Episode 25: David Chalmers on Consciousness, the Hard Problem, and Living in a Simulation 

David Chalmers and consciousness... my kind of cup of tea. Thanks!

Keep it up Sean, these are some of the best science podcasts around.

As the only concoiusness that exists in the universe, I really appreciate you making a video specifically for me. Thank you so much! 😅

My jaw is on the floor after hearing this conversation. I have to consider applying for a job in Trump's staff, because they experience this everytime he gives a speech, so i will probably fit in nicely. If anyone can give us explanation about conciousness, it will most likely be Carroll-Chalmers duet. I came across dr Carroll's podcast while gathering intel for my SF novel and i'm sure i will stay here for a long time. Huge respect for both Gentlemen. Best regards from Poland.

I know people say this a lot on here, but this is literally the only channel where I leave a like before it starts.

An excellent discussion, I think I understand what the hard problem of consciousness is at last! Thanks for posting.

38:00 Sean’s principle idea on life, consciousness, and exsistence gets shut down and called magic 😂 I love it

Great conversation between a favourite philosopher and a favourite physicist. Good stuff. Obviously Sean has strong leanings on this, but as always he's very fair and open minded. And Chalmers is what I think any true philosopher should be around such open questions: with current preferences but far from committed any way. As usual on this topic, the unthinking rejection of the problem by many in the comments is almost as interesting and entertaining as the problem itself, though not as hard to diagnose.

Beautiful discussion it opens the mind. No dogma .Thanks for arranging that

People like Noam Chomsky argue that our minds may just not be designed to crack the hard problem. We don't expect dogs to understand calculus. Maybe the scope and limits of the human mind make it cognitively impossible for beings like us to able to solve the hard problem.

Really enjoyed this talk. One of the things that makes human consciousness so great is our ability to imagine the neverending possibilities of what was, what is, and what could be. Although I personally am a strong proponent of realism and science, I believe that philosophers are a sign of a healthy ecosystem of ideas. I think there is great evidence to support that allowing people to think out side the box can give rise to truly astounding solutions. Talks like these are fun and have value in there entertainment and artistic nature. That being said most of what comes out of philosophers mouths is complete and utter nonsense and should never be taught or even entertained as fact until proven and verified through scientific processes. Thanks Sean and David for entertaining me on a long drive.

Well what a treat! Fantastic interview on a very interesting topic. I am subscriber of soft pan-psychism view due to my subjective experiences of awareness-expanding techniques (zen) and natural substances (Ayahuasca). Going in depth into this view and possible problems it runs into was a highlight of this episode, along with discussing simulation hypothesis and implications. Intellectually stimulating, non-attached, inspiring conversation! Your Mindscape project truly delivers 😊⚡️

Hi Sean, it could be very interesting if you made a podcast about emergence, since it was only mentioned briefly in this podcast and since you are working with complex systems. In my point of view it explains a lot about our experience of dualism and the disconnect between the the smaller parts and the overall emergent property.

Absolutely fantastic, I feel somewhat quantized after listening to that.

Hi Sean, just a note to say thanks to you and your guests for these excellent podcasts.

Best podcast for the thinking person. Love your work Sean!

I am getting into the whole phenomenon of consciousness......to me, it's the fundamental basis of everything.

The simulation hypothesis: We all live in a yellow subroutine.

Sean Carroll is such an amazing teacher and a class act !!! Also, I loved this conversation SO much, thank you SO much for such fantastic content!

Thanks for that great episode, Sean. It’d be great if you could one day interview Chalmers’ advisor, Douglas Hofstadter.

Great podcast! As a nuclear engineer who is also deeply interested in philosophy of mind, I applaud you for having these interesting and thought-provoking discussions. If you’re looking for recommendations for future podcasts, maybe you could convince Dan Dennett or John Searle to come on the show? As a side note, The Big Picture was a great read. I’ve seen many of your talks and I must say I’ve become a fan. I look forward to your next book!

Great topics! Thank you prof Carroll for bringing intellectualism into the mainstream!

