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All of the things that we put in the realm of mind, intelligence, intentionality, those things, according to the Sankhya tradition, are part of nature. What is missing that we have in us is pure consciousness.
Dr. Anand Vaidya is a professor of philosophy at San Jose State University, focusing on analytic philosophy, Eastern Vedic philosophy, artificial intelligence and consciousness. You can click on the timestamp here to skip this introduction, though I don't recommend that as I'm going to be giving some context for this talk. This was recorded at MindFest at the Florida Atlantic State University, courtesy of Susan Schneider.
Anand's work delves into non-dualism, which is colloquially thought of as the interconnectedness of all things without separation of subject and object. Though there are several different kinds of non-dualism, not all are created equal. For instance, there's what I just mentioned, that is the Advaita approach, that subject and object are the same. Then there's also the mystical approach of union with God. There's the non-negation approach of there's no such thing as up or down or left or right, black or white, good or evil.
There's the Advaya approach to non-dualism, which says that the absolute and relative truths of non-Buddhism are the same. And then there's a monism, which says that all there is is one vellum. In other words, everything's cut from the same cloth. Some proponents of non-dualism hold some, but not the other, and in fact see some as in conflict. Which is why it's imprecise to label oneself as a non-dualist. It's like if you were to say, I study science. Okay, well, which field in science and which subfield within that?
Anand argues that Western concepts often perceive consciousness as intentionally structured, digital, and also full of qualities. Anand in this talk explores the Advaita Vedanta tradition, which in some ways asserts the opposite, namely that consciousness is non-dual, it's analog, and it's without qualities.
This is interesting because it stands in contrast with bernardo castro and donald hoffman who frequently refer to qualities and also extended to the ethical domain especially in the context of artificial intelligence that is how can i have moral standing.
He contrasts this with Jainism, which ties moral standing not to consciousness, but to sensory capacity. Something you may want to ponder is, well, what the heck is the difference between sensory capacity and consciousness? Anand made a compelling analogy to me off air. He suggested that the way that the East has been marketed, and marketed is an apt word here since the 50s or 60s, is about being almost entirely non-dualistic, akin to how Italy has been reduced to pizza in modern culture. In fact, I think the phrase he said is that non-dualism is the pizza of the East.
Anand argues that there's a watered down version that we have of non dualism and the east actually is not representative of the extensive and nuanced philosophical traditions within the east some are extremely dualistic for instance some are beyond that pluralistic summer neither non dual nor pluralistic and we'll talk about all of those as well as whatever other questions you have in the comments for when and comes on the top podcast one on one next month.
This talk was the inaugural talk of the MindFest conference and it's a banger. The lights were low so that people could see the screen and we've placed slides in high quality atop so that you don't have to squint. Enjoy this presentation with Dr. Anand Vaidya.
So thank you very much for inviting me to speak here. It's really a great opportunity to try and open up MindFest with something that is trying to expand the horizons of concepts and ways of looking at issues in the nature of consciousness and artificial intelligence. I want to say something real quick about the title here a little bit. So when I'm talking about illumination here, what I really want to do is I want to try and get through as many of these
points that reveal deep background assumptions in the trajectory of how we explore consciousness. The point isn't so much as to say that these assumptions are incorrect.
or to offer a very profound evaluation of them, although there's plenty of time for me to talk about those things if people want to. But it's to reveal places where assumptions are made and that shifts the trajectory of how we might do research. And I think that's oftentimes what's important when you're looking at how paradigms are exploring a problem differently by looking at their underlying assumptions. So that's part of the goal of what I'm really trying to do.
Now, it's way too difficult to look at Indian philosophy and try to carve out all the ways in which it could contribute to contemporary discussions on the nature of consciousness, the mind, artificial intelligence. It's very difficult to do that because there are so many different traditions. So, for today, what I'm going to do is pretty much decidedly not talk about one tradition
talk about two other traditions, and the basic thing I need to explain from this first slide is that there's a division in Indian philosophy that's well recognized between what is called the Dynastica traditions and the Ostica traditions. Basically this is a distinction between traditions
which are heterodox and orthodox and all that really means is that certain traditions take certain sacred doctrines to be important in building their philosophy and other ones challenge those. So the one that we're going to look at from the challenging side is the Jain tradition and the one we're going to look at from the orthodox tradition is the Vedanta tradition and then along the way I'll say something also about the Sankhya tradition.
And finally, perhaps one of the biggest goals I'm going to try and shed light on is shifting the conversation from the perceived interpretation of what Indian philosophy offers consciousness studies because of what's become popular in looking at Indian philosophy to some less well-known ideas in Indian philosophy that actually might gain some traction in contemporary research. Sort of shift the picture that's coming out of Indian philosophy itself. Let's go.
So the place I want to start is with the parable of the blind.
in which it's a story about a king who brings five to six blind men around an elephant and asks him to touch certain parts of the elephant to determine what is in front of them. And because each of them are touching a different part of the elephant and not allowed to walk all the way around the elephant, each of them comes to make a different judgment about what's in front of them. One of them thinks it's a fan, one of them thinks it's a tree, one of them thinks it's a wall, one of them thinks it's a rope. And basically there are two points from this story that are very important.
One is that the people who are actually making their judgments are in part making their judgments based on their prior experience of what they've been exposed to. So the person who touches the tail and thinks it's either a rope or a snake because it's round might be doing so because that's what they're familiar with. And the person who touches the stomach and thinks it's a wall might in part be doing that because they were a brick layer and they were used to building walls. And so something that's similar to them in what they feel
forces them to sort of think a certain way about what could be before them. So this story is told in Indian philosophy. It's a pan-Indian story in epistemology, but actually it does find its roots in the Jain tradition and it's a very good way to understand how people approach debating things in Indian philosophy because if you have this many traditions
You can imagine when they all get together to try and debate anything, looking at this sort of example is going to help people understand why there might be disputes of certain kind. So this is a very big example that's oftentimes used in Indian philosophy to reset the tone of how things are going down in a debate. For our purposes, the elephant in the room is consciousness, because that's what we're all here to talk about in a certain sense. And it's important to realize that each of us may come to the topic of consciousness
based on what we're familiar with, based on the perspective that we find to be the one that we can work with. Not necessarily because we accept all the assumptions, but in part because we're good at working on consciousness that way, or we're good at working on artificial intelligence that way. And so what I want to do is, by introducing you to these ideas, is to let you see sort of the way in which different people might be approaching a topic differently, and because of that they're sent on a different trajectory in the way in which they investigate consciousness. Okay? So this is sort of the frame of where we're going.
in order to really talk about Indian philosophy in the context of talks about consciousness.
There is no way you can really do it without discussing the fact that some people are interested primarily in the scientific study of consciousness and some people are primarily interested in the spiritual aspect of consciousness. This is just, again, think of the parable of the elephant. Some people are approaching what's in front of them based on what they're familiar with and making certain judgments. Some people are approaching consciousness with different goals in mind.
However, I follow a tradition of Indian thinkers that have long held that basically these two ways of approaching consciousness are not incompatible. In fact, there are several centers of science and spirituality in India that spend their time studying consciousness from both dimensions. And there was a big movement in Indian philosophy in the 20th century to really look at quantum physics.
from the perspective of classical Indian philosophy. This was like one of the biggest things that was done in Indian philosophy for about 50 years. There were a number of thinkers in the beginning of the 20th century that just wanted to look at what classical Indian philosophy had in relationship to the developments that were happening in quantum physics.
So this is one thing that you really have to sort of accept, that part of the discussion that's going to happen when you look at Indian philosophy is you're going to be dealing with stuff on the spiritual side. It's also very important to recognize that Radhakrishnan, who was the first president of India, also a philosopher who was at Oxford for 20 years,
actually wrote several books arguing that this was a completely compatible way of thinking, to think about spirituality and science in relationship to consciousness as a unified project, not something that's disparate with people going in completely different directions. Okay. So this leads to two different models you can have when you're doing Indian philosophy in a contemporary context. One is sort of a comparative framework, and another one is an interventionist framework.
So a comparativist wants to basically tell you historically what was accurately said by some classical Indian philosophers and compare that directly to what's being said by a contemporary philosopher or physicist and show you what the differences and similarities are by paying attention to the accuracy of the textual research that they do.
An interventionist doesn't really want to do that. An interventionist wants to look carefully at the nature of how debates are proceeding in each tradition, and wants to see where using a tool, an idea, an argument, or a method from one tradition can make a plausible intervention in a debate in another tradition, and it wants to do it bi-directionally. So it's typical to think that maybe someone wants to do some research
and Indian philosophy in order to help influence contemporary Western philosophy, but it goes the other direction also. There are people who do research in Western philosophy and go to India like myself and help people understand how ideas in Western philosophy can change the trajectory in the debate of Indian philosophy. So I think it's a bi-directional project.
But I myself am less of a comparison person. I'm actually more of an interventionist. So I promote the interventionist model because I think that's a way of trying to get ideas from traditions that have excellent ideas, actually, and to see what work they can do in the contemporary projects we're pursuing in these areas. Okay. So in order to do the project of comparison versus intervention and to focus on intervention,
you actually have to make a distinction between identification and extraction. So the identification person is someone who wants to look carefully and see an idea in its historical context identified correctly and see and show how it's related to other contexts, other ideas in the context in the historical time period. An extractionist wants to basically find an idea
that served a certain purpose in a certain context and extracted out for a new purpose in a different context. So interventionism oftentimes goes with extraction and comparison goes with identification. So part again of what I'll be doing is extracting outside of the context of what's being done in Indian philosophy to use or repurpose it in a different sort of area of philosophy. Okay, and just so you don't think this is
Like, oh wow, this is something that only happens when someone does cross-traditional philosophy. It's very clear that in the metaphysics of consciousness and philosophy, when we debate the nature of consciousness, people will borrow ideas from ancient Western philosophers and take them, again, out of the context from which they come. So dual aspect monism
is a theory of the nature of consciousness that was contributed by Spinoza, and a lot of people who adopt that view, who are interested in pursuing it, don't pursue it in the religious context in which it was developed by Spinoza. So it's very clear that this idea of extracting things and trying to see what can be built from them is being done in multiple different contexts. It's not something that's particular to the kind of thing I'm doing by going between these two traditions. It's something that's done within traditions themselves.
Okay, so that takes us to the beginning of our path. And I think the beginning of our path is we have to start with a little bit of a history of the way analytic philosophy of mind has proceeded since, what, 1996 I think is when your book came out, Dave? Since Dave's book came out in 1996 of The Conscious Mind. So that was a very influential book in my own upbringing because I read that book when I was an undergraduate at UCLA. I took it very seriously and I got super interested in modal epistemology and consciousness and I now find myself here.
So my story begins here. And this argument in analytic philosophy of mind served an important purpose. It identified for us an explanatory gap between the physical nature of the world and the phenomenal nature of the world. It helped us see an argument structure for showing why it might be the case that physical facts don't tell us all about the phenomenal facts. It was a powerful argument. It was explored for a long time. It's still debated and it's still part of the canon.
