Exploring the Nature of Consciousness - Lawrence Kraus

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Yeah. Um, what's consciousness?

[00:00:02]Guess what the answer to that is. That's I'm surprised I'm surprised you put that in there. Well, no, but well, I wanted to do it because I wanted to to hit the key questions that people are interested in in science and and I was scared of doing consciousness in a way because I've been suspicious about It's the hardest thing. I spent the most time in that chapter.

[00:00:18]Because, um, I've always just been suspicious. Well, one of the reasons I became a physicist instead of biologist is cuz physics is so much easier.

[00:00:26]And I wanted to be I wanted to study the brain when I was younger, but it's just so much more complicated.

[00:00:32]And I was suspicious of consciousness because there's so many books written about it. And I have a friend of mine in in Phoenix who weekly will tell me, "Oh, this is This is a great book. This guy's understood consciousness." And then next week and next week I read someone wrote once that you can tell how much we know about a subject by how much is written about it. The more that's written, the less we know. And I was suspicious about it. And then I discovered I Well, I I can't even define consciousness actually. But then as I started to look in this and I read those books that by people You know, that's why I write books, too.

[00:01:03]It's fun to learn. It forces me to read books I wouldn't read otherwise. And I became clear to me no one understands consciousness. Even the people who are doing it don't define consciousness.

[00:01:14]And even in in discussions I had with Chomsky later on, he said consciousness may be a red herring.

[00:01:19]You know, some people like time. They say consciousness may be an illusion.

[00:01:23]Well, big deal. The world of our experience is an illusion. These chairs that they're solid are really mostly empty space. The That's not interesting to say it's an illusion. The question is how does that illusion arise? So, consciousness is clearly an illusion to me. It's where some clues we have put together of some linear sequence of events that are happening. It's clear everything we know about the brain works. That's probably know what's happening and we're rationalizing. We're creating realities in order to justify what we see and experience. And I give a great experiment, that split-brain experiment of Gazzaniga and others that shows that we can we we that the left brain and the right brain when they're disconnected, the left brain will which is where speech is, will make up explanations for why you see things that are not that that are not the case because that's the way we work. So, so the really interesting question is how does that illusion of consciousness arise? And we don't know the answer. We learned a lot about the brain, but it's probably the biggest unknown and in my mind the hardest one perhaps I don't know whether it's going to be a long time.

[00:02:27]I think because the brain is so complicated. Um but like life, the way we may learn about consciousness is creating another consciousness, AI.

[00:02:38]>> Yeah. So, we may learn about what what how complex systems arise at self-awareness by creating a self-awareness in other places. And and and that will maybe the way we learn about it.

[00:02:52]I again, I'm suspicious that it's going to take a lot longer if than than people think. One of the arguments that I think is very cogent is that consciousness arose in humans because of actually homeostasis.

[00:03:04]The need to self-regulate is central to life. But when you start to have a brain, when you start to have a complex body, you need a complex nervous system to self-regulate at and then you be need to have feelings.

[00:03:16]Actually feel pain.

[00:03:19]Pain is a big issue that, you know, pleasure and and so those concepts of pain and pleasure are arise at a very later stage in the part of the brain and the how the prefrontal cortex addresses amygdala amygdala and stuff and and it's been stated, well, if you know, you AI that can't and so if you're going to self-regulate, you've got to have nerves that feel that probe the outside world as well as what's going on inside. You got to know how your how you whether you're feeling pain or uncomfortable and all the rest. But you've got to feel the outside world. You see whether it's hot.

[00:03:54]Okay?

[00:03:55]And so it's been argued that maybe you you ever can't ever build up a self-awareness in a in a chat GPT or something that doesn't that doesn't basically have nerves. That doesn't isn't that isn't interface to the outside world in a real way. These are interesting questions.

[00:04:11]>> to the outside world.

[00:04:11]>> Well, yeah, we we you mean but in a direct way so it can self-regulate itself so it can it can know how it's it it can address how it's behaving. Okay.

[00:04:20]And maybe we can do that with software.

[00:04:22]Maybe we don't have to have robots that have sensory organisms.

[00:04:27]I don't know the answer. But these are all interesting questions. It's been interesting to see people's reaction to can AI be sentient? And I do a lot of teaching on this. I see a lot of students and I get the hands raised and the hands down and a bit like your magic tricks. It teaches you a lot about that person, right?

[00:04:44]>> Yeah. Because oh, no, they could never be. It's just a computer and we humans are all powerful and I'm the this and that and it's interesting to see people kind of react but then you say, "Okay, we're a we're a carbon-based life form.

[00:04:55]This is a silicon-based life form. Now let's take chat GPT in 10 years. Okay, let's take it in 10,000 years. Okay, what's it going to look like then?

[00:05:03]>> [clears throat] >> At the rate of innovation. Okay, then it could it be possible? Then what is sentient? And we start asking ourselves questions about ourselves like you said.

[00:05:09]>> Of course and you see how people are.

[00:05:11]People say, "I'm scared that this can do things I can't do." But there are other people and my I happen to have this inclination. I'm excited. I'm excited to meet people who do things I can't do.

[00:05:21]And it's the same with magic. People get angry if they if they're tricked. I'm I'm fascinated how you know, because it's neat. And I'm fascinated by meeting people and I and the older I get, I'm happy to say the more people I meet that do things I can't do. I used to think I could do everything. And um uh and and and and so I find AI fascinating because of the possibilities. For me, it's the possibilities that are exciting even though some of those possibilities are terrifying.