I would like to suggest a way that a simulated universe can be more complicated than the supporting universe. Assume that universe A (UA) produces a simulation of universe B (UB) and UA is itself a simulation, though this is not necessary. One of the laws of UA is that objects can only rotate to the right, none-the-less in UB objects can rotate both left and right by the following mechanism: UA controls the progression of time in UB by calculating the next state of UB and updating that state anytime it wants. As far as UB is aware one state follows another in an uninterrupted progression and time advances at a constant rate. This allows UA all the time it needs to calculate the next state of UB. In UA in order to rotate an object 90 degrees to the left it is not possible to go directly to that position because UA allows only right rotation, on the other hand it is possible to arrive at the same position by rotating to the right 90 degrees three times. So UA is able to produce left rotation in UB by rotating right until it reaches the desired position prior to updating the state of UB. As far as UB is concerned the left rotated state follows directly the previous state even though it required several states of UA to produce the effect. By this mechanism UB has a degree of freedom that UA doesn't and is thus more complicated.

I think there is one way to kind of solve it; they did studies of people that have had the left and right sides of the brain separated, where they could often act like different individuals. If the reverse is also true, multiple minds can meld together, or machine/mind can be melded together over time to create new emergent consciousness. If we can experience each other's subjective experiences by extension or connection we can perhaps verify the other is not a zombie.

Absolutely fascinating. I'm halfway through this one and on the edge of my seat. A bit skeptical about the illusionist hypothesis of consciousness though. It seems an illusion still presupposes a subjective, first person observer to view the illusion. And nor would a zombie ask questions about something they don't have i.e. consciousness. No I think zombies would resemble us only in ways which are unaffected by our being conscious. But in the hybrid phenomena produced by both factors shared by persons and zombies (physiology, cognitive networks, survival functions and behaviors, etc.) and factors unique to us conscious persons (existentialism, philosophy, introspection, etc.) I think our divergence from zombies would be clear.

Just think about your driving. Sometimes you are driving and your mind is somewhere else, you still stop at red light, slow down when someone crosses the road, an automated process without being conscious about it. Sometimes we don't even remember, know anything when we arrive. And when you did started to drive you remembered every car passed you, the we hole trip, because you were conscious about the whole experience. You can drive without conscious presence. But you cannot have experience of driving without being conscious.

This is the greatest conversation i've ever heard on youtube, maybe irl too ha. I wonder what he would say about LLMs, seeing as how he basically described them verbatim.

Liked the Ian M Banks reference. Some of the best sci-fi ever written.

Revisiting in 2022 after reading David’s Reality +. Intriguing stuff!!

Hey Sean, absolutely love the podcasts. Please don’t take this the wrong way but could you try not to breathe into the mic when the guest is talking? Again I mean this to be constructive and not an insult in any way. Keep up the good work!

Listening to this made me wonder if consciousness is fundamental as a field. Much like the Higgs giving rise to mass, perhaps it's interactions with this field that gives rise to consciousness. Instead of releasing fermions or bosons when the field is excited, it releases an observation or measurement unit. Of course even the smallest would collapse the wave function. Enough of them together could create subjective experience.

Somewhere out there in No Man's Sky npc's have become conscious, developed scientific observation and philosophy, and are sitting back in a podcast saying "yeah, but if this were a simulation, why would it be so dang big?".

Before this talk i was largely dismissing chalmers theories as wishfull thinking. After this podcast i am still with Sean in that i think consciousness is completely emergent, but i do have respect for chalmers position. He is much more critical of his own ideas then i thought and in the end, maybe there is something to it.

I don't get how people like Chalmers can dedicate so much time on this topic without getting depressed. I despise some theistic narratives that include something like a hell, but at the same time I find this pure naturalistic approach uncomfortable as well somehow I think. Oh whatever Anyway, I can't understand Carrols stance on conciousness either. He seriously can't differenciate between a philosophical zombie and his conciousness?

I don't understand the argument that consciousness doesn't have effects on the world. Of course it does! Just on a psychological level we know that emotions have effects on behaviors. Pleasure and pain have effects on behaviors. How can anyone argue this isn't so?

I give this podcast 2 simulated thumbs up. 👍😃👍

Our own brain is certainly creating the simulation we experience by the "I" circuit in our neural networks. The basis of the material reality is ultimately the Wave Function not an illusion which includes our neurons and biology etc etc.

Please have a chat with Stanislas Dehaene . thanks

Sean speaking of hard problems when are you going to have Scott Aaronson on?

