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TRANSCRIPT
Consciousness is just the fact that there's something that it's like to be what you are. There's an experience here. It's a synonym for experience really. So in a in a very influential essay the philosopher Thomas Nagel asked in the title "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?" And he posed this question not because he's interested in bats or because he thought we had to have an answer to the question but it was to nail down what the concept of consciousness is. If it's like something to be a bat. If you could trade places with a bat and the lights are still on in some sense. There's some spectrum of experience. Well then that's consciousness in the case of a bat. And a bat is conscious. So if we build conscious computers in the future that's simply to say that we will have built computers that have some perspective on the universe that has a qualitative character. It's like something to be those computers, they can suffer presumably or they can be happy.

And no matter how strange that the phenomenology is there and whether or not we can ever get a handle on it—if conscious computers are possible and we build them, that is what we mean by when we call them conscious. They have a some spectrum of experience. And the problem of explaining the emergence of consciousness or explaining how consciousness is situated in the physical world has been termed the hard problem of consciousness by the philosopher David Chalmers.
It is a problem although not all scientists and philosophers agree that it is one. I am I am one who agrees with Chalmers. It's a problem because no matter how you describe a physical system and its functioning, no matter how much fine grained information we seem to get about the brain or about any other physical system, it is always mysterious that that system is associated with conscious life. There's an interior dimension to that system. So there's no way to look at a brain and know that it's conscious. In fact you're looking at a brain at whatever level and what it would it whatever tool you have you would never even suspect that there might be something that is like to be that system. But for the fact that you already experience consciousness on your own side you know that it must be to some degree associated or arising with brain function.

And even if we had the right answer to the causal requirements of consciousness. Even if we just found out that you need exactly 12,000 neurons in this configuration, firing at 40 hertz and that you could make that you know the necessary insufficient conditions for consciousness as long as detailed as you want. It would still be mysterious that that is the basis for consciousness and we still could ask the further question why should it be like something to be that kind of system and not a system of 10, 000 neurons say or one neuron.

This is not true really of any other scientific explanation that we find satisfying. There is no hard problem with respect to fluidity say it will say hey how water liquid water behaves, right. So when you when you look at liquid water and you say well why is why does this material have this character why can you push your hand into it? Why does it flow?Why does it form droplets? Well when you understand more and more about the molecular constituents of water in liquid form, they are precisely the properties that you would expect of a liquid that explains its grosser character. So the explanation runs all the way down and it makes sense. It seems that there's very little reason to believe that whatever the explanation is for the emergence of consciousness that it will make sense in that way. It might always seem like a miracle. And that's why it's called the hard problem of consciousness.

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#SamHarris #Consciousness #Science

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