Apologies for the long-winded highbrow response, but I did really like this podcast episode on consciousness from 80,000 Hours (and I listen to very few of their episodes). They discuss:
Why is there so little consensus among philosophers about so many key questions?
Can free will exist, even in a deterministic universe?
Might we be living in a simulation? Why is this worth talking about?
The hard problem of consciousness
Materialism, functionalism, idealism, illusionism, panpsychism, and other views about the nature of consciousness
The story of ‘integrated information theory’
What philosophers think of eating meat
Should we worry about AI becoming conscious, and therefore worthy of moral concern?
Should we expect to get to conscious AI well before we get human-level artificial general intelligence?
Could minds uploaded to a computer be conscious?
If you uploaded your mind, would that mind be ‘you’?
Why did Dave [the interviewee] start thinking about the ‘singularity’?
Careers in academia
And whether a sense of humour is useful for research.
I think the wakefulness/self-awareness distinction and the question of whether we can slow down time are important from an ethical perspective (I think people often dismiss something as not capable of experiencing pain/happiness just because it doesn’t appear to be self-aware and presumably if things are in some sense “perceiving things more slowly and stretching out their existence” then those experiences should count for more).
Apologies for the long-winded highbrow response, but I did really like this podcast episode on consciousness from 80,000 Hours (and I listen to very few of their episodes). They discuss:
I think the wakefulness/self-awareness distinction and the question of whether we can slow down time are important from an ethical perspective (I think people often dismiss something as not capable of experiencing pain/happiness just because it doesn’t appear to be self-aware and presumably if things are in some sense “perceiving things more slowly and stretching out their existence” then those experiences should count for more).