I also have a general psychological question for Sean, based on the approach he says he has: Why aim for being conned/convinced about anything? Why choose to narrow your understanding of reality as opposed to being the scientist type who aims to broaden the view, *adding* different perspectives to generate a more multidimensional picture? Rather than dismissing some perspectives (data), a scientific approach welcomes *all* of the data and uses it to map reality and all of it's complexity.

That was a qualia episode! :D

This is great, thank you! Very much enjoyed the chat about if we were to create our own simulations!

honestly if you're having Chalmers on your show and not including his flowing mane in some visible fashion, are you even podcasting?

Stimulating torture with multiple challenging topics once you get pass the easy problem😉. The simulation postulate is a useful gedanken but it leads to so many further thoughts and questions. After listening to the podcast and reviewing many of the 500+ comments, I had to refresh myself through Chalmers' Wikipedia summary and again recognized any podcast/Wiki note that includes zombie references and philosophy of science is a priority.

As technologies like Neuralink is developing get better, I wonder if questions of comparing different people's experiences of colors, etc., will become testable.

Made my GF listen with me as we lay down to go to sleep... She didn't stay awake to the end, but had a dream that she was Rosencrantz & I was Guildensturn & we were dead, so at least I know he unconscious mind paid attention to the end...

To say that unconscious zombies that act exactly like conscious people are possible is also to say that consciousness is superfluous, is it not? It seems to me that we should assume the opposite, that consciousness is absolutely essential to us as gene replicators, otherwise apes such as ourselves wouldn’t have evolved to be conscious. We pay too high a price (via pain and suffering) for it not to be essential in some way.

If only proteins, which ones ? Only the ones that are involved in neuronal computations, like ion channels ? How do those atoms know what information (mental content) is associated at a given moment with the state of the protein ? Every 7 years the atoms are replaced in my body. How do the new atoms "learn" about my memories that are older than that ? When the atoms leave my body do they carry my mental content(s) ? What happens when I incorporate an atom that used to be in someone else brain ? How does the atom know which info belongs to which person ?...

I wish they talked more about Sean’s favorite interpretation, many worlds theory! Specifically, if all physical states are real, and consciousness traverses those states based on some rule like similarity of conscious state

David always refer to Maxwell defining the property of electric charge. I haven't heard or been able to find this anywhere else and I though charge goes back to Coulomb.

Say you have a philosophical zombie and they step on glass and cut their foot, and all the same nerve impulses etc work the same way as for you and I, with the only difference being they have no subjective experience of pain. What would cause them to react to the cut foot in the same way you or I would?

hey guys, i think sean could be absolutely certain that he is not a zombie. because sean knows what it is like to be conscious. the sean-zombie doesnt know anything. he isnt "thinking". thought is a part of consciousness. so even though sean-zombie says and does everything exactly like sean, he would have no idea of what consciousness is. i have a bit of a problem with the premise of a zombie-world, even in theory. because dave's definition of it describes it as a world in which there are exact human life-forms without consciousness, but that do and say everything that their conscious counterparts would do and say. why would a zombie cry, for example ? we cry, because we are feeling an emotion of some sort. maybe one of sadness, one of relief, etc. i see no reason why a zombie would ever evolve to cry ? or any other aspect of our lives. everything that we are, were, or could ever hope to be is 100% due to our consciousness. something that is totally lacking in the sean-zombie. it is our consciousness that triggers everything we do. while i agree with the easy problem of finding out which nerve reactions cause us to cry. those specific nerve reactions do not occur until our consciousness triggers them. so if we had no consciousness, we would have no mechanisms to trigger the reaction, to begin with. for most of my life, i just figured that our brains create our consciousness. i no longer think this is true. i do now suspect that our consciousness is not a physical part of us, because i am now aware of stuff that i had never been introduced to before. because i grew up with the western scientific philosophy. i wouldnt be the least bit surprised if consciousness is the only fundamental in our universe, from which everything else arises. however, i also highly suspect that this is not provable. which is not at all satisfying to a curious mind !!

If your zombie believes itself to be conscious and has all the necessary internal states and self-awareness to maintain that belief then it is conscious.

As subjective experience can’t be derived from physics (because physics is behaviouristic), I assume that Carroll is suggesting ontological rather than epistemic emergence. He seems to see the ontological emergence of subjective experience as no big deal, but I think that’s no explanation at all. Why should there be any ontologically emergent phenomena?

