What's the grab bag here?
Yeah, that'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 sometimes call them psychophysical laws for, you know, psycho 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 Tononi, where he basically connects consciousness to a measure of what he calls integrated information in the brain.
He says he's got a certain mathematical definition of integrated information in 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 the why does all this hi phi 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. Basically, it's a fundamental psychophysical law that where you have high integrated information, you get consciousness of a certain type. And 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 grand unified theories in physics, or the four fundamental forces or whatever it is.
I'm walking through the four fundamental forces 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 we just list those out now with consciousness added, that gives us something to build on as we explore your ideas. Yeah, well, standardly, you know, we have, we have gravity, the fundamental force of gravity. We have the fundamental force of electromagnetism, we have the strong and weak nuclear forces, and then we have basically quantum mechanics that provides a grand framework for all these things to take place.
Physicists very much hope there's going to be a grand unified theory that might unify all the forces and somehow unify quantum mechanics and gravity. That's a really hard part. They call this theories of quantum gravity. So they want a single unified theory underneath all those things.
They don't have that right now. They've unified some of the forces and no one's been able to unify everything. But roughly, you can think of it. Forget the nuclear forces of menality, okay, there's gravitation for the earth.
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 told it there, 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 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 for themselves govern consciousness directly. But right now that's just super specular. That's somewhere we hope to go maybe in 100 years. The interesting thing for me though is understanding 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 panpsychism, incredibly bright woman. I mean, really, really 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 there is some sense of experience, to being those things? Yeah, I'm not going to say 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 there's consciousness and there's consciousness and those are separate. So if you don't want, you know, electrons to be conscious, and so anyway consciousness just kicks in with complex organisms, then you might want to go in that more dualistic way. But the panpsychist picture, consciousness is everywhere, does have many attractions and yet many cultures have actually found that quite intuitive.
If you 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 Adam, just get me out of here. They're not thinking, they're probably not having emotions, nothing like that.
Maybe just some tiny little precursor of consciousness that somehow when put together in these giant information processing systems can add up to a consciousness like ours. People also talk about proto consciousness. Maybe it's not full scale consciousness you find in these primitive systems, but just some primitive precursor to consciousness. We can't even imagine the people who win.
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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 miracle down lower and you're saying, ah, it's part of physics. But as you do that, because I don't think we'll solve the hard problem of consciousness here today, but it leads you to some incredibly fascinating places. So as you push that down 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. I have a T shirt that says the Matrix was a documentary and it's like I say it tongue in cheek and I really believe it. 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. 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 the Matrix or about simulations or vice versa. I think they're somewhat independent of each other.
But that said, they're also actually a lot of links between the ideas. And one of the links you actually find by going way back to the 17th century French philosopher Rene Descartes, who asked, how can 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 Descartes said, I know some things about myself. I know that I'm here, I know that I'm thinking. I know that I'm conscious. And he said, I think, therefore I am.
I know that I exist. And what Descartes basically says, 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 it. 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 about 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 actually turned into a live concrete possibility. Because this technology is actually now coming.
We can already build, you know, we already built 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 virtual reality systems indistinguishable from physical reality.
At that point will actually be able to put people 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've been in a simulation like that all along? All right, so let's start getting into.
It's a really interesting question. And as you begin to peel back the layers, 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 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 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, 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 Agent Smith or the Oracle, they're not biological creatures. They are actually machines themselves. They are creatures of the simulation is actually basically simulated processes themselves.
That's what I call pure sims. So we've got like a pure impure simulation where we're brains connected to a simulation. That's one possibility. But another one is we could be pure Simulations, we could ourselves be simulated creatures connected to the simulation.
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 simulator is going to take shortcuts and make approximations. Every now and then they'll get things wrong.
I guess in the Matrix they had those black cats, those cats that cross 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. 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 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 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 how they connect, I think that'd be really helpful. Oh, yeah, let me go with the other stats. This is an interesting argument that comes from the philosopher Nick Bostrom and also the roboticist and 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 whole physical universes. We'll be able to simulate human beings. Probably we'll 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 going to be one unsimulated world. There 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 to ask what are the odds that I am one of those lucky ones in ground zero base reality unsimulated, when there are hundreds of thousands of beings just like me who are simulated? And then you start to, that's what gets you to conclusion, starts to look like maybe very, very good odds that we're simulated.
