0:00:00.774,0:00:02.515
Right now

0:00:02.515,0:00:05.989
you have a movie playing inside your head.

0:00:05.989,0:00:08.516
It's an amazing multi-track movie.

0:00:08.516,0:00:11.840
It has 3D vision and surround sound

0:00:11.840,0:00:14.476
for what you're seeing and hearing right now,

0:00:14.476,0:00:16.795
but that's just the start of it.

0:00:16.795,0:00:21.978
Your movie has smell and taste and touch.

0:00:21.978,0:00:24.530
It has a sense of your body,

0:00:24.530,0:00:28.849
pain, hunger, orgasms.

0:00:28.849,0:00:30.890
It has emotions,

0:00:30.890,0:00:34.426
anger and happiness.

0:00:34.426,0:00:38.220
It has memories, like scenes from your childhood

0:00:38.220,0:00:40.920
playing before you.

0:00:40.920,0:00:45.375
And it has this constant voiceover narrative

0:00:45.375,0:00:49.751
in your stream of conscious thinking.

0:00:49.751,0:00:54.824
At the heart of this movie is you

0:00:54.824,0:00:59.189
experiencing all this directly.

0:00:59.189,0:01:04.881
This movie is your stream of consciousness,

0:01:04.881,0:01:06.188
the subject of experience

0:01:06.188,0:01:11.326
of the mind and the world.

0:01:11.326,0:01:13.631
Consciousness is one of the fundamental facts

0:01:13.631,0:01:15.648
of human existence.

0:01:15.648,0:01:18.580
Each of us is conscious.

0:01:18.580,0:01:21.309
We all have our own inner movie,

0:01:21.309,0:01:24.040
you and you and you.

0:01:24.040,0:01:27.760
There's nothing we know about more directly.

0:01:27.760,0:01:31.232
At least, I know about my consciousness directly.

0:01:31.232,0:01:35.230
I can't be certain that you guys are conscious.

0:01:35.230,0:01:38.658
Consciousness also is what makes life worth living.

0:01:38.658,0:01:42.358
If we weren't conscious, nothing in our lives

0:01:42.358,0:01:45.723
would have meaning or value.

0:01:45.723,0:01:46.889
But at the same time, it's the most

0:01:46.889,0:01:51.059
mysterious phenomenon in the universe.

0:01:51.059,0:01:54.432
Why are we conscious?

0:01:54.432,0:01:55.973
Why do we have these inner movies?

0:01:55.973,0:01:58.226
Why aren't we just robots

0:01:58.226,0:02:00.469
who process all this input,

0:02:00.469,0:02:02.486
produce all that output,

0:02:02.486,0:02:06.341
without experiencing the inner movie at all?

0:02:06.341,0:02:08.850
Right now, nobody knows the answers

0:02:08.850,0:02:10.596
to those questions.

0:02:10.596,0:02:14.305
I'm going to suggest that to integrate consciousness

0:02:14.305,0:02:19.000
into science, some radical ideas may be needed.

0:02:19.000,0:02:21.966
Some people say a science of consciousness

0:02:21.966,0:02:23.918
is impossible.

0:02:23.918,0:02:27.686
Science, by its nature, is objective.

0:02:27.686,0:02:31.111
Consciousness, by its nature, is subjective.

0:02:31.111,0:02:35.560
So there can never be a science of consciousness.

0:02:35.560,0:02:38.780
For much of the 20th century, that view held sway.

0:02:38.780,0:02:42.598
Psychologists studied behavior objectively,

0:02:42.598,0:02:46.660
neuroscientists studied the brain objectively,

0:02:46.660,0:02:50.210
and nobody even mentioned consciousness.

0:02:50.210,0:02:52.966
Even 30 years ago, when TED got started,

0:02:52.966,0:02:55.348
there was very little scientific work

0:02:55.348,0:02:57.900
on consciousness.

0:02:57.900,0:02:59.605
Now, about 20 years ago,

0:02:59.605,0:03:02.578
all that began to change.

0:03:02.578,0:03:05.355
Neuroscientists like Francis Crick

0:03:05.355,0:03:08.111
and physicists like Roger Penrose

0:03:08.111,0:03:10.351
said now is the time for science

0:03:10.351,0:03:13.127
to attack consciousness.

