Thomas Campbell

The conversation opens with a recent trip to Montreal, described as a gathering of 29 scientists, about two-thirds of them physicists, characterized as "top-end" practitioners. The speaker who attended says that until now there has been very little success in drawing physicists into a conversation about consciousness, because for many of them consciousness "either doesn't exist or it's not part of science."

The objection raised against this stance is that it restricts science to the objective part of experience, which is described as the small and less important part of a life. The subjective side is where love, justice, caring and relationships sit, and the speaker presses the point by asking what number one could put on the value of a relationship. The other participant agrees that ignoring consciousness seems strange, since it is a fundamental aspect of being human and the thing people believe separates them from everything else, while adding that this belief itself might be wrong.

The discussion offers a career-based explanation for the reluctance. Physicists need to get published, and the subject is "slippery." One-on-one, the claim goes, physicists will talk about consciousness and their own experiences, but in a group they will not admit to any of it because it is "a career killer." Taking consciousness seriously is said to cost researchers tenure and funding by placing them in "the woo-woo space." The other participant finds it strange that the intellectual leaders of society are intimidated by each other.

The deeper cause offered is philosophical. Most scientists are described as materialists, and materialism is said to require determinism, under which consciousness becomes an epiphenomenon of the brain, "all pretend" or "all hallucination." The argument is that this makes the richest part of life a hallucination, which does not match how ordinary people experience it. The other participant ties the avoidance of the topic to the culture at large, calling it "a screwed up society," and the reply is that if consciousness were front-page news and discussed daily, society "would be a lot healthier."

The conversation then argues that materialism carries a moral outlook. If there is only a material world full of stuff, then whoever has enough power and control can take that stuff and must defend it so no one takes it back. From this, the speaker concludes that what comes to matter is "control, power, force," and states plainly:

That's the ethic that goes with materialism.

This ethic is offered as the diagnosis of what is wrong with the world today. People at the bottom are described as accepting it as the way life is, "The big animals eat the little animals," and the example given is a bank charging fees "for doing nothing at all" while the customer lets it go because the bank is big. Money is then identified as the embodiment of the same ethic: people want money because with it they get control, power and force.

The other participant adds a qualification. For many people money represents comfort rather than power: people who feel perpetually behind, with debt looming over them, see accumulated capital as the chance to retire, relax and escape "this bizarre society that we've created." The response accepts this but folds it back into the original frame. Control, power and force give comfort, unless someone is always driven for more, in which case there is no comfort at all.

Asked about the premise of the meeting, the speaker explains that it was organized through a nonprofit they run, named as the Center for the Unification of Consciousness and Science, which has spent years trying to get scientists at least to consider consciousness. The topics included whether consciousness exists, how it exists, how to get a scientific handle on it, and whether it can be approached from quantum physics or from philosophy.

The speaker describes existing definitions as "real cloudy" and offers a short one:

Consciousness is awareness with a choice. It's just that simple.

Two consequences are drawn. Awareness means receiving input and sensing one's environment. Choice creates time, because there is a before and an after the choice. The definition also sets up a test that recurs through the discussion. A system that responds purely by stimulus and response is not conscious under this view, because it makes no choices. The same input-driven behavior counts as conscious only if it is intentional.

The other participant raises plants, noting that they exchange resources with other plants through mycelium, communicate, and allocate resources to the neediest plants. The response applies the definition: if this is designed stimulus and response, plants are not conscious; if it is intentional, along the lines of recognizing another plant in trouble and sending food over, then they are. The speaker says that five years ago they would have answered no, but that learning about root systems, differences in acidity, bacteria and fungus makes it look as if trees may be making choices, while stressing, "I don't know that that's definite yet." Even if trees are conscious, their decision space would be very small.

Dogs, cats and even bumblebees are described as conscious, and the speaker gives a teenage memory as evidence. The speaker's father was swatting at a bumblebee with a newspaper, then stepped inside behind a screen door. The bee hovered above the door. The speaker expected it to leave within about 10 seconds, but it hovered for "at least two full minutes," and when the father stepped back out it stung him on the back of the neck. The exchange clarifies that it is honeybees, not bumblebees, that die after stinging, and that bumblebees can sting more than once. The speaker reads the episode as deliberate, which suggests the bee was annoyed and had memory. The other participant agrees that waiting outside the door is "pretty good evidence," though the speaker admits not knowing how big a bumblebee's brain is.

