Max Tegmark

It feels to me, subjectively, like my conscious module just got a little email saying,

facial processing task complete, it's Lex.

I'm going to just go with that, right?

So this fits perfectly with Tononi's model because this was all one-way information processing mainly.

And it turned out for that particular task, that's all you needed.

And it probably was kind of the most efficient way.

to do it.

But there are a lot of other things that we associate with higher intelligence and planning and so on and so forth, where you kind of want to have loops and be able to ruminate and self-reflect and introspect and so on, where

My hunch is that if you want to fake that with a zombie system that just all goes one way, you have to unroll those loops and it gets really, really long and it's much more inefficient.

So I'm actually hopeful that AI, if in the future we have all these very sublime and interesting machines that do cool things and are aligned with us,

they will also have consciousness for the kind of these things that we do.

Yes.

So that's a happy thought for me because the zombie apocalypse really is my worst nightmare of all.

It'd be like adding insult to injury.

Not only did we get replaced, but we freaking replaced ourselves by zombies.

Like how dumb can we be?

And I just want to say one more thing, which is super important.

Most of my colleagues, when I started going on about consciousness, tell me that it's all bullshit and I should stop talking about it.

I hear a little inner voice from my father and from my mom saying, keep talking about it because I think they're wrong.

And the main way to convince people like that, that they're wrong, if they say that consciousness is just equal to intelligence, is to ask them, what's wrong with torture?