Consciousness is an Explanation of What Already Has Been Computed (John Hopfield) | AI Podcast Clips

Let alone consciousness. Let alone consciousness, yes, yes. Because that's tied up in there too. You can't just put that on another shelf. Every once in a while I get interested in consciousness, and then I go and I've done that for years, and ask one of my bettors, as it were, their view on consciousness. It's been interesting collecting them. What is consciousness? Let's try to take a brief step into that room. Well, I asked Marvin Minsky, did you go on consciousness? And Marvin said, consciousness is basically overrated. It may be an epiphenomenon. After all, all the things your brain does, which are actually hard computations, you do non-consciously. And there's so much evidence that even the simple things you do, you can make decisions, you can make committed decisions about them. The neurobiologist can say, he's now committed, he's going to move the hand left, right, left, left, before you know it. So, his view that consciousness is not… that's just like little icing on the cake. The real cake is in the subconscious. Yeah, subconscious, non-conscious. Non-conscious, what's the better word, sir? It's only that Freud captured the other word. Yeah, that's a confusing word, subconscious. Nicholas Chater wrote an interesting book. I think the title of it is The Mind is Flat. And flat, in a neural net sense, might be flat is something which is a very broad neural net without really any layers in depth, whereas a deep brain would be many layers and not so broad. In the same sense that if you push Minsky hard enough, he would probably have said, consciousness is your effort to explain to yourself that which you have already done. Yeah, it's the weaving of the narrative around the things that have already been computed for you. That's right. And so much of what we do for our memories of events, for example, if there's some traumatic event you witness, you will have a few facts about it correctly done. If somebody asks you about it, you will weave a narrative which is actually much more rich in detail than that, based on some anchor points you have of correct things, and pulling together general knowledge on the other, but you will have a narrative. And once you generate that narrative, you are very likely to repeat that narrative and claim that all the things you have in it are actually the correct things. There was a marvelous example of that in the Watergate slash impeachment era of John Dean. John Dean, you're too young to know, had been the personal lawyer of Nixon. And so John Dean was involved in the cover-up, and John Dean ultimately realized the only way to keep himself out of jail for a long time was actually to tell some of the truths about Nixon. And John Dean was a tremendous witness. He would remember these conversations in great detail, and very convincing detail. And long afterward, some of the tapes, the secret tapes as it were, from which these, John was, Dean was recalling these conversations, were published. And one found out that John Dean had a good, but not exceptional, memory. What he had was an ability to paint vividly, and in some sense accurately, the tone of what was going on. By the way, that's a beautiful description of consciousness. Do you, like where do you stand in your, today? So perhaps this changes day to day, but where do you stand on the importance of consciousness in our whole big mess of cognition? Is it just a little narrative maker, or is it actually fundamental to intelligence? That's a very hard one. When I asked Francis Crick about consciousness, he launched forward in a long monologue about Mendel and the peas. Yeah. And how Mendel knew that there was something, and how biologists understood that there was something in inheritance, which was just very, very different. And the fact that inherited traits didn't just wash out into a gray, but were this or this, and propagated. That was absolutely fundamental to biology, and it took generations of biologists to understand that there was genetics, and it took another generation or two to understand that genetics came from DNA. But very shortly after Mendel, thinking biologists did realize that there was a deep problem about inheritance. And Francis would have liked to have said, and that's why I'm working on consciousness. But of course, he didn't have any smoking gun in the sense of Mendel. And that's the weakness of his position. If you read his book, which he wrote with Koch, I think. Yeah, Christoph Koch, yeah. I find it unconvincing for the smoking gun reason. So I've gone on collecting views without actually having taken a very strong one myself, because I haven't seen the entry point. Not seeing the smoking gun from the point of view of physics, I don't see the entry point. Whereas in neurobiology, once I understood the idea of a collective, an evolution of dynamics, which could be described as a collective phenomenon, I thought, ah, there's a point where what I know about physics is so different from any neurobiologist that I have something I might be able to contribute. And right now there's no way to grasp at consciousness from a physics perspective. From my point of view, that's correct. And of course, people, physicists like everybody else, think very muddily about things. You ask the closely related question about free will. Do you believe you have free will? Physicists will give an offhand answer, and then backtrack, backtrack, backtrack, where they realize that the answer they gave must fundamentally contradict the laws of physics. Naturally, answering questions of free will and consciousness naturally lead to contradictions from a physics perspective, because it eventually ends up with quantum mechanics, and then you get into that whole mess of trying to understand how much, from a physics perspective, how much is determined, already predetermined, how much is already deterministic about our universe. There's lots of different… And if you don't push quite that far, you can say, essentially all of neurobiology, which is relevant, can be captured by classical equations of motion. Right. Because in my view of the mysteries of the brain are not the mysteries of quantum mechanics, but the mysteries of what can happen when you have a dynamical system, a quantum driven system, with 10 to the 14 parts. That complexity is something which is… The physics of complex systems is at least as badly understood as the physics of phase coherence in quantum mechanics.


