In this episode of the Making Sense Podcast, I speak with Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher of mind and a long-time meditator. We talk about the role of intuition in science, the ethics of building conscious AI, the self as a hallucination, and the place of Eastern philosophy in Western science, as well as the limitations of secular humanism. We also talk about his views on the Nazi regime and its impact on Western thought, and his work in the philosophy of mind, including his new book, Being No One and the Ego Tunnel. This is a very interesting conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed recording it. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider becoming a supporter of what we're doing here by becoming a patron or subscribing to our other podcasting platform, Making Sense. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore, therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, we can't run the podcast without your support. Thank you for all the support you're giving us a chance to make sense of the things we're trying to do. You can't ask for more, can you ask for it? You're helping us to improve the podcast, and we'll only be better at making sense by listening to the podcast! Thanks to our sponsors, Sam Harris and the people who make it possible. Sam Harris & the team at The Making Sense team at Making Sense, and all the hard work that goes into making it all possible. Thanks to you, again and again, again, and again and more! - thank you again, to everyone who's listening to this podcast. - Sam Harris - Thank you, and keep making sense, and keeping it all the time, and coming back, and making it better, and more and more of it makes sense, you're making it so much more than just sense, we'll keep on making sense. -- Thank you. - Your support is so much appreciated, thank you, you'll get a better of it, and you'll be better listening, more of that, you know what you're listening to it, thanks to you'll hear it, you can do it, we're listening, and it's better than that, we know it, it'll help us all, and so on, and that's more than enough, and they'll know it'll make it, right? -
00:06:49.860But you must also see the historical situation, you know.
00:06:54.580In World War II, we have either murdered or driven out of the country all of the Jewish intelligentsia.
00:07:03.260So many teacher-disciple relationships were completely cut off.
00:07:08.740And I'm very grateful to the generation of analytical philosophers who came before me to reconnect us, you know, to the global discussion again, to mankind's philosophical conversation.
00:07:22.400That was something that had to be established first after World War II because there were many people who thought the hottest and most recent stuff is Heidegger.
00:07:33.880Who had more than a superficial connection with the trends that got so many people murdered and exiled.
00:08:37.920And this little scholar in me was awakening.
00:08:41.180And I was getting interested in the books in my parents' shelves.
00:08:44.220And I saw there was one book they put up very high because they didn't want me to see it.
00:08:49.500And of course, the next time they were out, I put a chair on my father's writing desk and crept up there.
00:08:56.740And it was a photo book called The Yellow Star.
00:08:59.620And I saw bulldozers pushing piles of corpses into mass graves.
00:09:06.240And I saw photo documentation of medical experiments on Jews with phosphor burning away their flesh and stuff like this.
00:09:15.880And that was the moment when my childhood ended.
00:09:18.640You know, until then, I was living in a world, you know, cowboys and Indians and fairy tales.
00:09:25.320And I didn't know that something like this existed in reality.
00:09:30.440So as you grow up, when I was 16 years old, I was still firmly and honestly convinced that I had been born in the worst country of the whole world, you know, with that tribe, with that history.
00:09:45.580And there's this aftermath where you ask your parents, how much did you know?
00:09:54.460And they all tell you, we didn't know anything.
00:09:57.180And then you ask the other school children in the schoolyard.
00:10:00.620And they all say, my parents also say, they didn't know anything of this.
00:10:05.000And then you ask your history teacher.
00:10:06.960And I said, they tell you, don't let yourselves be fooled.
00:12:39.380But, of course, he couldn't be a fascist and he couldn't be a Nazi because he couldn't be that.
00:12:43.900I also, technically, I don't regard him as a philosopher because he, in my view, doesn't have a serious interest in the growth of knowledge.
00:14:06.100It's not often I get a direct window onto this experience or that people even have this experience.
00:14:11.600So your description of what it was like to be a child stumbling upon that book and the evidence of the Holocaust that had not yet reached you.
