YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Aaronson

lines on the record: 134
first: 2020-10-12
most recent: 2020-10-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, well, well, look, I mean, I explored a view in this essay I wrote called The Ghost and the Quantum Touring Machine seven years ago that is related to that, except that I did not want to have consciousness be relative to the observer, right? Because I think that if consciousness means anything, it is something that is experienced by the entity that is conscious, right? You know, like I don't need you to tell me that I'm conscious, right? Nor do you need me to tell you that you are, right? But basically what I explored there is, you know, are there aspects of a system like a brain that just could not be predicted even with arbitrarily advanced future technologies because of chaos combined with quantum mechanical uncertainty and things like that. I mean, that actually could be”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does that mean that consciousness is relative to the observer? Like, could something be conscious for us but not conscious for an alien that understood better what was happening inside the black box?”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, yeah, but this is, I mean, the Chinese room actually would be doing some computation, at least in Searle's version, right? Here I'm just talking about a table lookup. Okay, now it's true that for conversations of a reasonable length, this lookup table would be so enormous it wouldn't even fit in the observable universe. Okay, but supposing that you could build a big enough lookup table and then just pass the Turing test just by looking up what the person said, right? Are you going to regard that as conscious?”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, look, I mean, it's almost tautologically true that if we had a machine that passed the Turing test, then it would be emulating consciousness, right? So if your position is that emulation of consciousness is consciousness, then by definition, any machine that passed the Turing test would be conscious. But I mean, you know, that you could say that is just a way to rephrase the original question, is an emulation of consciousness necessarily conscious, right? And you can, you know, here I'm not saying anything new that hasn't been debated ad nauseum in the literature, but you could imagine some very hard cases, like imagine a machine that passed the Turing test, but that did so just by an enormous cosmological sized lookup table that just cached every possible conversation that could be had. The old Chinese”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be it right, and that seems like an objection that you could always raise, no matter how much someone elucidated the details of how the brain works.”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI, how to get it to work. We've learned an enormous amount about the underpinnings of the physical world. And from one point of view, that's like an enormous distance that we've traveled along the road to understanding consciousness. From another point of view, you know, the distance still to be traveled on the road, you know, maybe seems no shorter than it was at the beginning. So it's very hard to say. I mean, you know, these are questions like in sort of trying to have a theory of consciousness, there's sort of a problem where it feels like it's not just that we don't know how to make progress, it's that it's hard to specify what could even count as progress, right? Because no matter what scientific theory someone proposed, someone else could come along and say, well, you've just talked about the mechanism. You haven't said anything about what breathes fire into the mechanism, what really makes there something that it's like.”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, it's clear that we've learned an enormous amount about neuroscience. We've learned an enormous amount about computation, about machine learning, about...”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. These are what have been called the vertigonous questions, right? They're the questions like you get a feeling of vertiga when thinking about them, right? I mean, I certainly feel like I am conscious in a way that is not reducible to computation. But why should you believe me? I mean, and if you said the same to me, then why should I believe you?”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, but I would say that with any concept, you know, there's Know like we first need to define it right, and a definition is only a good definition if it matches what we thought we were talking about prior to having a definition.”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm saying that if a theory of consciousness is getting that wrong, then whatever it is talking about at that point, I'm not going to call it consciousness. I'm going to use a different word.”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of Oregate's can be way more conscious than a person or any animal can be even if it is so uniform that it might as well just well just be a blank wall, right? And so now the point is, if this theory is sort of getting wrong, the question is a blank wall more conscious than a person, then I would say what is there for it to get right?”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I mean, the whole interest of the theory is the, you know, the hope that it could be completely general applied to aliens, to computers, to animals, coma patients, to any of it, right? And so he just said, well, Scott is relying on his intuition, but I'm relying on this theory. And to me, it was almost like, you know, are we being serious here? Yes, in science, we try to learn highly non-intuitive things. But what we do is we first test a theory on cases where we already know the answer, right? Like if someone had a new theory of temperature, right, then maybe we could check that it says that boiling water is hotter than ice. And then if it says that the sun is hotter than anything, you know, you've ever experienced, then maybe we trust that extrapolation, right? But like this theory, like if, you know, it's now saying that a gigantic grit, like regular grid of exclusive”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That just applies this error correcting code, it's conscious, you know, and if it has a much larger value of phi, then you or me, it's much more conscious than you or me. Interesting. You know, we just have to accept what the theory says because, you know, science is not about confirming our intuitions. It's about challenging them. And, you know, this is what my theory predicts that this thing is conscious and, you know, or super duper conscious. And how are you going to prove me wrong? So the way I would argue against your blood.”