Elon Musk as Inspiration for Science Fiction (Alex Garland) | AI Podcast Clips

Drawing inspiration from real life, so for devs, for Ex Machina, look at characters like Elon Musk. What do you think about the various big technological efforts of Elon Musk and others like him that he's involved with, such as Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink? Do you see any of that technology potentially defining the future worlds you create in your work? So Tesla is automation, SpaceX is space exploration, Neuralink is brain-machine interface, somehow a merger of biological and electric systems. In a way I'm influenced by that almost by definition because that's the world I live in and this is the thing that's happening in that world. And I also feel supportive of it. So I think amongst various things Elon Musk has done, I'm almost sure he's done a very, very good thing with Tesla for all of us. It's really kicked all the other car manufacturers in the face, it's kicked the fossil fuel industry in the face and they needed kicking in the face and he's done it. And so that's the world he's part of creating and I live in that world, just bought a Tesla in fact. And so does that play into whatever I then make? In some ways it does, partly because I try to be a writer who quite often filmmakers are in some ways fixated on the films they grew up with and they sort of remake those films in some ways. I've always tried to avoid that. And so I look to the real world to get inspiration and as much as possible sort of by living I think. And so yeah, I'm sure. Which of the directions do you find most exciting? Space travel. Space travel. So you haven't really explored space travel in your work. You've said something like if you had unlimited amount of money, I think I read it at AMA, you would make like a multi-year series of space wars or something like that. So what is it that excites you about space exploration? Well, because if we have any sort of long-term future, it's that. It just simply is that. If energy and matter are linked up in the way we think they're linked up, we'll run out if we don't move. So we got to move. But also how can we not? It's built into us to do it or die trying. I was on Easter Island a few months ago, which is, as I'm sure you know, in the middle of the Pacific and difficult for people to have got to, but they got there. And I did think a lot about the way those boats must have set out into something like space. It was the ocean and how sort of fundamental that was to the way we are. And it's the one that most excites me because it's the one I want most to happen. It's the thing, it's the place where we could get to as humans. Like in a way I could live with us never really unlocking, fully unlocking the nature of consciousness. I'd like to know, I'm really curious, but if we never leave the solar system and if we never get further out into this galaxy or maybe even galaxies beyond our galaxy, that feels sad to me because it's so limiting. There's something hopeful and beautiful about reaching out, any kind of exploration, reaching out across earth centuries ago and then reaching out into space. So what do you think about colonization of Mars? So go to Mars. Does that excite you, the idea of a human being stepping foot on Mars? It does. It absolutely does. But in terms of what would really excite me, it would be leaving the solar system in as much as that I just think, I think we already know quite a lot about Mars. And but yes, listen, if it happened, that would be, I hope I see it in my lifetime. I really hope I see it in my lifetime. It would be a wonderful thing.