Not that long after another person made an argument, Galen Strawson, and part of what he wanted to do was he wanted to talk about the way in which consciousness might emerge from something fundamental. And part of the argument he wanted to give was an argument that suggested that you either have two options, either consciousness emerges from something that's not conscious at all in any sense, or consciousness emerges from something that is conscious in some sense.
And if you think it can come from something that is completely non-conscious, that's like Seki saying you can make a real line from Euclidean points. Euclidean points don't have any extension. Things that don't have an extension can't make a real line. By analogy, things that are non-conscious completely in any sense whatsoever doesn't see how they can emerge to make things that are conscious. This argument gave us a position to think about emergence and he defended a view called micro-psychism. The idea was that some parts
of the fundamental nature of the universe have little conscious bits in them. So that paradigm went forward for a while and then a person named Sam Coleman offered an argument called the real combination problem where he basically tried to suggest that
If you wanted to explain macro conscious states of subjects like ourselves, we're all subjects, we're macro conscious subjects, from micro conscious entities, you would have to show how they could combine plausibly together. And the problem with that is that combining different conscious perspectives isn't really a plausible idea. So he defended this idea in what he called the real problem of combination.
And what he did was he tried to suggest that if you posit fundamental entities that are conscious in some sense, you won't really ever get to the kind of consciousness we have. That's not the way it's going to work because combination doesn't work that way from micro things to macro things. So then came another philosopher. His name is Philip Goff. And Philip argued, well, but the problem there is that what we're saying is fundamental in nature with respect to consciousness are little conscious bits
We're saying little conscious bits, little conscious atoms, little conscious particles or things attached to particles, that's what's fundamental and that leads to a problem of combination. So he said, why don't we just eliminate that metaphysics at the fundamental level and say that there's one unified field of consciousness, a single unified field of consciousness and that's where individual consciousness comes from. It doesn't come from adding up.
combining the micro bits in an atomistic way. It comes from something else, but it starts with a fundamental field. So this led to another question called the decombination problem, where Freya Matthews basically argued, well, if you have a combination problem,
going from atomistically combining bits of consciousness together to make macro conscious states, you're going to have the same problem in the reverse direction. It's just a decombination problem. How do you get from a unified field of consciousness to each and every one of your individual conscious states? How do you divide down? So there became, in some sense, two problems. And this is sort of a trajectory of current work in the metaphysics of consciousness. So in one case,
You have the micro-conscious things and you have to create a self. And that's the going from micro-psychism through combination to a self. And in the other direction you have to go from a unifinal field of consciousness and you have to divide down to the individual. So these became the two dominant problems in the metaphysics of consciousness based on sort of having some view that at the fundamental level consciousness is present, right? Either in its micro form or in this unified field form.
Now, doing my research during this time period, actively trying to stay engaged with what was going on in this trajectory, I started to notice with a bunch of my friends in India that a lot of these ideas were very prominent in Indian philosophy and that this sort of approach
to thinking about consciousness is very, very common in ancient Indian philosophy. If thinking about a unified field of consciousness or thinking about bits of consciousness being fundamental, there are different traditions. There are too many to go through all the variations of how they developed this. But this is clearly something that we all noticed was present there. But what I started to notice very carefully was that the frame of how this is debated in Indian philosophy
is different. And I started to wonder, does the frame change how we would think about the plausibility of these positions? And so I come to the first intervention. Okay. So the first intervention is to notice that there is a tendency in contemporary work on consciousness
to debate directly what the nature of consciousness is without respect to any other relevant property about the mind directly. And I'll explain exactly which property I think is relevant here.
But in Indian philosophy, this is very odd. This is not how it's pretty much ever done in any of the traditions. Usually when they're talking about consciousness, there's another target thing that they also want to give an answer to at the same time. And basically they want to solve both of those problems at the same time in a unified theory. But you can find many philosophers of mind who write on one topic in philosophy of mind
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So, what we notice in Indian philosophy
a major distinction about how things proceed is that usually a theory about the self is conjoined with the theory of consciousness and they're trying to give a unified theory of both of them at the same time. So they want to solve the problem of what the nature of the self is at the same time of giving it a coherent account of the nature of consciousness. And usually then it's tied to a further property such as the ability to know things. So it's like self and consciousness plus now
a story about what you think is knowable. That's usually the holy trinity of how things are done. So taking a position from a page, sorry, not a position, from Dave's book, The Conscious Mind, and his early work, I noticed that what he did was he had created the zombie argument and then he had gone through and talked about various ways in which people could refute the zombie argument and he created type A, type B, type C materialism, a long list of different types
of ways in which people to go. And I thought this is a very good instructive way to help people see a way of doing philosophy by listing out the options in the space. So I thought this is exactly what is going on in Indian philosophy, is that there are people who are illusionists about the self, realists about consciousness, realists about the self, illusionists about consciousness. There are people who are illusionists about the self and illusionists about consciousness. And there are people who are realists about the self and realists about consciousness. And then I looked carefully and I noticed
that some Western philosophers actually fit in here perfectly well. So, Galen Strawson fits nicely over here. Dan Dennett fits nicely over here. Keith Frankish fits nicely over here. An Indian tradition I'm going to talk about soon fits nicely over here. So, I started to notice that you can actually use this frame to bring both traditions together to have
of way of debating each other. The main thing you had to add was talking about the theory of the self and how your theory of consciousness and the self work together to give an answer to a question about the nature of knowledge. So my first intervention from Indian philosophy would be to say that to pursue a project about the nature of consciousness and artificial intelligence or the nature of consciousness in humans or non-human animals, I think also has to be tied to
Okay. So again, starting now with Franz Brentano,
It's important to recognize that one of the most important contributions in the philosophy of mind comes from this character and part of what he contributed was this idea that all consciousness is intentional.
That is, when you're conscious, you're conscious of something. Your mind is directed at something. And this directedness aspect is like a key aspect, or if not the mark, of what it is for something to be mental, is that it can be directed and about something. So he put together this idea of consciousness with intentionality. So it's a key idea that dominates Western philosophy.
John Searle, a philosopher much later, also made a very important contribution in the area of consciousness. He basically said, �By consciousness, I simply mean those subjective states of awareness or sentience that begin when one wakes in the morning and continue throughout the period that one is awake until one falls into a dreamless sleep, into a coma, or dies, or is otherwise, as they say, unconscious.� This statement might seem
In the background of this statement is a core idea. It's the idea that consciousness is digital. It's on and off. It's on when you're in a state of wakingness, and it's what's off in a dreamless sleep or a coma or when you die. It's an on-off thing. So another person, Tom Nagel, also introduced an important idea into the nature of
He came up with the idea of thinking of the subjective aspect of experience as the what it's like aspect of experience. And sometimes the way to understand this is to think about contrast. When you see red, there's something that's like to see red and that's different from what it's like to see blue.
There's something it's like to taste chocolate and that's different from what it's like to taste marinara sauce. These contrasts that we can make phenomenally give us an idea that there's a something that it's like or what it's like aspect to our subjective experience. This is a very powerful phrase. It's very useful when you're explaining types of consciousness to talk about this what it's like aspect. And he contributed this and it's about the qualitative nature of consciousness. Shortly after him,
Ned Block drew an important distinction between the type of consciousness that Tom Nagel is talking about, which most commonly we call phenomenal consciousness, with an idea that isn't so commonly discussed outside of philosophy and maybe cognitive science, which is the idea of a capacity consciousness.
So he drew this distinction between what's known as P-consciousness and A-consciousness, between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. And the way in which he got this conversation started was by investigating cases of blind sight.
So in cases of blind sight, a person has no ability or reports not being able to see anything in the left side of their visual field, for example. Yet if we put them in a hallway and we ask them to walk down the hallway, they can, for example, navigate perfectly around the objects. So in some sense, they're saying and reporting that they can't see something,
But in another sense, they have a capacity that's tied to the normal capacity to see something. So they have a capacity to do something independent from being able to phenomenally experience what usually guides that capacity. So this is a distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness.
four different major ideas that still are important to how we discuss consciousness in Western philosophy. They're still talked about all the time in seminars and universities. These are core ideas. Now what we're going to do is we're going to go back to Indian philosophy and I'm going to show you how some thinkers in certain traditions would disagree or challenge these assumptions. So in the Advaita Vedanta tradition of Brentano, whose father is Adi Sankacharya,
There is an idea that not only is consciousness duly structured, which means there's a subject-object structure, but there's the idea that it's non-dually structured, which means there's a lack of a subject-object structure. So there are sets of arguments where he tries to show the relationship of consciousness at a fundamental level being non-dually structured and consciousness at the level at which we're experiencing it as being duly structured. But if you notice what he's saying,
In a careful logical sense, he is denying what Brentano is saying. In a straightforward sense, he's saying it's false that an essential property of consciousness is that it's intentionally structured. It's false that there's a subject-object dichotomy in all conscious states. Okay? So that's the first contrast is between the dual-non-dual structure that we find in
Shankara in Advaita Vedanta and how that relates to what's going on in Brentano. Okay, another one, Contra-Serial. So, the idea that Serial forwarded was that consciousness is digital. It's kind of on and off. And in the Advaita Vedanta tradition, this is not the idea. The idea is that consciousness is analog, actually. It goes from subtle to gross.
The idea is that in a subtle state of consciousness, consciousness is focused on something very fine-grained. It's not operating in your cognitive sphere the way it normally does when you're walking around and doing your everyday activities. It's doing something very different at a fine-grained level. But it's like a volume knob. It can be turned up. And it can be turned up to what's called gross consciousness. So there are lots of ways of thinking about how this distinction can play out in a different way.
in terms of contemporary debates. But the core idea is just like with the Brentano theme, what's being challenged is the idea, first of all, that everything has to be directed and now that everything has to be digital. That's the second one that's being challenged. Okay. The third one, Contra Nagel, is this. In the conscious states that Tom Nagel talks about, he's talking about the qualitative aspect of what we experience, seeing red versus seeing blue.
There's not an assumption in what Nagel is saying, but there's sort of like a tacit implicit consequence that you might think follows. And that's the idea that when you're having a conscious state, there is qualities present. That's what it is to have a conscious state, is for there to be qualities present in it.
And Sankhacharya is going to challenge that very strongly and say, no, that's false. There are non-dual states and in non-dual states there are no qualities present because non-dual states are states of pure consciousness, not impure consciousness. Impure consciousness correlates to a state of consciousness with qualities present in it. Pure consciousness is like taking away all the qualities and seeing the canvas of consciousness itself.
There's a quirk in the way in which he explains this in his work, because he does say that there is an essential nature to consciousness. He says that the essential nature of consciousness is bliss. And you would think, okay, wait, but bliss is a quality, like being happy, that has something it's like to feel happiness is something different than what it's like to feel sadness. So you would think that there is some quality there.
