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Right now

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you have a movie playing inside your head.

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It's an amazing multi-track movie.

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It has 3D vision and surround sound

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for what you're seeing and hearing right now,

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but that's just the start of it.

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Your movie has smell and taste and touch.

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It has a sense of your body,

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pain, hunger, orgasms.

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It has emotions,

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anger and happiness.

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It has memories, like scenes from your childhood

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playing before you.

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And it has this constant voiceover narrative

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in your stream of conscious thinking.

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At the heart of this movie is you

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experiencing all this directly.

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This movie is your stream of consciousness,

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the subject of experience

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of the mind and the world.

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Consciousness is one of the fundamental facts

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of human existence.

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Each of us is conscious.

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We all have our own inner movie,

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you and you and you.

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There's nothing we know about more directly.

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At least, I know about my consciousness directly.

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I can't be certain that you guys are conscious.

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Consciousness also is what makes life worth living.

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If we weren't conscious, nothing in our lives

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would have meaning or value.

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But at the same time, it's the most

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mysterious phenomenon in the universe.

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Why are we conscious?

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Why do we have these inner movies?

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Why aren't we just robots

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who process all this input,

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produce all that output,

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without experiencing the inner movie at all?

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Right now, nobody knows the answers

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to those questions.

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I'm going to suggest that to integrate consciousness

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into science, some radical ideas may be needed.

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Some people say a science of consciousness

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is impossible.

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Science, by its nature, is objective.

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Consciousness, by its nature, is subjective.

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So there can never be a science of consciousness.

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For much of the 20th century, that view held sway.

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Psychologists studied behavior objectively,

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neuroscientists studied the brain objectively,

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and nobody even mentioned consciousness.

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Even 30 years ago, when TED got started,

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there was very little scientific work

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on consciousness.

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Now, about 20 years ago,

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all that began to change.

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Neuroscientists like Francis Crick

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and physicists like Roger Penrose

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said now is the time for science

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to attack consciousness.

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And since then, there's been a real explosion,

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a flowering of scientific work

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on consciousness.

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And this work has been wonderful. It's been great.

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But it also has some fundamental

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limitations so far.

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The centerpiece

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of the science of consciousness in recent years

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has been the search for correlations,

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correlations between certain areas of the brain

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and certain states of consciousness.

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We saw some of this kind of work

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from Nancy Kanwisher and the wonderful work

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she presented just a few minutes ago.

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Now we understand much better, for example,

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the kinds of brain areas that go along with

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the conscious experience of seeing faces

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or of feeling pain

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or of feeling happy.

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But this is still a science of correlations.

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It's not a science of explanations.

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We know that these brain areas

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go along with certain kinds of conscious experience,

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but we don't know why they do.

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I like to put this by saying

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that this kind of work from neuroscience

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is answering some of the questions

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we want answered about consciousness,

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the questions about what certain brain areas do

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and what they correlate with.

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But in a certain sense, those are the easy problems.

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No knock on the neuroscientists.

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There are no truly easy
problems with consciousness.

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But it doesn't address the real mystery

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at the core of this subject:

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why is it that all that physical processing in a brain

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should be accompanied by consciousness at all?

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Why is there this inner subjective movie?

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Right now, we don't really have a bead on that.

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And you might say,

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let's just give neuroscience a few years.

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It'll turn out to be another emergent phenomenon

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like traffic jams, like hurricanes,

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like life, and we'll figure it out.

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The classical cases of emergence

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are all cases of emergent behavior,

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how a traffic jam behaves,

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how a hurricane functions,

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how a living organism reproduces

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and adapts and metabolizes,

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all questions about objective functioning.

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You could apply that to the human brain

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in explaining some of the behaviors

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and the functions of the human brain

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as emergent phenomena:

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how we walk, how we talk, how we play chess,

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all these questions about behavior.

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But when it comes to consciousness,

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questions about behavior

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are among the easy problems.

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When it comes to the hard problem,

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that's the question of why is it

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that all this behavior

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is accompanied by subjective experience?