I think the fact that life on a fundamental level is predicated on suffering (animals have to eat and get eaten by other animals), is a pretty strong defeater for the simulation hypothesis. Any civilization capable of simulating all of this, would have gotten nowhere near that level of techological sofistication if they had an ethics system that would allow for this in the first place. It's one thing for a god (the simulator) to allow suffering; it is another entirely to make it a base premise for life.

How realistic does a simulation have to be before we can define it as reality? In other words if there are no qualitative differences between 'simulation' and 'reality' what physical or philosophical difference is there between them?

What he proposes a understanding of protophenomenal properties behind a property dualism that mental properties can exist as emergent

I often wonder what it must be like to be the Sicilian Defense. Though recently I've thought more about the Caro-Kann...

The coolest part of this conversation was the simulation hypothesis. What if we're all living in an Apple simulation to test which iPhone sells the best 😂

I am sure many listeners of MindScape podcast would have noticed that Lisa Aziz-Zadeh interview had made "hard problem" not so hard anymore. The subjective experience of seeing red could be very similar or at least explainable with "embodied cognition". Do we still need to appeal to qualia?

I'm actually mildly surprised that solipsism didn't get a mention in this conversation (because I know that _I_ have experience of qualia, but I just can't prove that anyone else is). Perhaps it's not a very productive idea in the first place (I could see that being a good reason for it not coming up).

I love how both David and Sean both started going 'errr' in the simulation discussion! Dark energy is just the overhead computer process required by the higher plane entities that generate our gigantic simulated universe. :-)

You got Chalmers!

Wouldn't uncomputable numbers and quantization error be obstacles to digitizing an organic (numerically continuous) consciousness? My digital camera doesn't have an "infinity-P" resolution! This problem seems non-trivial, specifically in "where does consciousness act on the physical world?" because the amount of physical energy it would take to willfully influence reality is vanishingly small. Anybody else agree that this is an under-explored set of questions?

Great talk!

Great discussion. Well done, gentlemen.

The best podcast.

Good one! But... where's the Hammerof podcast? He' position is much more grounded than Chalmers!

So light waves and sound waves get translated into electrical chemical stimulations by interacting with our sensory perceptual systems. Why aren’t these a hard problem when these same electrical chemical stimulations getting translated into sounds and visual experiences apparently are the hard problem? Are electrons interacting with our tv sets making pictures and sounds a hard problem? How is that different from the translations that occur within our sensory perceptual systems? Also, why go from consciousness, skip biology and evolution and land on physics and interacting particles to explain consciousness, when consciousness clearly arises out of or is a property of biological life forms? And certainly seems to have been continually selected for and expanded on by evolution due to the advantaged it gives for survival.

For me consciousness( the global, not personal level) is the same as the quantum field, the base fundamental of existence of anything, material or energetic.

I find many worlds interpretation and the hard problem interesting ideas. Just speculating out loud but how about self-locating observer in a many-worlds interpretation measurement combined with the idea of Wigner's friend. something like consciousness having a role on where an observer finds themselves on which branch of a measurement outcome. Could consciousness play a role in self-locating on an Everettian branch? I am just throwing stuff against a wall here but it is a thought.

One view is that we are in a dream similar to entities being in our dreams at night. If we are in a Mind that allows us to share in its consciousness and gives us free will with an individuality that will never be taken away we are lucky. Luckier than the entities in our dreams which do not have individuality or soul or whatever one wants to call it.

we are already talking about the implications of AI, such as would it be right to turn them off if they are conscious, one of the pointers that this isn't a simulation is that we get turned off, we die, surely that would be unethical in a simulation where we are conscious?

The mind has states and motion. They did not bring up motion, is there evidence that consciousness has motion? If it does not have motion it is not physical because everything that is physical has motion or is subject to motion. If consciousness is prior to the three forces and the motions that they engender, it is not physical.