But the way to understand this is that quality is what the canvas's quality is. So when consciousness is free of everything else, its only quality is bliss. So he's still trying to say that pure consciousness is without qualities, but for some reason he holds the view that bliss is not a quality like the quality of seeing red versus blue. So he's challenging Nagel's idea that qualities are necessary in
of consciousness. Okay, so those are three big things. It doesn't have to be intentionally structured, it doesn't have to be digital, and it doesn't have to be full of qualities. Those are three major assumptions that are in the trajectory of Western philosophy that this school seriously challenges through argumentation.
So there's one person who's recently come to think that all of this stuff coming out of this school is actually tremendously useful for the mind-body problem in philosophy of mind, and that person's Mary Al-Bahari. So she's argued actually that, in fact, if you take on some of the ideas that come from the Advaita Vedanta school, you might be able to solve
the decombination and the combination problem that you find in panpsychism, in cosmopsychism and micropsychism. So some people actually are now starting to think it wasn't just an odd chance that we navigated in philosophy of mind to this area and there turned out to be ideas in Indian philosophy that are related. Some people are now actually trying to actively generate from those ideas arguments that do work in the contemporary debates we're having.
I myself work in this precise area of taking ideas from Indian philosophy. However, I work on a different tradition than the one that I'm talking about right now. I'm just talking about this one because it's one of the most commonly talked about traditions. Alright, so this is an example of where we already see the confluence of using different traditions in the extraction interventionist model to do some work. Okay.
So one of the issues that also occurs in the Advaita tradition that we have to be sensitive to is this issue of a priority. So this is now a very extractionist point and definitely textually inaccurate.
The part of the reason why Shankara wants to claim that there's a difference between dual and non-dual consciousness is because he thinks that the fundamental nature of reality is pure consciousness. The problem in his perspective that we face in science is to explain what matter is, not what consciousness is. Consciousness is what is fundamental. That is the one thing we can always be certain most
What we can't explain so easily is matter. So for him, the problem is the problem of matter, not the problem of consciousness. Consciousness is what is fundamental. But consciousness as something that's fundamental isn't going to have any selves in it. It's going to be completely non-dual. So there's a distinction between non-dual being fundamentally and most real versus dual consciousness being non-fundamental and less real. So this is now the extractionist point. Although Shankara argues
that it has to be the case that non-dual consciousness is what is real and most fundamental. There's no need for anyone to accept that. You could simply say, you know what I do like is the distinction between dual and non-dual consciousness, but what I don't think is necessary is to hold that one is fundamentally more basic than the other. I can just accept that what he has discovered is that there are two types of consciousness, right? And those two things
So that's what I'm saying in this slide. I'm basically saying there's an option here to be more of an extractionist than someone who's just telling you the story of what Shankara would have done. And this is actually in a paper I recently wrote. I defended this exact point, trying to argue with Indian philosophers that it's not at all necessary to accept the fundamental point because what's more interesting is that there's another type of consciousness that we can explore and think about.
Okay, so this leads to another intervention. When people are asking questions about whether or not artificial systems and machines have consciousness, we can expand the types of consciousness we have when we're asking these questions. Typically, we're asking these questions with concepts of consciousness that derive only from Western philosophy.
What happens if we now increase the number of concepts of consciousness by exploring them in non-Western traditions and then adding those to the list of questions we ask alongside the other questions we're already asking? So we might be asking later on in this conference, can AI be sentient? Can it manifest phenomenal consciousness? Can it manifest effective consciousness? Can it manifest agential consciousness? We might be asking,
Can AI have a consciousness? Carlos Montemayor and Garrett Mint have a wonderful paper about exploring the relationship between AGI and A consciousness. But we can also ask other questions. We can ask, can an AI system have non-dual consciousness?
So a lot of Indian philosophers will find that to be a very interesting question because they think spirituality is tied to non-dual consciousness. And a question for some Indian philosophers is can an artificial system, maybe it can become sentient, but can it actually have something like a spiritual life to it in some way? That's a relevant question an Indian philosopher would ask. So there are different questions that will come from drawing out these different sorts of examples. But the key thing to see
is that what we're doing is we're expanding the types of consciousness we can talk about so we can expand the different ways in which we can evaluate what's going on with artificial systems. That's the primary goal. It's not to say one is better than the other. It's to say if we have a wider list, then perhaps we have a better traction on the options of what's available. That's the key idea that I see is valuable.
There is one strict problem here that I think is worth pointing out, which is sometimes there's an issue of translation. How do you translate words written in Sanskrit with things in English? And sometimes there's a little bit of a problem there. But that's a technical quirk that I think can be worked out, and I can discuss that later. But I just wanted to be honest that there sometimes are issues about why would you translate something that violates all the conditions in Western philosophy on consciousness as consciousness? How would that be a good translation, right? That's a legitimate question to ask.
Okay. Next question. A lot of us are interested in the relationship between the philosophy of mind and issues in ethics. And in particular, we're interested in these questions about how many kinds of things have moral standing, what is the reason or explanation of why something has moral standing, and what is the metric for measuring moral standing.
Okay? So this is a very, very important topic right now. Several articles are being written in popular magazines talking about whether or not we should extend rights to AI based on whether or not AI is sentient. So all of this stuff is completely on the table using Indian philosophy as well. So the quantity question is how many kinds of things, you know, are ants conscious enough to have moral standing? Is it only vertebrates?
So we're going to explore the option that says that some things have moral standing. That's the position we want to go for. The other options in a paper I've written, I explore why those don't actually work out. So we'll go for the some things have moral standings. I think that's what most people believe, that some things have moral standing.
Then the moral grounding question is, for anything that has moral standing or deserves moral consideration, what is it in virtue of that that thing has the moral standing? Like what makes it true? So if a rock doesn't have moral standing or consideration, but you and I do and orangutan does, what's the difference maker between the three of those things that puts the two in one category and the other one outside of it? That's the question we're interested in.
And the moral metric question asks, now suppose that the rock isn't in the circle of moral standing, but the orangutan and I am. Does it follow that if me and the orangutan are both in the sphere of moral standing that we matter equally from the perspective of morality? Or can we matter unequally? That is, one of us has greater moral standing than the other. And if so, why? So there are two views here.
The binary one both have equal moral standing and the graded view that things can differ in their moral standing.
So here are two people who have recently, one wrote about this a while ago, Peter Singer. He basically argued that phenomenal suffering is one of the most important things we can think about when we're thinking about moral standing. So if something has a capacity to suffer, then it's in the moral sphere. More recently in Dave's book, Reality Plus, he's argued that phenomenal consciousness is a necessary condition. And now we can look, what would other philosophers say about this and how would Indian philosophers get into this issue? Okay.
One of the traditions I want to look at that I'm working on heavily right now is how the Jain tradition would approach this issue by looking at specifically one of the texts known as the Tattvarta Sutra in which the author Umasvati doesn't really distinguish or talk about these questions that we're raising in Western philosophy, but he says some very interesting things about the ethical positions that they hold. And the more I thought about it, I realized you can actually generate
in answer to the moral grounding question, the moral metric question, and the moral quantity question by just building from these basic ideas that they talk about. So the first thing is that there is a distinction in this text between the sense capacities of different creatures. So what they're doing is they're saying, okay, we observe in nature various different creatures and we observe that they have different sensory capacities.
So now what we're going to do is we're going to say, based on the amount of sensory capacities that they have, they have more or less capacity for something that morally matters. That's part of the question I'm working on. What is it that they think that that capacity yields? But the one thing that they do start out with is the differentiation of sensory capacities. And then, in a very strong sense, because Jainism is committed to the idea of ahimsa, which means nonviolence or nonharming,
They basically are saying part of the goal of what you have to do is create the least amount of harm in the world that you can. And one of the ways in which you can do that is by choosing to harm those creatures which suffer the least. And suffering the least correlates with the ranking of the sensory capacities. So the more sensory capacities you have, in some sense you can suffer
more than something with less sensory capacities. Now the question is what is that thing that's making that difference in these gradations, but at least the structure is there. There's a differentiation based on sensory capacities and because our goal is to cause the least amount of harm, harming those creatures
with the least amount of sensory capacities is better than harming creatures with more sensory capacities. This is why all Jains are vegetarians and there's a massive movement in Jainism to make them all vegans and to make everyone a vegan. Because I think that just causes the least amount of harm both to the animals, to the environment, to everything. So there's a huge push in this community to go this direction because I think there's a strong connection between these principles and this differentiation of sensed creatures.
This is not a distinction that Umasvati draws, but in analytic philosophy, we can distinguish between two notions of a sensory capacity. We can distinguish between the phenomenal notion and the functional notion. The phenomenal notion of a sensory capacity is tied into the concept of having a what-it's-like aspect to your experience. So if I can sense blue versus red, it's because there's something it's like for me to sense blue versus red, right? So a sensory capacity can be understood in terms of having phenomenology, but it can also be understood in terms of
function, right? So a sensor can just give information to a sensing system about its environment. There doesn't have to be a subjective self there or any phenomenology for the system. Your thermostat is sensing the temperature in this room and adjusting. The thermostat doesn't have any phenomenology to it, nor does it have a self. It might have a central operating system, but it doesn't have a self in the same sense. So we can understand sensory capacities in
the Jane distinction in two different ways. I'm going to choose to do it in the functional interpretation and not in the phenomenal interpretation. Because the functional interpretation is the only one that's consistent with biology. Because if I take an amoeba, an amoeba is sensing its environment. I don't think it has any phenomenology or any self. An orangutan, I think, is sensing its environment in more ways than an amoeba. But I do think it has a phenomenology and I do think it has a self. So taking the functional interpretation as consistent with biology,
And because they're very interested in that aspect of the different creatures and the ones you can harm, and why you have to harm the ones that have the least sensory capacities, it makes sense to take the functional over the phenomenal interpretation. Okay. So one of the things that now we have to do as an extractionist is that we have to realize that the Jain tradition and many Indian traditions are tied to a theory of karma and rebirth. There's pretty much no way
in talking about Dharma ethics, the ethics that come out of Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism, without talking about karma and rebirth. But now there's an obvious question. Is anything about that distinction or ontological commitment of their view a necessary condition for developing these ideas? And the answer is no.
Just as dual aspect monism was taken from Spinoza and cut away from God and has been used in philosophy of mind, the same thing can be done here. So my current research leads me to the conclusion that nothing about Umasvati's distinctions require a commitment to the karma and rebirth story. In fact, the distinction seems very clear in terms of how he's drawing it. So I don't think that that's a necessary component.
Let's go. Oh, yes. Okay. So I want to go here. So I want to talk about how this actual account can be extended to the case of AI, right? So how can actually we take what the Janes are saying and use it to build a foundation for why AI might have moral standing? So the way to think about it is that instead of the Jane account saying, because artificial systems are sentient,
The view that I think would come out of this one is they have sensory capacities. It's not based on the fact that they have the capacity for phenomenology.