Now things can. That does require some assumptions. For example, it does require the assumption that a simulated being can be conscious. Now like we 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 out the idea that we're in a simulation, at least as a pure simulation, because it'll be like the bio sim, like Neo, because remember, Neo is the brain, not a simulation. So it gets complicated. There's a few ways, or you could say that these civilizations aren't actually going to create simulations because they might decide it's a bad idea.
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'm at least 50% that simulations like this are going to be possible. And 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 there actually will be many more simulations simulated to be angels who 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 the 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. 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 Rene 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, ah, 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 one of those ambiguous words. But I've got a few different criteria for being real.
One is it to be real you have to have causal powers. You make a difference 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, then we don't usually count it as real. In as strong a sense it's going to be independent of our minds. And third, maybe the most important to be real, we care that something is not an illusion, that is that things are roughly the way that they seem. What I would argue is if we're in a simulation, then there are still going to be digital entities in the simulation.
Say I see a tree and I'm actually in the matrix. And I say, well there's 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 can leave the matrix, the tree will still be there.
And I might 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 a 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. We were used to the idea that under plants and trees are made of cells. Cells are made of molecules made of atoms made of quarks. But Wheel speculated underneath all that 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 we know. And this is a controversial idea about real physics, but it's one that some people have taken seriously. Stephen Wolfram's written 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 an it 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're causal powers or other independent of us, and they needn't be an illusion. So basically, the simulation hypothesis is a version of the IT from bit hypothesis. Let's talk about who's profiting from your personal information.
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An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your [email protected] do you ever drive yourself crazy with the idea that you're really just pushing the miracle lower or deeper or however you want to think about it? Because here's an idea that drives me crazy.
So as you're explaining that, I'm like, oh my God, yeah, this makes so much sense. There's bits. And then like, but wait, where did the bits come from? And then it's like, okay, 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 moments where I have to say, yeah, I just don't know.
Like 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 base based assumption? Is it simulations all the way down? Is it like if we get to the ground zero that you talked about before, the one sort of real world, where'd that come from?
It's a great question. 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 bits are the basic level of reality.
That's the pure it from bit hypothesis. But even that moment you get to like, they've always existed. Like, does that not just like fry your brain? You got to take something as fundamental as this.
This already kind of fries your brain. One of the basic questions of 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, 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. For a simulation, probably these bits are running on some computer in the next universe app that may have, you know, transistors of its own or some completely different physics. I call that the it from bit from it hypothesis.
The bits are made of something else. Because in that universe, maybe it's a simulation too. Maybe the it's a made of bits. They have to get it from bit from it, from bit from it.
Maybe with 3 universes down or 5 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 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 foundational. And it's 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. 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 maybe this is just not a wise way to think about it. But for me.
And so as a storyteller, I'm obsessed with this idea. In fact, this character right here is 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. And what becomes interesting to me is when we get to the point where 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, 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 we've already been able to do and manipulate and change because we've gotten the sum layer of the code right? So, like, when I think about satellites and how most people 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 I think they give us our destin.
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 because we are of the Matrix. That, to me, is incredibly interesting. Have you thought through that?
Do you have any ideas around that? Yeah. You know, one way to kind of make this concrete is that like whenever we create a virtual world, even like in a video game, whenever it creates the virtual world is in effect the God of that video game. They're all powerful in principle, can reset anything.
They can be all knowing. They can know everything that's going on. They created it. So it's like they are the God of the video games.
You can give yourself, if you actually write the video game yourself, you can give yourself superpowers, 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 out there that has this kind of power over our reality. A kind of power not that different in some ways from those of a traditional God. And then you start to think, well, could we get access to that? I mean, I guess if it's a perfect simulation now 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 do to try and at least 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 something happens. Or the very least, maybe more effective, we could try and communicate with them, tempt them into communicating with us. I don't know, maybe write some books on the simulation hypothesis and put forward some hypotheses about their nature and see if they get so infuriated by this that they reveal themselves in order to prove us wrong. Or sounds communicating with them, then.