Absolutely the best conversation I have ever heard on this subject. I am more or less in Chalmer's camp, but have to give high marks to Sean Carroll for having a rational discussion of the subject. I haven't lsitened to all yet, but must poin out that Chalmers missed the appropriate response to Carroll's doubt that he himself is conscious (32:05 and following). Carroll confuses behavior with being consciousness. They simply are not the same. This mistake (which seems to sten from personal temperament, in my experience) is the root of the pure materialist-behaviorist's misunderstanding. He believes that all 1st person experience can be reduced to 3rd person descriptors because he really cannot "see" any difference between their own 1st person experience and descriptions of others behavior. (the philospher Chalmer's describes who doubts that some philosophers are conscious was probablyt extrapolating from this glaring lack of insight.) I will keep listening, but so far, Chalmers is too agreeable.

Doesn't bother me to call it consciousness or quantum field or even God( if we don't think it as a human like being, but existence itself)

If it a dream, like our nightly dreams, then we will wake up unharmed. Duality is necessary for there to be anything and that involves suffering. We suffer less if we use our free will to cooperate with reality. If we fail to do so we suffer and we learn from that.

I don't really understand Sean's position on the zombie philosophy, if he has the intuition to ask himself the question am I conscious, then the answer would be yes. A zombie would just be a complex computer. You could create a clone zombie that could mimic every action a single person has made up unto the present moment, but the zombies action would diverge after.

LOVETHISPODCAST!!

Does a self evolving system can be simulated? It would be a run away train. And would take enormous amount of time to simulate our world. Definitely not 13 billion years. Another interesting issue is can we humans be truly objective. It wouldn't mean we are looking our world from outside of our system, which is impossible. So we really only can be approximately objective. We always have subjective consciousness, so our perception and understanding also subjective. That why we see things differently. Scientific knowledge also continuously evolving, but always subject to our individual acceptance and understanding.

What about quantum mechanics as a computer itself generating a simulation universe?

14:56 - Who is to say that humans are really conscious and not just mimicking consciousness, also?

32:20 list three things about your self and this is what comes to mind. Rock n Roll Sean 😉

If consciousness is a name given to the intrinsic nature of electron, and intermediate objects like tables do not have consciousness and then humans have consciousness, then we could easily give the initinsic nature of electron a name - bonksciousness (not a misspelling, but a made up word). Why? Because it is never claimed that consciousness as name for intrinsic nature has any connection with consciousness of humans.

What is the novel mentioned at the end about simutaions rights?

Maybe the representation of red and green in the brain is colorless? And why do we see yellow if the red and green cones in our retina are triggered simultaneously?

Dualism isn't 'the other side' of materialism/physicalism. Idealism is.

Suppose a zombie listening to this podcast realized that he is merely an analog displaying human-like behaviors, but dark inside&lacking subjective experience, having always suspected that behavior from nearby beings represented genuine expressions of consciousness in a sense that he has known for a long time he does not have. Would this zombie's new self awareness suddenly impart unto him the mystical/scientific properties/characteristics that we will one day call the guideline litmus tests for consciousness in a being? If the scientific property that will one day define the existence of consciousness cannot be imparted suddenly by self realization, then what kind of criteria would it have to be?

Pure gold!!!

How did matter become animated / alive? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does the universe have the laws of physics it does? These are the really foundational questions and vital Frontiers to explore There is no hard question of consciousness because we have a clear understanding of evolution and the molecular happenings of organisms All organisms must have some internal experience Anyway just wanted to mention these points because I think a lot of people are looking at this issue from a very abstract linguistic perspective that's not taking into account the incredible scientific achievements in the branches of Neurology, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, biochemistry We Know What organisms are and we know how they function Further we can functionally understand all of their internal experiences Much of the confusion on these issues is simply a matter of language in the ability to talk in 1st 2nd and 3rd person perspectives

The problem I see in what Chalmers is saying is that it reduces to... something can't be explained (consciousness) therefore we need a new property. But nature doesn't care I we can explain things or not. Just because we can't explain something doesn't mean we should introduce a fudge (new property).

We shouldn't give up on trying to explain consciousness we shouldn't embrace mysterianism like some have

It strikes me as odd that Chalmers (and others with similar views) focuses on consciousness not being reducible to specifically 'physical' - in the sense of physics (atoms, fields, etc.) - processes, as being the materialist's problem. A more appropriate (and, unsurprisingly, more tractable) approach would be considering the reducibility of consciousness to biological processes. And even then, as being a higher-order, late coming biological phenomenon associated with nervous systems. Of course we can't make sense of consciousness in terms of micro-physical constituents, we can't make sense of much of the biological world in those terms either: speciation, natural selection, perception, digestion, etc., none of these properties can be explained in terms of physics, but no one finds that perplexing, nor should they. This isn't to say consciousness is easily explained biologically, far from it. But it is to say that the explanation is certainly feasible within that specific domain, and not inherently paradoxical, same as speciation, natural selection, perception and digestion. Love the podcast. All the best.

