David Chalmers Thinks We May Be Living in a Simulation (and He’s OK With It)

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Science, Society & Culture, Social Sciences, Education

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2023

⏱️ 101 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Last year, Rufus sat down with philosopher David Chalmers to talk about the allure of virtual reality, whether robots will ever achieve consciousness, and the likelihood that we’re living in a simulation (David thinks it’s about 25 percent). It was a fascinating, freewheeling conversation, and we left large chunks of it on the cutting room floor. Now, though, with ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms taking the world by storm, those unaired sections, many of which were about the ethics of artificial intelligence, feel super relevant. So today, we’re sharing our complete interview with David. Buckle up. It’s a wild ride.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Last week, after I spoke with New York Times tech columnist Kevin Russo about the alarming
0:04.6	speed at which AI is advancing, I found myself thinking about another conversation we had on
0:09.2	this show. This one was with philosopher David Chalmers, who rose to prominence in the 1990s
0:14.8	when he started writing about what he called the hard problem of consciousness.
0:19.1	How am I, is it that physical processes in the brain should give you a conscious experience
0:24.1	at all? We still don't have a definitive answer, but our search for one feels more pressing
0:29.4	than ever, because in what feels like just the last few weeks, we've entered a new era,
0:34.4	the age of AI, where computers are rapidly improving their ability to learn and communicate.
0:40.2	It makes you wonder if hooking up 86 billion neurons in the right pattern gives us the experience
0:45.8	of consciousness? Could you achieve something similar with lines of code? In other words,
0:51.3	could AI one day be sentient? David and I had a long conversation about this, big chunks of which
0:57.8	ended up on the cutting room floor by the time my exacting producer Caleb was done with it.
1:03.1	So today we're sharing the unedited version of my interview with David. LinkedIn presents.
1:13.9	The main slogan in this book, Reality Plus, is virtual reality is genuine reality.
1:21.4	I'm Rufus Griskem and this is the next big idea. Today, are we living in a simulation?
1:28.9	philosopher David Chalmers says there's a decent chance that we are, but he's okay with it.
1:36.7	Let's begin with a clip from a classic American movie, The Matrix. The film, if you're one of the
1:52.7	17 people on earth who hasn't seen it, revolves around a character named Neo, played by Keanu Reeves.
1:58.7	He lives an ordinary life until he meets Morpheus, played by Lawrence Fishburn, who lifts him in
2:04.0	on a secret. Right now, we're inside a computer program. Is it really so hard to believe?
2:10.2	Your appearance now is what we call residual self-image. It is the mental projection of your digital self.
2:18.8	This isn't real? What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can
	...

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