00:14:21.220And then the experience of talking about this with parents and friends who talk about it with their parents and getting a kind of denial.
00:14:30.780Really, it sounds like a blanket denial that anyone was aware at the time what was happening.
00:14:37.000And yet the official story from your historians and your teachers of history is, no, of course, more or less everyone knew this was happening.
00:14:47.700And the whole culture is complicit on some level.
00:14:51.920How do you reconcile those two pieces?
00:14:54.800Because in terms of Germany's reputation, it is much more of the latter sort that Germany has quite famously really lived in a kind of purgatory of self-criticism since World War II in a way that Austria hasn't and Japan hasn't.
00:15:15.020I mean, you know, in Austria and Japan, you have a more or less official denial of just how morally dark their behavior became.
00:15:24.400But with Germany, everyone seems to acknowledge that there has been an impressive and perhaps even sufficient degree of hand-wringing over the Holocaust and over World War II.
00:15:37.920But it sounds like your experience is one of where the grown-ups are more or less living in total denial about that.
00:15:48.560Well, some of the last witnesses are dying right now.
00:15:52.400Right now, many have finished their lives in denial.
00:15:55.940They have also been psychologically traumatized.
00:15:58.620For instance, my father had to go to war with 17, and he wrote a book about things he couldn't talk about.
00:16:06.200They have seen horrible things as children.
00:16:08.320And he told me when they saw 800 American airplanes fly over the Rhine Valley in broad daylight using the Rhine Valley and counted them as children, and they came back without their bomb load.
00:16:26.060And then it was the first time that it dawned on them that they might not be winning this war, like everybody told them.
00:16:33.780And so, actually, I didn't want to go this direction at all.
00:16:39.200But now it, of course, connects to Trump and your political situation, because I think as a German, we can bring a unique perspective onto what you are living through right now.
00:16:51.380So, I'm so very grateful for the U.S., for the thousands of beautiful young men that you have sacrificed, you know, to defeat the generation of my grandfather and my father.
00:17:06.080You brought us democracy, the Marshall Plan and everything, and now see how this has played out 70 years later.
00:17:16.520You are lying on the ground in a very serious situation, and we are one of the most stable democracies in the whole world.
00:17:26.400It's completely bizarre to be a German right now.
00:17:29.220Everybody is tapping on your shoulder and saying, hey, you are the leaders of the civilized world now.
00:18:41.380Where were you in these decisive years?
00:18:44.140This is not going to be over when it's over.
00:18:46.240There will be a deep intergenerational rift in the society and it will be a major threat to social cohesion that you may need decades to get over.
00:18:58.560So there will be an aftermath to this bizarre Trump episode right now.
00:19:04.880And you better think about it now, how you want to go about it.
00:19:08.260And then there will be no aftermath to climate change.
00:19:13.580Climate change is going to go on for centuries, even in the best possible scenario.
00:19:22.560There is not going to be this episode is not going to be over.
00:19:26.080And, you know, the U.S. are now what I would call a climate rogue state.
00:19:32.180They're completely isolated from the rest of mankind.
00:19:35.820And, you know, your children and grandchildren will have to deal with that, too.
00:19:45.040We just went through this the last 70 years.
00:19:47.600Yeah, it's interesting to hear that perspective.
00:19:49.380I can tell you that what you just said about how dire it appears from the German point of view that we have elected a person like Trump to run this country.
00:20:01.680That will seem like sheer delusion to anyone who is at all sympathetic with Trump or at least thought Clinton was terrible enough that it was just kind of an ordinary judgment call to pick Trump over her.
00:20:18.400And it will it will seem hyperbolic, I think, to most people who are even worried about Trump.
00:20:24.700I don't want to spend any real time on him because I don't know how I don't know how much you've listened to this podcast, but I probably have 20 hours of me shrieking about Trump on this podcast.
00:20:34.380And even those who agree with me are probably sick of it by now.
00:20:38.020So I have to sort of pick my moments here on this topic.