Yeah, then maybe we can access the controls. Yeah, that's where this gets at least as you know. I suppose your thought experiments run the nature of 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, you know, certainly don't think I have any real insights. But it is 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 got me in my attraction 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 code name, 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 don't know, something about when you said that, I thought that loss is devastating.
But it also adds something incredibly poignant to life. And while I personally want to live forever, 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, 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 that in a film, children of Men, when there's no longer. No longer any birth, and that's kind of. You get the sense of people's lives, they're all meaningless, but they've been robbed at least of one element of their meaning.
So when I think about 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 an exit. Virtual worlds in association with this, 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 being actually born inside the Matrix. Maybe you simulate pregnancy, simulate the development of a fetus, eventually have a simulated birth, and you'll have creatures which are born in the Matrix and likewise creatures that die in the.
Die in the virtual world, too. Without remembering that machines we talked about, they never had to be biological, they were 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 are tied so deeply to our biology that it's hard to get analog inside a virtual world until you move for a long term future where all of physics and all biology 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 the sense of self awareness.
Now I have a feeling you're gonna take us into zombie land 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. Yeah, 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 in perceptual consciousness, I see things, I hear things, and there's something. It's like for me to see things and hear things about the subjective experience of seeing and hearing or feeling pain, then I don't think it needs to involve consciousness of 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, maybe a fish has some consciousness 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. Where conscious of ourself, 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 do. But it is an interesting question for anything you think consciousness does.
You mentioned zombies. For almost anything for pretty much anything that you want consciousness to do, we always say, couldn't you do that for principle, without consciousness? So either just seeing and getting visual information, couldn't a robot do that without consciousness? Or maybe something which I use self consciousness to do, to make plans, make decisions, reflect on my life, couldn't in principle there 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, 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 it 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 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 pose a 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? Why in principle couldn't a zombie have had all this kind of these reflective processes led to guiding its action in all these ways without any subjective experience at all?
I think there might be some elements of 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 Toxo parasite prefers to.
It can do asexual replication, or it can do sexual replication, and it prefers to do sexual replication, but 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 parasite and it will suddenly be drawn to the scent of cat urine and then the cat eats the rat or the mouse. It then is able to replicate sexually within his intestines. And 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 bore into the head of like a wasp. I can't remember how it happens, but anyway, the wasp does it to an ant or something, and you get these totally zombified creatures that, like just, you know, begin to locomotive 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 wouldn'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. 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, what you're describing is not so different in some ways from, let's say the Facebook algorithm gets in there and gets control of some bit 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 it's as if, yep, 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 there are simulators out there, maybe they're performing these experiments on us all the time as well. But yeah, the brain is a deeply complex machine and some things that does are conscious.
Some of our activities are conscious of 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 just breathing or somehow where we choose 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 brain computer interfaces, our brain is going to be potentially vulnerable to all kinds of manipulation there. So, I mean, it's kind of expected. Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg.
And so much of what we do is unconscious. Consciousness can be manipulated too. There are areas of the brain people call the neural correlates of consciousness that go along with consciousness and people found ways to directly manipulate those areas. 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 panpsychism or the fundamental nature of consciousness? And do you, like I've said a couple times that it's a scale, but is that the right way to think about it?
Yeah, I think, yeah, there's a huge, it's not even like a mono dimensional scale. There's a huge space of states of consciousness which are audible in so many different ways, from the simple to the complex, from the less intense to the more intense, from a couple of sensory modalities to many sensory modalities. So yeah, there'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.
It's 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 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, 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.
There's other areas go along with action. People have used this to actually communicate with patients who they thought were in some kind of post coma state where they couldn't communicate. Maybe you thought someone was in a vegetative state. Then you ask 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 the brain light up. And people take that as pretty strong evidence that, hey, these people are conscious in different ways and then they manage that for communication. Thrilling and heartbreaking.
So the thought that they're. Have you seen or read the book the Doubting Bell and the Butterfly? Sure, yeah. Oh, my God.