0:03:13.127,0:03:15.447
And since then, there's been a real explosion,

0:03:15.447,0:03:17.784
a flowering of scientific work

0:03:17.784,0:03:19.048
on consciousness.

0:03:19.048,0:03:21.087
And this work has been wonderful. It's been great.

0:03:21.087,0:03:23.175
But it also has some fundamental

0:03:23.175,0:03:27.000
limitations so far.

0:03:27.000,0:03:28.658
The centerpiece

0:03:28.658,0:03:31.478
of the science of consciousness in recent years

0:03:31.478,0:03:33.973
has been the search for correlations,

0:03:33.973,0:03:37.102
correlations between certain areas of the brain

0:03:37.102,0:03:41.120
and certain states of consciousness.

0:03:41.120,0:03:42.210
We saw some of this kind of work

0:03:42.210,0:03:43.970
from Nancy Kanwisher and the wonderful work

0:03:43.970,0:03:47.246
she presented just a few minutes ago.

0:03:47.246,0:03:50.809
Now we understand much better, for example,

0:03:50.809,0:03:53.126
the kinds of brain areas that go along with

0:03:53.126,0:03:56.497
the conscious experience of seeing faces

0:03:56.497,0:03:59.617
or of feeling pain

0:03:59.617,0:04:02.106
or of feeling happy.

0:04:02.106,0:04:04.922
But this is still a science of correlations.

0:04:04.922,0:04:08.278
It's not a science of explanations.

0:04:08.278,0:04:10.901
We know that these brain areas

0:04:10.901,0:04:14.825
go along with certain kinds of conscious experience,

0:04:14.825,0:04:18.461
but we don't know why they do.

0:04:18.461,0:04:20.786
I like to put this by saying

0:04:20.786,0:04:24.183
that this kind of work from neuroscience

0:04:24.183,0:04:25.929
is answering some of the questions

0:04:25.929,0:04:27.734
we want answered about consciousness,

0:04:27.734,0:04:31.507
the questions about what certain brain areas do

0:04:31.507,0:04:33.616
and what they correlate with.

0:04:33.616,0:04:36.772
But in a certain sense, those are the easy problems.

0:04:36.772,0:04:39.213
No knock on the neuroscientists.

0:04:39.213,0:04:41.834
There are no truly easy[br]problems with consciousness.

0:04:41.834,0:04:46.425
But it doesn't address the real mystery

0:04:46.425,0:04:48.355
at the core of this subject:

0:04:48.355,0:04:52.575
why is it that all that physical processing in a brain

0:04:52.575,0:04:55.500
should be accompanied by consciousness at all?

0:04:55.500,0:04:58.706
Why is there this inner subjective movie?

0:04:58.706,0:05:01.960
Right now, we don't really have a bead on that.

0:05:01.960,0:05:03.993
And you might say,

0:05:03.993,0:05:07.548
let's just give neuroscience a few years.

0:05:07.548,0:05:11.328
It'll turn out to be another emergent phenomenon

0:05:11.328,0:05:16.210
like traffic jams, like hurricanes,

0:05:16.210,0:05:18.831
like life, and we'll figure it out.

0:05:18.831,0:05:20.902
The classical cases of emergence

0:05:20.902,0:05:24.280
are all cases of emergent behavior,

0:05:24.280,0:05:26.627
how a traffic jam behaves,

0:05:26.627,0:05:28.123
how a hurricane functions,

0:05:28.123,0:05:30.316
how a living organism reproduces

0:05:30.316,0:05:33.905
and adapts and metabolizes,

0:05:33.905,0:05:36.188
all questions about objective functioning.

0:05:36.188,0:05:39.010
You could apply that to the human brain

0:05:39.010,0:05:40.519
in explaining some of the behaviors

0:05:40.519,0:05:42.792
and the functions of the human brain

0:05:42.792,0:05:43.951
as emergent phenomena:

0:05:43.951,0:05:48.349
how we walk, how we talk, how we play chess,

0:05:48.349,0:05:50.239
all these questions about behavior.

0:05:50.239,0:05:52.366
But when it comes to consciousness,

0:05:52.366,0:05:54.255
questions about behavior

0:05:54.255,0:05:57.180
are among the easy problems.