00:20:42.340And I think we're, you know, we happily with all the chaos that we see in the U.S. government at the moment, there hasn't been much concrete consequence to Trump's tenure and his incompetence and his narcissism.
00:20:59.680And the way in which he's eroded the norms of our politics and civil society, it's been a fairly quiescent period in human history, despite the fact that North Korea keeps testing ICBMs and Russia keeps hacking the electoral process of democracies throughout the West.
00:21:18.680But I completely take your point that there's no telling how bad it could get with a person like him in charge.
00:21:25.860I'm not at all complacent on that topic.
00:21:28.460And, you know, insofar as I can do anything on this podcast, I have made noise about this to the limits of even my fans' patience.
00:21:36.800But I want to move on to topics of our mutual philosophical concern and scientific concern, because there's just so much to talk about here.
00:21:46.460Well, may I just briefly interrupt before we leave that topic all together?
00:21:52.040I mean, I went to your website when I got all these emails and said, OK, this looks good, but it's probably one of these American self-marketing robots.
00:22:02.440And then I had no time to read any of your books.
00:23:54.460Yeah, well, obviously, you as a German and a scholar of the relevant history are in a good position to warn our society what it means to elect somebody who is not disposed to pay attention to constitutional or democratic norms.
00:24:12.480But, you know, Germany in particular is aware of just how, you know, as Timothy Snyder, the historian, said on this podcast, just how, you know, the people go to the polls not knowing that they're voting away their freedom or that they're voting for the last time.
00:24:27.500And yet this is an experience that democracies have had, and we haven't had that in the U.S.
00:24:33.680There is an assumption that our institutions are strong enough and that the stakes are always low enough that, you know, nothing terrible will happen when we put a selfish imbecile of this magnitude in charge.
00:24:49.280But I just think it's not a safe assumption, and I'm as, you know, I've expressed my worries, again, more or less ad nauseum on this podcast.
00:24:57.180But, you know, I hope he gets reined in by everything that can reign him in and the military professionals included.
00:25:04.900So, Thomas, let's start with consciousness.
00:25:08.500We have questions of intellectual and moral interests that will outlive us and have, you know, they outlived Plato, they outlived the Buddha, they outlived everyone who has touched them, and I think they will endure.
00:25:23.300But the mystery of consciousness, how do you think about consciousness?
00:25:28.580Well, I've been in this for 30 years now.
00:25:33.540You may know that I'm one of the people who founded the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness 22 years ago.
00:25:41.880I think the first thing we have to understand that consciousness is not one problem, but that it's a whole bundle of problems, some more conceptual, some more empirical.
00:26:19.700And in this one popular book, The Ego Tunnel, I've actually predicted that by 2050, we will have the global neural correlate of consciousness.
00:27:10.280But conceivability arguments are just very, very weak.
00:27:15.080If you have an ill-defined folk psychological umbrella term, like consciousness, then you can pull off all kinds of scenarios and zombie thought experiments.
00:27:29.920It doesn't really, it helped to clarify some issues in the mid-90s.
00:27:36.320But the consciousness community has listened to this and just moved on.
00:27:41.860I mean, nobody of the serious researchers in the field thinks about this anymore.
00:27:48.120But it has taken on like a folkloristic life of its own.
00:27:53.060A lot of people talk about the hard problem who wouldn't be able to state what it consists in now.
00:28:00.560Well, maybe we should just state it just so that those listeners who didn't hear me speak with David on the podcast or haven't read my book, Waking Up.
00:28:08.380Basically, the issue is this, that consciousness, if you define it as, to follow Thomas Nagel here, the fact that it's like something to be what you are.
00:28:19.720The fact that a brain of sufficient complexity or a creature at a certain point in evolutionary terms has a subjective, qualitative perspective on the world.
00:28:33.640This formulation, I mean, there have been many variants of it, but famously, the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a paper, a very influential paper in the early 70s, titled, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
00:28:45.280And he said, you know, we may never know, a bat experience could be totally unlike our own, but if it is like something to be a bat, if you switch places with a bat, that wouldn't be synonymous with just the canceling of experience, but you would be laid bare to a different domain of experience.
