AI Consciousness? Exploring the Possibility with Prof. Eric Schwitzgebel

**Christina Farr** (0:00)
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**Nathan Labenz** (1:27)
Hello, and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Eric Torenberg. Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today my guest is Eric Schwitzgebel, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. Erik's interests include philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, moral psychology, classical Chinese philosophy, epistemology, metaphilosophy, metaphysics, and science fiction. His blog is called The Splintered Mind, and he has written several books, including The Weirdness of the World, which is soon to be published. I first encountered him on a recent 80,000 Hours podcast about consciousness in general, which I really enjoyed and which inspired me to reach out to propose this conversation about the possibility of consciousness in AI systems in particular. As AI systems become increasingly sophisticated, the question of whether they could become conscious and what that might mean for how we ought to treat them is becoming more relevant than ever. Many people have strong intuitions on this subject. Some argue that AIs are not now and in fact never could become conscious, while others contend that they probably already are and therefore deserve at least some rights. In my view, given that we lack a consensus account of the source and nature of our own consciousness, we are really nowhere close to having enough clarity on this subject to warrant confident stances. But considering the fact that human history is full of horrors which were predicated on the intuitive denial of consciousness, personhood, or the moral standing of others, including other humans as well as animals and nature broadly, I think the very least that we can do is approach this topic with extreme humility. With that in mind, we begin this conversation by exploring the most popular theories of consciousness, including idealism, dualism, and materialism. We discussed the strengths and weaknesses of each, and we consider wherever possible how these theories might be informed by the nature of today's AI systems as well as what they would imply for the possibility of consciousness in AI systems if they were in fact true. Along the way, Professor Schwitzgebel explains the core ideas motivating the various schools of thought, highlights important uncertainties, and at times pushes back on my intuitions and interpretations, including when I described my understanding of recent mechanistic interpretability results, such as the Golden Gate Claude experiment, and how I understand AI systems to be conceptually understanding the world. Toward the end, he also offers his recommendations for how AI developers should be thinking about this challenge, suggesting that we should either create systems that we're confident are not conscious, or those that we're sure deserve moral consideration, but that we should avoid the uncertain middle ground, because that is where we would be most likely to make tragic mistakes. Looking just a bit ahead into the future of AI development, anticipating systems that we've already seen that can carry on fully natural voice conversations, systems that have increasingly integrated long-term memories and capacity for relationships, and systems that people find it very natural to form attachments to, and even at times fall in love with, I have no doubt that debates around AI consciousness will become increasingly urgent and focal. I do not expect that we'll resolve the key questions cleanly anytime soon, if ever, and I think of this episode really as an opening exploration, certainly not the last word on this important topic. As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to share it with friends, post about it online, or leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We always welcome your feedback, and we are still accepting resumes for aspiring AI engineers and AI advisors on our website, cognitiverevolution.ai.