The host suggested the last few years must be a bonanza for philosophers of mind. Gold agrees: the debates he studied as a grad student, about machine consciousness and whether it needs a biological substrate, felt like science fiction then and are now questions people have to make real decisions about.
…to. Philosophy of mind and maybe even ethics. And so a lot of things are going to be unveiled. I think there's just no question about that. And if we can also get together and keep some of the bad actors from getting their hands on the powerful stuff, then I think things will work out just fine.
Yeah, I guess through that lens, this moment in time, the last five years or so, must really be just like a philosopher of the mind's bonanza.
Oh, in every way. So intellectually, I mean, the thing that kills me, of course, is that the world has waited till I'm close to retirement to make philosophy of mind sexy. The idea that you could open the New York Times and find out that companies are competing for philosophers of mind is just inconceivable to me. That's less conceivable to me than that AI would destroy the world. I was brought up as a grad student on things like Cyril's Chinese room argument and those early debates about what strong AI would look like and whether consciousness depended on having a biological substrate and whether functionalism made room for consciousness and so on. To see all of those debates that all seem just like science fiction. I mean, they were science fiction. And I never expected them to ever actually manifest in real things that we had to make decisions. But to see that now become a real thing where we have to start addressing these questions is, for someone like me, just astonishing. Absolutely astonishing.
I agree. This is astonishing. It's also right to be skeptical, critical, maybe even angry about what's happening behind the closed doors of the frontier AI labs. All of these responses contain a truth, and this episode lives at their intersection. But before we get too deep into it, here's a quick…
I think you're probing something that's really rich because there's always this judgment in how we name things. Like we don't call our home an artificial dwelling. You know, we call it a home, you know, because it feels safe. I think you're right that artificial is a term that's being used to mark…
This brings us to the question: even if it is artificial, should Mark be engineering consciousness in the first place? Because if he succeeds, he will have made something that can suffer. Before the philosophers, I want to talk to a clinician, Dr. Joel Gold, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in New…