Max Tegmark

They don't maybe...

or unconscious or women don't have souls or whatever.

So I'm a little bit nervous when I hear people just take as an axiom that machines can't have experience ever.

I think this is just a really fascinating science question is what it is.

Let's research it and try to figure out what it is that makes the difference between unconscious intelligent behavior and conscious intelligent behavior.

You mean to have a conscious experience?

To have consciousness.

I do think it helps a lot to have a physical embodiment to learn the kind of things about the world that are important to us humans, for sure.

But I don't think the physical embodiment is necessary after you've learned it, just have the experience.

Think about when you're dreaming, right?

Your eyes are closed.

You're not getting any sensory input.

You're not behaving or moving in any way, but there's still an experience there, right?

And so clearly the experience that you have when you see something cool in your dreams isn't coming from your eyes.

It's just the information processing itself in your brain, which is that experience, right?

Well, now we're getting a little bit anthropomorphic, anthropomorphizing things, maybe talking about self-preservation instincts.

I mean, we are evolved organisms, right?

Right.

So Darwinian evolution endowed us and other evolved organisms with a self-preservation instinct because those...

that didn't have those self-preservation genes got cleaned out of the gene pool.