Hi Sean, I learn alot from You.

Sean C. for president. What could possibly go wrong? What do we have to lose? Who else is more qualified? Plus, he's not 78 years old.

To begin with, the core of philosophy and logic requires us to DEFINE our terms before we start talking about them. But almost no one even tries to define "consciousness"! (Or "simulation" for that matter.) So here we go: **Consciousness is the ability to model reality internally, at some number of dimensions. Basically, consciousness is simply a pattern in reality.** Levels of consciousness increase with the number of dimensions that can be modeled: 0D - preconsciousness - simple matter "models" only itself, it's internal state is its internal state (1:1 modeling). It's not really conscious, but it is "aware" of itself in a sense, at the moment, so it's sort of the fetal stage of consciousness. 1D - physical consciousness - a single celled organism (and maybe plants?) models itself, now, plus a future state, or an outside state. It can have a goal state in mind, essentially, or be aware that "there's something I like/dislike out there". Current, linear, computers are at this level as well I think. They have a current state and a goal state, and try to move from point A to point B. 2D - emotional consciousness - a simple brain and similar things can model both its own current and goal state along with a current and goal state of another individual (animal, vegetable, mineral, etc.) and see where they both intersect for more complex, non-linear, problem solving. 3D - intellectual consciousness - a social animal has the ability to model things logically, by looking at a whole group of individual perspectives (current state to goal state) starting with the self, and moving outward from there in an "objective" space where problems can be solved by triangulating the intersection point of the three different paths. 4D - philosophical consciousness - a mature human brain can model all four dimensions of time and space for a model that can problem solve for "me, you, and everyone else, now and into the future" all in one impressive go (neuroscience, and some funny math, suggests this starts coming online around age 40, when the two sides of the prefrontal cortex start functioning in parallel instead of only one at a time). ... This is sort of (proto)panpsychism and Tononi's approaches, as well as many others, as it includes all of the different levels. And... it means that everything that is conscious at a level of 1D and above is running a "simulation" if we say that a **simulation is a model of something larger**. A cell simulates it's own path through the universe by generating a pattern that represents it's current state compared to its goals for the future (based on the the intersection of the genes plus the environment) and makes *plans* (a map/model/simulation) to do things like move, eat, divide, etc. Finally, as for the quantum Zeno effect (which I'd never heard of before, so thanks to Chalmers for that!), the only thing that is *constantly* being measured is the beginning singularity of the universe, aka, t=0. Our own consciousness, then, is indeed the measurement (modeling/copying of reality internally) of some part of reality at some later point in time, thus collapsing the wave function (of the multiverse, probably), and creating a single timeline that sets our own unique path through reality. Each of our histories (memories) is a unique universe, connected by the past, like a trunk of a tree, with us moving up the branches, which diverge and reconnect periodically, so that we're not separate universes, but a network of intertwined ones, partly connected, informationally.

Why does Chalmers think epiphenomenonalism is weird?

On Sean's objection "How could I know that I am not a zombie', well you know because you are having a subjective experience of your life, a zombie doesnt have this subjective experience, they only act as though they do. So when Sean says " well how could I know that I'm not a zombie because I do all the things a zombie would do" hes completely missing the point. Sean you know you arent one because you are having a subjective experience. How you act is irrelevant to the question of if you are a zombie. A zombie is defined as a being without this subjective experience.

One must learn calculus in order not to understand better. How can there be a mechanistic understanding of a world? To be conscious is to know that something exists. The interpretation is irrelevant and relative but the knowing is not.

David Chalmers says consciousness is some phenomenon totally separate from anything behavioral, but even he keeps slipping from that view into conflating consciousness and certain types of behavior. For instance, he says there is research about NCCs, "neural correlates of consciousness", where they take people, look at which neurons fire, and correlate that with what the person feels. Well... how do the researchers know what the subject consciously feels? They presumably look at some sort of physical behavior! Maybe they ask them, and the subject tells them. That's behavior!