It's
water that doesn't have a lot of salt in it, other ones can tolerate water that has a lot of salt in it. That's a preference for being in two different environments. So sensing goes along with preferences and the ability or the capacity to prefer different environments over others.
We can think about that in terms of AI. I wouldn't make this argument for CHAT GPT-4, but I think as we go down the road, I think we're in a position basically by using their theory to say something like the following, that artificial intelligence systems that satisfy certain conditions will have sensing capacities. Those sensing capacities make a moral difference to what is a preferential state for the system as a consequence
They have moral standing. But now remember, there are two ways of taking moral standing. You can take the moral metric as being equal or unequal. My understanding of the Jain tradition is that it's got to be the unequal one. So I think what will end up happening is they'll end up saying something like, yes, artificial intelligence systems can fit somewhere
But they're not going to fit the same as other things on the scale, and that's because they don't have other conditions that they satisfy. So in research work I'm doing right now, I'm working on a theory of cluster capacities where different things with different clusters of capacities have different states of moral standing because their different cluster capacities work differently. So that's the view I'm developing right now, but it's tied to research I've done on Jainism. Okay, so maybe because of
I'll do just one more minute on this and then stop. Okay. So this is actually the point I really wanted to get to and it's really important. So a lot of what people, if they know anything about Indian philosophy and consciousness, the one thing they know about is they know about the stuff I talked about with Advaita Vedanta. They've heard about non-dual consciousness. They're curious about it. Maybe they've gone to the Vedanta center, but they've heard about that.
And this became such a dominant theme in the 20th century that at one point in time, I like to refer to it as the pizza pasta problem. Like if you go to Italy and you think the pizza and pasta are exactly the best things there, you're missing out on the vast diversity of food in Italian culture. Like there are so many good things. If you think in Indian philosophy that the gold mine was Advaita Vedanta, you're missing out on like most of the really good things.
So the one idea that I thought would be interesting to pursue was to say that, look, it is true that Advaita offers this theory of consciousness being fundamental and the distinction between dual and non-dual consciousness. But there's an older tradition called the Samkhya tradition, which is a dualistic tradition which is different and compared oftentimes to Descartes. So Descartes has what we call a vertical dualism and Samkhya has it called a horizontal dualism.
And in the vertical dualism, Descartes faces the problem of interaction or causation between bodily states and mental states because they're two different substances. In the Sankhya tradition, the issue is the question of animation or observation. So the basic idea is that all of the things that we put in the realm of mind, intelligence, intentionality, those things, according to the Sankhya tradition, are part of nature.
Okay? So nature already contains in it intelligence and primitive intentionality. What is missing that we have in us is pure consciousness. That's called purusha. So there's a distinction between what's called purusha and prakriti. Prakriti means nature and purusha means self and a certain type of consciousness. And so their view is there's a dichotomy between all of the functions of the mind working with the body nicely
and consciousness being outside of that sphere, actually. And so this leads to a very interesting hypothesis from a different Indian tradition, the Samkhya tradition, which I'll go to here. Yes, it's the contrast between panpsychism and panintelligence. So the panpsychists, for the last, I guess, 10 years, have tried to tell us that what might be abundant in nature
is consciousness. It's in more places than we think, and it's fundamental. And there are definite schools of Indian philosophy that agree with that position for sure. But there's also this school of Indian philosophy which thinks, no, that's not really what's going on. What's really going on is that intelligence is what's ubiquitous in nature. Intelligence is what's fundamental. Permanent intentionality is what's found in nature. Consciousness is what's outside of it. And that leads
to
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to know more about the definitions, because I think a lot of those terms are very ill-defined or very difficult to define, especially like the pure consciousness that you define as bliss, but at the same time we both are flalia. Bliss seems to me very interesting.
Okay, sure. So first of all, the point I made about translation is directly related to the question you're asking. So I'll just make that point and I think that'll help clarify things.
I literally had a debate in India in January where I told the scholar, I have no idea why you ever translated these terms into English as being consciousness, if you think pure consciousness has no qualities. And Bliss has a quality. I literally made the argument. You just said, I don't understand what you're talking about. They're like, okay, that's a good point on it. I don't know why we did this, actually. So they kind of admitted it and backed off. I was like, look, there's something wrong here with what you're saying. There's something called semantic plasticity.
I'm basically following the people who think that this is
The best way to translate this term, how to get a grasp on it, I can provide you with lots of literature that will give you a better understanding. But the point that bliss is a quality and therefore it can't be qualityless, the only way of conveying this is by saying that the bliss that they're talking about is not identical to the happiness you feel in a subjective state.
So by the way, my name is the name of this Sanskrit word. Anand is the name for the Sanskrit concept attached to consciousness. That's what the bliss is. But it doesn't mean happiness, which is a common translation of it. Oh, sorry, there's another point. Moral standing means the same as legal standing, but for the moral realm. Legal standing means that someone has standing according to a legal system. Moral standing means that according to morality, this thing deserves consideration.
from the moral point of view, not just the legal point of view. Yes.
Okay, so let me just clarify the technical distinction and then I'll re-ask your question.
The technical consideration is that in this system, purusha and prakriti, prakriti is where buddhi and manas are. And buddhi and manas are things that in Cartesian system are associated with the mind. But the claim that is done in this literature, which is pretty vast now in the 20th century, is that the Samkhya people see a lot of what some traditions of Western philosophy see as functions of the mind, as functions in nature.
That's what they're saying. So they don't think
that consciousness is part of nature. That is the whole dualism of this system. But that's because they also don't think of consciousness in the same way that Descartes does. Purusha and the notion of consciousness that is in this system is what's known as the suction, the disinterested witness or observer. It's a type of consciousness, it's like
If you want to talk about what allows for a wave function to collapse, people say observation does, right? That's a very common idea. What they think Purusha is, is they think it's a disinterested witness. Now, they weren't thinking it's what collapses the wave function, but they're thinking of it as the observer, right? The disinterested observer. And they think that's outside of nature, right? So they don't connect in their system that with this. So what I did was I extracted
Samkhya's view of nature, Prakriti, and then I attached it to a thesis called the PC band view. And that idea is that intelligence is ubiquitous in nature and consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, is what occurs at a certain band of intelligence and complexity, amount and complexity of it. But after that band, it goes away.
So the idea is that as intelligence increases, it's likely that we don't continue to find things that are phenomenally conscious. Rather, after a certain degree or increase in intelligence, phenomenal consciousness goes away. It's like boiling a soup and getting froth for a certain little while, and then the froth boils off, right? That's kind of the idea. So I would not tie the type of consciousness
that Sompke is talking about into nature because that would violate the distinction of their dualism. It's to tie the notion of phenomenal consciousness with qualities that's from Western philosophy as a band from their theory of nature which is full of intelligence and primitive intentionality. That's actually a project I'm working on with another friend of mine. Thank you.
pictures of less more sentences, two sentences, et cetera, et cetera. Five, six speakers have a moral duty to cause less amount of harm to lower six speakers. Cool.
Could artificial intelligence, if it becomes sufficiently advanced, have enough senses that it would have more greater moral standing? Excellent. Perfect. Yes. That's a very good question. I'm so happy you asked that question because there is a thesis that I've been working on for a year now that's related directly to this. It's called morism, which means if you have more of quantity phi, you have more moral standing. So if X has more of quantity
f then y then x has more moral standing so someone might say if you have more consciousness you have more moral standing
If you have more capacities, you have more moral standing. I think that thesis is clearly false, and I clearly think that Jains think it's false. So the claim, the reason why is because there's something called a threshold effect. That is sometimes two things can pass a threshold, and even though one has more of the property than the other, that doesn't make them taller than is kind of a bad example, but it works. Like you can be taller than me, but we both can be tall, right? So there could be something like that with moral standing.
I do think there are going to be cutoffs, though. So maybe what's going on with a one-sense creature and a two-sense creature definitely makes them have less moral standing than a three- and four-sense creature. But I don't know that, for example, a seven-sense creature like a super AI gets to have more than us just because it has more, because that would require that more-ism is true, but there are good reasons to deny more-ism. I think the reasons to deny more-ism are actually things Janes would actually textually find that support their view. So I don't think overall that's going to work.
But I think there will be cutoff points. Yes. Thank you.
If you enjoyed this talk, then you're going to enjoy other talks from Florida Atlantic University's MindFest, which is about the intersection between artificial intelligence and consciousness spearheaded by professor of philosophy, Susan Schneider. The talks include Stephen Wolfram on chat GPT, as well as physics, another one with Ben Gortzel on the singularity and where AGI will be in just a few years. That one's actually quite disturbing.
And then there's another talk on non-human consciousness. So plant consciousness, infant consciousness, petri brains. What happens when you grow a brain, which we do in petri dishes, just a few cells? Okay, we think that's ethically okay. But what happens as we add more and more cells? What happens when it becomes a functioning brain with the capacity to feel pain and suffer? That's talked about in this triage talk.
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▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze."
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"text": " All of the things that we put in the realm of mind, intelligence, intentionality, those things, according to the Sankhya tradition, are part of nature. What is missing that we have in us is pure consciousness."
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"text": " Dr. Anand Vaidya is a professor of philosophy at San Jose State University, focusing on analytic philosophy, Eastern Vedic philosophy, artificial intelligence and consciousness. You can click on the timestamp here to skip this introduction, though I don't recommend that as I'm going to be giving some context for this talk. This was recorded at MindFest at the Florida Atlantic State University, courtesy of Susan Schneider."
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"text": " Anand's work delves into non-dualism, which is colloquially thought of as the interconnectedness of all things without separation of subject and object. Though there are several different kinds of non-dualism, not all are created equal. For instance, there's what I just mentioned, that is the Advaita approach, that subject and object are the same. Then there's also the mystical approach of union with God. There's the non-negation approach of there's no such thing as up or down or left or right, black or white, good or evil."
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"text": " There's the Advaya approach to non-dualism, which says that the absolute and relative truths of non-Buddhism are the same. And then there's a monism, which says that all there is is one vellum. In other words, everything's cut from the same cloth. Some proponents of non-dualism hold some, but not the other, and in fact see some as in conflict. Which is why it's imprecise to label oneself as a non-dualist. It's like if you were to say, I study science. Okay, well, which field in science and which subfield within that?"
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"text": " Anand argues that Western concepts often perceive consciousness as intentionally structured, digital, and also full of qualities. Anand in this talk explores the Advaita Vedanta tradition, which in some ways asserts the opposite, namely that consciousness is non-dual, it's analog, and it's without qualities."
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"text": " This is interesting because it stands in contrast with bernardo castro and donald hoffman who frequently refer to qualities and also extended to the ethical domain especially in the context of artificial intelligence that is how can i have moral standing."
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"text": " He contrasts this with Jainism, which ties moral standing not to consciousness, but to sensory capacity. Something you may want to ponder is, well, what the heck is the difference between sensory capacity and consciousness? Anand made a compelling analogy to me off air. He suggested that the way that the East has been marketed, and marketed is an apt word here since the 50s or 60s, is about being almost entirely non-dualistic, akin to how Italy has been reduced to pizza in modern culture. In fact, I think the phrase he said is that non-dualism is the pizza of the East."
