Sarah Walker
speaker
510 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Sarah Walker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
We have to have a theory that explains when things are conscious or not that's testable, right? And we don't have one right now. So I think until we have that, it's always going to be this sort of gray area where some people think it hasn't, some people think it doesn't, because we don't actually know what we're talking about that we think it has.
For sure.
It is a tricky one. I mean, that's why it's called the hard problem of consciousness, because it's hard. And, you know, it might even be outside of the purview of science, which means that we can't understand it in a scientific way.
There might be other ways of coming to understand it, but those may not be the ones that we necessarily want for technological utility or for developing laws with respect to, because the laws are, you know, the things that are going to govern the technology.
Oh, that's interesting. I think it depends on the culture though, because I mean, some cultures already think like everything's imbued with, you know, a life essence or kind of conscious.
No, they don't. They're probably not building the most advanced technologies.
And so what do you think the risks are there, that the conscious things will get angry with us and fight back?
Oh, okay. Yeah, I think we do that quite a lot. Anyway, without I mean, I don't I mean, it goes back to your and I don't know how to feel about this. But, you know, like we talked already about the predator prey thing that like in some sense, you know, being alive requires eating other things that are alive.
And even if you're a vegetarian or, you know, like try to have like you're like you're still eating living things like.
But I don't like thinking about them as like our technologies as a separate species. Because this again goes back to this sort of levels of selection issue. And if you think about humans individually alive, you miss the fact that societies are also alive. And so I think about it much more in the sense of
An ecosystem is not the right word, but we don't have the right words for these things of like – and this is why I talk about the technosphere. It's a system that is both human and technological. It's not human or technological. And so –
This is the part that I think we're really good for the like, and this is driving in part a lot of the sort of attitude of like, I'll kill you first with my nuclear weapons. We're really good at identifying things as other. We're not really good at understanding when we're the same or when we're part of an integrated system that's actually functioning together in some kind of cohesive way. Right.
Um, but, uh, but that's how societies solve problems. What it looks like for an individual is really different than the societal level outcomes. And the fact that like, there is, uh, I don't want to call it cognition or computation. I don't know what you call it, but like, there is a process playing out in the dynamics of societies that we are all individual actors in.
And like, we're not part of that, you know, like it requires all of us acting individually, but like this higher level structure, uh, is playing out some things and like things are getting solved for it to be able to maintain itself. And that's the level that our technologies live at. They don't live at our level.
They live at the societal level and they're deeply integrated with the social organism, if you want to call it that. And so I really get upset when people talk about the species of artificial intelligence. I'm like, you mean we live in an ecosystem of all these kinds of intelligent things and these animating technologies that we're in some sense, helping to come alive.
We are generating them, but it's not like the biosphere eliminated all of its past history when it invented a new species. All of these things get scaffolded. And we're also augmenting ourselves at the same time that we're building technologies. I don't think we can anticipate what that system's going to look like.
The planet is one living thing.
Is it still just the- Still the same causal chain.
It's like when the first cell split into two. That's what I was talking about. When a planet reproduces itself, the technosphere emerges enough understanding. It's like this recursive, like the entire history of life is just recursion, right? So you have an original life event. It evolves for 4 billion years, at least on our planet. It evolves the technosphere.
The technologies themselves start to become- having this property we call life, which is the phase we're undergoing now. It solves the origin of itself, and then it figures out how that process all works, understands how to make more life, and then can copy itself onto another planet so the whole structure can reproduce itself.
Showing 421–440 of 510 · page 22 of 26
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