0:05:57.180,0:05:58.777
When it comes to the hard problem,

0:05:58.777,0:06:01.154
that's the question of why is it

0:06:01.154,0:06:02.965
that all this behavior

0:06:02.965,0:06:05.810
is accompanied by subjective experience?

0:06:05.810,0:06:07.565
And here, the standard paradigm

0:06:07.565,0:06:09.411
of emergence,

0:06:09.411,0:06:12.358
even the standard paradigms of neuroscience,

0:06:12.358,0:06:16.801
don't really, so far, have that much to say.

0:06:16.801,0:06:20.446
Now, I'm a scientific materialist at heart.

0:06:20.446,0:06:24.473
I want a scientific theory of consciousness

0:06:24.473,0:06:26.802
that works,

0:06:26.802,0:06:29.209
and for a long time, I banged my head

0:06:29.209,0:06:30.650
against the wall

0:06:30.650,0:06:32.787
looking for a theory of consciousness

0:06:32.787,0:06:34.543
in purely physical terms

0:06:34.543,0:06:35.870
that would work.

0:06:35.870,0:06:37.613
But I eventually came to the conclusion

0:06:37.613,0:06:41.798
that that just didn't work for systematic reasons.

0:06:41.798,0:06:43.733
It's a long story,

0:06:43.733,0:06:46.450
but the core idea is just that what you get

0:06:46.450,0:06:48.790
from purely reductionist explanations

0:06:48.790,0:06:51.434
in physical terms, in brain-based terms,

0:06:51.434,0:06:53.549
is stories about the functioning of a system,

0:06:53.549,0:06:55.675
its structure, its dynamics,

0:06:55.675,0:06:57.667
the behavior it produces,

0:06:57.667,0:06:59.747
great for solving the easy problems —

0:06:59.747,0:07:02.245
how we behave, how we function —

0:07:02.245,0:07:05.698
but when it comes to subjective experience —

0:07:05.698,0:07:09.259
why does all this feel like[br]something from the inside? —

0:07:09.259,0:07:11.334
that's something fundamentally new,

0:07:11.334,0:07:15.227
and it's always a further question.

0:07:15.227,0:07:20.640
So I think we're at a kind of impasse here.

0:07:20.640,0:07:23.855
We've got this wonderful, great chain of explanation,

0:07:23.855,0:07:27.455
we're used to it, where physics explains chemistry,

0:07:27.455,0:07:30.695
chemistry explains biology,

0:07:30.695,0:07:34.542
biology explains parts of psychology.

0:07:34.542,0:07:36.000
But consciousness

0:07:36.000,0:07:38.771
doesn't seem to fit into this picture.

0:07:38.771,0:07:40.661
On the one hand, it's a datum

0:07:40.661,0:07:42.630
that we're conscious.

0:07:42.630,0:07:43.916
On the other hand, we don't know how

0:07:43.916,0:07:47.894
to accommodate it into our[br]scientific view of the world.

0:07:47.894,0:07:49.841
So I think consciousness right now

0:07:49.841,0:07:52.304
is a kind of anomaly,

0:07:52.304,0:07:54.340
one that we need to integrate

0:07:54.340,0:07:58.240
into our view of the world, but we don't yet see how.

0:07:58.240,0:08:00.168
Faced with an anomaly like this,

0:08:00.168,0:08:03.407
radical ideas may be needed,

0:08:03.407,0:08:06.412
and I think that we may need one or two ideas

0:08:06.412,0:08:08.852
that initially seem crazy

0:08:08.852,0:08:11.788
before we can come to grips with consciousness

0:08:11.788,0:08:13.880
scientifically.

0:08:13.880,0:08:15.479
Now, there are a few candidates

0:08:15.479,0:08:17.975
for what those crazy ideas might be.

0:08:17.975,0:08:22.317
My friend Dan Dennett, who's here today, has one.

0:08:22.317,0:08:24.714
His crazy idea is that there is no hard problem

0:08:24.714,0:08:26.457
of consciousness.

0:08:26.457,0:08:29.820
The whole idea of the inner subjective movie

0:08:29.820,0:08:34.432
involves a kind of illusion or confusion.

