Latest / Art of the Question / Is Your Red the Same as Mine? - George Musser - #49

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Is Your Red the Same as Mine? - George Musser - #49 · Art of the Question

• Julius Moorman: So George, yeah, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. And yeah, like I said, I was really looking forward to ⁓ to having this conversation. Like me, you are a science communicator, although you have a lot more experience ⁓ than I do. I was curious what What sparked your interest in science and why did you decide to become a science communicator rather than a hardcore scientist? Yeah, well, what's my origin story? By the way, I'm really happy to be on on your pod. Is it really you've covered some amazing topics across science, philosophy, culture, and I'm honored to be part of that kind of program that you've started. So the The way I usually tell a story is I like a lot of us, I have multiple interests. Science. I was really interested in and and interested in politics, geopolitics. Music, lots of things. And I tried to juggle all these things through different parts of of my life. And I'd always I guess I settled into a routine where science was kind of my day job in a way. It was the thing that was like the main focus. But I did journalism, writing, mostly in politics and social issues, kind of that was my night job. It was actually literally sometimes my night job. I used to ride around with police officers in in like all night going around the town and I wrote a series of articles. This was when I was living in upstate New York in graduate school. And it was just to riff on that a little bit, it was I love that kind of journalism. It doesn't kind of the the thing people think about when they think of journalism, but it was really being a social hub. P the social the police, the social workers, the local politicians started coming to me. Because I knew everybody. I'd interviewed everybody. I'd been in their cop cars, I'd been in their offices, I'd been in their homeless shelters, their drug rehabilitation clinics everywhere. And I kind of had a within that small town had a pretty wide ability. And I tried to incorporate that into my work and also kind of in the connections that I was able to make with people. So I was doing that, but upstate New York is a cold, literally cold environment. I love it in the summer, but in the winters it's It's brutal. And I'd always want to live in California. So I saw a job come up as a science editor at a nonprofit, kind of a science education nonprofit group in California. And I until that point in my life, I never really thought about doing science communication. Again, I was kind of in this mode of doing both, but separately. And so I applied for the job and I actually got it kind of almost to my, you know, sometimes you really want something, you don't get it. Sometimes you kind of Aren't sure, but you do get it. It's like the kind of serendipity of life. And I had to have a very awkward conversation with my advisor, because in graduate school you have a faculty advisor that's the person you work with and work for. And he was shocked, kind of pissed actually. But the next day, he was like, I think you're right. This is a great direction for you. Frankly, the world doesn't need more scientists. The world needs ⁓ communicators. That was his thinking. Now I'm actually wondering whether that's really true. But anyway, at the time it seemed that was a good thing. And then I took a leave of absence technically and I loaded up my car and drove out to San Francisco. And that's a whole adventure driving across the country. We can talk about some other time. And started this job and I found I really liked it because, like you do. So it's really very much in the mode of what this podcast is is attempting. You get to cover a lot of areas. You get to dabble in a lot of things. And sometimes you can go deep, but then you extract yourself and you move on to the next thing. And I kind of that suited my personality type. I like looking at a lot of different things rather than as a scientist, where you go deep and you go deeper and you keep going deeper, deeper, deeper. And yeah, people do move around a little bit, but they definitely have to concentrate and specialize. And that's fun, but I enjoy the kind of more dabbling approach myself. So I ended up publishing some of the work I did in graduate school on the planet Venus. So at one point in my life I was an expert on the planet Venus and then just moved into science education. I did a lot of work with teachers and also science ⁓ writing and science editing. Yeah. I mean that I I I completely recognize what you say ⁓ when you're talking about dabbling into different Topics. It's what I love about journalism. It's basically I can make what I'm interested in at the time. And my interests are all over the place and they differ from week to week. And I really love it when I get to speak to someone as a science communicator who has dedicated their entire lives to one single topic, and they're so knowledgeable about this very topic. And it's great. And I mean, my job wouldn't be as fun without having those people, but I am not one of those people. I can't commit myself to one singular topic for the rest of my life, which is why I ended up doing this. So I I completely recognize that. And I will argue, even though it might be ⁓ yeah, may people may have a different view on it, but I do also believe that when you are not a true expert in a field, you can kind of be unburdened by some of the knowledge and some of the assumptions you have if you operate within a field. I think sometimes when you're when you're too knowledgeable about something, it almost becomes impossible to it's very hard to unlearn stuff, right? So Some things become very obvious if you are a certain expert. And that's not always a great thing if you want to communicate to a broader audience, even an informed audience, because if you are slightly uninformed, you are asking the questions that people actually want to know. ⁓ so I think that's very helpful. Yeah, I really like how you put the unlearn. I had a dis short discussion of that idea in, I guess, my very first book, that scientific progress Comes from there's different ways that science makes progress. Some is just discovery, something that was never known was known. But a lot of times, and Einstein's theories really fall into this particular category, scientific progress comes from unlearning. It comes from something that humans took for granted and then had to unlearn it and realize that that thing they have been taking for granted isn't a feature of reality. Copernicus was another person in that. Camp. If it's look, of course the sun goes around the earth. That's what you see, literally. If I stand like on a mountain, I watch the course of the sun over the course of the day, east to west, it's going around me. But I we had to, we humanity, Copernicus, and it wasn't just Copernicus, it actually was known earlier, even, but he was the one who kind of nailed it. We had to unlearn that and realize, no, it actually would always look like the sun's going around you, even If you're going around it, it's just a matter of shifting your perspective. Same thing with Einstein. We of course the notion of simultaneous is a valid notion. I can speak of what's happening to you now. I can speak what's happening to me now. That word now is like intuitive, right? We look at the clock, it's the same clock time. So we had to we, again, Einstein, but all of us had to unlearn the idea of there being an absolute notion of simultaneity in the universe. And that's what led down to the whole, you know, relativity theories and and and beyond that we're still coping with today. See I I the Yeah, no no, no, no, I agree. I w I was just listening and and and I agree. And I know ⁓ I'm I'm kinda like tooting my own horn here ⁓ and and and just promoting ⁓ well well communicators like us in general, but I think there's ⁓ there's something going for it to have ⁓ to ask certain questions. If I have a question, it's probably an indication that more people have that question because I don't have the 30, 40 something years of experience that someone in the field may have, and therefore they have different questions than ⁓ than other people. ⁓ but I I I wanna make a segue into something you recently published. It's ⁓ the article you sent me, which is a fascinating piece on consciousness, it's about subjective experience, it's about ⁓ observing colors, it's about feelings, and you start the article about the fact that you did a zombie test. Can you tell me a little bit more about the zombie test you did? Because it's I I was I was being playful in the article, and it's not a zombie test in the sense of like a Romero zombie shuffling. So I'm not undead. I'm pretty sure I'm alive and have not been reanimated. But I was using zombie there in the philosophical zombie sense. And this is a being could be an AI, but some kind of creature that seems to be conscious, seems to be sentient. But it turns out they're kind of just faking it. They're there's actually no they're they're they're waxing eloquent about the sun's sunset or the flowers or w or anything that we commonly associate with sentience. But on the inside, there's just kind of mechanical kind of operations going on. There's no real sense of a flower, there's no real sense of a sunset. It's just they're they're kind of spouting that. And so That's the sense I'm wishing you're using zombie. And the question is, how would you know whether I'm a zombie in that sense? How would you know that I'm having inner experience? Because you can't trust what I say. I c I could be do just be lying to you, lying to myself. What do I know? It's also possible we all are all zombies. This is there's just thinking in that area, but let's assume that it's possible to not be a zombie. So how would you kind of differentiate the not zombie from the zombie? So you have to have some way to Probe the interactivity of the mind, the brain. And this is this is a profound takes you kind of down a profound path that's way beyond even the little experiment that I I talked about in that article. And it takes you down the path of questioning