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"text": " Anand argues that there's a watered down version that we have of non dualism and the east actually is not representative of the extensive and nuanced philosophical traditions within the east some are extremely dualistic for instance some are beyond that pluralistic summer neither non dual nor pluralistic and we'll talk about all of those as well as whatever other questions you have in the comments for when and comes on the top podcast one on one next month."
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"text": " This talk was the inaugural talk of the MindFest conference and it's a banger. The lights were low so that people could see the screen and we've placed slides in high quality atop so that you don't have to squint. Enjoy this presentation with Dr. Anand Vaidya."
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"text": " So thank you very much for inviting me to speak here. It's really a great opportunity to try and open up MindFest with something that is trying to expand the horizons of concepts and ways of looking at issues in the nature of consciousness and artificial intelligence. I want to say something real quick about the title here a little bit. So when I'm talking about illumination here, what I really want to do is I want to try and get through as many of these"
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"text": " points that reveal deep background assumptions in the trajectory of how we explore consciousness. The point isn't so much as to say that these assumptions are incorrect."
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"text": " or to offer a very profound evaluation of them, although there's plenty of time for me to talk about those things if people want to. But it's to reveal places where assumptions are made and that shifts the trajectory of how we might do research. And I think that's oftentimes what's important when you're looking at how paradigms are exploring a problem differently by looking at their underlying assumptions. So that's part of the goal of what I'm really trying to do."
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"text": " Now, it's way too difficult to look at Indian philosophy and try to carve out all the ways in which it could contribute to contemporary discussions on the nature of consciousness, the mind, artificial intelligence. It's very difficult to do that because there are so many different traditions. So, for today, what I'm going to do is pretty much decidedly not talk about one tradition"
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"text": " talk about two other traditions, and the basic thing I need to explain from this first slide is that there's a division in Indian philosophy that's well recognized between what is called the Dynastica traditions and the Ostica traditions. Basically this is a distinction between traditions"
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"text": " which are heterodox and orthodox and all that really means is that certain traditions take certain sacred doctrines to be important in building their philosophy and other ones challenge those. So the one that we're going to look at from the challenging side is the Jain tradition and the one we're going to look at from the orthodox tradition is the Vedanta tradition and then along the way I'll say something also about the Sankhya tradition."
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"text": " And finally, perhaps one of the biggest goals I'm going to try and shed light on is shifting the conversation from the perceived interpretation of what Indian philosophy offers consciousness studies because of what's become popular in looking at Indian philosophy to some less well-known ideas in Indian philosophy that actually might gain some traction in contemporary research. Sort of shift the picture that's coming out of Indian philosophy itself. Let's go."
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"text": " So the place I want to start is with the parable of the blind."
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"text": " in which it's a story about a king who brings five to six blind men around an elephant and asks him to touch certain parts of the elephant to determine what is in front of them. And because each of them are touching a different part of the elephant and not allowed to walk all the way around the elephant, each of them comes to make a different judgment about what's in front of them. One of them thinks it's a fan, one of them thinks it's a tree, one of them thinks it's a wall, one of them thinks it's a rope. And basically there are two points from this story that are very important."
},
{
"end_time": 476.442,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 449.224,
"text": " One is that the people who are actually making their judgments are in part making their judgments based on their prior experience of what they've been exposed to. So the person who touches the tail and thinks it's either a rope or a snake because it's round might be doing so because that's what they're familiar with. And the person who touches the stomach and thinks it's a wall might in part be doing that because they were a brick layer and they were used to building walls. And so something that's similar to them in what they feel"
},
{
"end_time": 497.261,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 476.92,
"text": " forces them to sort of think a certain way about what could be before them. So this story is told in Indian philosophy. It's a pan-Indian story in epistemology, but actually it does find its roots in the Jain tradition and it's a very good way to understand how people approach debating things in Indian philosophy because if you have this many traditions"
},
{
"end_time": 527.176,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 497.261,
"text": " You can imagine when they all get together to try and debate anything, looking at this sort of example is going to help people understand why there might be disputes of certain kind. So this is a very big example that's oftentimes used in Indian philosophy to reset the tone of how things are going down in a debate. For our purposes, the elephant in the room is consciousness, because that's what we're all here to talk about in a certain sense. And it's important to realize that each of us may come to the topic of consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 556.937,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 527.739,
"text": " based on what we're familiar with, based on the perspective that we find to be the one that we can work with. Not necessarily because we accept all the assumptions, but in part because we're good at working on consciousness that way, or we're good at working on artificial intelligence that way. And so what I want to do is, by introducing you to these ideas, is to let you see sort of the way in which different people might be approaching a topic differently, and because of that they're sent on a different trajectory in the way in which they investigate consciousness. Okay? So this is sort of the frame of where we're going."
},
{
"end_time": 565.435,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 557.551,
"text": " in order to really talk about Indian philosophy in the context of talks about consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 589.821,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 565.657,
"text": " There is no way you can really do it without discussing the fact that some people are interested primarily in the scientific study of consciousness and some people are primarily interested in the spiritual aspect of consciousness. This is just, again, think of the parable of the elephant. Some people are approaching what's in front of them based on what they're familiar with and making certain judgments. Some people are approaching consciousness with different goals in mind."
},
{
"end_time": 614.411,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 590.111,
"text": " However, I follow a tradition of Indian thinkers that have long held that basically these two ways of approaching consciousness are not incompatible. In fact, there are several centers of science and spirituality in India that spend their time studying consciousness from both dimensions. And there was a big movement in Indian philosophy in the 20th century to really look at quantum physics."
},
{
"end_time": 632.534,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 614.616,
"text": " from the perspective of classical Indian philosophy. This was like one of the biggest things that was done in Indian philosophy for about 50 years. There were a number of thinkers in the beginning of the 20th century that just wanted to look at what classical Indian philosophy had in relationship to the developments that were happening in quantum physics."
},
{
"end_time": 650.111,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 633.302,
"text": " So this is one thing that you really have to sort of accept, that part of the discussion that's going to happen when you look at Indian philosophy is you're going to be dealing with stuff on the spiritual side. It's also very important to recognize that Radhakrishnan, who was the first president of India, also a philosopher who was at Oxford for 20 years,"
},
{
"end_time": 677.961,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 650.111,
"text": " actually wrote several books arguing that this was a completely compatible way of thinking, to think about spirituality and science in relationship to consciousness as a unified project, not something that's disparate with people going in completely different directions. Okay. So this leads to two different models you can have when you're doing Indian philosophy in a contemporary context. One is sort of a comparative framework, and another one is an interventionist framework."
},
{
"end_time": 698.268,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 678.336,
"text": " So a comparativist wants to basically tell you historically what was accurately said by some classical Indian philosophers and compare that directly to what's being said by a contemporary philosopher or physicist and show you what the differences and similarities are by paying attention to the accuracy of the textual research that they do."
},
{
"end_time": 723.592,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 698.882,
"text": " An interventionist doesn't really want to do that. An interventionist wants to look carefully at the nature of how debates are proceeding in each tradition, and wants to see where using a tool, an idea, an argument, or a method from one tradition can make a plausible intervention in a debate in another tradition, and it wants to do it bi-directionally. So it's typical to think that maybe someone wants to do some research"
},
{
"end_time": 741.374,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 723.592,
"text": " and Indian philosophy in order to help influence contemporary Western philosophy, but it goes the other direction also. There are people who do research in Western philosophy and go to India like myself and help people understand how ideas in Western philosophy can change the trajectory in the debate of Indian philosophy. So I think it's a bi-directional project."
},
{
"end_time": 767.346,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 741.374,
"text": " But I myself am less of a comparison person. I'm actually more of an interventionist. So I promote the interventionist model because I think that's a way of trying to get ideas from traditions that have excellent ideas, actually, and to see what work they can do in the contemporary projects we're pursuing in these areas. Okay. So in order to do the project of comparison versus intervention and to focus on intervention,"
},
{
"end_time": 794.224,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 767.739,
"text": " you actually have to make a distinction between identification and extraction. So the identification person is someone who wants to look carefully and see an idea in its historical context identified correctly and see and show how it's related to other contexts, other ideas in the context in the historical time period. An extractionist wants to basically find an idea"
},
{
"end_time": 823.66,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 794.701,
"text": " that served a certain purpose in a certain context and extracted out for a new purpose in a different context. So interventionism oftentimes goes with extraction and comparison goes with identification. So part again of what I'll be doing is extracting outside of the context of what's being done in Indian philosophy to use or repurpose it in a different sort of area of philosophy. Okay, and just so you don't think this is"
},
{
"end_time": 841.834,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 824.36,
"text": " Like, oh wow, this is something that only happens when someone does cross-traditional philosophy. It's very clear that in the metaphysics of consciousness and philosophy, when we debate the nature of consciousness, people will borrow ideas from ancient Western philosophers and take them, again, out of the context from which they come. So dual aspect monism"
},
{
"end_time": 868.677,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 841.834,
"text": " is a theory of the nature of consciousness that was contributed by Spinoza, and a lot of people who adopt that view, who are interested in pursuing it, don't pursue it in the religious context in which it was developed by Spinoza. So it's very clear that this idea of extracting things and trying to see what can be built from them is being done in multiple different contexts. It's not something that's particular to the kind of thing I'm doing by going between these two traditions. It's something that's done within traditions themselves."
},
{
"end_time": 899.104,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 869.616,
"text": " Okay, so that takes us to the beginning of our path. And I think the beginning of our path is we have to start with a little bit of a history of the way analytic philosophy of mind has proceeded since, what, 1996 I think is when your book came out, Dave? Since Dave's book came out in 1996 of The Conscious Mind. So that was a very influential book in my own upbringing because I read that book when I was an undergraduate at UCLA. I took it very seriously and I got super interested in modal epistemology and consciousness and I now find myself here."
},
{
"end_time": 927.449,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 899.428,
"text": " So my story begins here. And this argument in analytic philosophy of mind served an important purpose. It identified for us an explanatory gap between the physical nature of the world and the phenomenal nature of the world. It helped us see an argument structure for showing why it might be the case that physical facts don't tell us all about the phenomenal facts. It was a powerful argument. It was explored for a long time. It's still debated and it's still part of the canon."
},
{
"end_time": 953.865,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 927.722,
"text": " Not that long after another person made an argument, Galen Strawson, and part of what he wanted to do was he wanted to talk about the way in which consciousness might emerge from something fundamental. And part of the argument he wanted to give was an argument that suggested that you either have two options, either consciousness emerges from something that's not conscious at all in any sense, or consciousness emerges from something that is conscious in some sense."