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And here, the standard paradigm

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of emergence,

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even the standard paradigms of neuroscience,

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don't really, so far, have that much to say.

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Now, I'm a scientific materialist at heart.

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I want a scientific theory of consciousness

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that works,

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and for a long time, I banged my head

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against the wall

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looking for a theory of consciousness

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in purely physical terms

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that would work.

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But I eventually came to the conclusion

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that that just didn't work for systematic reasons.

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It's a long story,

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but the core idea is just that what you get

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from purely reductionist explanations

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in physical terms, in brain-based terms,

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is stories about the functioning of a system,

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its structure, its dynamics,

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the behavior it produces,

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great for solving the easy problems —

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how we behave, how we function —

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but when it comes to subjective experience —

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why does all this feel like
something from the inside? —

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that's something fundamentally new,

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and it's always a further question.

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So I think we're at a kind of impasse here.

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We've got this wonderful, great chain of explanation,

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we're used to it, where physics explains chemistry,

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chemistry explains biology,

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biology explains parts of psychology.

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But consciousness

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doesn't seem to fit into this picture.

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On the one hand, it's a datum

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that we're conscious.

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On the other hand, we don't know how

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to accommodate it into our
scientific view of the world.

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So I think consciousness right now

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is a kind of anomaly,

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one that we need to integrate

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into our view of the world, but we don't yet see how.

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Faced with an anomaly like this,

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radical ideas may be needed,

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and I think that we may need one or two ideas

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that initially seem crazy

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before we can come to grips with consciousness

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scientifically.

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Now, there are a few candidates

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for what those crazy ideas might be.

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My friend Dan Dennett, who's here today, has one.

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His crazy idea is that there is no hard problem

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of consciousness.

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The whole idea of the inner subjective movie

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involves a kind of illusion or confusion.

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Actually, all we've got to do is explain

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the objective functions, the behaviors of the brain,

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and then we've explained everything

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that needs to be explained.

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Well I say, more power to him.

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That's the kind of radical idea

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that we need to explore

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if you want to have a purely reductionist

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brain-based theory of consciousness.

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At the same time, for me and for many other people,

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that view is a bit too close to simply

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denying the datum of consciousness

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to be satisfactory.

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So I go in a different direction.

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In the time remaining,

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I want to explore two crazy ideas

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that I think may have some promise.

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The first crazy idea

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is that consciousness is fundamental.

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Physicists sometimes take
some aspects of the universe

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as fundamental building blocks:

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space and time and mass.

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They postulate fundamental laws governing them,

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like the laws of gravity or of quantum mechanics.

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These fundamental properties and laws

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aren't explained in terms of anything more basic.

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Rather, they're taken as primitive,

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and you build up the world from there.

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Now sometimes, the list of fundamentals expands.

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In the 19th century, Maxwell figured out

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that you can't explain electromagnetic phenomena

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in terms of the existing fundamentals —

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space, time, mass, Newton's laws —

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so he postulated fundamental laws

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of electromagnetism

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and postulated electric charge

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as a fundamental element

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that those laws govern.

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I think that's the situation we're in

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with consciousness.

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If you can't explain consciousness

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in terms of the existing fundamentals —

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space, time, mass, charge —

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then as a matter of logic,
you need to expand the list.

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The natural thing to do is to postulate

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consciousness itself as something fundamental,

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a fundamental building block of nature.

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This doesn't mean you suddenly
can't do science with it.

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This opens up the way for you to do science with it.

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What we then need is to study

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the fundamental laws governing consciousness,

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the laws that connect consciousness

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to other fundamentals: space, time, mass,

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physical processes.

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Physicists sometimes say

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that we want fundamental laws so simple

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that we could write them on the front of a t-shirt.

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Well I think something like that is the situation

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we're in with consciousness.

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We want to find fundamental laws so simple

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we could write them on the front of a t-shirt.

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We don't know what those laws are yet,

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but that's what we're after.

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The second crazy idea

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is that consciousness might be universal.

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Every system might have some degree

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of consciousness.

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This view is sometimes called panpsychism:

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pan for all, psych for mind,

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every system is conscious,

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not just humans, dogs, mice, flies,

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but even Rob Knight's microbes,

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elementary particles.

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Even a photon has some degree of consciousness.

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The idea is not that photons are intelligent

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or thinking.

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It's not that a photon

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is wracked with angst

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because it's thinking, "Aww, I'm always
buzzing around near the speed of light.

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I never get to slow down and smell the roses."

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No, not like that.

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But the thought is maybe photons might have

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some element of raw, subjective feeling,

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some primitive precursor to consciousness.

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This may sound a bit kooky to you.

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I mean, why would anyone think such a crazy thing?

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Some motivation comes from the first crazy idea,

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that consciousness is fundamental.

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If it's fundamental, like space and time and mass,

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it's natural to suppose that it might be universal too,

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the way they are.

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It's also worth noting that although the idea

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seems counterintuitive to us,

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it's much less counterintuitive to people

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from different cultures,

276
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where the human mind is seen as much more

277
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continuous with nature.

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A deeper motivation comes from the idea that

279
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perhaps the most simple and powerful way

280
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to find fundamental laws connecting consciousness

281
00:13:02,987 --> 00:13:04,967
to physical processing

282
00:13:04,967 --> 00:13:08,062
is to link consciousness to information.

283
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Wherever there's information processing,

284
00:13:10,073 --> 00:13:11,138
there's consciousness.

285
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Complex information processing, like in a human,

286
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complex consciousness.

287
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Simple information processing,

288
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simple consciousness.

289
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A really exciting thing is in recent years

290
00:13:21,638 --> 00:13:24,903
a neuroscientist, Giulio Tononi,

291
00:13:24,903 --> 00:13:26,146
has taken this kind of theory

292
00:13:26,146 --> 00:13:28,221
and developed it rigorously

293
00:13:28,221 --> 00:13:30,070
with a mathematical theory.

294
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He has a mathematical measure

295
00:13:31,587 --> 00:13:33,317
of information integration

296
00:13:33,317 --> 00:13:35,236
which he calls phi,

297
00:13:35,236 --> 00:13:36,843
measuring the amount of information

298
00:13:36,843 --> 00:13:38,463
integrated in a system.

299
00:13:38,463 --> 00:13:40,832
And he supposes that phi goes along

300
00:13:40,832 --> 00:13:42,270
with consciousness.

301
00:13:42,270 --> 00:13:43,591
So in a human brain,

302
00:13:43,591 --> 00:13:46,110
incredibly large amount of information integration,

303
00:13:46,110 --> 00:13:48,144
high degree of phi,

304
00:13:48,144 --> 00:13:49,693
a whole lot of consciousness.

305
00:13:49,693 --> 00:13:53,386
In a mouse, medium degree
of information integration,

306
00:13:53,386 --> 00:13:54,405
still pretty significant,

307
00:13:54,405 --> 00:13:56,430
pretty serious amount of consciousness.

308
00:13:56,430 --> 00:13:58,695
But as you go down to worms,

309
00:13:58,695 --> 00:14:02,172
microbes, particles,

310
00:14:02,172 --> 00:14:03,706
the amount of phi falls off.

311
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The amount of information integration falls off,

312
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but it's still non-zero.

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On Tononi's theory,

314
00:14:09,526 --> 00:14:11,733
there's still going to be a non-zero degree

315
00:14:11,733 --> 00:14:13,562
of consciousness.

316
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In effect, he's proposing a fundamental law

317
00:14:16,101 --> 00:14:19,485
of consciousness: high phi, high consciousness.

318
00:14:19,485 --> 00:14:22,107
Now, I don't know if this theory is right,

319
00:14:22,107 --> 00:14:25,318
but it's actually perhaps the leading theory right now

320
00:14:25,318 --> 00:14:26,704
in the science of consciousness,

321
00:14:26,704 --> 00:14:28,935
and it's been used to integrate a whole range

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00:14:28,935 --> 00:14:31,322
of scientific data,

323
00:14:31,322 --> 00:14:33,565
and it does have a nice property
that it is in fact simple enough

324
00:14:33,565 --> 00:14:37,060
you can write it on the front of a t-shirt.

325
00:14:37,060 --> 00:14:39,685
Another final motivation is that

326
00:14:39,685 --> 00:14:41,736
panpsychism might help us to integrate

327
00:14:41,736 --> 00:14:44,950
consciousness into the physical world.

328
00:14:44,950 --> 00:14:48,127
Physicists and philosophers have often observed

329
00:14:48,127 --> 00:14:50,568
that physics is curiously abstract.

330
00:14:50,568 --> 00:14:52,716
It describes the structure of reality

331
00:14:52,716 --> 00:14:54,800
using a bunch of equations,

332
00:14:54,800 --> 00:14:57,824
but it doesn't tell us about the reality

333
00:14:57,824 --> 00:14:59,392
that underlies it.

334
00:14:59,392 --> 00:15:01,289
As Stephen Hawking puts it,

335
00:15:01,289 --> 00:15:05,343
what puts the fire into the equations?

336
00:15:05,343 --> 00:15:07,961
Well, on the panpsychist view,

337
00:15:07,961 --> 00:15:10,600
you can leave the equations of physics as they are,

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00:15:10,600 --> 00:15:12,164
but you can take them to be describing

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00:15:12,164 --> 00:15:13,838
the flux of consciousness.

340
00:15:13,838 --> 00:15:15,876
That's what physics really is ultimately doing,

341
00:15:15,876 --> 00:15:18,205
describing the flux of consciousness.

342
00:15:18,205 --> 00:15:19,858
On this view, it's consciousness

343
00:15:19,858 --> 00:15:24,104
that puts the fire into the equations.

344
00:15:24,104 --> 00:15:25,764
On that view, consciousness doesn't dangle

345
00:15:25,764 --> 00:15:27,440
outside the physical world

346
00:15:27,440 --> 00:15:28,858
as some kind of extra.

347
00:15:28,858 --> 00:15:32,314
It's there right at its heart.

348
00:15:32,314 --> 00:15:35,188
This view, I think, the panpsychist view,

349
00:15:35,188 --> 00:15:38,489
has the potential to transfigure our relationship

350
00:15:38,489 --> 00:15:39,984
to nature,

351
00:15:39,984 --> 00:15:42,219
and it may have some pretty serious social

352
00:15:42,219 --> 00:15:45,912
and ethical consequences.

353
00:15:45,912 --> 00:15:48,071
Some of these may be counterintuitive.

354
00:15:48,071 --> 00:15:51,142
I used to think I shouldn't eat anything

355
00:15:51,142 --> 00:15:53,604
which is conscious,

356
00:15:53,604 --> 00:15:56,208
so therefore I should be vegetarian.

357
00:15:56,208 --> 00:15:58,775
Now, if you're a panpsychist and you take that view,

358
00:15:58,775 --> 00:16:01,505
you're going to go very hungry.

359
00:16:01,505 --> 00:16:02,793
So I think when you think about it,

360
00:16:02,793 --> 00:16:04,960
this tends to transfigure your views,

361
00:16:04,960 --> 00:16:07,203
whereas what matters for ethical purposes

362
00:16:07,203 --> 00:16:08,477
and moral considerations,

363
00:16:08,477 --> 00:16:11,554
not so much the fact of consciousness,

364
00:16:11,554 --> 00:16:15,510
but the degree and the complexity of consciousness.

365
00:16:15,510 --> 00:16:17,448
It's also natural to ask about consciousness

366
00:16:17,448 --> 00:16:20,498
in other systems, like computers.

367
00:16:20,498 --> 00:16:22,287
What about the artificially intelligent system

368
00:16:22,287 --> 00:16:25,729
in the movie "Her," Samantha?

369
00:16:25,729 --> 00:16:27,129
Is she conscious?