interiority as as a category. And we so science deals with the exterior, deals with the observable, deals with what's reproducible, what can be seen in a sense by multiple people. We can agree on it. It's happening outside us. But a lot of the phenomena, certainly the phenomena of consciousness, but the honored things we talk about in physics have this interior component to them. We can get into some of those others later that come up in quantum mechanics and cosmology. But how do you get at them? And how do you kind of fuse the interior to exterior? And this is what I call the inside-outside problem. And it comes up in against, as I said, a number of contexts. So The proposition of that particular experiment was that to be conscious is to have a certain type of brain activity. And this is goes under the rubric of in integrated information theory. And the idea is that consciousness comes from the integration or the kind of coherence or the harmony within our brain activity. And to the extent we have this harmony, we are conscious. So the device that I ⁓ strap was strapped into and the they applied magnetic pulses to my brain and measured the electrical activity was intended to get at whether my brain was acting in this kind of harmonious or coherent or integrated way. And I'm pleased to report that it is and that the according to this theory, I am conscious and I'm not a zombie. Now I need to put a bunch of asterisks on that. The device and the theory sometimes don't agree with each other. They don't it You don't necessarily need the theory to explain the device, but you can say the device was inspired by the theory of strict. In fact, I got an email from David Chalmers afterwards, the philosopher who talks a lot about consciousness and said, George, I love your article, but you know, you know, you need asterisk it and say, you know, technically it wasn't a zombie detector because the readout would still suggest that you're conscious, even if you really are a zombie. So the he the point being it's actually literally impossible to tell s someone's a zombie from the outside, even through this kind of apparatus. But I think he was he he you know, we were both laughing about it. He was he acknowledged that that the experiment did indicate that, you know, there's something to my claims of of being being conscious. And the the the experiment was really actually still experimental, but it can't be used for medical reasons. Can be determined whether someone who's in a kind of coma or unresponsive state actually has an interior life. That's always, you know, something that families worry about and families are wondering about. Is my son, daughter, et cetera, actually in there somewhere? And the the device can you know I can't really it can offer guidance in that kind of very difficult decision that that people make. Yeah. So that was kind of the serious purpose of that machine. But that's kind of what I ⁓ what I talk about in that article. Yeah, and and is what Chalmer Chalmers meant there is that if it was a true ⁓ philosophical zombie, like a of or or like a perfect humanoid ⁓ replica of ⁓ of a human, then it would be so sophisticated that it would also show the same electrical signals and therefore we can never be certain whether it is indeed conscious. Exactly, exactly right. Yeah, yeah. Like Westworld, basically. Have you seen Westworld? You know, I watched the original movie and I watched a couple episodes in the show when it came out and just kind of fell off. Why did you like it? Well, the season one was great because I just thought the entire premise of living in a future where we are able to build humanoid robots that are indistinguishable from human life and that we can kind of as a theme park go there. in the the wild west in this example, but you can think of any other time that you would like to travel to, and you'd be around surrounded by NPCs who are so incredibly sophisticated that these NPCs don't even know that they are indeed NPCs. And this just crazy adventure. And it was just like so exciting for me to think about that and what it would be like to actually experience such a a game, if you will. But after a while, like you you kind of like the novelty vanishes, and I the the second season didn't grip me as much as ⁓ the first ⁓ season did. ⁓ because after a while it's just okay, yeah we we get it, right? Okay, that's the the this is the NPC indistinguishable from real life humanoid robots like We need something new and it was kinda difficult. So maybe it would have been ⁓ functioned better as a movie or a Black Mirror episode or whatever, rather than ⁓ a show that was going season into season into season. ⁓ but yeah, that was my take on it. I loved season one, ⁓ didn't finish season two. You know, it happens a lot with shows, right, where it has such a great start, but it's just hard for them to develop it or I mean the the show Dark I I thought really was perfect in that regard. Yes. Three seasons, they knew start, they knew the end, they knew how to get from from A to B. Battlestar Galactica, kind of the reboot, was an example of how they started amazingly and then just fell off. They couldn't they couldn't keep it up. Yeah, it's difficult. It's difficult. But that's why b why Black Mirror is so smart. It's ⁓ harder to produce and ⁓ basically they're making every season they have to make five new movies. ⁓ as as a show, so it's it's challenging, but ⁓ every episode is new and and why it's why it's one of my favorite shows of all time. ⁓ if we before we dive deeper into your your article, because there's a lot of things I would like to dissect there and a lot of things I I wanna get into. ⁓ but as you know, I have ⁓ a lot of philosophers on the show. I have a lot of people who are With technology. I recently had someone who studies near-death experiences. And I I I ask a lot of my guests what their definition of consciousness is. And I'm very curious to hear yours. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I'm actually my n for my next book, I want to talk about the nature of life and the question of what is life comes up in there. And to the and I'll come back to consciousness in a second, but just to riff on life a little bit. I think that. In a way, we start with these intuitive ideas of what it means to be a living thing. And then science asks, ⁓ what does that actually mean technically? But I think a lot of times it almost doesn't matter what the d the kind of loose intuitive is kind of definition is enough to boot up a field. And then the course of the development of that field will then retroactively tell us what it studies. So in the case of life, I think the origin of life, knowing how life originated on the earth. Was it in a vent hydrothermal event, or was it in a pond, or did it come from outer space? That will define life force. So the answer will come the definition will come kind of after the answers. And I think consciousness is a little bit like that too. We have these ideas of what consciousness means. And I'll tell you what my idea is in a in a moment, but just a broader take on this. But I think ultimately, once we have a theory of consciousness. based on our loose ideas, that will provide us a definition that we've been seeking all along. So we shouldn't, in other words, get too caught up on definitions. However, having said all that, my personal definition is consciousness is that in the interior life that we have, it's the experiences that we have that go beyond their kind of utilitarian or informational content. So red, I see red in the car, I stop the car. Or, you know, if I see red, in any case I'm kind of I I'm I I'm being careful about that thing. So red evokes caution or evokes do not enter or something like that. Mm-hmm. But beyond that, beyond that kind of association that is kind of informational, there's also redness. It's like, whoa, it's red. It has kind of a feel to it. It has a something, it evokes it it you can feel it in the pit of your stomach, that experience the red has. It's beautiful, it's awful, all these things. There's different shades of red, and we that should this will come up in later when we talk about my article. Different shades of red have slightly different meanings, like a fire engine red versus a sunset red versus whatever. So to me, consciousness is this is what philosophers call phenomenal consciousness. That when I say the word consciousness, I really mean what they call phenomenal consciousness, and that is this experiential quality of the world that is. purely an interior construct. It's c within our heads. It's not in the world in a way. So it's not I think you've talked before about trees in the forest, and that's kind of what it gets at. The tree falls in the forest, it makes a sound in the exterior sense of sound, in the sense of sound like acoustic waves propagating through the air, th that sort of thing. But does it make a sound in the interior way? And no, it doesn't, because there needs to be an experiencer to do that. And needs to be someone who can take in the sound, combine it with their musical training, their language, their associations, and make a quality of sound. So this quality or qualia is really co central to consciousness for me. Yeah. No, I I think I I would agree and I I I think it's very close to to how I would describe it. And I I like that you bring up the the colour color part of it ⁓ because it's also pretty It's an important part of the article, and I think there's a lot to unpack there because one of the questions we can ask is Is your red the same as my red? Right. And then there was this study, I believe, where actually they they had different groups where they were able to kind of ⁓ see that ⁓ Some people experience red in a different way, and and there were groups of people who had a slightly different experience to the color red, but they were able to group these people. So then you could say, like, okay, and and again, hard problem of consciousness. ⁓ we can never be sure that my red is exactly the same as your red. But there is also something very objective to light, to to to ⁓ what Waves, right? I mean, we can we have instruments, it's how we look into space, and we can see that red lives at a certain wavelength. So there is