Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the kinds of questions that I get a lot, whether in Ask Me Anything episodes or just more generally, is, can you tell me something that you've changed your mind about? Of course, I've changed my mind about lots of things. I tried not to be too dogmatic or stuck, but I actually struggle to answer that question because there's some trivial examples where I changed my mind because we got better data or I got better information, right?

I've changed my mind about the acceleration of the universe.

I used to think it was decelerating.

In 1998, we found it's accelerating, and I instantly changed my mind about that.

Right now, I think the best candidate for what's causing that acceleration is the cosmological constant. I'm open to changing my mind

if we get better data that says it's something dynamical rather than a constant vacuum energy.

But more vague questions, philosophical, cultural, political, aesthetic questions, I have trouble pinpointing when I changed my mind, even though I certainly did it, because my process tends to be fairly gradual and I've forgotten what it was that started me down the road of changing my mind.

So maybe I did change my mind, but to me, what my opinions are now seem like

they must have always been that way, even though I know that's not true. I mention all this because I

think I might be in the process of changing my mind about something, not something like super

dramatic about my feelings about how the world works, but something nevertheless pretty

important.

The question of what does it mean to be conscious? In other words, what are the requirements

for something to be conscious? There's a point of view towards consciousness, which we all know

is a complicated subject. We've talked about it here on the podcast many times. There's plenty of we

don't know about consciousness. And mostly I stick to saying we don't have to change the laws of physics

in order to explain consciousness. I still think that, okay? I'm not going to, not in any danger

of changing my mind about that anytime soon, although, you know, eventually, who knows? But okay,

even if the world was made of physical stuff, doing physical things, when does that stuff doing some processes count as conscious, right?

There's a point of view that really puts the emphasis on kind of an input-output mechanism.

This would go back to the Turing test with Alan Turing, right?

Turing suggested that if you had a computer program that could have a conversation with a human and trick them into thinking that it was conscious, then it should count as conscious.

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