#152 Why AI Will Never Be Conscious
4/20/20261 hr 42 min
Get Huel today with this exclusive offer for New Customers of 15% OFF with code alexoconnor at https://huel.com/alexoconnor (Minimum $50 purchase).For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack.Anil Seth is a British neuroscientist and professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex. A proponent of materialist explanations of consciousness, he is currently amongst the most cited scholars on the topics of neuroscience and cognitive science globally.Read Anil's essay, "The Mythology of Conscious AI". - TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - The Difference Between Intelligence and Consciousness
03:55 - What’s Stopping the Replication of Consciousness in AI?
17:01 - Can You Separate What the Brain Is From What It Does?
22:20 - Is Conscious Experience Just Predictions From the Brain?
26:48 - Why Do We Project Consciousness Onto LLMs?
37:27 - Can Consciousness Exist Without a Body?
42:25 - Why We Liken the Brain to a Computer
52:11 - Is There An Evolutionary Reason For Consciousness?
56:29 - Studying Unconscious Perception?
1:01:21 - Is Consciousness Unified? Split-Brain Patients
1:15:10 - Attention and Consciousness
1:19:04 - What Would a Conscious Chatbot Even Look Like?
1:25:13 - Consciousness as a Controlled Hallucination
1:34:19 - Do Scientists Actually Study “Consciousness” At All?
- CONNECT
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Clips
Showing 10 of 11Transcript preview
First 90 secondsAlex O'Connor· Host0:00
And, Anil Seth, welcome back to the show.
Anil Seth· Guest0:01
Thanks, Alex.
Alex O'Connor· Host0:02
What is the difference between intelligence and consciousness?
Anil Seth· Guest0:07
Both resist the kind of precise consensus definitions, but I think intuitively they are fundamentally different kinds of things. If we think about intelligence, it's about doing something. Could be about solving a complex problem or, or solving any kind of problem. But in general, it's about the capability to, to do things functionally, behaviorally. Consciousness is primarily about feeling and being rather than doing.
Alex O'Connor· Host0:37
Mm-hmm.
Anil Seth· Guest0:37
It's, it's in the words of Thomas Nagel more than 50 years ago now.
Alex O'Connor· Host0:41
Yeah.
Anil Seth· Guest0:41
He said... Yeah, it's, it was 1970- '70, probably ... six, I think. Anyway, uh, that for a conscious organism or a conscious anything, there is something it feels like to be that organism, and he doesn't mean feeling that it has to be necessarily emotional or anything like that. Simply the idea that there's some sort of interiority, there's some kind of experiencing going on. It feels like something to be me, to be you, but probably not to be a chair. And I think this, this distinction between feeling and, and, and doing is, is intuitively right. It doesn't mean they're unrelated. I think they may very... They're certainly related in things that exist, in, in living creatures, for instance. But they may not have to go together in general.
Alex O'Connor· Host1:26
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You just wrote an essay, a prize-winning