0:08:34.432,0:08:36.330
Actually, all we've got to do is explain

0:08:36.330,0:08:39.337
the objective functions, the behaviors of the brain,

0:08:39.337,0:08:41.362
and then we've explained everything

0:08:41.362,0:08:43.837
that needs to be explained.

0:08:43.837,0:08:46.446
Well I say, more power to him.

0:08:46.446,0:08:48.460
That's the kind of radical idea

0:08:48.460,0:08:50.384
that we need to explore

0:08:50.384,0:08:52.723
if you want to have a purely reductionist

0:08:52.723,0:08:56.273
brain-based theory of consciousness.

0:08:56.273,0:08:58.344
At the same time, for me and for many other people,

0:08:58.344,0:09:00.171
that view is a bit too close to simply

0:09:00.171,0:09:02.192
denying the datum of consciousness

0:09:02.192,0:09:03.695
to be satisfactory.

0:09:03.695,0:09:06.763
So I go in a different direction.

0:09:06.763,0:09:07.949
In the time remaining,

0:09:07.949,0:09:10.948
I want to explore two crazy ideas

0:09:10.948,0:09:14.665
that I think may have some promise.

0:09:14.665,0:09:16.285
The first crazy idea

0:09:16.285,0:09:20.910
is that consciousness is fundamental.

0:09:20.910,0:09:23.751
Physicists sometimes take[br]some aspects of the universe

0:09:23.751,0:09:25.911
as fundamental building blocks:

0:09:25.911,0:09:29.660
space and time and mass.

0:09:29.660,0:09:33.270
They postulate fundamental laws governing them,

0:09:33.270,0:09:37.160
like the laws of gravity or of quantum mechanics.

0:09:37.160,0:09:39.470
These fundamental properties and laws

0:09:39.470,0:09:42.687
aren't explained in terms of anything more basic.

0:09:42.687,0:09:45.427
Rather, they're taken as primitive,

0:09:45.427,0:09:48.806
and you build up the world from there.

0:09:48.806,0:09:53.905
Now sometimes, the list of fundamentals expands.

0:09:53.905,0:09:56.362
In the 19th century, Maxwell figured out

0:09:56.362,0:09:59.530
that you can't explain electromagnetic phenomena

0:09:59.530,0:10:01.881
in terms of the existing fundamentals —

0:10:01.881,0:10:04.950
space, time, mass, Newton's laws —

0:10:04.950,0:10:07.521
so he postulated fundamental laws

0:10:07.521,0:10:09.335
of electromagnetism

0:10:09.335,0:10:11.746
and postulated electric charge

0:10:11.746,0:10:13.514
as a fundamental element

0:10:13.514,0:10:16.473
that those laws govern.

0:10:16.473,0:10:19.756
I think that's the situation we're in

0:10:19.756,0:10:21.366
with consciousness.

0:10:21.366,0:10:23.851
If you can't explain consciousness

0:10:23.851,0:10:26.269
in terms of the existing fundamentals —

0:10:26.269,0:10:28.940
space, time, mass, charge —

0:10:28.940,0:10:32.370
then as a matter of logic,[br]you need to expand the list.

0:10:32.370,0:10:34.846
The natural thing to do is to postulate

0:10:34.846,0:10:38.102
consciousness itself as something fundamental,

0:10:38.102,0:10:41.134
a fundamental building block of nature.

0:10:41.134,0:10:44.102
This doesn't mean you suddenly[br]can't do science with it.

0:10:44.102,0:10:47.700
This opens up the way for you to do science with it.

0:10:47.700,0:10:49.604
What we then need is to study

0:10:49.604,0:10:52.557
the fundamental laws governing consciousness,

0:10:52.557,0:10:54.937
the laws that connect consciousness

0:10:54.937,0:10:57.738
to other fundamentals: space, time, mass,

0:10:57.738,0:11:00.674
physical processes.

0:11:00.674,0:11:02.856
Physicists sometimes say

0:11:02.856,0:11:05.736
that we want fundamental laws so simple

0:11:05.736,0:11:09.538
that we could write them on the front of a t-shirt.

0:11:09.538,0:11:11.259
Well I think something like that is the situation

0:11:11.259,0:11:13.127
we're in with consciousness.

0:11:13.127,0:11:15.877
We want to find fundamental laws so simple

0:11:15.877,0:11:17.964
we could write them on the front of a t-shirt.

0:11:17.964,0:11:19.539
We don't know what those laws are yet,

0:11:19.539,0:11:23.566
but that's what we're after.

0:11:23.566,0:11:25.983
The second crazy idea

0:11:25.983,0:11:29.461
is that consciousness might be universal.

0:11:29.461,0:11:32.522
Every system might have some degree

0:11:32.522,0:11:36.247
of consciousness.

0:11:36.247,0:11:39.208
This view is sometimes called panpsychism:

0:11:39.208,0:11:42.210
pan for all, psych for mind,

0:11:42.210,0:11:43.981
every system is conscious,

0:11:43.981,0:11:48.228
not just humans, dogs, mice, flies,

0:11:48.228,0:11:50.805
but even Rob Knight's microbes,

0:11:50.805,0:11:52.992
elementary particles.

0:11:52.992,0:11:55.705
Even a photon has some degree of consciousness.

0:11:55.705,0:11:59.484
The idea is not that photons are intelligent

0:11:59.484,0:12:00.561
or thinking.

0:12:00.561,0:12:01.991
It's not that a photon

0:12:01.991,0:12:03.436
is wracked with angst

0:12:03.436,0:12:06.728
because it's thinking, "Aww, I'm always[br]buzzing around near the speed of light.

0:12:06.728,0:12:09.720
I never get to slow down and smell the roses."

0:12:09.720,0:12:11.864
No, not like that.

0:12:11.864,0:12:14.912
But the thought is maybe photons might have

0:12:14.912,0:12:17.535
some element of raw, subjective feeling,

0:12:17.535,0:12:21.687
some primitive precursor to consciousness.

0:12:21.687,0:12:24.541
This may sound a bit kooky to you.

0:12:24.541,0:12:27.324
I mean, why would anyone think such a crazy thing?

0:12:27.324,0:12:30.884
Some motivation comes from the first crazy idea,

0:12:30.884,0:12:33.030
that consciousness is fundamental.

0:12:33.030,0:12:37.405
If it's fundamental, like space and time and mass,

0:12:37.405,0:12:40.070
it's natural to suppose that it might be universal too,

0:12:40.070,0:12:41.970
the way they are.

0:12:41.970,0:12:43.919
It's also worth noting that although the idea

0:12:43.919,0:12:45.943
seems counterintuitive to us,

0:12:45.943,0:12:48.687
it's much less counterintuitive to people

0:12:48.687,0:12:50.418
from different cultures,

0:12:50.418,0:12:51.938
where the human mind is seen as much more

0:12:51.938,0:12:55.010
continuous with nature.

0:12:55.010,0:12:58.744
A deeper motivation comes from the idea that

0:12:58.744,0:13:00.753
perhaps the most simple and powerful way

0:13:00.753,0:13:02.987
to find fundamental laws connecting consciousness

0:13:02.987,0:13:04.967
to physical processing

0:13:04.967,0:13:08.062
is to link consciousness to information.

0:13:08.062,0:13:10.073
Wherever there's information processing,

0:13:10.073,0:13:11.138
there's consciousness.

0:13:11.138,0:13:13.678
Complex information processing, like in a human,

0:13:13.688,0:13:15.220
complex consciousness.

0:13:15.220,0:13:17.349
Simple information processing,

0:13:17.349,0:13:19.307
simple consciousness.

0:13:19.307,0:13:21.638
A really exciting thing is in recent years

0:13:21.638,0:13:24.903
a neuroscientist, Giulio Tononi,

0:13:24.903,0:13:26.146
has taken this kind of theory

0:13:26.146,0:13:28.221
and developed it rigorously

0:13:28.221,0:13:30.070
with a mathematical theory.

0:13:30.070,0:13:31.587
He has a mathematical measure

0:13:31.587,0:13:33.317
of information integration

0:13:33.317,0:13:35.236
which he calls phi,

0:13:35.236,0:13:36.843
measuring the amount of information

0:13:36.843,0:13:38.463
integrated in a system.