},
{
"end_time": 981.613,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 954.172,
"text": " And if you think it can come from something that is completely non-conscious, that's like Seki saying you can make a real line from Euclidean points. Euclidean points don't have any extension. Things that don't have an extension can't make a real line. By analogy, things that are non-conscious completely in any sense whatsoever doesn't see how they can emerge to make things that are conscious. This argument gave us a position to think about emergence and he defended a view called micro-psychism. The idea was that some parts"
},
{
"end_time": 998.592,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 981.988,
"text": " of the fundamental nature of the universe have little conscious bits in them. So that paradigm went forward for a while and then a person named Sam Coleman offered an argument called the real combination problem where he basically tried to suggest that"
},
{
"end_time": 1020.879,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 999.104,
"text": " If you wanted to explain macro conscious states of subjects like ourselves, we're all subjects, we're macro conscious subjects, from micro conscious entities, you would have to show how they could combine plausibly together. And the problem with that is that combining different conscious perspectives isn't really a plausible idea. So he defended this idea in what he called the real problem of combination."
},
{
"end_time": 1050.043,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1021.152,
"text": " And what he did was he tried to suggest that if you posit fundamental entities that are conscious in some sense, you won't really ever get to the kind of consciousness we have. That's not the way it's going to work because combination doesn't work that way from micro things to macro things. So then came another philosopher. His name is Philip Goff. And Philip argued, well, but the problem there is that what we're saying is fundamental in nature with respect to consciousness are little conscious bits"
},
{
"end_time": 1073.456,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1050.367,
"text": " We're saying little conscious bits, little conscious atoms, little conscious particles or things attached to particles, that's what's fundamental and that leads to a problem of combination. So he said, why don't we just eliminate that metaphysics at the fundamental level and say that there's one unified field of consciousness, a single unified field of consciousness and that's where individual consciousness comes from. It doesn't come from adding up."
},
{
"end_time": 1092.602,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1074.087,
"text": " combining the micro bits in an atomistic way. It comes from something else, but it starts with a fundamental field. So this led to another question called the decombination problem, where Freya Matthews basically argued, well, if you have a combination problem,"
},
{
"end_time": 1122.039,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1093.046,
"text": " going from atomistically combining bits of consciousness together to make macro conscious states, you're going to have the same problem in the reverse direction. It's just a decombination problem. How do you get from a unified field of consciousness to each and every one of your individual conscious states? How do you divide down? So there became, in some sense, two problems. And this is sort of a trajectory of current work in the metaphysics of consciousness. So in one case,"
},
{
"end_time": 1151.067,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1122.432,
"text": " You have the micro-conscious things and you have to create a self. And that's the going from micro-psychism through combination to a self. And in the other direction you have to go from a unifinal field of consciousness and you have to divide down to the individual. So these became the two dominant problems in the metaphysics of consciousness based on sort of having some view that at the fundamental level consciousness is present, right? Either in its micro form or in this unified field form."
},
{
"end_time": 1169.667,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1151.988,
"text": " Now, doing my research during this time period, actively trying to stay engaged with what was going on in this trajectory, I started to notice with a bunch of my friends in India that a lot of these ideas were very prominent in Indian philosophy and that this sort of approach"
},
{
"end_time": 1195.026,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1169.667,
"text": " to thinking about consciousness is very, very common in ancient Indian philosophy. If thinking about a unified field of consciousness or thinking about bits of consciousness being fundamental, there are different traditions. There are too many to go through all the variations of how they developed this. But this is clearly something that we all noticed was present there. But what I started to notice very carefully was that the frame of how this is debated in Indian philosophy"
},
{
"end_time": 1217.176,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1195.316,
"text": " is different. And I started to wonder, does the frame change how we would think about the plausibility of these positions? And so I come to the first intervention. Okay. So the first intervention is to notice that there is a tendency in contemporary work on consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 1230.111,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1217.619,
"text": " to debate directly what the nature of consciousness is without respect to any other relevant property about the mind directly. And I'll explain exactly which property I think is relevant here."
},
{
"end_time": 1252.688,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1230.265,
"text": " But in Indian philosophy, this is very odd. This is not how it's pretty much ever done in any of the traditions. Usually when they're talking about consciousness, there's another target thing that they also want to give an answer to at the same time. And basically they want to solve both of those problems at the same time in a unified theory. But you can find many philosophers of mind who write on one topic in philosophy of mind"
},
{
"end_time": 1272.534,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1252.688,
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"end_time": 1299.514,
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"start_time": 1273.422,
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"text": " So, what we notice in Indian philosophy"
},
{
"end_time": 1507.073,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1477.261,
"text": " a major distinction about how things proceed is that usually a theory about the self is conjoined with the theory of consciousness and they're trying to give a unified theory of both of them at the same time. So they want to solve the problem of what the nature of the self is at the same time of giving it a coherent account of the nature of consciousness. And usually then it's tied to a further property such as the ability to know things. So it's like self and consciousness plus now"
},
{
"end_time": 1533.541,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1507.534,
"text": " a story about what you think is knowable. That's usually the holy trinity of how things are done. So taking a position from a page, sorry, not a position, from Dave's book, The Conscious Mind, and his early work, I noticed that what he did was he had created the zombie argument and then he had gone through and talked about various ways in which people could refute the zombie argument and he created type A, type B, type C materialism, a long list of different types"
},
{
"end_time": 1561.527,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1533.541,
"text": " of ways in which people to go. And I thought this is a very good instructive way to help people see a way of doing philosophy by listing out the options in the space. So I thought this is exactly what is going on in Indian philosophy, is that there are people who are illusionists about the self, realists about consciousness, realists about the self, illusionists about consciousness. There are people who are illusionists about the self and illusionists about consciousness. And there are people who are realists about the self and realists about consciousness. And then I looked carefully and I noticed"
},
{
"end_time": 1583.575,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1561.834,
"text": " that some Western philosophers actually fit in here perfectly well. So, Galen Strawson fits nicely over here. Dan Dennett fits nicely over here. Keith Frankish fits nicely over here. An Indian tradition I'm going to talk about soon fits nicely over here. So, I started to notice that you can actually use this frame to bring both traditions together to have"
},
{
"end_time": 1609.036,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1584.189,
"text": " of way of debating each other. The main thing you had to add was talking about the theory of the self and how your theory of consciousness and the self work together to give an answer to a question about the nature of knowledge. So my first intervention from Indian philosophy would be to say that to pursue a project about the nature of consciousness and artificial intelligence or the nature of consciousness in humans or non-human animals, I think also has to be tied to"
},
{
"end_time": 1634.326,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1609.036,
"text": " Okay. So again, starting now with Franz Brentano,"
},
{
"end_time": 1646.237,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1634.906,
"text": " It's important to recognize that one of the most important contributions in the philosophy of mind comes from this character and part of what he contributed was this idea that all consciousness is intentional."
},
{
"end_time": 1670.759,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1646.561,
"text": " That is, when you're conscious, you're conscious of something. Your mind is directed at something. And this directedness aspect is like a key aspect, or if not the mark, of what it is for something to be mental, is that it can be directed and about something. So he put together this idea of consciousness with intentionality. So it's a key idea that dominates Western philosophy."
},
{
"end_time": 1696.51,
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"start_time": 1671.271,
"text": " John Searle, a philosopher much later, also made a very important contribution in the area of consciousness. He basically said, �By consciousness, I simply mean those subjective states of awareness or sentience that begin when one wakes in the morning and continue throughout the period that one is awake until one falls into a dreamless sleep, into a coma, or dies, or is otherwise, as they say, unconscious.� This statement might seem"
},
{
"end_time": 1726.834,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1697.21,
"text": " In the background of this statement is a core idea. It's the idea that consciousness is digital. It's on and off. It's on when you're in a state of wakingness, and it's what's off in a dreamless sleep or a coma or when you die. It's an on-off thing. So another person, Tom Nagel, also introduced an important idea into the nature of"
},
{
"end_time": 1744.002,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1727.244,
"text": " He came up with the idea of thinking of the subjective aspect of experience as the what it's like aspect of experience. And sometimes the way to understand this is to think about contrast. When you see red, there's something that's like to see red and that's different from what it's like to see blue."
},
{
"end_time": 1773.814,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1744.445,
"text": " There's something it's like to taste chocolate and that's different from what it's like to taste marinara sauce. These contrasts that we can make phenomenally give us an idea that there's a something that it's like or what it's like aspect to our subjective experience. This is a very powerful phrase. It's very useful when you're explaining types of consciousness to talk about this what it's like aspect. And he contributed this and it's about the qualitative nature of consciousness. Shortly after him,"
},
{
"end_time": 1793.524,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1774.275,
"text": " Ned Block drew an important distinction between the type of consciousness that Tom Nagel is talking about, which most commonly we call phenomenal consciousness, with an idea that isn't so commonly discussed outside of philosophy and maybe cognitive science, which is the idea of a capacity consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 1806.903,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1793.882,
"text": " So he drew this distinction between what's known as P-consciousness and A-consciousness, between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. And the way in which he got this conversation started was by investigating cases of blind sight."
},
{
"end_time": 1827.415,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1807.244,
"text": " So in cases of blind sight, a person has no ability or reports not being able to see anything in the left side of their visual field, for example. Yet if we put them in a hallway and we ask them to walk down the hallway, they can, for example, navigate perfectly around the objects. So in some sense, they're saying and reporting that they can't see something,"
},
{
"end_time": 1846.067,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1827.415,
"text": " But in another sense, they have a capacity that's tied to the normal capacity to see something. So they have a capacity to do something independent from being able to phenomenally experience what usually guides that capacity. So this is a distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 1876.34,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1846.596,
"text": " four different major ideas that still are important to how we discuss consciousness in Western philosophy. They're still talked about all the time in seminars and universities. These are core ideas. Now what we're going to do is we're going to go back to Indian philosophy and I'm going to show you how some thinkers in certain traditions would disagree or challenge these assumptions. So in the Advaita Vedanta tradition of Brentano, whose father is Adi Sankacharya,"
},
{
"end_time": 1905.077,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 1877.022,
"text": " There is an idea that not only is consciousness duly structured, which means there's a subject-object structure, but there's the idea that it's non-dually structured, which means there's a lack of a subject-object structure. So there are sets of arguments where he tries to show the relationship of consciousness at a fundamental level being non-dually structured and consciousness at the level at which we're experiencing it as being duly structured. But if you notice what he's saying,"
},
{
"end_time": 1930.06,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 1905.845,
"text": " In a careful logical sense, he is denying what Brentano is saying. In a straightforward sense, he's saying it's false that an essential property of consciousness is that it's intentionally structured. It's false that there's a subject-object dichotomy in all conscious states. Okay? So that's the first contrast is between the dual-non-dual structure that we find in"
},
{
"end_time": 1957.978,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 1930.691,
"text": " Shankara in Advaita Vedanta and how that relates to what's going on in Brentano. Okay, another one, Contra-Serial. So, the idea that Serial forwarded was that consciousness is digital. It's kind of on and off. And in the Advaita Vedanta tradition, this is not the idea. The idea is that consciousness is analog, actually. It goes from subtle to gross."
