How we think, feel, and experience the world is a mystery. What distinguishes our consciousness from AI and machine learning?

Liad Mudrik studies high level cognition and its neural substrates, focusing on conscious experience. She teaches at the School of Psychological Sciences at Tel Aviv University. At her research lab, her team is currently investigating the functionality of consciousness, trying to unravel the depth and limits of unconscious processing, and also researching the ways semantic relations between concepts and objects are formed and detected.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What for you is the importance of storytelling and the environmental humanities? And what would you like young people to know, preserve and remember?

LIAD MUDRIK

So I think, first of all, I would like young people to keep an open mind and to be able to extract information from multiple sources and gain interdisciplinary training. So if you are a computer scientist, read philosophy. If you're a philosopher, read neuroscience or whatever is interesting for you. And don't be ignorant. It's important for climate change. It's important for politics, for sure. Again, going back to what's going on in the last few weeks, it's important for science, and it's important for who you are.

So my, kind of aspiration, if some genie came and gave me one wish, well, I would like three. So after I got my loved ones to be healthy and happy, that's the most important thing. The next wish for me would be to continue learning throughout my life and learn and if I can also teach, that's a plus. But this ability to evolve and expand your horizons and chase the truth, irrespective of which type of truth you're interested in, which field. What's the burning question that you want to answer? But find it yourself. Don't believe others. Build yourself on the knowledge of others, learn from others, but develop this kind of inner sense of critical thinking that allows you to say this is what I believe in. This is what I don't. And leave that to your children as well. So I hope our future generations will build on and will cherish knowledge and kind of generate new knowledge - but qualitative knowledge. It just allows us to know more about ourselves, about the world we live in, about other human beings. And be respectful of others, and be kind.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

One distinction between humans and AI systems seems to be the things that we don't really have control over. I think that when we talk about our consciousness, as opposed to talking about machine learning, which may be highly intelligent because it's a crowdsourced brain. It's these things like our biological processes, our limbic system, things we don't necessarily think about that are not even in our conscious. We define what makes us conscious by things that I feel operate on the unconscious, like our breathing and these things that we don't have control of. Our language is an artificial system. The things that we make, we say they are not conscious things. They are man-made things.

MUDRIK

So when I say that I am a conscious creature, I mean that I don't only analyze information about the world, or not only even respond to the world because you can think about, your thermostat response to the world, but when I sense the world, I don't only process information. I also have a qualitative experience, adopting Thomas Nagel's famous title of his paper. It feels like something in his case to be a bat. In our case, to be me. It feels like something to drink coffee, right? So the question is what allows us as human beings not only to process information but also to experience it? And this is what we are trying to understand, basically. And I should say, I said us as human beings, but I think that animals also have such conscious experience.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

I think that it is important to note, of the many animals on Earth, we are people of the book, and our reality, perception, and consciousness is really influenced by language. At the same time, we can be influenced and manipulated, whether it's concerning elections or how we receive news. I lived in Ireland for a number of years and I overheard these two women talking and one said, "Oh, don't worry. It's just a phrase he's going through." I think she literally meant it was a phrase, which doesn’t make sense at first, but you know, it's true. You can actually influence your own reality. If you've been told you're this, or you're not good at this, or you'll never achieve that. We can limit ourselves through language. We can also psychologically program ourselves to have confidence, to achieve things, through visualization. What we do with language is very powerful.

MUDRIK

So to what extent does our cognition affect perception itself? And I belong to those researchers who think that it does. We are affected by what we expect to see. And sometimes we even perceive the expected as opposed to the world as it is. That also pertains to day-to-day life, to politics, to the reality you construct for yourself. So the brain is an amazing, amazing piece of machinery. And one of the things that it does best is to create these narratives. into which we project ourselves. So it creates a model of the world.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

The mind is really a garden, and it's full of so many wonders we really don't understand. Studying consciousness also tells you about how we learn. What has it taught you about different education models, the way you were taught? With respect to our consciousness, how could we improve our educational models to adapt to different people's intelligences. How can we educate for the future so that young people flourish and explore their creativity?

MUDRIK

I think that critical thinking, especially in our day and age, it's probably one of the most important mechanisms that we should endow children with: not to accept things as they are. Especially, not to accept things as they seem in social media. Always question not only others but also oneself and try to take the other perspective, try to question your beliefs. Ask yourself how many of those beliefs are genuine and how many have been shaped by past experiences, by manipulations, and so on. And I think that if we can build a society with critical thinkers, self-doubters, and modest people, then we would live in a better place. And I can only hope this message is heard.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

We've spoken a little bit about artists who have a heightened awareness or think quite a lot about their own minds as part of their profession. On the other side of that, we have certain spiritual traditions, Buddhism and others, where the practice of meditation and other physical practices, singing, all these things can actually create brain waves. We can produce, we can change our consciousness. We can change our experience of time and even the chemicals in our brain and in our body. We can heal ourselves through this. What are your reflections on that and the mind-body problem that we've have in the West?