0:13:38.463,0:13:40.832
And he supposes that phi goes along

0:13:40.832,0:13:42.270
with consciousness.

0:13:42.270,0:13:43.591
So in a human brain,

0:13:43.591,0:13:46.110
incredibly large amount of information integration,

0:13:46.110,0:13:48.144
high degree of phi,

0:13:48.144,0:13:49.693
a whole lot of consciousness.

0:13:49.693,0:13:53.386
In a mouse, medium degree[br]of information integration,

0:13:53.386,0:13:54.405
still pretty significant,

0:13:54.405,0:13:56.430
pretty serious amount of consciousness.

0:13:56.430,0:13:58.695
But as you go down to worms,

0:13:58.695,0:14:02.172
microbes, particles,

0:14:02.172,0:14:03.706
the amount of phi falls off.

0:14:03.706,0:14:06.139
The amount of information integration falls off,

0:14:06.139,0:14:07.587
but it's still non-zero.

0:14:07.587,0:14:09.526
On Tononi's theory,

0:14:09.526,0:14:11.733
there's still going to be a non-zero degree

0:14:11.733,0:14:13.562
of consciousness.

0:14:13.562,0:14:16.101
In effect, he's proposing a fundamental law

0:14:16.101,0:14:19.485
of consciousness: high phi, high consciousness.

0:14:19.485,0:14:22.107
Now, I don't know if this theory is right,

0:14:22.107,0:14:25.318
but it's actually perhaps the leading theory right now

0:14:25.318,0:14:26.704
in the science of consciousness,

0:14:26.704,0:14:28.935
and it's been used to integrate a whole range

0:14:28.935,0:14:31.322
of scientific data,

0:14:31.322,0:14:33.565
and it does have a nice property[br]that it is in fact simple enough

0:14:33.565,0:14:37.060
you can write it on the front of a t-shirt.

0:14:37.060,0:14:39.685
Another final motivation is that

0:14:39.685,0:14:41.736
panpsychism might help us to integrate

0:14:41.736,0:14:44.950
consciousness into the physical world.

0:14:44.950,0:14:48.127
Physicists and philosophers have often observed

0:14:48.127,0:14:50.568
that physics is curiously abstract.

0:14:50.568,0:14:52.716
It describes the structure of reality

0:14:52.716,0:14:54.800
using a bunch of equations,

0:14:54.800,0:14:57.824
but it doesn't tell us about the reality

0:14:57.824,0:14:59.392
that underlies it.

0:14:59.392,0:15:01.289
As Stephen Hawking puts it,

0:15:01.289,0:15:05.343
what puts the fire into the equations?

0:15:05.343,0:15:07.961
Well, on the panpsychist view,

0:15:07.961,0:15:10.600
you can leave the equations of physics as they are,

0:15:10.600,0:15:12.164
but you can take them to be describing

0:15:12.164,0:15:13.838
the flux of consciousness.

0:15:13.838,0:15:15.876
That's what physics really is ultimately doing,

0:15:15.876,0:15:18.205
describing the flux of consciousness.

0:15:18.205,0:15:19.858
On this view, it's consciousness

0:15:19.858,0:15:24.104
that puts the fire into the equations.

0:15:24.104,0:15:25.764
On that view, consciousness doesn't dangle

0:15:25.764,0:15:27.440
outside the physical world

0:15:27.440,0:15:28.858
as some kind of extra.

0:15:28.858,0:15:32.314
It's there right at its heart.

0:15:32.314,0:15:35.188
This view, I think, the panpsychist view,

0:15:35.188,0:15:38.489
has the potential to transfigure our relationship

0:15:38.489,0:15:39.984
to nature,

0:15:39.984,0:15:42.219
and it may have some pretty serious social

0:15:42.219,0:15:45.912
and ethical consequences.

0:15:45.912,0:15:48.071
Some of these may be counterintuitive.

0:15:48.071,0:15:51.142
I used to think I shouldn't eat anything

0:15:51.142,0:15:53.604
which is conscious,

0:15:53.604,0:15:56.208
so therefore I should be vegetarian.

0:15:56.208,0:15:58.775
Now, if you're a panpsychist and you take that view,

0:15:58.775,0:16:01.505
you're going to go very hungry.