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's not even the key criticism. That's just a side point. Okay. The core of it is that I think that they want to say that a system is more conscious the larger its value of fee. And I think that that is obvious nonsense. As soon as you think about it for like a minute, as soon as you think about it in terms of could I construct a system that had an enormous value of fee, like even larger than the brain has, but that is just implementing an error correcting code, doing nothing that we would associate with intelligence or consciousness or any of it. The answer is yes. It is easy to do that, right? And so I wrote blog posts just making this point that, yeah, it's easy to do that. Now, you know, Tinoni's response to that was actually kind of incredible, right? I mean, I admired it in a way because instead of disputing any of it, he just bit the bullet in the sense, you know, he was one of the most audacious bullet bitings I've ever seen in my career. He said, okay, then, fine. You know, this says...”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's like the details aren't always well. Well, it's true. I mean, they have nothing even resembling a derivation of this fee. Okay, so what they do is they state a whole bunch of postulates, you know, axioms that they think that consciousness should satisfy. And then there's some verbal discussion. And then at some point, appears. Right, and this was the first thing that really made the hair stand on my neck, to be honest, because they are acting as if there's a derivation. They're acting as if, you know, you're supposed to think that this is a derivation. And there's nothing even remotely resembling a derivative. They just pull the fee out of a hat completely.”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the definition of phi has actually changed over time. It changes from one paper to another. But in all of the variations, it involves something about what we in computer science would call graph expansion. So basically what this means is that they want, in order to get a large value of phi, it should not be possible to take your system and partition it into two components that are only weakly connected to each other. So whenever we take our system and sort of try to split it up into two, then there should be lots and lots of connections going between the two components.”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So now this IIT, this integrated information theory, which has been put forward by Giulio Tinoni and a bunch of his Collaborators over the last decade or two. This is noteworthy, I guess, as a direct attempt to answer that question, to answer, to address the pretty hard problem. And they give a criterion that's just based on how a system is connected. So it's up to you to sort of abstract a system like a brain or a microchip as a collection of components that are connected to each other by some pattern of connections and to specify how the components can influence each other, like where the inputs go, where they affect the outputs. But then once you've specified that, then they give this quantity that they call fee, you know, the Greek letter phi.”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for example, yes, yeah. I mean, if consciousness is some multidimensional vector, well, just tell me in which respects these things are conscious and in which respect they aren't, right? And, you know, and have some principled way to do it where you're not, you know, carving out exceptions for things that you like or don't like, but could somehow take a description of an arbitrary physical system and then just based on the physical properties of that system or the informational properties or how it's connected or something like that, just in principle calculate, you know, its degree of consciousness, right? I mean, this would be the kind of thing that we would need if we wanted to address questions like, you know, what does it take for a machine to be conscious, right? Or when are, you know, when should we regard AIs as being conscious?”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good ring to it. And so, you know, the infamous hard problem of consciousness is to explain how something like consciousness could arise at all, you know, in a material universe, right? Or, you know, why does it ever feel like anything to experience anything? And so I'm trying to distinguish from that problem, right? And say, you know, no, okay, I am, I would merely settle for an account that could say, you know, is a fetus conscious? You know, if so, at which trimester, you know, is a dog conscious. You know, what about a frog, right?”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is it, first of all? Okay, well, so what I called the pretty hard problem of consciousness. This is my term, although many other people have said something equivalent to this. But it's just, you know, the problem of, you know, giving an account of just which physical systems are conscious and which are not. Or, you know, if there are degrees of consciousness, then quantifying how conscious a given system is. Oh,”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was this my talk about refuting the integrated information theory? Yes. Which is a particular account of consciousness that, yeah, I think one can just show it doesn't work.”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right. Well, yeah. I mean, the word everything is a little ambiguous here, right? Because, you know, and then people will get into debates about, you know, reductionism versus emergentism and blah, blah, blah. And so in not wanting to say theory of everything, people might just be trying to short circuit that debate and say, you know, look, you know, yes, we want a fundamental theory of, you know, the particles and interactions of nature.”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me put it this way. I mean, if you asked Ed Witten, let's say, who is you might consider a leader of the string community and thus very, very mainstream in a certain sense, but he would have no hesitation in saying, you know, of course, you know, they're looking for a unified description of nature, of general relativity, of quantum mechanics, of all the fundamental interactions of nature, right? Now, whether people would call that a theory of everything, whether they would use that term, that might vary. You know, Lenny Suskin would definitely have no problem telling you that, you know, if that's what we want, right?”