},
{
"end_time": 1985.623,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 1958.473,
"text": " The idea is that in a subtle state of consciousness, consciousness is focused on something very fine-grained. It's not operating in your cognitive sphere the way it normally does when you're walking around and doing your everyday activities. It's doing something very different at a fine-grained level. But it's like a volume knob. It can be turned up. And it can be turned up to what's called gross consciousness. So there are lots of ways of thinking about how this distinction can play out in a different way."
},
{
"end_time": 2015.333,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 1985.811,
"text": " in terms of contemporary debates. But the core idea is just like with the Brentano theme, what's being challenged is the idea, first of all, that everything has to be directed and now that everything has to be digital. That's the second one that's being challenged. Okay. The third one, Contra Nagel, is this. In the conscious states that Tom Nagel talks about, he's talking about the qualitative aspect of what we experience, seeing red versus seeing blue."
},
{
"end_time": 2034.889,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2015.879,
"text": " There's not an assumption in what Nagel is saying, but there's sort of like a tacit implicit consequence that you might think follows. And that's the idea that when you're having a conscious state, there is qualities present. That's what it is to have a conscious state, is for there to be qualities present in it."
},
{
"end_time": 2065.145,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2035.35,
"text": " And Sankhacharya is going to challenge that very strongly and say, no, that's false. There are non-dual states and in non-dual states there are no qualities present because non-dual states are states of pure consciousness, not impure consciousness. Impure consciousness correlates to a state of consciousness with qualities present in it. Pure consciousness is like taking away all the qualities and seeing the canvas of consciousness itself."
},
{
"end_time": 2087.244,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2065.674,
"text": " There's a quirk in the way in which he explains this in his work, because he does say that there is an essential nature to consciousness. He says that the essential nature of consciousness is bliss. And you would think, okay, wait, but bliss is a quality, like being happy, that has something it's like to feel happiness is something different than what it's like to feel sadness. So you would think that there is some quality there."
},
{
"end_time": 2114.701,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2087.688,
"text": " But the way to understand this is that quality is what the canvas's quality is. So when consciousness is free of everything else, its only quality is bliss. So he's still trying to say that pure consciousness is without qualities, but for some reason he holds the view that bliss is not a quality like the quality of seeing red versus blue. So he's challenging Nagel's idea that qualities are necessary in"
},
{
"end_time": 2135.486,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2115.026,
"text": " of consciousness. Okay, so those are three big things. It doesn't have to be intentionally structured, it doesn't have to be digital, and it doesn't have to be full of qualities. Those are three major assumptions that are in the trajectory of Western philosophy that this school seriously challenges through argumentation."
},
{
"end_time": 2158.695,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2135.794,
"text": " So there's one person who's recently come to think that all of this stuff coming out of this school is actually tremendously useful for the mind-body problem in philosophy of mind, and that person's Mary Al-Bahari. So she's argued actually that, in fact, if you take on some of the ideas that come from the Advaita Vedanta school, you might be able to solve"
},
{
"end_time": 2185.964,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2159.224,
"text": " the decombination and the combination problem that you find in panpsychism, in cosmopsychism and micropsychism. So some people actually are now starting to think it wasn't just an odd chance that we navigated in philosophy of mind to this area and there turned out to be ideas in Indian philosophy that are related. Some people are now actually trying to actively generate from those ideas arguments that do work in the contemporary debates we're having."
},
{
"end_time": 2212.841,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2185.964,
"text": " I myself work in this precise area of taking ideas from Indian philosophy. However, I work on a different tradition than the one that I'm talking about right now. I'm just talking about this one because it's one of the most commonly talked about traditions. Alright, so this is an example of where we already see the confluence of using different traditions in the extraction interventionist model to do some work. Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 2227.159,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2213.387,
"text": " So one of the issues that also occurs in the Advaita tradition that we have to be sensitive to is this issue of a priority. So this is now a very extractionist point and definitely textually inaccurate."
},
{
"end_time": 2249.804,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2227.637,
"text": " The part of the reason why Shankara wants to claim that there's a difference between dual and non-dual consciousness is because he thinks that the fundamental nature of reality is pure consciousness. The problem in his perspective that we face in science is to explain what matter is, not what consciousness is. Consciousness is what is fundamental. That is the one thing we can always be certain most"
},
{
"end_time": 2279.65,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2249.804,
"text": " What we can't explain so easily is matter. So for him, the problem is the problem of matter, not the problem of consciousness. Consciousness is what is fundamental. But consciousness as something that's fundamental isn't going to have any selves in it. It's going to be completely non-dual. So there's a distinction between non-dual being fundamentally and most real versus dual consciousness being non-fundamental and less real. So this is now the extractionist point. Although Shankara argues"
},
{
"end_time": 2305.265,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2280.026,
"text": " that it has to be the case that non-dual consciousness is what is real and most fundamental. There's no need for anyone to accept that. You could simply say, you know what I do like is the distinction between dual and non-dual consciousness, but what I don't think is necessary is to hold that one is fundamentally more basic than the other. I can just accept that what he has discovered is that there are two types of consciousness, right? And those two things"
},
{
"end_time": 2332.244,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2305.725,
"text": " So that's what I'm saying in this slide. I'm basically saying there's an option here to be more of an extractionist than someone who's just telling you the story of what Shankara would have done. And this is actually in a paper I recently wrote. I defended this exact point, trying to argue with Indian philosophers that it's not at all necessary to accept the fundamental point because what's more interesting is that there's another type of consciousness that we can explore and think about."
},
{
"end_time": 2354.872,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2333.046,
"text": " Okay, so this leads to another intervention. When people are asking questions about whether or not artificial systems and machines have consciousness, we can expand the types of consciousness we have when we're asking these questions. Typically, we're asking these questions with concepts of consciousness that derive only from Western philosophy."
},
{
"end_time": 2382.568,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2354.974,
"text": " What happens if we now increase the number of concepts of consciousness by exploring them in non-Western traditions and then adding those to the list of questions we ask alongside the other questions we're already asking? So we might be asking later on in this conference, can AI be sentient? Can it manifest phenomenal consciousness? Can it manifest effective consciousness? Can it manifest agential consciousness? We might be asking,"
},
{
"end_time": 2399.275,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2383.302,
"text": " Can AI have a consciousness? Carlos Montemayor and Garrett Mint have a wonderful paper about exploring the relationship between AGI and A consciousness. But we can also ask other questions. We can ask, can an AI system have non-dual consciousness?"
},
{
"end_time": 2426.271,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2399.599,
"text": " So a lot of Indian philosophers will find that to be a very interesting question because they think spirituality is tied to non-dual consciousness. And a question for some Indian philosophers is can an artificial system, maybe it can become sentient, but can it actually have something like a spiritual life to it in some way? That's a relevant question an Indian philosopher would ask. So there are different questions that will come from drawing out these different sorts of examples. But the key thing to see"
},
{
"end_time": 2446.852,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2426.954,
"text": " is that what we're doing is we're expanding the types of consciousness we can talk about so we can expand the different ways in which we can evaluate what's going on with artificial systems. That's the primary goal. It's not to say one is better than the other. It's to say if we have a wider list, then perhaps we have a better traction on the options of what's available. That's the key idea that I see is valuable."
},
{
"end_time": 2476.374,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2447.227,
"text": " There is one strict problem here that I think is worth pointing out, which is sometimes there's an issue of translation. How do you translate words written in Sanskrit with things in English? And sometimes there's a little bit of a problem there. But that's a technical quirk that I think can be worked out, and I can discuss that later. But I just wanted to be honest that there sometimes are issues about why would you translate something that violates all the conditions in Western philosophy on consciousness as consciousness? How would that be a good translation, right? That's a legitimate question to ask."
},
{
"end_time": 2500.64,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2477.244,
"text": " Okay. Next question. A lot of us are interested in the relationship between the philosophy of mind and issues in ethics. And in particular, we're interested in these questions about how many kinds of things have moral standing, what is the reason or explanation of why something has moral standing, and what is the metric for measuring moral standing."
},
{
"end_time": 2527.159,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2500.64,
"text": " Okay? So this is a very, very important topic right now. Several articles are being written in popular magazines talking about whether or not we should extend rights to AI based on whether or not AI is sentient. So all of this stuff is completely on the table using Indian philosophy as well. So the quantity question is how many kinds of things, you know, are ants conscious enough to have moral standing? Is it only vertebrates?"
},
{
"end_time": 2543.592,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2527.534,
"text": " So we're going to explore the option that says that some things have moral standing. That's the position we want to go for. The other options in a paper I've written, I explore why those don't actually work out. So we'll go for the some things have moral standings. I think that's what most people believe, that some things have moral standing."
},
{
"end_time": 2568.729,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2544.394,
"text": " Then the moral grounding question is, for anything that has moral standing or deserves moral consideration, what is it in virtue of that that thing has the moral standing? Like what makes it true? So if a rock doesn't have moral standing or consideration, but you and I do and orangutan does, what's the difference maker between the three of those things that puts the two in one category and the other one outside of it? That's the question we're interested in."
},
{
"end_time": 2594.258,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2569.582,
"text": " And the moral metric question asks, now suppose that the rock isn't in the circle of moral standing, but the orangutan and I am. Does it follow that if me and the orangutan are both in the sphere of moral standing that we matter equally from the perspective of morality? Or can we matter unequally? That is, one of us has greater moral standing than the other. And if so, why? So there are two views here."
},
{
"end_time": 2601.834,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2594.838,
"text": " The binary one both have equal moral standing and the graded view that things can differ in their moral standing."
},
{
"end_time": 2631.51,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2602.585,
"text": " So here are two people who have recently, one wrote about this a while ago, Peter Singer. He basically argued that phenomenal suffering is one of the most important things we can think about when we're thinking about moral standing. So if something has a capacity to suffer, then it's in the moral sphere. More recently in Dave's book, Reality Plus, he's argued that phenomenal consciousness is a necessary condition. And now we can look, what would other philosophers say about this and how would Indian philosophers get into this issue? Okay."
},
{
"end_time": 2660.265,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2632.073,
"text": " One of the traditions I want to look at that I'm working on heavily right now is how the Jain tradition would approach this issue by looking at specifically one of the texts known as the Tattvarta Sutra in which the author Umasvati doesn't really distinguish or talk about these questions that we're raising in Western philosophy, but he says some very interesting things about the ethical positions that they hold. And the more I thought about it, I realized you can actually generate"
},
{
"end_time": 2686.783,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2660.265,
"text": " in answer to the moral grounding question, the moral metric question, and the moral quantity question by just building from these basic ideas that they talk about. So the first thing is that there is a distinction in this text between the sense capacities of different creatures. So what they're doing is they're saying, okay, we observe in nature various different creatures and we observe that they have different sensory capacities."