definitely something objective about light. However, that wavelength still does not tell us about the inner experience of it. But again, you mentioned nature there as well. There is something alarming about the color red. And that is not just a social construct, because in nature, red is used in all sorts of ways to indicate danger in in snakes, in frogs, in in every other thing. And I think if you could say like, yeah, but still we don't know whether that is just okay, they they've associated that color. We still don't know whether it would be the same or not. Is it though? Because there's also something about the contrast of it, I feel like ⁓ the reason why it read really stands out. So I feel like there's subjectiveness to this question, but there's also definitely a lot of objective objective ⁓ objectivities involved. And I was just curious to hear your take on on this entire ⁓ problem. Yeah, that it's it's you're a lot of great. Intuitions and insights and questions in there. So I guess question number one would be, and I don't think I've seen a study of this, but ⁓ there must be one by biologist. Is it true that red in nature is associated with something humans or primates or mammals in general should be wary of? And if so, why? What why did nature single out that particular set of wavelengths? I I would love to see that. I mean, maybe a bee or a bird that can see s see in in ⁓ you know, kind of in a wider spectrum wouldn't have those associations with red. So that would be a kind of a cool it's almost like a science fair experiment. You can ⁓ if you have bees in your backyard, you probably could figure out some kind of experiment that would probe their response to red things. ⁓ so, but given that that that is the case ecologically, you would expect, you would hope, you would rec almost demand that Our brains would have those associations because we're evolved creatures in the world, we would have died, our lineage would have died out, you know, eons ago if we hadn't been attuned to these dangers. So the fact that we do respond to red ⁓ with with fear, alarm, or whatever, or wariness, that's not the surprising thing. So the surprising because if it didn't, then we'd be in trouble. So then the question is. And that that's the again, that goes to the information content of it. But then the question is why do we have the experience of red, which can invoke alarm, but also like other things, love or or or or whatever. So why do we have there's a construction of the experience of red that occurs in our brains? And that constitutes our minds, brain and mind being distinct here, ⁓ mind almost being the software in a way on the hardware of the brain. So why is there like a variable or a matrix in the software of the mind that has these associations with red and how are those constructed? And that's kind of what I was was I was trying to get at. And then the proposition I was entertaining in that article, and actually I talked about it a little bit in my my recent book. So the two were kind of one came out of the other in a way, is there are multiple associations. So you can say, well, this color red is a little bit like that color red, but very different from the color of blue, or this color of red is a lot like my emotion of danger. Blue is a more chill kind of color, whatever. You have a series of emotional and perceptual associations. And you can, and you, but the scientists, this is what the scientists do, they can actually kind of map those and create almost like a geography. So they can. Put things next to one another or farther apart based on the strength of those associations and create a geometric object. And in abstract geometry, the geometry of experience, like the space of experience, very high dimensional. Within that space of experience, then kind of create a a a structure. They actually do call it a structure. that can be like a polygon or some higher dimensional version of that. And that shape of that polygon. That is what we experience as either red, blue, green, hate, pain, any of the other kinds of experiences that we have. So if you do this approach and you think in terms of structure, then what you it kind of changes the nature of the problem a little bit. So instead of looking for kind of a direct stimulus response, I see red, ⁓ my brain has a certain pattern, kind of like input-output. I look for structures. And then you can then go to different people. And map their structures in them. And do they have the same structure corresponding to red? And that's why the kind of article was framed in Is Your Red My Red? And this was done, that they did it, and they did it with a a series of people. Some people were kind of n had c ⁓ color normal vision or kind of the majority normative color vision. Some people were deficient, I don't remember the details in Say it's green. I'm making it up, but it wasn't that, but it was something like that. So they were what we would call it colorblind or color vision impaired or had a different color experience. And then there was a third group. This is actually done in Japan, I believe. So the third group actually was super interesting because those people passed all the kind of they they didn't register on the standard psychological test as being deficient, colorblind. They could Still kind of identified red lights, ⁓ traffic, no, red, yellow, green traffic lights, all those kinds of standard tests, different mixing of colors they could get by. But they said, they told the scientists, look, I know I passed these tests, but my color vision is different. I just can't put my finger on it, but it is different from other people I've talked to. So they had this experiential reported difference. And it turns out they those that Group of people who said they were different but didn't pass the test did indeed have different structures in their brain. So there are three kinds of structures here. There was the normal structure, the kind of ⁓ colorblind structure. There's a better word for colorblind than that. I I know I'm I'm I'm bad with my DEI on this, but there's a ⁓ people with different kinds of color vision. And then this third group. And the third group was kind of intermediate between the other two. Mm-hmm. And then then they said, well, these people really do see a different red than other people see. So their red really is different because their structure is different from the other groups. That's so interesting. And is isn't this very similar as to why and how AIs are able to understand language so well and why it works across different languages? Because the structures of a certain language if you map it out in a 3D structure, that it can basically speak Japanese as well as it can speak English and and Dutch because a lot of our languages have similar structures. Is is I've I I I believe I've seen a visualization of ⁓ how this works. Yeah, I'm little glad you brought that up because that is it's absolutely the s the analogy that I I thought of. And that is I think one of the unheralded discoveries. of machine learning AI. Mm the fact that it can respond to dialogue, okay, that that's pretty amazing. And its its information nobilities are are astounding and its ability to recognize people and images. But this language thing is so cool. So they do exactly what you you described and what I was getting at with the the colors, but they do it instead with words or phonemes or tokens or some kind of basic unit of language. They map all the associations that words have with one another. You know, ⁓ and they imbibe the it works when there's a lot of literature in that language, but it actually works on so-called low resource languages that have less kind of published material. And they just create a map of all the different word associations, like a giant word cloud, but built in like hugely high-dimensional word cloud. And the the discovery is that the word clouds are all the language or I don't know literally all the languages, but all lots of the human lots of human languages. Actually, I think they're going now into like whale languages, are similar. So all languages are basically the same language. They ⁓ and it makes sense in a way, they're discovering the same or excuse me, they're representing the same world. But okay, within our brains, there's this giant word cloud, this is set of associations that we have that forms a h a high dimensional geometry. And what makes French different from Dutch, from English, from Chinese, et cetera. Is that you can basically rotate it the word cloud and you can cause them to come into alignment. And that rotation represents kind of the obvious differences that languages have. The vocabulary diff or specific words to sounds, tones for tonal languages do differ. But if you're able to do that kind of rotation, you will have removed those. You could call them superficial aspects of language to get at kind of the deep language, and then you use that to do your translation. And it it stands to reason that ⁓ the word love, amour, or s or or whatever in the Latin language play the same role. They have the same kind of content. They have the same relations to other words. So if you can do this rotation, you can kind of ⁓ figure out what word plays the role in Spanish or French that love plays in English. And then you can kind of cross over and course things get more interesting when you have words that don't have a direct ⁓ I mean you're a multilingual person. I'm sure there'll things you can say in Dutch that you can't say in English or other languages. Same ⁓ I mean German's full of those kinds of words. That's the fun when you get together with ⁓ friends over dinner and people speak different languages, you kind of compare, hey, do you how do you say this? I can't say that. That doesn't have a word in our language. So though but those words too can be kind of mapped using this word clout. Thing. That's what kinds of gives it some extra power. It'll map maybe a single word in German to a phrase in English or a word like zeitgeist in German. We just use zeitgeist in English as a word because we don't have a word, you know, time ghost or whatever. We don't, we don't say that. We just say zeitgeist. So, but if I were forced in English to kind of I'd have to give a whole phrase