Donald Hoffman
speaker
2,139 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 26 Jun
Donald Hoffman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The fact that I'm not just processing light waves that are bouncing off all the objects in this room. I'm seeing yellow, I'm seeing green, I'm seeing shapes, I'm having an experience from the inside in a way that we imagine computers don't. You know, computers and cameras can process light waves.
And we don't imagine that they see green or that there's any kind of experience of color or anything like that, even though they're processing similar things.
inputs from the environment, the question is, and the really mysterious thing is, why does some processing, why do some organisms in nature have an experience of being the organism, have the experience of being that collection of atoms that's doing that processing? So sentience is also a great term, although it's not used that often in our culture and most people equate it with life.
So I don't use it that much. But the definition of sentience is really actually what I'm getting at here. Susceptibility to sensation, consciousness in its most basic form. So I use experience, I use awareness, felt experience and sentience interchangeably. But that is what I mean by consciousness.
Yes. So that phrasing comes from Thomas Nagel, the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who wrote a famous article, at least within the world of philosophy called, what is it like to be a bat?
And he basically, you know, discusses what I was just explaining, but in a more philosophical and detailed sense, in terms of what different types of organisms might experience in the world, having vastly different sensory modalities, inputs, brains, that type of thing. And there's a great German word, umwelt, to describe, and that kind of covers everything
all of the types of conscious experiences a given organism has. So we have a human umwelt and bats would experience a different umwelt because they're experiencing sonar and navigating the world through a different sense than vision. Yeah.
Yeah. And that phrase comes from David Chalmers, the philosopher. Although the hard problem, you know, as a problem has been expressed many, many times throughout history, he kind of coined this great term and now we have this shorthand.
So the quote unquote easy problems of the brain and neuroscience and consciousness are what we're really at the beginning stages of now in neuroscience, which is understanding and learning which brain states correlate with which types of conscious experiences. The hard problem is why there would be any felt experience of any processing, brain processing or otherwise at all.
And this is very intuitive for some people. For other people, it's not. Seeing how mysterious this actually is. But when you start to compare things that human beings do,
to things that other systems do, whether they're artificial intelligence systems or plant systems or insect systems, it's easy for us to see how other systems, or we intuit that other systems may not have a felt experience associated with processing. And it seems natural that human beings and maybe mammals do. But when you look more closely at
what that entails and what differences there are or that there really are a lack of to point to why some systems or some processing would not entail an experience from the inside and others would. It's actually very hard. to come up with a reason for it. It's also in terms of the sciences, science studies everything from the outside. And this isn't true beyond science.
This is true in our daily lives, just our understanding of the world, of each other. We are only able to study, observe, try to understand, experience other things in the world from the outside, from their behavior, from their physical characteristics.
And so, you know, luckily human beings can communicate so well that we can get a pretty good sense of what we're each experiencing because we have this high level of communication and we're similar enough that we can talk about how we're feeling. But I can never have direct contact with your experience. I can't know your experience from the inside.
And so this is a real challenge for the sciences and for just us as curious creatures, how to better understand something that you can only know firsthand in terms of the experience itself. The experience itself exists for itself and can't be really received or penetrated from any other place.
Yes. So there are two questions that I raise in my book, and this is one of them. And I pose it that way because I think it gets at our deepest intuitions about what consciousness is. And it shows us how counterintuitive a lot of the answers to these two questions are. And the first one is essentially how you phrased it.
can we find conclusive evidence from the outside of any system that consciousness is present in that system? And while we feel that the answer is yes, and I think we're correct in our assumptions about other human beings and mammals, the truth is it's actually...
impossible at this point in neuroscience and in our path as human beings to actually be able to conclusively say because the only evidence we can get is through communication. As I said, I can't jump into another experience and have that experience myself. And this is actually very interesting.
I've been thinking a lot lately as I've been working on my documentary series about how important communication is for our ability really to talk about any experience at all. And we can't communicate if we don't share the same experiences. And so there's this limit. If I were talking to someone who were born blind and I was trying to explain something about my experience of seeing,
it's extremely limiting. I mean, I could give some analogies, but there would be no way for me to explain to someone who doesn't have vision what my world of sights is like. The more different an organism is from us, the less ability we have to communicate. And so it's easier for us to kind of assume we have evidence from organisms that are similar to us. It gets much more difficult
Showing 2101–2120 of 2,139 · page 106 of 107
← Previous
Next →