},
{
"end_time": 2714.923,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2687.21,
"text": " So now what we're going to do is we're going to say, based on the amount of sensory capacities that they have, they have more or less capacity for something that morally matters. That's part of the question I'm working on. What is it that they think that that capacity yields? But the one thing that they do start out with is the differentiation of sensory capacities. And then, in a very strong sense, because Jainism is committed to the idea of ahimsa, which means nonviolence or nonharming,"
},
{
"end_time": 2739.718,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2715.299,
"text": " They basically are saying part of the goal of what you have to do is create the least amount of harm in the world that you can. And one of the ways in which you can do that is by choosing to harm those creatures which suffer the least. And suffering the least correlates with the ranking of the sensory capacities. So the more sensory capacities you have, in some sense you can suffer"
},
{
"end_time": 2757.466,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2740.179,
"text": " more than something with less sensory capacities. Now the question is what is that thing that's making that difference in these gradations, but at least the structure is there. There's a differentiation based on sensory capacities and because our goal is to cause the least amount of harm, harming those creatures"
},
{
"end_time": 2784.189,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2757.824,
"text": " with the least amount of sensory capacities is better than harming creatures with more sensory capacities. This is why all Jains are vegetarians and there's a massive movement in Jainism to make them all vegans and to make everyone a vegan. Because I think that just causes the least amount of harm both to the animals, to the environment, to everything. So there's a huge push in this community to go this direction because I think there's a strong connection between these principles and this differentiation of sensed creatures."
},
{
"end_time": 2814.94,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2785.145,
"text": " This is not a distinction that Umasvati draws, but in analytic philosophy, we can distinguish between two notions of a sensory capacity. We can distinguish between the phenomenal notion and the functional notion. The phenomenal notion of a sensory capacity is tied into the concept of having a what-it's-like aspect to your experience. So if I can sense blue versus red, it's because there's something it's like for me to sense blue versus red, right? So a sensory capacity can be understood in terms of having phenomenology, but it can also be understood in terms of"
},
{
"end_time": 2839.838,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2815.333,
"text": " function, right? So a sensor can just give information to a sensing system about its environment. There doesn't have to be a subjective self there or any phenomenology for the system. Your thermostat is sensing the temperature in this room and adjusting. The thermostat doesn't have any phenomenology to it, nor does it have a self. It might have a central operating system, but it doesn't have a self in the same sense. So we can understand sensory capacities in"
},
{
"end_time": 2868.575,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2840.401,
"text": " the Jane distinction in two different ways. I'm going to choose to do it in the functional interpretation and not in the phenomenal interpretation. Because the functional interpretation is the only one that's consistent with biology. Because if I take an amoeba, an amoeba is sensing its environment. I don't think it has any phenomenology or any self. An orangutan, I think, is sensing its environment in more ways than an amoeba. But I do think it has a phenomenology and I do think it has a self. So taking the functional interpretation as consistent with biology,"
},
{
"end_time": 2895.23,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2868.916,
"text": " And because they're very interested in that aspect of the different creatures and the ones you can harm, and why you have to harm the ones that have the least sensory capacities, it makes sense to take the functional over the phenomenal interpretation. Okay. So one of the things that now we have to do as an extractionist is that we have to realize that the Jain tradition and many Indian traditions are tied to a theory of karma and rebirth. There's pretty much no way"
},
{
"end_time": 2914.872,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 2895.657,
"text": " in talking about Dharma ethics, the ethics that come out of Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism, without talking about karma and rebirth. But now there's an obvious question. Is anything about that distinction or ontological commitment of their view a necessary condition for developing these ideas? And the answer is no."
},
{
"end_time": 2937.176,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 2914.872,
"text": " Just as dual aspect monism was taken from Spinoza and cut away from God and has been used in philosophy of mind, the same thing can be done here. So my current research leads me to the conclusion that nothing about Umasvati's distinctions require a commitment to the karma and rebirth story. In fact, the distinction seems very clear in terms of how he's drawing it. So I don't think that that's a necessary component."
},
{
"end_time": 2964.497,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 2938.012,
"text": " Let's go. Oh, yes. Okay. So I want to go here. So I want to talk about how this actual account can be extended to the case of AI, right? So how can actually we take what the Janes are saying and use it to build a foundation for why AI might have moral standing? So the way to think about it is that instead of the Jane account saying, because artificial systems are sentient,"
},
{
"end_time": 2981.715,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 2964.957,
"text": " The view that I think would come out of this one is they have sensory capacities. It's not based on the fact that they have the capacity for phenomenology."
},
{
"end_time": 3003.029,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 2981.971,
"text": " It's"
},
{
"end_time": 3018.49,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3003.592,
"text": " water that doesn't have a lot of salt in it, other ones can tolerate water that has a lot of salt in it. That's a preference for being in two different environments. So sensing goes along with preferences and the ability or the capacity to prefer different environments over others."
},
{
"end_time": 3046.459,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3019.189,
"text": " We can think about that in terms of AI. I wouldn't make this argument for CHAT GPT-4, but I think as we go down the road, I think we're in a position basically by using their theory to say something like the following, that artificial intelligence systems that satisfy certain conditions will have sensing capacities. Those sensing capacities make a moral difference to what is a preferential state for the system as a consequence"
},
{
"end_time": 3066.152,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3046.834,
"text": " They have moral standing. But now remember, there are two ways of taking moral standing. You can take the moral metric as being equal or unequal. My understanding of the Jain tradition is that it's got to be the unequal one. So I think what will end up happening is they'll end up saying something like, yes, artificial intelligence systems can fit somewhere"
},
{
"end_time": 3095.009,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3068.763,
"text": " But they're not going to fit the same as other things on the scale, and that's because they don't have other conditions that they satisfy. So in research work I'm doing right now, I'm working on a theory of cluster capacities where different things with different clusters of capacities have different states of moral standing because their different cluster capacities work differently. So that's the view I'm developing right now, but it's tied to research I've done on Jainism. Okay, so maybe because of"
},
{
"end_time": 3120.06,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3095.401,
"text": " I'll do just one more minute on this and then stop. Okay. So this is actually the point I really wanted to get to and it's really important. So a lot of what people, if they know anything about Indian philosophy and consciousness, the one thing they know about is they know about the stuff I talked about with Advaita Vedanta. They've heard about non-dual consciousness. They're curious about it. Maybe they've gone to the Vedanta center, but they've heard about that."
},
{
"end_time": 3146.988,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3120.35,
"text": " And this became such a dominant theme in the 20th century that at one point in time, I like to refer to it as the pizza pasta problem. Like if you go to Italy and you think the pizza and pasta are exactly the best things there, you're missing out on the vast diversity of food in Italian culture. Like there are so many good things. If you think in Indian philosophy that the gold mine was Advaita Vedanta, you're missing out on like most of the really good things."
},
{
"end_time": 3172.278,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3146.988,
"text": " So the one idea that I thought would be interesting to pursue was to say that, look, it is true that Advaita offers this theory of consciousness being fundamental and the distinction between dual and non-dual consciousness. But there's an older tradition called the Samkhya tradition, which is a dualistic tradition which is different and compared oftentimes to Descartes. So Descartes has what we call a vertical dualism and Samkhya has it called a horizontal dualism."
},
{
"end_time": 3201.988,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3172.722,
"text": " And in the vertical dualism, Descartes faces the problem of interaction or causation between bodily states and mental states because they're two different substances. In the Sankhya tradition, the issue is the question of animation or observation. So the basic idea is that all of the things that we put in the realm of mind, intelligence, intentionality, those things, according to the Sankhya tradition, are part of nature."
},
{
"end_time": 3228.677,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3202.858,
"text": " Okay? So nature already contains in it intelligence and primitive intentionality. What is missing that we have in us is pure consciousness. That's called purusha. So there's a distinction between what's called purusha and prakriti. Prakriti means nature and purusha means self and a certain type of consciousness. And so their view is there's a dichotomy between all of the functions of the mind working with the body nicely"
},
{
"end_time": 3256.391,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3229.599,
"text": " and consciousness being outside of that sphere, actually. And so this leads to a very interesting hypothesis from a different Indian tradition, the Samkhya tradition, which I'll go to here. Yes, it's the contrast between panpsychism and panintelligence. So the panpsychists, for the last, I guess, 10 years, have tried to tell us that what might be abundant in nature"
},
{
"end_time": 3280.247,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3256.578,
"text": " is consciousness. It's in more places than we think, and it's fundamental. And there are definite schools of Indian philosophy that agree with that position for sure. But there's also this school of Indian philosophy which thinks, no, that's not really what's going on. What's really going on is that intelligence is what's ubiquitous in nature. Intelligence is what's fundamental. Permanent intentionality is what's found in nature. Consciousness is what's outside of it. And that leads"
},
{
"end_time": 3301.766,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3281.032,
"text": " to"
},
{
"end_time": 3327.858,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3302.005,
"text": " Hi, I'm here to pick up my son Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock. I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us."
},
{
"end_time": 3352.551,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3328.387,
"text": " So this was all planned. What are you going to do? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All Her Fault, a new series streaming now only on Peacock. Any questions?"
},
{
"end_time": 3375.674,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3353.37,
"text": " to know more about the definitions, because I think a lot of those terms are very ill-defined or very difficult to define, especially like the pure consciousness that you define as bliss, but at the same time we both are flalia. Bliss seems to me very interesting."
},
{
"end_time": 3393.677,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3376.271,
"text": " Okay, sure. So first of all, the point I made about translation is directly related to the question you're asking. So I'll just make that point and I think that'll help clarify things."
},
{
"end_time": 3419.565,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3393.677,
"text": " I literally had a debate in India in January where I told the scholar, I have no idea why you ever translated these terms into English as being consciousness, if you think pure consciousness has no qualities. And Bliss has a quality. I literally made the argument. You just said, I don't understand what you're talking about. They're like, okay, that's a good point on it. I don't know why we did this, actually. So they kind of admitted it and backed off. I was like, look, there's something wrong here with what you're saying. There's something called semantic plasticity."
},
{
"end_time": 3431.203,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3419.565,
"text": " I'm basically following the people who think that this is"
},
{
"end_time": 3451.459,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3431.92,
"text": " The best way to translate this term, how to get a grasp on it, I can provide you with lots of literature that will give you a better understanding. But the point that bliss is a quality and therefore it can't be qualityless, the only way of conveying this is by saying that the bliss that they're talking about is not identical to the happiness you feel in a subjective state."
},
{
"end_time": 3479.428,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3452.142,
"text": " So by the way, my name is the name of this Sanskrit word. Anand is the name for the Sanskrit concept attached to consciousness. That's what the bliss is. But it doesn't mean happiness, which is a common translation of it. Oh, sorry, there's another point. Moral standing means the same as legal standing, but for the moral realm. Legal standing means that someone has standing according to a legal system. Moral standing means that according to morality, this thing deserves consideration."
},
{
"end_time": 3487.142,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3479.599,
"text": " from the moral point of view, not just the legal point of view. Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 3518.097,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3489.616,
"text": " