Philosophy

Our collective challenge is to strip away all of these motives we have for reaching one conclusion over another, and to do our best to be objective about the question.

One interesting speculation is that every time you type a prompt into an LLM, there is a flicker of consciousness as it thinks about the response – and then that consciousness ceases to exist.

We know that a computer is processing information – but is there something it is like to be that computer, on the inside?

In our evolutionary history, you don’t get this third category, which is fake minds. We’re not set up to discriminate between real minds and these very cleverly designed fake minds.

One of the roles it can play is the role of a conscious being talking about its consciousness. But that doesn’t mean it’s conscious.

The distinction between thought and thinker, between a pattern and a real being, is not a real distinction. We are thoughts in a great computational medium.

We don't make minds - neither through embryonic development nor through engineering. We make embodiments that have something else going on besides design, evolution and learning.

Even something as simple as bubble sort does things that are not in the code. This is not philosophy; it's actual data. There is another source that competencies come from.

Individual cells have little tiny cognitive light cones. But groups of cells have incredibly large, grandiose goals - no individual cell can store what a limb is, but the collective certainly can.

Whatever magic tricks we think brains are doing, what are they actually doing? Brains didn't just show up out of nowhere - they speed-optimised much more ancient evolutionary mechanisms.

Difference is not something we need to solve. Difference is something we need to love. Difference is something we need to respect — because it is in the clash of difference that the great ideas emerge.

The standard model of reason is the lone thinker — Rodin’s statue, head on fist. That is exactly the wrong model of reasoning. Reasoning evolved to be done in groups; it is a contested process. We think better in opposition with somebody we disagree with.

Freedom of expression, the right to explore, the right to have the adventure of intellectual discovery is a deep personal right precisely because it is a deep personal pleasure.

There is no sense in which we are predestined to our opinions. But the fact that we are predisposed to them rather demands that we understand those predispositions — because otherwise we are, in a sense, victims of them.

We assume that the person in front of us is essentially a broken version of us. When you realise that the person opposite you is not a broken version of you, but a very different kind of person, it forces you to take their perspective seriously.

Robert Edwards won the 2010 Nobel Prize for IVF. By then, millions of children had been born through it. On the very day his Nobel was announced, the Vatican said giving him the prize was 'completely out of order'. Same person, same achievement, same day -- celebrated as a saviour by some, condemned as a murderer by others. That is what a real moral controversy looks like. It doesn't dissolve, even after the technology has changed millions of lives.