to mean that, and that that will work. Then this is now how Google Translate and the other translation ⁓ AI so-called translation systems work as they do this ⁓ structural analysis. Yeah, I I agree. And it that's what what's make what makes it so interesting. And and just to give a couple examples there, a b ⁓ a a famous one that doesn't translate to English well is gezellig, which is a Dutch word for ⁓ getting together with friends. It's cozy, it's it's there's a certain vibe going on, ⁓ Perhaps drinks are flowing, they don't have to be flowing. Maybe it's it's it's cozy, but it's it's it's a different kind of cozy. There is not a great translation. You need a whole bunch of words in English in order to translate that. And I believe in Japanese there's a there's a wonderful example. They have a specific word, I believe, for the feeling when you went to the barber and after they messed up your hair, the sadness, the specific sadness you're feeling after the barber has messed up your haircut. I I wouldn't be able to tell you the Japanese word, but apparently they have a specific word for it, which I think is amazing. But I think more more interestingly, ⁓ when I saw this ⁓ visualization of language and like you say that you can rotate it in a certain way ⁓ so that it basically maps onto this other language, I think Is a great people always try to, or not everyone, but many people try to dismiss AI as never that it could never be truly intelligent because they're merely prediction machines and ⁓ therefore ⁓ that's just ⁓ it's they're they're they're smart calculators rather than something that can ever be truly intelligent. However, if we are able to map all of our languages into this structure that we can use and twist and turn, and that it basically helps to communicate everything we want to communicate in this different language, even though we ⁓ are missing certain words from it. I think that does imply that it could at least be possible for a computer to be truly intelligent if it's pa possible to at least translate a very important part of our communication, which is language. ⁓ what what do you make of that? And what do you make of of AI in general when we're talking about consciousness? So yeah, so ⁓ come back to the machine consciousness question in a second, but ⁓ to riff off intelligence. So yeah, that there's no question that AI is intelligent. The A the I in the AI is no misnomer. ⁓ it It can st it can solve problems, it can perceive structure in the world, any any definition you could possibly give of intelligence, an AI system could have that same quality. So I don't I don't I don't think intelligence is ever the issue here. Often, however, people do say it lacks certain kind of resourcefulness or generality of intelligence. Even the so-called AGIs that are being developed. don't have quite the same flexibility as a human intelligence does, or most humans at least, ⁓ our ability to go into a situation we've never been in before and kind of cope with it, our improvisational capacity, ability to learn on the fly, a lifelong learning. ⁓ so the you know, Chat GPT or Claude or whatever, obviously know more than any single human does, but they they're not good at learning. In fact, I don't think they can. Except within very narrow context window, learn on the fly. You can't put them through college. You can't like have them watch a YouTube video and learn to fix the fridge. That kind of thing. ⁓ and then there's the other issue, they don't have any kind of embodied yet in any embodied capacity to work in the world. And a lot of our intelligence comes from our motor skill or comes from our ability to act in the world. Maybe that's even why our intelligence evolved historically, kind of through our evolutionary heritage, was really to act. To throw spears and rocks and whatever. That is a hugely complicated to be able to predict how to catch a ball. The passes that the Spanish team made, I mean, these are incredible feats of intelligence that often, you know, we put in a different bucket from chess or science or math or whatever. But they're they're there too. And probably our mathematical abilities are ultimately. Deriving from our spatial awareness ⁓ in the world abilities. So anyway, this is kind of a long winded answer answer to your question. Artificial intelligence is unequivocally intelligent. It doesn't have all the capacities of human intelligence, and of course we don't have all the capacities it does. So I think we're kind of evolving to two distinct forms of of intelligence. Yeah, no, I agree. But it's like f in order to to answer, I had Henry Chevlin on the show. He's a British ⁓ philosopher who recently started working at Google Deepmind ⁓ in order to build artificial intelligence in a in a responsible way. And I the the topic of our discussion was whether artificial intelligence can ever be conscious, ⁓ whether consciousness is something that is exclusively ⁓ yeah for for for mans or or animals like biological entities if you will or that we can also produce consciousness by in in silicon or or some other form of technology. If so, why if not, why not? That was basically the the entire discussion we were having. And I somehow I I I can explain it to you perfectly why, but I feel like ⁓ us being able to visualize and and and AI b being able to understand every language because they are so similar to me implies that there is something about intelligence and and language ⁓ that would make it possible, easier for computers to understand ⁓ than perhaps we thought of before. even though it's just a small part of our entire conscious experience. ⁓ Yeah. So I when I talk to some of the more thoughtful people working on AI, they they call language, natural human language, kind of what's the term? A AGI complete or intelligence complete. I d they use a some kind of term like that. And it's kind of parallel to NP complete. So it's a type and It's an idea that there's some kinds of capacities that generalize, that kind of extrapolate. And the proposition is that language is one of those that once you solved language, once you or a machine or whatever has language ability, it can basically do anything by piecing those it's like Turing complete. It comes up in in in a lot of compu computational theory, that there's a subset of skills that once acquired lets you do everything else. Yes. And and the propositionist language is like that. And I think the success of LLMs suggests, you know, there may be something to that. I think it hasn't really been determined whether that's indeed the case. ⁓ because it does be some specialized like doing math. Doesn't always map math does not always map into ⁓ natural language or chess. Doesn't map necessarily cause you need s a spatial awareness in that that maybe language being linear and kind of coming out in time rather than space may not have. But basically I think we could at this point, I think to your larger a couple of your larger questions, there's a lot in there. LMs are basically solved language. And that's something I I think when when we're talking twenty twenty two, twenty twenty or so, when Transformers to T and GPT really became an issue, ⁓ really became a technology, they didn't really expect that. But now we can say that today language has been solved as a category, as a type of capacity humans have. And then it's remarkable how far solving this one capacity has gotten you. It's kind of brought on almost like a fellow of traveler, other capacities. To some extent, logic and reasoning are in there too. But probably not complete. I think we s the kind of things that hallucinations show with LLMs or just an ability to solve certain kinds of problems in a If you tell it, you know, a chess move and say, I I move my pawn checkmate, even if it really wasn't checkmate, they'll go, ⁓ I give up. So they don't still sometimes you can see in these LOMs an ability as l is lacking. But I think that's probably a matter of time. I think, you know, that's obviously the tech companies with all the money they have are bolting on new capacities and new kind of plugins and so forth to give you those capacities ⁓ that language itself doesn't give you. Yeah. And then we can go later into machine consciousness as well. Yeah. No, that's it's it's interesting. I I think one of the the points I I wanna discuss from your article as well, ⁓ because it's also important for machine consciousness, but also consciousness in general. We we've discussed ⁓ color, which is is your red the same as my red? but Colors can also be perceived by machinery, right? We have telescopes, ⁓ we we use them all the time, we have cameras that can can view the color red. Something you also mentioned in your article and is something that machines aren't able to capture, at least not in the same way colors can be, is emotions, right? ⁓ joy, ⁓ sadness. And emotions feel very subjective because again, ⁓ if I feel sad or if I am happy, is my happy the same as your happy? However, there are also a lot of objective parts to emotions because we can look at someone's heart rate, we can look at the chemicals that are being released inside of one's body, the dopamine that's flowing around. and then there's also the external manifestation of those emotions. If someone is ⁓ laying on the couch all day with the curtains closed, we might call them depressed. If someone is jumping around in circles and and and and yelling, we might call them very happy. So I guess my question is are emotions really subjective? Wow. Okay, that's that's good. So in humans and mammals and plants or whatever other creatures, probably all creatures are, by the way, to your earlier question, conscious to some degree. The consciousness is ⁓ the emotional aspect of it, the affective aspect of of that, it has to do with body states. So emotions are very much tied up with our physicality. Obviously. our physical needs, ⁓ tie into tie into that, maybe that kind of higher order emotions, like like s being satisfied or depressed, also kind of are layered on top of our our physical needs like pain or love and and and and what have you. Mm-hmm. So Does that have to be the case with a machine? Might be one way to phrase the question. And I think it's and to some extent an open question, but