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, Stephen Hawking certainly talked constantly about theory of everything, right? You know, I mean, I mean, people, you know, use those terms who were, you know, some of the most respected people in the whole world of physics, right? But I mean, I think that the distinction that I would make is that people might react badly if you use the term in a way that suggests that you, you know, thinking about it for five minutes have come up with this major new insight about it. Yeah.”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, certainly, let's say by theory of everything, you know, we don't literally mean a theory of cats and of baseball. But we just mean it in the more limited sense of everything, a fundamental theory of physics, right? of all of the fundamental interactions of physics. Of course, such a theory, even after we had it, would leave the entire question of all the emergent behavior, right? to be explored. So it's only everything for a specific definition of everything. Okay, but in that sense, I would say, of course, that's worth pursuing. I mean, that is the entire program of fundamental physics, right? All of my friends who do quantum gravity, who do string theory, who do anything like that, that is what's motivating them.”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. That's right. We can't say that they're impossible, but we know that sort of a lot else in physics breaks. So now regarding Eric Weinstein and Stephen Wolfram, I wouldn't say that either of them has a theory of everything. I would say that they have ideas that they hope could someday lead to a theory of everything.”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, to travel faster than our current spaceships could travel, you wouldn't need to find any bug in the universe, right? The known laws of physics, you know, let us go much faster, up to the speed of light, right? And when people want to go faster than the speed of light, well, we actually know something about what that would entail, namely that according to relativity, that seems to entail communication backwards in time. Okay, so then you have to worry about closed time-like curves and all of that stuff. So, you know, in some sense, we sort of know the price that you have to pay for these things, right?”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“know Occam's razor kind of guess has to be that you know it will continue to hold up you know that the fact that we don't know the laws of physics governing some phenomenon is not a strong sign that probing that phenomenon is going to crash the universe right but you know of course I could be wrong”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the question Yeah, well, I have no idea. I mean, Peter Shore, you know, the very famous person in quantum computing, of course, has joked that maybe the reason why we haven't yet integrated general relativity in quantum mechanics is that the part of the universe that depends on both of them was actually left unspecified. And if we ever tried to do an experiment involving the singularity of a black hole or something like that, then the universe would just generate an overflow error or something. A blue screen of death. Yeah, we would just crash the universe. Now, you know, the universe has seemed to hold up pretty well for $14 billion, right? So, you know,”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, with the computers that we actually have, I mean, first of all, we all know that humans have done an imperfect job of enforcing the abstraction boundaries of computers. You may try to confine some program to a playpen, but as soon as there's one memory allocation error in the C program, then the program has gotten out of that playpen and it can do whatever it wants. This is how most hacks work, you know, the viruses and worms and exploits. And, you know, you would have to imagine that in AI would be able to discover something like that. Now, of course, if we could actually discover some exploit of reality itself, then this whole, I mean, then in some sense we wouldn't have to philosophize about this. This would no longer be a metaphysical conversation.”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any direct evidence about that other universe? You know, we will only be able to see the effects of the computation that is running in this universe.”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. It is an interesting and reasonably well-defined question to ask, is the world computable? Does the world satisfy what we would call in CS, the church touring thesis? That is, you know, could we take any physical system and simulate it to any desired precision by a Turing machine, you know, given the appropriate input data, right? And so far, I think the indications are pretty strong that our world does seem to satisfy the church Turing thesis. At least if it doesn't, then we haven't yet discovered why not. But now, does that mean that our universe is a simulation? Well, you know, that word seems to suggest that there is some other larger universe in which it is running. And the problem there is that if the simulation is perfect, then we're never going to be able to get it.”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, that's right. Well, if it was an imperfect simulation, if we could hack it, you know, find a bug in it, then that would be one thing, right? If this was like the matrix and there was a way for me to, you know, do flying kung fu moves or something by hacking the simulation, well, then, you know, we would have to cross that bridge when we came to it, wouldn't we? I mean, at that point, you know, it's hard to see the difference between that and just what people would ordinarily refer to as a world with miracles”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I mean, even in principle, how could we ever know if we were in one, right? A perfect simulation by definition is something that's indistinguishable from the real thing”
2020-10-12 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #130 – Scott Aaronson: Computational Complexity and Consciousness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source