Max Tegmark

Because let's face it, we know that some information processing is conscious because we are conscious.

But we also know that a lot of information processing is not conscious.

Like most of the information processing happening in your brain right now.

is not conscious.

There's like 10 megabytes per second coming in, even just through your visual system.

You're not conscious about your heartbeat regulation or most things.

Even if I just ask you to read what it says here, you look at it and then, oh, now you know what it said.

You're not aware of how the computation actually happened.

Your consciousness is like the CEO that got an email at the end with the final answer.

So...

What is it that makes a difference?

I think that's both a great science mystery.

We're actually studying it a little bit in my lab here at MIT.

But I also think it's just a really urgent question to answer.

For starters, I mean, if you're an emergency room doctor and you have an unresponsive patient coming in, wouldn't it be great if in addition to having

A CT scanner.

You had a consciousness scanner that could figure out whether this person is actually having locked-in syndrome or is actually comatose.

And in the future, imagine if we build robots or the machine that

we can have really good conversations with, which I think is very likely to happen, right?

Wouldn't you want to know if your home helper robot is actually experiencing anything or just like a zombie?