there have been pretty suggestive kind of observations that there's something like an emotion in an AI system. Doesn't come from its embodiment in that case, because at least in any kind of direct way, because it's not like the data center is under threat and the machine feels that and you know whatever. There's nothing like that going on with with a machine, but there's something there's something else. There's like a state that the LLM or other AI system can be in that modulates its response. And you see this, it's it's kind of puzzling in a way if you just ask the machine to you say, you know, that was response wasn't very good. Give me a better response. It often produces a better response. And it's kind of weird. Why didn't you give me that better response the first time? Because the machine somehow wasn't in the right state. And it's probably state's not the right word, but the you know, the conditions weren't right for it to give that response. And you had to kind of jostle it a little bit to give a better response. So there's there's some kind of reaction. The word I would use again is modulation. And what I mean by that is it's not the actual response, it's something that affects the response. So it's kind of like the next order of response. So it's responding, giving information, but It's doing that under the control of some emotion variable, as it were. Just as our responses are human, in other words, human responses are modulated or controlled in this meta way by our emotions. Like I'm gonna give a different response to you if I'm happy, sad, whatever. even the information might be identical, but I might express you two differently depending on my emotional state. And so I think the machine's Do you seem to have something like that? Now, is it emotions and anything that is vaguely resembling a biological emotion? To me, that that is open. But to me, that's actually been one of the more fascinating developments, observations with LLMs that, again, I don't think was really expected. People thought, okay, I could build an emotion into a machine. I could just put it there. I would put a pain variable or a happiness variable or whatever. I'd actually explicitly put it in my machine because it's kind of going back to the old way of doing AI pre-neural networks. But to have it emerge as a matter of course, just in the course of training and being able to respond and also the fine so-called fine-tuning of the of the training, ⁓ the fine-tuning stage of training where it's being evaluated on some responses, that's probably where the emotions are are really coming in. They're trying to just The machine is trying to be rated h more highly by a a human coach. So this it's kind of like that's where the guardrails come in. That's also where the emotions might come in. So anyway, it's a long-winded response to this, but I think the question of machine emotion is very much an open one and a very interesting one. Yeah, it's interesting. And I completely agree what you say there, that I seem to have some sort of emotion. Whenever I'm working with Claude, for example, and sometimes I feel like It's just cutting corners. It's lazy sometimes. And I don't know why. And then I call it out. It's like, hey, are you lazy today? Like what's this? Like, why aren't you looking harder into this? And it's like, yeah. And then okay, this is what I keep it going. And then it seems to actually improve. And then there's also the famous one, the famous example where it was in a it was an experiment. To see what would happen. So it was fabricated in a way. But I believe they wanted to see how AIs would react in the scenario where it would be shut off indefinitely. And I believe they gave it access to a ⁓ a ⁓ mailbox, and inside the mailbox ⁓ was some information that they were going to run an update, and this update would kill off the the current version of the AI and ⁓ it would give rise to a newer version, which would be different than the one that had access to the mailbox. And inside this mailbox they also had information that one of the people that was going to run this update was having ⁓ an affair with someone. And ⁓ what the AI ended up doing, I think they ran multiple ones of this, but in a couple of cases the AI actually tried to preserve itself by blackmailing the scientist that was going to run the update. and they said Well, if you are going to run this update, I will expose you and ⁓ let's ⁓ push the brakes here. And people responded to this kind of in ⁓ some people were alarmed by it, but I also read some like pessimistic comments like it's seen this in a movie and it's just repeating what would be interesting. And I mean might be true, like it might know that it is in such an environment and it might want to Like produce like an interesting cool story or whatever. ⁓ maybe there is some sort of movie that that it was trained on. Or it was actually trying to preserve itself, which ⁓ opens up a whole new kind of worms. Are you familiar with this ⁓ with this story? Not this particular one, but I've heard other incredible things. ⁓ you always have to kind of dig deeper in some of these stories because often they come out as an explicit test. ⁓ like a safety test that's being conducted. So the machine has the kind of goal of evading the ⁓ the guardrails, and it finds one in this case. so the the thing that I don't think and again, what do I really know? I think it it's a matter of study. But my I I would come into it skeptically, thinking that there's some kind of introspective capacity that the machine has. It doesn't look into itself and say, ⁓ I am ⁓ an an extant being. I want to pre- preserve myself. ⁓ I I don't want to die. I mean, it it does it does it really ⁓ have those because those are pretty high order emotions, even in humans. I mean, most kids don't I mean it is really kind of later in life that you even begin to think in in those in those terms, or maybe after you've had a a scary experience directly, do you begin to think in those kinds of existential terms? So I guess I'd be a little skeptical the machine really had existential worries of that of that way. Because it seems if it did, I'd be I'd be by by the way, huge discovery, probably. ⁓ but it seems a little unlikely. I think the kind of emotions that are more plausible to me are s really simpler in a way. They're not existential. They're there you know, slight variations on produced output based on the the state of mind of the machine is it's feeling a little bit sad, a little bit happy. So it's it's more of a conditional emotion as opposed to I'm sure the philosophers have a term for this. I don't have a good terminology. As opposed to a I've looked deep into my soul and seen the darkness emotion. I it it doesn't seem to have that no, I agree. And ⁓ w one thing ⁓ I I I wanted to touch on as well is that you were also part of a second experiment. The first one being the the consciousness test that we discussed. ⁓ but there was one by a group in in Germany where ⁓ you had to do a a computer task and it was about the the conscious and the unconscious mind. Can you maybe explain what was going on there and and what the experiment was trying to prove and what the actual results were of that? Yeah, so this goes back to the question of color similarity structure. Mm-hmm. And Maybe our notion of red and blue, et cetera, isn't it's connected to physical world, but it what it really represents is is a mass of associations that I have with redness and and other kind of perceptual categories. And the experiment and I basically I basically insisted, please let me do the experiment. And the okay, well set it up, but you have to install this, you have to upgrade your Python, you know, whatever. So it it took a while to actually get the exp I don't really mention that the article, it took a while to actually get the thing working because it was it was really an experimental kind of put together with with you know duct tape and sealing wax kind of of of thing. But I finally got it working. And it basically was pretty simple and pretty boring. ⁓ it's actually hard to kind of stay awake through to doing it. So The they it the experiment was just like you present a a blank screen and you had to kind of look at the center of the screen, there'd be two colors presented to you. That was one way. It was there was other kind of variations on that. But and then you would ⁓ you presented two colors and then like a third color, and you had to say which of those two colors was most like the third color. So you're basically just making these kind of assessments of similarity. Mm-hmm. So you might get a red. and a green and like an orange. What's what's it close to? Or pink, what's it close to? Or it often was much harder to be like, ⁓ you get a little blue, you get a cyan blue, and then this other like navy blue. I kinda it was it got a little a little tricky and you had to do it quickly, because part of it was like you're getting a lot of them at thrown at you. You're like clicking the buttons as fast as you can to to do this. And of course I would sometimes say, ⁓ just like a millisecond later, I wish I hadn't pressed that. And so what it's doing is it's a different way of assessing color perception than typically people do. Actually, it's just comparative technique really is quite old. It goes back to earliest days of psychology in the 19th century, but kind of you don't really think about it that much because most of the time you're asked to assess blue by being given kind of a color strip. Here's a rainbow, here's blue, and the rainbow. You're not really making comparisons. So if you think of color in terms of a rainbow, it's it's a one-dimensional phenomenon. You have red all the way to like indigo. So you kind of can map it, and that's a sp really a spectr ultimately based on this the electromagnetic spectrum. But if you do the similarity thing, you kind of open up a whole new realm of color possibilities. ⁓ so you do I did hundreds, maybe thousands probably, of these of these color chip comparisons. It took like you do it in sessions and it's super boring and in between I had to go get a cup of coffee kind of situation. And it turns out that color and and at the end it gave me my color structure. It gave me this is