Ezra Klein

And for us, it's our social lives.

The fact that we are fundamentally social beings, absolutely dependent on other people.

With a long period of complete dependence for babies and children compared to other species, social life cannot be automated.

It's just too complex.

So you need to be able to anticipate what I'm likely to say, how a remark is going to land.

We call it theory of mind, this idea that we can imagine our way into other people, basis of compassion and things like that.

So once we entered this realm of great complexity, automating our responses just wasn't going to work.

And the creatures that had consciousness that could imagine what was going on in another human's head did better than people who didn't and failed to imagine what was going on in someone else's head.

I find that a pretty persuasive theory.

Yeah.

I think you could make a case that young children are more conscious than we are.

Yeah.

And which is a kind of interesting thing that we prune consciousness down the way we're pruning so many things in the brain as we age.

But this idea of lantern versus spotlight consciousness, I found very powerful.

I learned it from Alison Gopnik, who's a child psychologist, developmental psychologist at Berkeley.

And she gave me a lot of good advice as I was embarking on this.

The first was...

Never forget that the kinds of people working on these questions about consciousness are not typical in their consciousness.

These are people who can sit in a chair for a really long time, read books for a really long time, think out problems.

They have an extreme version of spotlight consciousness, which she calls professor consciousness.