Maximum tegmark: Of all the words I know, none make more of my colleagues more emotional and prone to foaming at the mouth than the words I am about to say. It is “awareness”. Many scientists dismiss this as complete BS and totally irrelevant, and many others think it’s central. what do i think I think consciousness is irrelevant and incredibly important. Let me explain why.

First of all, if you’re being chased by a heat-seeking missile, whether this heat-seeking missile is conscious, whether it has a subjective experience, what it’s like to be that heat-seeking missile. It doesn’t matter to you if you feel What you care about is what the heat-seeking missile does, not how it feels. This goes to show that it’s a complete herring to think you’re safe from future AI if you’re not conscious. What you want to make sure is in line with your goals is its behavior.

On the other hand, I think there are parts where awareness is very important, and parts where it is very attractive. Rewind 400 years or so and Galileo could have told you that if you threw an apple and a hazelnut, it would move exactly in the form of a parabola, and he could give you all the math for that. He has no idea why hazelnuts are brown or why apples are soft and hazelnuts are hard. It seemed to him beyond science, and 400 years ago science could only say sensible things about this very limited domain of motion-related phenomena. Then came Maxwell’s equations, which told us all about it, and it became the realm of science. And then we got to quantum mechanics, which taught us why apples are softer than hazelnuts, and all the other properties of matter. Gradually, science conquered more and more natural phenomena. ask, it’s actually much quicker to explain the little things that science can’t wisely talk about. People mean many different things with that word. I simply mean the subjective experience, the experience of colors, sounds, emotions, etc., which is what I feel is who I am, and which is quite separate from my actions that I can have. Even if I’m a zombie and haven’t experienced anything, it’s possible.

So why should you care? Because it’s basically the basic things we know about the world. It’s been my experience and I want to understand why it is scientifically, and not leave it to philosophers alone. And secondly, it is also very important in terms of purpose and meaning. In the laws of physics, there is nothing about meaning. There is no formula for that. I feel that we should not seek the universe to give it meaning. It is because we are conscious and experience things that give meaning to the universe. Our universe was not conscious before. It used to be a lot of things moving around. Gradually these incredibly complex patterns were laid down in our brains and we woke up and now our universe recognizes itself. why are they beautiful Because we are consciously aware of them. We look at them through telescopes. In the future, if we screw up our technology and all life becomes extinct, our universe will revert to meaninglessness, and as far as I am concerned it will be a colossal waste of space. When I say I think it’s BS, I ask them to tell me what’s wrong with rape and torture and describe it without using the word consciousness or the word experience. If they can’t talk about it, then all they’re saying is very bad, and it’s just a bunch of electrons and quarks moving around in a certain way and not some other certain way, and that what’s wrong with

I feel that the only way we can really have a logical and scientific basis for ethics, morality, purpose and meaning is precisely from the point of view of experience, consciousness. As we prepare for the future, it becomes very important to understand what this is. I don’t think the difference between living bugs and dead bugs is that living bugs have some kind of secret source of life. I think of bugs as mechanisms, and dead bugs are just broken mechanisms. Similarly, what makes my brain conscious is that the food I ate was rearranged in my brain and I was not conscious because they were made of different kinds of things. not from It’s a rearrangement of the same quarks, right? Aligned pattern. I think this is a scientific question: What properties does this pattern of information processing need to have in order to have a subjective experience? You can imagine building a brain scanner. In fact, the MIT I work at has a pretty good one. Among them is software that tests the theories we have about consciousness and predicts what we will experience. If I’m sitting at this machine and the computer screen says to me, “Okay, now I see you processing information that indicates that you’re consciously aware of Apple’s thoughts. I say yes, yes, yes, and it says you are aware of this by looking at information about your heartbeat in your brain. Now that I have ruled out the theory implemented in software, it is falsifiable, i.e. it was a scientific theory.

If one day we can find a theory like this, and if there is a candidate on the market like Giulio Tononi’s theory of integrated information, for example, find a theory that continues to pass such a test, and take it seriously. Once you get started, use it to build a consciousness detector. This is very convenient first of all. The emergency room doctor said they would come in with an unresponsive patient and put them in a consciousness scanner to see if they were just conscious because they were locked in and unable to communicate, or if there was no one at home. I’m glad… this will also help us understand if the future AI systems we build are conscious and if we should feel guilty about turning them off . Some people might prefer future home helper robots to be unconscious zombies. So you don’t have to feel guilty about giving it boring chores or turning it off. Some people may prefer to be conscious so that it becomes a positive experience. And most importantly, in the longer term future, life spreading from Earth to other galaxies will be far away from now, and the entire universe will be alive. If this life is going to be the descendant of mankind, isn’t it? What if it turns out to be a play for an empty bench? Seriously tackle the last frontier of scientific ignorance, the question of consciousness, to solve it and shape a truly wonderful future. I feel the need to be able to do that. , but to have someone at home who actually goes through all of this.