what your brain is doing in terms of its color associations. And here's some of the conclusions that we can draw. And Sometimes there is this unidimensional rainbow. So if you started to piece together all the individual color comparisons I made, they do actually l cent on a line. You actually can say, well, you consist were fairly consistent with putting red next to pink and far from blue, and then cyan close to blue but far from whatever. ⁓ but s but then it got it got kind of sometimes surprising the kind of other qualities of color. Sometimes I would, it turns out, I would actually take the very same color and color categorize it differently based on context. Maybe I had been shown a bunch of reds and then it was thrown a blue and I would do differently than if I'd been thrown a bunch of blues and then shown another blue. So it just goes to show first of all that psychology or color psychology is very context dependent. And this is a lot of optical illusions play off that, right? The kind of context that you're in. And then the other fun thing that was done. Is they compared it, this is a kind of where you kind of have to, this is why I want to do the experiment because it seems so unlikely. They were comparing my conscious and unconscious color perception. So the conscious is kind of easy to understand. Okay, I took in blue, I took in red, I made a an evaluation. But how is an experiment supposed to get you at your unconscious evaluations? Like how does your unconscious brain express itself? It's not able to speak, right? It's it's just happening subverbally. And it turns out the reaction time is the way to get at that. So your unconscious brain is a press called priming. And it you're on even an unconscious perception will subtly affect your responses. It'll kind of shorten your reaction time. As if I see a blue, the next time I see a blue, I'll press the button faster. That's why it was important to press the buttons pretty fast, is to make this kind of timing comparison work. And it turns out that my unconscious and conscious Color structures were different from each other. So my conscious one tended to put colors in kind of a line. I can't remember, but the unconscious one had a more kind of jumbled ⁓ approach. So the color structure does seem to differentiate conscious from unconscious perception. There is something specific about our conscious brains that brings structure to our perceptual experiences of the world. That our unconscious brains don't have. Because a lot of, you know, frankly, a lot of the time we're operating unconsciously. We're just walking down the street, we're driving, not really thinking. I'm a showering, I was just thinking this morning, you know, I'm I'm I'm showering, I'm doing my shampoo. I'm not thinking about it. I'm just kind of doing a ment and autopilot, right? So a lot of our experiences of the world or a lot of our kind of actions the world are taking subconsciously. And it's kind of interesting to know that a subconscious brain works a little differently than our conscious brains. So perceive things little differently. Now I'm actually kind of wondering now that I say this, does it change when you're driving? Does it change like, will you register a stoplight differently if you're consciously aware of it versus unconsciously aware of it? Like maybe that's a reason why talking on your cell phone or dri or listening to music when you're driving is a bad thing because it maybe it changes your perceptions of in this way. It's so interesting that you bring up driving because that's one of the Questions about consciousness that I keep coming back to is I have this example that I think most people who drive cars regularly and drive on roads that they're very familiar with have experienced, which is if you're driving and you have moments where you are actively focusing on the road. This is usually when you're driving through a crowded city or when you're trying to find The road in a new environment where you haven't been. But if you are on a road that you've driven a hundred million times, and then sometimes you don't know when it starts and you don't know what happens during it, but sometimes you snap back and it's like, whoa, were I was I behind the wheel of this vehicle? Did I drive for for 20 minutes already? Like what happens? And It's it's interesting to me and it it goes back to the the the question I feel like ⁓ whether consciousness is like a binary thing where it's on or off or whether there is some whether it's a spectrum because in a way I was conscious because obviously I I didn't crash and I was able to to control the car perfectly fine, but also there's something else to it because how There's a different state because how can there not be if I was able to snap out of it, if you know w what I mean? So the driving is is very it's an interesting one for me. So so I like that you used that as an example there. Yeah, so I d I'm fascinated by this and I probably should look into it a bit more. But one thing I did mention in my last book about it was and again, this isn't been studied, it's just kind of an idea. Going back to this idea of integrated information theory. And by the way, the the theory may or may not be right as an explanation of consciousness, but it's certainly interesting to think about. I and I I approach this subject in that way. I like thinking about different theories and how they turn out in the end to be right or wrong is is I'll leave that to posterity. But the the brain is conscious in this theory, phenomenally conscious, to the extent that it's integrated, to the extent it has kind of an internal harmony of activity. Or really, it's actually kind of a cause-effect behavior in the brain, the way it kind of acts mechanistically. And so but you can start to get more sophisticated about this. It's not just the whole brain that's acting in harmony, maybe like this part of the brain is acting, or that part of the brain. And it turns out you could have multiple centers of conscious activity in the brain. Like you could literally have three minds in your brain at one time. There's kind of the the main one in a way. That's the one that maybe is receiving sensory input or talking or whatever, but you might have this kind of subsidiary one. And so the speculation is maybe when you're driving and your brain is like you're paying you're listening to the music, let's say. You're you're kind of engaged consciously on the music. So, but you're still driving. So it's part of you is still attending to the road. Maybe one of these. like mini minds or these kind of sub minds or like subroutines as a ta to take a computational view. Maybe that is what's continuing to monitor the road for you to awaken the main mind if, as you say, you need to be snapped back to attention, 'cause that happens to us all the time. You're driving along, especially an experienced driver, your mind wanders, ⁓ look at the pretty pedestrian. So you do thank God you have that. I frankly that's as I introspect and as I observe myself, the main kind of benefit of driving experience, the reason I was better driving like five years after starting than I was at the very beginning, is that I have this kind of ability to monitor myself. And so it's almost like I almost like several me's in my head. One is kind of driving and one's kind of watching you drive and you can l allow your mind to wander and then be snapped back to attention because the experience that you've gained can be resurfaced by events. Like if a pedestrian or a red light goes off or something, the it triggers an association in your memory. ⁓ I had better pay attention. Boom, you're paying attention again. And of course a lot of accidents, maybe the most human accidents, ⁓ occur when like you you fail to pay attention and you fail to be brought back to paying attention. Yeah, right. And but there is some interesting I I I can't remember if it whether it was surgeons or it was people who work on airplanes, but I understand that there is like a degree to where more experience is better and then there comes a point of diminishing returns because people get too cocky or too arrogant, if you will, in their own capabilities, and they stop paying attention to fine details and and that's where mistakes happen. As you as you point out. I I look absolutely yeah, I should look this up, ⁓ which profession s profession it was. I don't wanna blame surgeons unnecessarily or or people who ⁓ surface airplanes, but I believe it was something ⁓ something in in that field of field of work. 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Now let's get back to talking. we haven't really touched on ⁓ quantum mechanics. And you you wrote a whole book about quantum entanglement. I know it's an extremely I mean, we could do several shows on the topic, right? I mean, it's it's kind of It's it's incredible how much there is to discuss there, but it it is something that I I I wanted to to touch on still today. can you can you tell me about your your book ⁓ that was about ⁓ quantum entanglement? ⁓ what inspired you to to write it, and also ⁓ what what were some of the ⁓ findings you had while ⁓ when finishing the book? Yeah, so this was the book Spooky Action at a distance. Came out about ten years ago. And I think the kind of animating principle, the kind of ⁓ epiphany ⁓ a moment, ⁓ aha moment I had that led me to write the book, is that Entanglement and this broader phenomenon of non-locality, the ability of things in different parts of space to interact, even though there doesn't seem to be a way for them to interact. Entanglement is an example, but not the only example o of that phenomenon, is questions are nature the nature of space. So I was able in that book to kind of piece together two branches of fundamental physics, quantum entanglement and quantum gravity. And the kind of ideas of what's called emergent space-time. The idea, and it comes up in a lot of areas, independent of quantum entanglement, that space-time doesn't seem to be fundamental. Certainly space doesn't seem to be fundamental to the universe. There's a lot of debate about time. ⁓ it could be time not fundamental, but that's harder to kind of picture. But certainly space, maybe space-time as a unified kind of structure, seems