Like the whole idea of being locked in. He could blink one eye and that he had was completely bare mentally. For anybody that doesn't know it. Completely there mentally has a stroke or something.
Completely bare mentally, but cannot move any part of his body except for one of his eyes. And that idea, I'd heard about that, the playing tennis to move through your house thing. And if I'm not mistaken, they could ask them effectively, like yes or no questions by saying, okay, imagine someone playing tennis for yes. Imagine walking to your house for no.
And now we ask you all these questions. 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 ding Bell and the butterfly, but without the control over the one eye. I've asked people a few times actually, do we have reason to believe there are people out there with this lock 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 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 lock in syndrome because there was some brain damage in those cases, but still it's on a continuum with this, and this is 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 of the behavior, not even the eyelid, but who are actually richly conscious the way that, you know, the way that we are or the way that the guy in the diving bell and 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. Ooh, man. I know it's to the side of our conversation, but 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 yelling, awake, I'm awake, I'm awake. And then they, you know, ah. And you just drift away again. But you hear about the stories of people that don't lose consciousness during surgery.
Yo, like that. That is. That's not ideal, David. That is not ideal.
Yeah, it's not great. Especially once you realize that for a long time, I think at least, anesthetics consisted of three components. A paralytic to paralyze your body, an analgesic to remove the pain, and also an amnestic to remove your memory afterwards. And so you're just saying one of these things doesn't work so well, so you're still somehow awake.
Well, okay, there's going to be amnesty. You don't remember it afterwards, because that's reassuring. Maybe you're awake for the whole operation. Oh, my God.
I found that. Yeah. Very well. Now they have better anesthetics, and they've developed people.
Actually, the scales of consciousness they use for anesthesia are still quite primitive, and they're trying to develop better scales. But this is the place where the science of consciousness has to get better to help us actually properly remove states of consciousness. And anesthesia. Yeah, anesthesia.
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 I think about a summation of that? Not that I've heard, but the fact that there would be any sort of physical correlation to something like that I find extremely strange. But, yeah, that's very interesting to me.
Now, one idea that you talked about in the book that I wanted to go to is Zhuangzi. And the idea of whether or not I'm dreaming or whether or not I'm the butterfly dreaming that I'm Zhuangzi, like that to me, is this, like, first of all, Zhuangzi was God knows how long ago and 100 BC, right? So just a few days ago, 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 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 thought everything was one way and actually it's another way. Wait, it was the first lines of Bohemian Rhapsody. My Queen.
Is this the real life or is it just fantasy? Desperately want all this to be real. I think it's the genuine. Every ancient philosophical tradition has versions of this question.
In Chinese philosophy, we had Bruongji and the Butterfly. In ancient Greek philosophy, we had Plato with his allegory of a 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 going to 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 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 emotion, which is really just neurochemistry. And that neurochemistry is triggered by your beliefs about the situation 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 understand is that you have a frame of reference, and that frame of reference is you live in a house full of funhouse 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 snip 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 you have in life, what you suffer, 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 Zhuangzi was a Taoist and the whole Daoist philosophy is like unwinding that frame of reference and being able to get outside of it and recognize, you know, the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. 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 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 mean 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 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 fits everything into it, colors things in even though there may be no colors out there. And external reality, it puts everything into this nice neat Euclidean space, even though that may be not how it is in external reality. Basically our consciousness is what gives all of this.
You've got atoms in the void and consciousness somehow gives it meaning. And so much of our, I think our pre theoretical model of the world is just this mix of the two. And that's what some people say. Could this all be my consciousness?
Could this just be a dream? Could it be? Could it just come from me? And I think there's actually a good reason to think there's something outside our consciousness.
Maybe it's physics, maybe it's a simulation and so on, but everyone 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 say physics as an attempt to do that. Pull consciousness out of the world.
When Galileo or whoever founded modern science, it's like, okay, 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 always this sense how much of the world is us and how much of it is out there independent of us. And the assimilation idea, I don't know. 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 a wrong attitude towards simulations. 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. 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, 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 what I get. One contrast is just that 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.