"A.I., Artificial Souls, and the Crazy Conundrum of Consciousness" with Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel
Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
Josh Szeps
4.5 • 905 Ratings
🗓️ 23 June 2025
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Let's take a break from the news cycle for a moment, shall we? There's a lot of cool shit to ponder that's more important and more fascinating. Like, how does the gooey blob of atoms between your ears generate all of your experiences? And are we on track to producing machines that feel as alive as you?
Eric Schwitzgebel is a legendary professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley and an important voice in Silicon Valley's conversations about ethical artificial sentience. He and Josh muse on the various explanations of what your experiences actually are at their most profound level; why you probably don't have a soul; whether sufficiently intelligent machines will ever feel internally emotional alive... and how we'll even be able to tell.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | G'day humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, and it's one of the most |
| 0:08.1 | dangerous ideas that we ever contemplate. How did it come to pass that physical material |
| 0:14.6 | ejected from stars has assembled itself into your brain, capable of gazing back on those stars and thinking stone |
| 0:22.8 | thoughts about them as you pull on a reefer lying on your back as a 15-year-old child |
| 0:26.7 | looking up at the stars, or maybe I'm just talking about my own experiences here. |
| 0:31.0 | The mystery of consciousness has perplexed philosophers for many, many years. |
| 0:35.4 | I felt like it was time to talk to one of the world's leading |
| 0:38.0 | philosophers of mind, who is currently working on a book about whether artificial intelligence |
| 0:42.6 | will ever become conscious, and if it does, whether we will be obligated to give it rights |
| 0:47.9 | and to treat it ethically. Eric Schwitzgable is an absolute leader in his field. He's a professor |
| 0:53.7 | of philosophy at the University of California Riverside. |
| 0:56.6 | He specializes in the philosophy of mind, in moral psychology, and in epistemology. |
| 1:01.2 | He writes a psychology philosophy blog called The Splinted Mind, and I first came across him in his book, The Weirdness of the World. |
| 1:09.5 | We talk here mostly about the competing theories of what consciousness is and how it arises, |
| 1:15.3 | and then we sort of segue into questions of whether or not it's plausible that it will arise inside machines. |
| 1:21.7 | Pull out a reefer for this one. |
| 1:23.4 | I hope you enjoy as much as I did. |
| 1:24.9 | The one, the only, Erichschwitz cable. |
| 1:30.9 | It was a ridiculous. I hope you enjoy as much as I did, the one, the only, Erikshwitz cable. It's really how it comes to pass that creatures that are made from the stuff of stars |
| 1:39.0 | have managed to assemble themselves into entities that are having experiences in the first place. Like, this is sometimes |
| 1:47.4 | called the hard problem of consciousness. Let's just pause to reflect on the weirdness and |
| 1:53.2 | awesomeness of that very fact, right? I mean, it's wild. I've just been, I literally just got |
... |
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