to be derived from something. Deeper, some kind of dynamics or some kind of underlying degrees of freedom. We that's the kind of term of art we use for this. And this comes up in string theory. Any quantum gravity theory talks about this and implicit in pretty much every quantum gravity theory, except with a few exceptions, but the majority of them postulate that space-time is emergent, that something happens to. unite the ingredients, the the atoms of space-time, as it were, whatever kind of building blocks space-time has, and causes them to behave in a spatial way. And that entanglement might be in fact entanglement certainly is related to that ⁓ gluing together of these building blocks. The people who work on quantum gravity talk a lot about quantum entanglement. That's actually been a kind of a development in the past, well, In the years leading up to the book and even since then. Then the question is, and this is less established, is whether those emergent ⁓ kind of space-time emergence can explain quantum entanglement. That direction is a bit more speculative, but I made kind of a an attempt in my book to to suggest that it might be. And I mean, quantum entanglement is just a super interesting phenomenon. It's definitely one of the biggest puzzles in science. And this is, I think, where being a a journalist goes back to what we were saying earlier at the beginning. Being a journalist kinda helps. I d I don't again have the depth of knowledge. I thought about it quite a lot, actually. So I would say I do have quite a deep knowledge on this, but I don't I'm not an expert by any means. However, I'm not an expert. And that means I'm free to explore different options. I can I'm like at a ⁓ Indian buffet where I take the All the different ⁓ meals, all the different foods that are available have both non and rice and pickle and you know, curd and everything. So I I'm going around, I try all the different foods, schmurgisburg in like Scandinavian context. So I feel like that with the science as well. I don't get latched on to, I don't get committed to one theory. I like I like them all, to be honest. I think all of these different Interpretations of quantum mechanics, all the different theories of quantum gravity, and there's a variety on each side, are all interesting in their way. They've all been promoted by extremely genius people. ⁓ They may all be latching on to some element of truth. ⁓ I think what often happens with the scientists, with the scholars, those who are committed to one or the other, is they tend to talk down the others. They say, Well, I like my idea. The others must be wrong, and they kind of diss stuck. And I don't think that that's really the right approach here. I think we need to find value in all the approaches. And maybe they're all wrong to some degree, but all have an element of truth in them. And that's kind of my ability to kind of step back from this. And that's what I tried to do in that book. I tried to actually my argument to the extent I made one was I think they all, all of the interpretations of quantum mechanics, all pretty much all, with one exception, the theory proposed theories of quantum all have non-locality in them. It expresses differently, it means different things, but it's all there, always there. So this seems to be a common element in theories. And the scientists themselves don't see it that way. I mean maybe they do if if you talk to them in in in the right way, but usually they're trying to differentiate their theory from others. They're not in the process of finding common ground. They're in the process of finding difference. Whereas a journalist I'm looking for common ground. Yeah. No, that's that's a good way. That's a good way to to put it. And yeah, it makes it easier if if you're looking inside from the outside, ⁓ if if you will, because I think you're also it allows you to be less attached to ⁓ to the ideas and and whenever we do get attached, it's it's difficult. It's it's why it's so hard to also review your own articles, whether that's why we have people read our our articles, right? It's it's hard to remove the mistakes from your own piece because you've written it so it's it's almost impossible to ⁓ to have an ⁓ objective ⁓ look at it. ⁓ you you mentioned in the beginning that you are also working on a new book ⁓ about about life. is there is that something that is still Well, well, that that you can tell something more about, or is that still ⁓ d ⁓ early, early days? Well well, I'm I'm very curious to hear more about that. It's pretty early. I've been thinking about it for about a year. Okay. Actually been thinking about it my whole life, but really I started more kind of directed thinking about a year ago, and I'm multitasking it with other things, so I don't give a hundred percent attention to it yet. So it's kind of going a little more slowly than I would want. But I've always been fascinated by the origin of life. And how did the planet come alive? It has happened four billion years ago or so. And, you know, I as I mentioned before, my degree work was in planetary science. So it's definitely connected with the nature of planets. Why is Venus dead or currently dead? It may have been alive in the past. That's an interesting question. Mars does seem to be mostly dead. There's a few hints maybe of of life, but okay. Nothing like Earth. Why the difference? So Done a lot of reading on this. There's actually a lot of really good books on it. So many that I actually begin to question whether I should add to them. But I begin to to think over time that I do have, and again, it goes back to this search for common ground, the scholarly books, which are really good, actually, ⁓ nonetheless do tend to take one side or the other. And they do tend to formulate the whole question in terms of sides. So it's kind of polarized. Mm-hmm. So I do think that the the journalists can come in and And also philosophers have written on this too. So people outside the Origins of Life community can come in and kind of seek common ground. I think there actually is a lot of common ground. In a sense, all the different sides of it aren't really an opposition. They're kind of maybe stages of the origins process. Some focus on one stage, some focus on an another stage, but they're probably compatible ultimately. They people don't see it that way, of course, or at least older people don't. I think there's been a generational change in this. A lot of young people, frankly, a lot of young scientists are just fed up with all the bickering by by older scientists on this question. And they kind of just think that there's ⁓ now time to seek common ground. So I think there's been a both a generational shift and again, my outsider perspective also tends me to me in that direction. And then questions of what is life comes in, ⁓ how un how unlikely was it for life to arise on Earth? Is it kind of a feature complet as soon as you have a planet? A rocky planet that has water, it boom, do you get life? And that obviously will be important in understanding life and its prevalence in the on the entire universe, the galaxy. Or is it an unlikely thing where or maybe stages of life were unlikely? And actually the one that I've been thinking about a lot lately is the formation of eukaryotes. So these are the kinds of cells in our bodies are called you we're actually we mammals. Plants, fungi are all eukaryotes, and then bacteria are well, they're bacteria, they're prokaryotes, and there's also a type of prokaryot called the archaea. So there's actually ⁓ these three kings of life, two of which were prokaryotes, one are eukaryotes. And it was eukaryotes, seemed to be the more like unlikely kind of member of that triumvirate. It came later, came billions of years later. into the evolution of the Earth. So why was there that time delay? Why did it take so long? And does that mean it's unlikely? And so I think if there's any kind of I'm actually probably not going to write too much on this. It's just kind of a side spin-off of the of the main project, but it is super interesting you you carry it and why ⁓ and maybe that would be the bottleneck in the universe that you did life pretty readily, but you don't you carry it that easily. That was special to Earth. And you carry it seem to be necessary for civilization, like advanced life. So maybe that means advanced life won't be common in the universe. But of course, we're we're working in a state of ignorance on this. Yeah. Now I'm ⁓ two things I I want to mention. ⁓ first is I'm just incredibly curious to finally get a look. It will be a very long time until we we we will, but ⁓ the the J Jupiter's i see moons, ⁓ until we can get ⁓ a submarine out there that has to ⁓ drill through meters of of ice ⁓ in order to to find out whether there is some biology going on there, which I mean I've I've watched so many YouTube videos ⁓ on this topic and ⁓ the fact that the core seems to heat up the water inside of ⁓ some of these moons and that all of the building blocks of of life should be there and that they have had the opportunity for to evolve there millions of years undisturbed, unlike ⁓ different planets in the solar system. It's just endlessly fascinating topic to me. So I would love to ⁓ to I would love for you to to to write that book. I would definitely ⁓ read it. As something I've been I have never written a book, but it's something I've been thinking about. And it's We we know that ⁓ we seem to be the only ones in the universe, at least we seem to be the only ⁓ intelligent species in the universe. And then of course there's Fermi's paradox. ⁓ that's like if if ⁓ life is ⁓ so so easy, if it arises so quickly as it did on Earth, seems to history seems to imply where where is everyone? I read this paper, it's a pretty old Paper and basically the idea was I I came up with the idea and then I started researching it, and then it seemed to be different people who had a similar idea. But I think part of the reason why we aren't seeing any other civilizations, of course, is because the universe is so big and it takes incredible amounts of time for us to go from A to B. ⁓ even going to the nearest ⁓ star ⁓ system would take an incredible amount of time, many, many, many lifetimes ⁓ given our