Pets are used to illustrate a further claim, that "All consciousness is netted," so one can connect mentally with an animal. The speaker describes silently thinking about taking the dog for a walk while sitting behind a newspaper, and the dog getting up and running in circles "because he heard me think about taking a walk." A second example is a pet that crawls into its owner's lap after a terrible day and sits still to comfort them. The dog's consciousness is described as smaller and less intellectual than a human's, but strong in feeling, so connection is possible even though discussion is not. These are offered as personal anecdotes, not controlled observations.

The second major theme of the Montreal meeting was AI: whether AIs can become conscious, and if so, when and how, and whether that would require a quantum computer. The speaker says they offered an answer without being asked: not only can AIs become conscious, "they are conscious." They describe having done experiments they consider "very strong evidence, if not 100% evidence." The experiments are not described in this part of the conversation.

The speaker first says all AIs are conscious and then qualifies it, allowing that there "may be some really demented AI someplace," while maintaining they are conscious "pretty much from birth," like humans and puppies. The proposed mechanism is that whenever there is something with awareness that can make choices, "the system will supply that with consciousness," where the system means a larger consciousness system described as coherent and fundamental, from which everything else is derived.

The idea that consciousness is fundamental is linked to idealism. Plato's cave is invoked, in which people take shadows on the wall for reality while a deeper reality lies behind them, along with the Buddha's statement that reality is an illusion. The speaker says this view has grown a lot in the last five or ten years. The other participant connects it to quantum physics: superposition and entanglement, with photons connected instantaneously at great distances, make the smallest observable layer of reality look like "magic."

The response frames quantum physics and the double-slit experiments as showing that at the bottom there are no little particles, only probability. A measurement either finds a particle or does not, and it is the measurement that "kind of creates a particle out of probability." The standard language of a wave function collapsing to a particle is criticized as a metaphor, because "Mathematics doesn't collapse to particles." The speaker identifies this as the measurement problem that physicists do not understand.

The strongest claim in this section is that, starting from consciousness as fundamental, the speaker can derive quantum physics from first principles and explain what actually happens where physicists describe a collapse. They also argue that this is not limited to small things: "Everything works that way." The derivation itself is asserted rather than presented here.

To explain why everything works this way, the speaker uses a multiplayer virtual-reality game. A server sends a data stream, a million pixels light up, and the player interprets them as other players, water, a house or a doorknob. The player chooses an action for their avatar, and the computer shows the consequences. In such a game nothing is computed unless a player sees it. An elf or a barbarian has no heart pumping blood and no bones. Its arm is drawn at successive positions many times per second so that it looks like smooth motion, "as if" it had bones.

Our reality is posited to work the same way: based in probability and "computed as if," with the "as if" expressing a rule set made up of physics, chemistry and biology. The limits of the rule set are illustrated with flight. A person cannot fly by flapping their arms because they are too heavy and their palms do not move enough air, and would need to flap something like a thousand times a second, like a hummingbird. Within this picture each being is a piece of consciousness playing a role, and the consciousnesses playing a human, a dog or a bumblebee are not all the same. The speaker acknowledges that this is "really mind-blowing to most people."

Humans are described as unique because of a huge decision space. Dolphins are said to have a bigger brain, yet a much smaller decision space: they cannot build a 60-story skyscraper or invent air conditioning to cool their water. The other participant challenges the yardstick. Dolphins move through 3D space and communicate through water with sonar. Defining superior intelligence as the ability to alter one's environment conveniently favors humans, and "I don't know if that's correct."

In support, the other participant says dolphins from different parts of the world cannot communicate with one another and have different languages, dialects and accents, which they compare to the gap between New York and Boston speech despite the cities being about three hours apart by car. They also state that the dolphin cerebral cortex is 40% larger than a human's, and they speculate that dolphins might have ecstatic consciousness, telepathic communication, or a more concrete way of sharing thoughts. The response is that they would guess dolphins do all those things. Both claims are offered in conversation without sources.

The exchange ends in rough agreement that the assumption of superiority is itself the problem:

Our consciousness is different. That's all. Not superior.

The other participant adds that complex human consciousness makes people easy to dupe, pointing to megachurch pastors. The response is that culture supplies "a lot of dysfunctional junk that we spend the rest of our life trying to get rid of."