370
00:16:27,129 --> 00:16:28,560
Well, if you take the informational,

371
00:16:28,560 --> 00:16:29,740
panpsychist view,

372
00:16:29,740 --> 00:16:33,211
she certainly has complicated information processing

373
00:16:33,211 --> 00:16:34,632
and integration,

374
00:16:34,632 --> 00:16:37,299
so the answer is very likely yes, she is conscious.

375
00:16:37,299 --> 00:16:40,237
If that's right, it raises pretty serious

376
00:16:40,237 --> 00:16:42,602
ethical issues about both the ethics

377
00:16:42,602 --> 00:16:46,123
of developing intelligent computer systems

378
00:16:46,123 --> 00:16:48,859
and the ethics of turning them off.

379
00:16:48,859 --> 00:16:51,359
Finally, you might ask about the consciousness

380
00:16:51,359 --> 00:16:53,241
of whole groups,

381
00:16:53,241 --> 00:16:55,078
the planet.

382
00:16:55,078 --> 00:16:58,001
Does Canada have its own consciousness?

383
00:16:58,001 --> 00:17:00,100
Or at a more local level,

384
00:17:00,100 --> 00:17:01,308
does an integrated group

385
00:17:01,308 --> 00:17:03,571
like the audience at a TED conference,

386
00:17:03,571 --> 00:17:07,020
are we right now having a
collective TED consciousness,

387
00:17:07,020 --> 00:17:08,513
an inner movie

388
00:17:08,513 --> 00:17:11,319
for this collective TED group

389
00:17:11,319 --> 00:17:12,999
which is distinct from the inner movies

390
00:17:12,999 --> 00:17:14,088
of each of our parts?

391
00:17:14,088 --> 00:17:16,243
I don't know the answer to that question,

392
00:17:16,253 --> 00:17:17,624
but I think it's at least one

393
00:17:17,624 --> 00:17:20,098
worth taking seriously.

394
00:17:20,098 --> 00:17:22,435
Okay, so this panpsychist vision,

395
00:17:22,435 --> 00:17:24,248
it is a radical one,

396
00:17:24,248 --> 00:17:26,462
and I don't know that it's correct.

397
00:17:26,462 --> 00:17:28,315
I'm actually more confident about

398
00:17:28,315 --> 00:17:29,948
the first crazy idea,

399
00:17:29,948 --> 00:17:32,117
that consciousness is fundamental,

400
00:17:32,117 --> 00:17:33,920
than about the second one,

401
00:17:33,920 --> 00:17:36,141
that it's universal.

402
00:17:36,141 --> 00:17:38,219
I mean, the view raises any number of questions,

403
00:17:38,219 --> 00:17:39,760
has any number of challenges,

404
00:17:39,760 --> 00:17:41,120
like how do those little bits

405
00:17:41,120 --> 00:17:42,860
of consciousness add up

406
00:17:42,860 --> 00:17:45,157
to the kind of complex consciousness

407
00:17:45,157 --> 00:17:47,480
we know and love.

408
00:17:47,480 --> 00:17:48,940
If we can answer those questions,

409
00:17:48,940 --> 00:17:50,445
then I think we're going to be well on our way

410
00:17:50,445 --> 00:17:53,532
to a serious theory of consciousness.

411
00:17:53,532 --> 00:17:56,920
If not, well, this is the hardest problem perhaps

412
00:17:56,920 --> 00:17:58,764
in science and philosophy.

413
00:17:58,764 --> 00:18:02,209
We can't expect to solve it overnight.

414
00:18:02,209 --> 00:18:05,749
But I do think we're going to figure it out eventually.

415
00:18:05,749 --> 00:18:08,736
Understanding consciousness is a real key, I think,

416
00:18:08,736 --> 00:18:11,188
both to understanding the universe

417
00:18:11,188 --> 00:18:13,718
and to understanding ourselves.

418
00:18:13,718 --> 00:18:16,621
It may just take the right crazy idea.

419
00:18:16,621 --> 00:18:18,612
Thank you.

420
00:18:18,612 --> 00:18:20,300
(Applause)