MUDRIK

The mind-body problem has been the main thing that I explored in my days in philosophy because I also had some small romances with philosophy as well. And I think this is not a matter of empirical investigation. So I don't think that there is any experience experiment that could tell you if there is a soul that is non-physical. I think that at the end of the day, this is for a philosophical and metaphysical discussion that could be determined by arguments and not experiments.

I don't think that there is any experience experiment that could tell you if there is a soul that is nonphysical. I think that at the end of the day, this is for a philosophical and metaphysical discussion that could be determined by arguments and not experiments. I am a physicalist. So I think that our mind is magnificent, amazing, and physical. And I agree with you, we can change by changing the way we think. We can influence our body.

Let's just think about the placebo. It's probably one of the most robust phenomena we know in medicine, right? They give you a fake pill, and you start to feel better. Why? Because of the way we perceive ourselves. That doesn't mean that we can counteract every disease by thinking positively, but there is a very strong bond between mind and body and brain. And I would argue that everything in that bond happens within the physical domain.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

You’ve mentioned social media, so I think it's something that you're concerned about. It concerns me too, particularly its affects young people and their neuroplasticity and being exposed to technologies at younger and younger ages. What do you feel is responsible use. And what your hopes are for that?

MUDRIK

We live on the one hand in very exciting times with technological development, but on the other hand, we should also be careful. And I've seen studies showing the effects of screen time on brain development that are worrisome, in my opinion.

So as a mother, I continuously engaged in a battle to minimize screen time for my children. Not always successfully because I also understand that the world that we live in requires a lot of screen time. I think that social media in particular and again, I can't take this interview out of context, I am continuously exposed to hatred in social media from all sides. People are scared. People are afraid. People are angry and that finds its way into social media. And I read things on (now it's called X) Twitter. and I'm horrified and disappointed and saddened. So did I disconnect? No, I'm also a part of the system, but I also want to raise a critical voice concerning that.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

We're growing so close to our machines that we can begin to think that the responses we get from AI are a form of consciousness. It sounds human-like, but it's not. In fact, it's like a big search engine. But people say: what's AI doing? What will it do? As if it were alive and not ultimately under our control.

MUDRIK

Even when I send a query to ChatGPT. I always say, "Hi, can I please ask you something?" And when it replies, I say, "Thank you." As if I am kind of treating it as a person who cares about whether I say hi or thank you, although I don't think that it does. And I think that here I had the privilege to be a part of this group, an interdisciplinary group of philosophers, neuroscientists, and computer scientists. "Thank It" was led by Patrick Battling and Robert Long, and we met and discussed and corresponded over the possibility of consciousness in AI. And what we tried to do there was to adopt some of the insights that we did. And so what we, the field of consciousness studies, relying on theories of consciousness that I mentioned before, and asking in humans, what are the critical functions that have been ascribed by these theories to conscious processing?

And then our approach was to say, let's adopt computational functionalism as a working assumption, not as a truth. So let me explain. When I say computational functionalism, the idea is that a system that implements the computations involved in specific functions that in humans or in conscious systems are related to consciousness, that system should also be treated as conscious.

Some of the people in our group think that if you have functional computationalism equivalence, if you have a system that implements all these functions, all these computations that we deem critical for consciousness.

I take the same agnostic approach as I took before, and I say, I don't know if it is conscious or not. I don't know if functions and computations are enough to give rise to consciousness. But I think that this is the most promising approach to tackle this question. So unless you have some pre-existing reason to think that an AI system is conscious or not... For example, we mentioned Anil Seth, he thinks that only biological systems, living systems are conscious, but unless you have reason to think that they are conscious or not, I think that accepting this approach of computational functionalism is promising because it allows us to at least assess.

So now we can say, give me an AI system. Let me check if it has the indicators that we, in this case, our group has put together as critical for consciousness. If it does have all these factors, all these indicators, I would say that there is at least a good chance that it is either conscious or can develop consciousness. If it doesn't have these indicators, then the chances are lower. So for me, this allows me to estimate the probability of this system being conscious as opposed to not. So that's the exercise that we've been engaged in. And I found it extremely thought-provoking, and I hope also promising.

And with that exercise, current AI systems might have 1, 2, 3 indicators out of the 14 that we came up with, but not all of them. It doesn't mean that they cannot have all of them. We didn't find any substantial barrier to coming up with such systems, but currently, they don't. And so I think that although it's very tempting to think about GPT as conscious, it sounds sometimes like a human being, I think that it doesn't have the ability to experience.

It's manipulative, even irrespective, you can think about maybe consciousness without a limbic system, but you cannot think of consciousness without meaning and experience. And what GPT is doing is basically manipulating words in an incredibly brilliant way. It can do amazing things. Is there anyone home? so to speak. Is anyone experiencing or, qualitatively, again, for the lack of a better word, experiencing the world? I don't think so. I don't think we have any indication of that.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Sam Myers and Faith Hoang. The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Additional production support by Sophie Garnier.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).