137 - Guest: Anil Seth, AI-Human Consciousness Expert, part 1

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .

 

What does it mean to be conscious? And why should we care? To answer that, we have the man who wrote the book: Being You: The New Science of Consciousness. Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and a TED speaker with over 13 million views.

He came on the show to help us understand more about consciousness because the debate over whether an AI has become conscious may not be far off--witness the furor over Blake Lemoine asserting that LaMDA had become sentient in 2022--and yet we have no good way of settling that debate. You may be sure that you're conscious, but good luck proving it to someone on the other side of a computer link. And whether an AI is conscious will have pivotal implications for governance, not to mention our collective self image. Even if you're sure an AI can't be conscious, the space the debate will occupy in our world will be huge.

Anil is Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, and has a PhD in artificial intelligence. Being You was a 2021 Book of the Year for The Guardian, The Economist, The New Statesman, and Bloomberg Business.

In part 1, Anil talks about how he got started in this field, distinctions of wakefulness, intelligence, self, phenomenology, Nagle's definition, Anil's three aspects of consciousness, ex Machina, and... zombies.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.