00:29:04.780Well, that is the fact of consciousness in the case of a bat.
00:29:09.060Whether we ever understand it or not, the fact that the lights are on, the fact that there is a perspectival, qualitative character there, that is what we mean by consciousness.
00:29:20.700And I've always thought that that is a good definition.
00:29:25.160It doesn't answer any of what Chalmers called the easy problems of consciousness.
00:29:30.260You know, how does the eye and the visual cortex transduce light energy into a visual mapping of the visual scene?
00:29:39.300The hard problem on Chalmers' account is always this bit, the fact that it's like something to do any of that,
00:29:45.320because it's the transition from unconscious seeing, which human brains do and robots do, to the conscious experience of seeing, which we know humans accomplish.
00:29:57.100And at the moment, there's no good reason to think our robots or computers do.
00:30:02.440And a corollary to this framing is that any explanation we get about consciousness,
00:30:09.520and let's just say we, you know, open the back of the book of nature and we get the right answer about consciousness,
00:30:15.080and it turns out that you need exactly, you know, 10,000 information processing units of a certain character.
00:30:22.980They have to be wired in a certain way.
00:30:25.200They have to be firing at a certain hertz.
00:30:27.940And just lo and behold, that is what gives you consciousness.
00:30:31.780And if you change any of those parameters, well, then the lights go out.
00:30:48.860And that's not the way most or really any satisfying scientific explanation works out.
00:30:56.040When I give you an explanation for any higher level property, you know, the fluidity of water or the brittleness of glass in terms of its micro constituents,
00:31:07.240well, then that explanation actually does run through and conserves your intuitions about how things function at a lower level so as to appear as they do on a higher level.
00:31:18.000And so it is, I would argue, even with the example you just gave of life.
00:31:23.180So you said that 100 years ago or even less, 70 years ago, perhaps, let me get my dates right.
00:31:31.300People felt that we would never have a satisfactory explanation of what life is or how life, the energy of life, relates to physical structure and how heredity could be a mere mechanism and how, you know, the healing of disease or from wounds could be just a matter of chemistry.
00:31:50.060But, of course, with the advent of molecular biology and other insights, we figured all of that out really without remainder and therefore vitalism or a notion that there has to be any kind of life spirit in matter, that has gone out the window.
00:32:04.680That's another analogy that doesn't really get at how mysterious consciousness is because something like reproduction or growth or healing from injury, that really can be explained mechanistically and our intuitions run through there.
00:32:23.900So the conceivability issue for me with the hard problem isn't so much a statement about what is true.
00:32:31.720It's not that I doubt that consciousness can be an emergent property of information processing because it's so difficult to conceive or impossible to conceive how that works, but it is just a statement about the seeming limits of explanation.
00:32:47.820It sounds to me that whatever you put in the space provided will still sound like the restatement of a miracle, which is really analogous to how to take an analogy to cosmology, the idea that everything, including the laws of nature, emerged out of nothing, right?
00:33:09.560Now, that may in fact be true, but I would argue, or at least it seems to me, that it's inconceivable or uninterpretable or it's not understandable.
00:33:31.460You've now mentioned so many important points that I don't really know where to start.
00:33:37.240So maybe we should just say technically the hard problem is that phenomenal properties only nomologically supervene on functional properties, but not logically.
00:33:49.540That is the conscious properties of sweetness or redness or whatever the bat perceives is determined by information flow in its brain in this world under the laws of nature holding in this world.
00:34:03.360But there are other worlds where we can imagine that the bat is a zombie with exactly that information flow in its brain, that there could always be a functional isomorph to Sam, right?
00:34:16.380Some entity that has the same functions on a certain level of granularity, but which instantiates no phenomenal properties.
00:34:26.540Thomas, I want to jump in here for one second because I want people to understand the distinctions you're making.
