Ezra Klein

It's how the body talks to the brain.

And we have to remember this very simple fact, which is the brain exists to keep the body alive, not the other way around.

We're not just a support system for this amazing three pounds of tofu in our heads.

Once you realize that, you realize that the messages coming from the body are really important to the brain.

These feelings are the beginning of conscious experience.

If you didn't have them, it's questionable whether you would have consciousness.

Exactly.

And where do you experience disgust, like moral disgust?

It's in your belly.

You have a great experiment in the book about people giving ginger.

Yeah, this is a very cool experiment.

They gave people ginger before exposing them to some morally distasteful event or something or image.

And the people who had the ginger were less disgusted because their stomachs were settled.

So our feeling of moral disgust is kind of channeled through our gut, which is such a weird idea.

But that's probably true of a lot of feelings and that it has enormous implications for this discussion about AI, whether it can be conscious.

Because feelings are not just signals.

They're not just bits of information.

They contain information.

You're getting a lot of information from a feeling.

But that's the residue of the feeling.