WEBVTT

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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.

NOTE Paragraph

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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,

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where the human mind is seen as much more

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continuous with nature.

NOTE Paragraph

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A deeper motivation comes from the idea that

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perhaps the most simple and powerful way

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to find fundamental laws connecting consciousness

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to physical processing

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is to link consciousness to information.

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Wherever there's information processing,

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there's consciousness.

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Complex information processing, like in a human,

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complex consciousness.

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Simple information processing,

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simple consciousness.

NOTE Paragraph

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A really exciting thing is in recent years

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a neuroscientist, Giulio Tononi,

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has taken this kind of theory

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and developed it rigorously

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with a mathematical theory.

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He has a mathematical measure

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of information integration

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which he calls phi,

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measuring the amount of information

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integrated in a system.

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And he supposes that phi goes along

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with consciousness.

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So in a human brain,

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incredibly large amount of information integration,

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high degree of phi,

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a whole lot of consciousness.

00:13:49.693 --> 00:13:53.386
In a mouse, medium degree
of information integration,

00:13:53.386 --> 00:13:54.405
still pretty significant,

00:13:54.405 --> 00:13:56.430
pretty serious amount of consciousness.

00:13:56.430 --> 00:13:58.695
But as you go down to worms,

00:13:58.695 --> 00:14:02.172
microbes, particles,

00:14:02.172 --> 00:14:03.706
the amount of phi falls off.

00:14:03.706 --> 00:14:06.139
The amount of information integration falls off,

00:14:06.139 --> 00:14:07.587
but it's still non-zero.

00:14:07.587 --> 00:14:09.526
On Tononi's theory,

00:14:09.526 --> 00:14:11.733
there's still going to be a non-zero degree

00:14:11.733 --> 00:14:13.562
of consciousness.

00:14:13.562 --> 00:14:16.101
In effect, he's proposing a fundamental law

00:14:16.101 --> 00:14:19.485
of consciousness: high phi, high consciousness.

00:14:19.485 --> 00:14:22.107
Now, I don't know if this theory is right,

00:14:22.107 --> 00:14:25.318
but it's actually perhaps the leading theory right now

00:14:25.318 --> 00:14:26.704
in the science of consciousness,

00:14:26.704 --> 00:14:28.935
and it's been used to integrate a whole range

00:14:28.935 --> 00:14:31.322
of scientific data,

00:14:31.322 --> 00:14:33.565
and it does have a nice property
that it is in fact simple enough

00:14:33.565 --> 00:14:37.060
you can write it on the front of a t-shirt.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:37.060 --> 00:14:39.685
Another final motivation is that

00:14:39.685 --> 00:14:41.736
panpsychism might help us to integrate

00:14:41.736 --> 00:14:44.950
consciousness into the physical world.

00:14:44.950 --> 00:14:48.127
Physicists and philosophers have often observed

00:14:48.127 --> 00:14:50.568
that physics is curiously abstract.

00:14:50.568 --> 00:14:52.716
It describes the structure of reality

00:14:52.716 --> 00:14:54.800
using a bunch of equations,

00:14:54.800 --> 00:14:57.824
but it doesn't tell us about the reality

00:14:57.824 --> 00:14:59.392
that underlies it.

00:14:59.392 --> 00:15:01.289
As Stephen Hawking puts it,

00:15:01.289 --> 00:15:05.343
what puts the fire into the equations?

00:15:05.343 --> 00:15:07.961
Well, on the panpsychist view,

00:15:07.961 --> 00:15:10.600
you can leave the equations of physics as they are,

00:15:10.600 --> 00:15:12.164
but you can take them to be describing

00:15:12.164 --> 00:15:13.838
the flux of consciousness.

00:15:13.838 --> 00:15:15.876
That's what physics really is ultimately doing,

00:15:15.876 --> 00:15:18.205
describing the flux of consciousness.

00:15:18.205 --> 00:15:19.858
On this view, it's consciousness

00:15:19.858 --> 00:15:24.104
that puts the fire into the equations.

00:15:24.104 --> 00:15:25.764
On that view, consciousness doesn't dangle

00:15:25.764 --> 00:15:27.440
outside the physical world

00:15:27.440 --> 00:15:28.858
as some kind of extra.

00:15:28.858 --> 00:15:32.314
It's there right at its heart.

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:32.314 --> 00:15:35.188
This view, I think, the panpsychist view,

00:15:35.188 --> 00:15:38.489
has the potential to transfigure our relationship

00:15:38.489 --> 00:15:39.984
to nature,

00:15:39.984 --> 00:15:42.219
and it may have some pretty serious social

00:15:42.219 --> 00:15:45.912
and ethical consequences.

00:15:45.912 --> 00:15:48.071
Some of these may be counterintuitive.

00:15:48.071 --> 00:15:51.142
I used to think I shouldn't eat anything

00:15:51.142 --> 00:15:53.604
which is conscious,

00:15:53.604 --> 00:15:56.208
so therefore I should be vegetarian.