00:34:30.960And you used some terms that will lose most people who are not philosophically trained.
00:34:37.140So I think you hit upon that consciousness nomologically supervenes upon the physical or something like that.
00:34:46.420Nomologically means under the laws of nature holding in our universe.
00:34:52.660Now, there could be other universes, logically possible worlds, in which these laws of nature do not hold.
00:34:59.400So the idea is that consciousness is determined from below, from the brain, may only hold in this world with these laws of nature, but it's not conceptually something that may hold across all possible worlds.
00:35:16.820That's the idea that that is the mystery that you are trying to isolate, that the mystery consists in the fact that we can always imagine that Sam Harris is a zombie, that he would talk, he would even talk about his emotions and his color experiences, but he would not have any inner perspective.
00:35:47.900I don't know if it originates with Chalmers, and he certainly made good use of it in his book,
00:35:51.860but this idea that we can conceive of a zombie, which is a being that functions and appears exactly like a human being, but has no conscious experience.
00:36:03.820The lights are not on in a zombie, it's just a perfectly humanoid robot that has no subjectivity or qualitative experience.
00:36:12.620Now, the fact that we can imagine such a thing does not even slightly suggest that such a thing is possible.
00:36:19.960It just may be that in order to get something that functions like a human being and seems like a human being from the outside,
00:36:25.800that consciousness is always going to be necessary or will always come along for the ride.
00:36:30.860And I'm just agnostic as to whether or not that's the case.
00:36:34.140And, you know, I think as we develop AI, we may, you know, learn more and more about whether or not that's the case or cease to find it intellectually interesting.
00:36:43.740So I'm not arguing from the side of it's conceivable that there could be a zombie, Sam, and therefore there's a hard problem of consciousness.
00:36:51.940It's more that whatever I imagine the explanation to be, the idea that, you know, the first the lights are not on,
00:37:00.680and then they come on by virtue of some complexity in the system, some...
00:37:07.400No, complexity doesn't explain anything. Complexity is not good.
00:37:12.160But then you can keep changing, I mean, you keep changing the noun, whether it's information, integration, or, you know...
00:39:05.100Our intuitions were designed to avoid getting hit over the head by another ape or to mate with his sister.
00:39:11.420Our intuitions are very crude, but again, we use certain intuitions that we have, you know,
00:39:17.720whether mathematical or otherwise, to leverage ourselves into areas where our intuitions are common sense intuitions
00:39:25.460and certainly our folk psychological intuitions are not good.
00:39:29.500So I can certainly follow you there, but it still just seems to be the case that consciousness provides some kind of extra impediments here.
00:39:38.380So take something like platform independence.
00:39:40.980So like, you know, if we assume that there's nothing magical about having a computer made of meat
00:39:47.180and consciousness is, as mind is, as intelligence is, clearly platform independent,
00:39:54.840and therefore we could, in principle, build conscious computers that were non-biological,
00:39:59.140how would we move, in your view, from having characterized the neural correlate of consciousness in people
00:40:06.500into being confident that the computers that seem to emulate that functionally and informationally
00:42:00.160You know, if you have to set this intuition, this guy is dangerous or she is a good person.
00:42:07.640And this is a way of computing itself.
00:42:11.340It doesn't generate sentences in your head, but intuitions.
00:42:14.620You know, the question is, could we ever be intuitively satisfied?
00:42:20.360I think we cannot, because our theory of consciousness will also tell us what a self is and what a first-person perspective is.
00:42:30.000And that is something we will not be able to ever grasp intuitively what's coming out of there.
00:42:35.240But to come back to your question, you know, that for a number of years, I've strictly argued against even risking phenomenal states in machines.
00:42:44.160We should in no way try, attempt to create conscious machines or even get close, because we might cause a cascade, you know, of suffering.
00:42:56.320We might just increase the overall amount of suffering in the universe.
00:43:00.260And just because of this reason, it's very important to have a theory of consciousness.