0:16:01.505,0:16:02.793
So I think when you think about it,

0:16:02.793,0:16:04.960
this tends to transfigure your views,

0:16:04.960,0:16:07.203
whereas what matters for ethical purposes

0:16:07.203,0:16:08.477
and moral considerations,

0:16:08.477,0:16:11.554
not so much the fact of consciousness,

0:16:11.554,0:16:15.510
but the degree and the complexity of consciousness.

0:16:15.510,0:16:17.448
It's also natural to ask about consciousness

0:16:17.448,0:16:20.498
in other systems, like computers.

0:16:20.498,0:16:22.287
What about the artificially intelligent system

0:16:22.287,0:16:25.729
in the movie "Her," Samantha?

0:16:25.729,0:16:27.129
Is she conscious?

0:16:27.129,0:16:28.560
Well, if you take the informational,

0:16:28.560,0:16:29.740
panpsychist view,

0:16:29.740,0:16:33.211
she certainly has complicated information processing

0:16:33.211,0:16:34.632
and integration,

0:16:34.632,0:16:37.299
so the answer is very likely yes, she is conscious.

0:16:37.299,0:16:40.237
If that's right, it raises pretty serious

0:16:40.237,0:16:42.602
ethical issues about both the ethics

0:16:42.602,0:16:46.123
of developing intelligent computer systems

0:16:46.123,0:16:48.859
and the ethics of turning them off.

0:16:48.859,0:16:51.359
Finally, you might ask about the consciousness

0:16:51.359,0:16:53.241
of whole groups,

0:16:53.241,0:16:55.078
the planet.

0:16:55.078,0:16:58.001
Does Canada have its own consciousness?

0:16:58.001,0:17:00.100
Or at a more local level,

0:17:00.100,0:17:01.308
does an integrated group

0:17:01.308,0:17:03.571
like the audience at a TED conference,

0:17:03.571,0:17:07.020
are we right now having a[br]collective TED consciousness,

0:17:07.020,0:17:08.513
an inner movie

0:17:08.513,0:17:11.319
for this collective TED group

0:17:11.319,0:17:12.999
which is distinct from the inner movies

0:17:12.999,0:17:14.088
of each of our parts?

0:17:14.088,0:17:16.243
I don't know the answer to that question,

0:17:16.253,0:17:17.624
but I think it's at least one

0:17:17.624,0:17:20.098
worth taking seriously.

0:17:20.098,0:17:22.435
Okay, so this panpsychist vision,

0:17:22.435,0:17:24.248
it is a radical one,

0:17:24.248,0:17:26.462
and I don't know that it's correct.

0:17:26.462,0:17:28.315
I'm actually more confident about

0:17:28.315,0:17:29.948
the first crazy idea,

0:17:29.948,0:17:32.117
that consciousness is fundamental,

0:17:32.117,0:17:33.920
than about the second one,

0:17:33.920,0:17:36.141
that it's universal.

0:17:36.141,0:17:38.219
I mean, the view raises any number of questions,

0:17:38.219,0:17:39.760
has any number of challenges,

0:17:39.760,0:17:41.120
like how do those little bits

0:17:41.120,0:17:42.860
of consciousness add up

0:17:42.860,0:17:45.157
to the kind of complex consciousness

0:17:45.157,0:17:47.480
we know and love.

0:17:47.480,0:17:48.940
If we can answer those questions,

0:17:48.940,0:17:50.445
then I think we're going to be well on our way

0:17:50.445,0:17:53.532
to a serious theory of consciousness.

0:17:53.532,0:17:56.920
If not, well, this is the hardest problem perhaps

0:17:56.920,0:17:58.764
in science and philosophy.

0:17:58.764,0:18:02.209
We can't expect to solve it overnight.

0:18:02.209,0:18:05.749
But I do think we're going to figure it out eventually.

0:18:05.749,0:18:08.736
Understanding consciousness is a real key, I think,

0:18:08.736,0:18:11.188
both to understanding the universe

0:18:11.188,0:18:13.718
and to understanding ourselves.

0:18:13.718,0:18:16.621
It may just take the right crazy idea.

0:18:16.621,0:18:18.612
Thank you.

0:18:18.612,0:18:20.300
(Applause)