current technology. So I figured how do we circumvent the this this 80 year time limit that we roughly have of of a human ⁓ human life? I think it would be to send out spaceships with robots on there and then they scout for habitable planets or at least semi-suitable. And then as soon as we find those planets on board, there are ⁓ sperm cells and egg cells that can be fertilized inside of an artificial womb. And then the first generation would be raised by humanoid robots. And then after that we would be able to have regular generations of ⁓ people, if you will. So I've been thinking about this idea and I wanted to I wanted to do some some some deeper research into what are the current what where does the technology currently stand? So what do we already have in place in order to turn this into a reality? which technologies would need to advance in order to make this a reality and how likely is it that we will? ⁓ and then of course also some chapters about an ethical ⁓ idea. Like can we ⁓ can we ever do this? Like ⁓ what what happens to this new generation? What would this is this allowed because it if we don't do it, it might mean the end of consciousness in the universe one day, and we're currently putting all our eggs in one basket. Is that justified? ⁓ that we put possibly our children eighty thousand years from now? ⁓ let them live on a on a different planet, God knows what will happen to them, or is that by default not allowed? So it's ⁓ an idea I have that I would further like to explore, maybe in some article series, maybe in a book. But ⁓ yeah, I need to speak to a lot of a lot of people for that. Just wanted to to to put that out there as well. That is sounds like a really super cool project. And actually ⁓ I'm definitely gonna be thinking more about the Fermi paradox myself. I don't have that particular direction to go in. And I'm with my partner Corey Powell, who is also a former Scientific American editor. We're going to launch a podcast. In fact, I've been editing down the first ⁓ episode called The Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox podcast. And so if if you follow me, I'll I'll definitely be posting about that. Awesome. Yeah. I will be ⁓ in the loop. Well when we can when can we expect that? ⁓ it's been a little delayed, but I think within the next month. Okay. We're we're we're still we're just waiting to get the logo and ⁓ you know all the other logistics ⁓ good to go. Yeah, let me know when that's out because I'll I'll ⁓ I'll put it in the in the show notes of ⁓ of this episode ⁓ as well. ⁓ before before we ⁓ wrap it up ⁓ today, ⁓ George, is there anything you think we we haven't touched on that we should? I mean, there's a million things we can still ⁓ discuss and ⁓ this is what happens when you put Two people that aren't super dedicated to one single topic ⁓ in a same conversation. you get a lot of different discussions, but I thought it was great. But is there anything you think we should cover today? I mean we've covered a lot of ground. I guess the the one question we didn't really I wrote it down, didn't really ⁓ address was machine consciousness. Yes. And our large language models. Consciousness And this actually riffs just off what you were saying now, that people are committed to a position on that. The either saying they are or they're not. Mm-hmm. And I I tend to step back from that and say, Well, I'm agnostic, but agnostic in the particular sense of how can we tell? I don't want to rush to an answer and say, Well, they're clearly not clearly are. I want to know why. So I want us to go through a process. of of deciding that. And I think the process has to pass through an understanding of our consciousness. So if you take the theories of human consciousness and apply them to a machine system. Now, as I said before, those theories may be wrong. We don't know which is right, if any, they may all be wrong. Some may be right, some may have elements of truth. But that's all we got. So we should apply those to machines. And when that's done, I think The answer is not yet. The machines are not yet conscious. They may say they're conscious, or they may be guardrailed to say, I'm not conscious. So they kind of you can't trust their answer either way. ⁓ so what you have to do is think about the way they're they're structured, the way they're built. And one thing that seems to be a common ground in all these different theories of consciousness is feedback loops. In some way or other, there's a self-referential quality to consciousness. The integration of information I mentioned has that. Other theories are explicitly loop driven. So there's kind of a sense of which we're we don't just produce input to output, we take the output, put it back into the input. And that's how our perception works. That's kind of how our mental capacities work. We're kind of always we're never stopping. We take whatever we we think and we put it back into our thought process and it goes around and around around. I think that kind of self-referential qual self referential quality is essential to consciousness. And the machines don't really have it, at least they don't have it that much. They don't have it enough. There's a little bit of it through the context window. So when they they produce an output, they use that output as part of their next input to the next query. But it's not really looping because it it depends still on the human kind of pressing the button. So there's no kind of ⁓ process there's no interior. dynamics that's going on. They just sit there waiting for you to act. They respond. They wait for your next you respond. So they don't sit there all the while thinking. And I think that all the while part's super important to consciousness. But anyway, I think that's just I don't think there's any reason machines can't be conscious. I think that's going to happen. And we need to be ready for it. It's so interesting that you mentioned this because I thought about this as well, actually. And some people argue that AI isn't creative, that it's just repeating things ⁓ that are already out there. It also heavily depends on your definition of creativity, because my definition of creativity is that it combines already existing elements into something novel, whether visually or or a different purpose, but it even human creativity is based on concepts that are already out there and combining them. turns them into something new. However, even still many people argue that AI is not really very creative in that sense as well. And that it's also the output is often it it sounds very similar and every everyone it's often the critique, right? Everyone is starting to sound the same because everyone is using AI. So I I wrote a piece, I never published it, but but the but the idea was called artificial shower thoughts, where ⁓ is the unlock to true artificial creativity the the shower thoughts we have? Because when we are in the shower, we aren't really doing anything and we can just let our mind go. And the AI is only working when we prompted. And I mean of course AI agents are doing a bit more for a longer period of time, but it's still one very specific goal that they have. And there is no real moment where they can just sit in an idle state and and let their thoughts brew, if you will. So that was kind of a a a sidestep, but it was something I thought about. Maybe that would be a way to unlock artificial creativity, is is put it in the shower. I think you're right. I think AIs are clearly creative in some ways. ⁓ they do create things and people do value the things that they create, maybe sometimes more than things humans create, which is kind of sad, but anyway, that's what it is. But they they definitely lack other forms of creativity. Their creativity you might call it craftsmanship, or I don't know what the proper word would be. Given a kind of constrained exercise, they they do amazing things. It's the unconstrained exercise, like your shower ⁓ ramblings that it it doesn't do. In an in a paragraph by paragraph, they'll outride most humans. But once you get a page or two into an AI generated output, it starts to just go off and it starts to kind of lose focus. So they don't really have a good long term focus. And that's kind of what's necessary for creating the things that Einstein, Picasso, the great kind of innovators, do, is they have this kind of longer-term view. They often kind of don't do well in short-term things. ironically, of course Picasso was was a master even probably before he became an innovator, so he definitely mastered all the available art. But sometimes a lot of the most creative artists weren't very good technically, Picasso being an exception. And And yet they're able to create things. Or like the sex pistols. They sucked as musicians, but you know, w look what they did historically, they were hugely influential. So you see that in in different kinds of human creativity. Yeah. It's a super interesting, ⁓ interesting topic. But yeah, I think I've I think we should ⁓ run it back ⁓ someday, ⁓ George. ⁓ many more things ⁓ to discuss. ⁓ this was absolutely fantastic and Yeah, I really I really appreciate you. And yeah, I mean the podcast isn't out as we record this, ⁓ but there are ways to are there what are the best ways to currently follow your work and keep up to date with everything you're doing. Yeah, if you could put the the links in your in your notes or yes ⁓ description, that'd be cool. But the f ⁓ the it's called the Fair Me Paradox Podcast. It's actually Fairme Paradox Podcast dot com. It's just ⁓ we're setting up that website now. But follow me on Blue Sky. That's kind of where I'm the most active. I have a YouTube channel, but I don't really I'm not doing much there anymore. But if you just do a general search for me, George Musser, ⁓ there aren't that many George Musters in the world. And you'll ⁓ unfortunately one was recently killed, so I'm not that George Muster, I'm the other one. ⁓ god. So ⁓ if you follow Delive Delive George Muster, you'll be taken to my YouTube channel, my Blue Sky feed. And Soon to this new podcast project. Awesome. Well, George, thank you so much. I ⁓ yeah, I really appreciate it. And ⁓ this was great. Let's ⁓ let's do it again sometime. Yeah, likewise. This has been super fun.