00:15:56.208 --> 00:15:58.775
Now, if you're a panpsychist and you take that view,

00:15:58.775 --> 00:16:01.505
you're going to go very hungry.

00:16:01.505 --> 00:16:02.793
So I think when you think about it,

00:16:02.793 --> 00:16:04.960
this tends to transfigure your views,

00:16:04.960 --> 00:16:07.203
whereas what matters for ethical purposes

00:16:07.203 --> 00:16:08.477
and moral considerations,

00:16:08.477 --> 00:16:11.554
not so much the fact of consciousness,

00:16:11.554 --> 00:16:15.510
but the degree and the complexity of consciousness.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:15.510 --> 00:16:17.448
It's also natural to ask about consciousness

00:16:17.448 --> 00:16:20.498
in other systems, like computers.

00:16:20.498 --> 00:16:22.287
What about the artificially intelligent system

00:16:22.287 --> 00:16:25.729
in the movie "Her," Samantha?

00:16:25.729 --> 00:16:27.129
Is she conscious?

00:16:27.129 --> 00:16:28.560
Well, if you take the informational,

00:16:28.560 --> 00:16:29.740
panpsychist view,

00:16:29.740 --> 00:16:33.211
she certainly has complicated information processing

00:16:33.211 --> 00:16:34.632
and integration,

00:16:34.632 --> 00:16:37.299
so the answer is very likely yes, she is conscious.

00:16:37.299 --> 00:16:40.237
If that's right, it raises pretty serious

00:16:40.237 --> 00:16:42.602
ethical issues about both the ethics

00:16:42.602 --> 00:16:46.123
of developing intelligent computer systems

00:16:46.123 --> 00:16:48.859
and the ethics of turning them off.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:48.859 --> 00:16:51.359
Finally, you might ask about the consciousness

00:16:51.359 --> 00:16:53.241
of whole groups,

00:16:53.241 --> 00:16:55.078
the planet.

00:16:55.078 --> 00:16:58.001
Does Canada have its own consciousness?

00:16:58.001 --> 00:17:00.100
Or at a more local level,

00:17:00.100 --> 00:17:01.308
does an integrated group

00:17:01.308 --> 00:17:03.571
like the audience at a TED conference,

00:17:03.571 --> 00:17:07.020
are we right now having a
collective TED consciousness,

00:17:07.020 --> 00:17:08.513
an inner movie

00:17:08.513 --> 00:17:11.319
for this collective TED group

00:17:11.319 --> 00:17:12.999
which is distinct from the inner movies

00:17:12.999 --> 00:17:14.088
of each of our parts?

00:17:14.088 --> 00:17:16.243
I don't know the answer to that question,

00:17:16.253 --> 00:17:17.624
but I think it's at least one

00:17:17.624 --> 00:17:20.098
worth taking seriously.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:20.098 --> 00:17:22.435
Okay, so this panpsychist vision,

00:17:22.435 --> 00:17:24.248
it is a radical one,

00:17:24.248 --> 00:17:26.462
and I don't know that it's correct.

00:17:26.462 --> 00:17:28.315
I'm actually more confident about

00:17:28.315 --> 00:17:29.948
the first crazy idea,

00:17:29.948 --> 00:17:32.117
that consciousness is fundamental,

00:17:32.117 --> 00:17:33.920
than about the second one,

00:17:33.920 --> 00:17:36.141
that it's universal.

00:17:36.141 --> 00:17:38.219
I mean, the view raises any number of questions,

00:17:38.219 --> 00:17:39.760
has any number of challenges,

00:17:39.760 --> 00:17:41.120
like how do those little bits

00:17:41.120 --> 00:17:42.860
of consciousness add up

00:17:42.860 --> 00:17:45.157
to the kind of complex consciousness

00:17:45.157 --> 00:17:47.480
we know and love.

00:17:47.480 --> 00:17:48.940
If we can answer those questions,

00:17:48.940 --> 00:17:50.445
then I think we're going to be well on our way

00:17:50.445 --> 00:17:53.532
to a serious theory of consciousness.

00:17:53.532 --> 00:17:56.920
If not, well, this is the hardest problem perhaps

00:17:56.920 --> 00:17:58.764
in science and philosophy.

00:17:58.764 --> 00:18:02.209
We can't expect to solve it overnight.

00:18:02.209 --> 00:18:05.749
But I do think we're going to figure it out eventually.

00:18:05.749 --> 00:18:08.736
Understanding consciousness is a real key, I think,

00:18:08.736 --> 00:18:11.188
both to understanding the universe

00:18:11.188 --> 00:18:13.718
and to understanding ourselves.

00:18:13.718 --> 00:18:16.621
It may just take the right crazy idea.

NOTE Paragraph

00:18:16.621 --> 00:18:18.612
Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:18:18.612 --> 00:18:20.300
(Applause)