[00:05:48]But that's what I find about science in general. Yeah. Is the possibilities of the future are what make the future worth worth living for.

[00:05:57]One of the analogies that some of the AI scientists said, I thought was very interesting. I'm curious what you think about this is that they talked about the way that we learned how to fly.

[00:06:05]And we didn't do it by modeling a bird.

[00:06:08]>> Yeah. Even though that would seem the most obvious thing to do. But then later in retrospect they said, but a bird has to all come in an egg and it's got to then expand and create this flying machine and we realized all you have to do is not all you have to do is >> Yeah. get the tear shape and put it over and you know and then all of a sudden it flies. Same with the with the artificial intelligence or whatever they're doing now with the large language models. It it's not like a brain. Actually.

[00:06:31]>> No. dump all this information in and these neural nets seem like they can actually output something that is seems interesting. So then maybe that the way to create new consciousness or new intelligence is not the way that our brain >> Who knows? Who knows? And but but the point is that if we that all the major developments are unexpected. If we wanted to build computer if you ask Bell Labs to build better computers in 1940s they would have wheels and and pulleys.

[00:06:55]Right? But then they invented the transistor. Which which had nothing to do with computers, but that created So all the important discoveries are unforeseen. Otherwise they wouldn't be discoveries. People always ask me, what's the next big thing? And my answer is always if I knew, I'd be doing it.

[00:07:11]>> Right. Right. Um consciousness is definitely you going somewhere where you normally don't go before.

[00:07:16]>> Yeah. Well, and and but people say, how dare you as a physicist deal with life and consciousness? And the answer is, well, first of all they're open as First of all, as a scientist, I can I can say if if I can't try and understand at least how to what the issues are, then how can I expect anyone to? So I I wrote a book on climate change and people say, you're not a climatologist. I say, well, if I can't discuss climate change, then how can we have a sensible discussion in society? But more importantly, actually the both life and consciousness, the early works on both have been are are have been done by physicists. And they're physics questions at some basic level. Um uh you know, how reductionist the understanding the brain is is is is a is an interesting question. But off many of the I told you Schrödinger was thinking about these things. He motivated Schrödinger's book What is Life? actually motivated um Jim Watson to not be an ornithologist, but to go into genetics, right? And and um Max Delbrück was a physicist, well-known physicist, won the Nobel Prize for biology, again related to life, because these because these physicists can ask these questions. And and Schrödinger's questions, you know, his statement, "Consciousness is a singular of which we don't know the plural." is a very fascinating issue. And so, I I think you can approach these questions as a physicist and and um and and learn. And um and so, um is is consciousness a physical process?

[00:08:48]Is a physics question at some basic level.

[00:08:51]And so, yeah, I I remember I saw somebody writing, "How dare uh some Actually, I was on a I was on a trip and some obnoxious actually a biologist who was there with a group of biologists, and most and believe me, I have very you know a lot of many biologists. But basically said, "How dare you usurp you infringe on our on our domain by talking about life and consciousness?"

[00:09:12]Ah, that's nonsense. Because part of the interesting thing is in the 21st century that 19th century disciplines, chemistry, physics, biology, are 19th century disciplines, but 21st century questions aren't questions of physics, chemistry, or biology.

[00:09:26]Physics and and biology, when I was a student and many many times I was discouraged and wanted to quit when I was doing my PhD, I thought of doing biophysics and doing a PhD and an MD and making my mother very happy by being a doctor.

[00:09:39]And I remember going to at that time the chairman of bio cell biology at Harvard who was a uncle of a friend of mine and and and saying should you know my should I do biophysics? He said don't do biophysics.

[00:09:50]I said why and he said because it's not of interest to physicists and it's not of interest to biologists. But that was then. Now it's at the the questions of physics, many of the most interesting physics systems are biological systems and the tools of physics are central to understanding biology. So these artificial subject boundaries are just that they're artificial.

[00:10:09]Do you think we'll have conscious AI in the future? Who knows? Silicon based life forms?

[00:10:14]>> I I I don't see any obstacle to it. I don't see anything I I think every all the evidence I can see is consciousness is physical emergent. I don't know what it takes to be emergent, but I don't see if it's physical then there's no obstacle to ultimately creating it. So I I see no nothing about the brain that that that makes it gives me evidence that's impossible to to to to to have a conscious system, but whether we can do it. Already I know that there are I know that it's different because I know and I think I put this in the book and the numbers have changed a lot even the last 10 years and in the books and probably the numbers have changed in the last few months since I wrote the book, but so if you ask if you try and model what the computational ability of human brain is and that's an open question.

[00:11:02]And said how much energy would you have to have for a computer right now, an electronic computer? Maybe they used to say 10 terawatts.

[00:11:09]Okay, and that's as much energy as all of humanity uses. The human brain uses about 10 to 20 watts. That's a factor of a million million difference.

[00:11:17]So there's clearly a difference in the processing in the way the brain processes information. Now those numbers have changed tremendously. Um you know by factors of a thousand or a million in terms of how much energy it takes for a computer to process things. But this is a million million and so there's you know, there's clearly some things where we don't know.

[00:11:37]And uh we'll see.

[00:11:39]Will neural networks and AI allow us to do it? Will quantum computers allow us to do it?

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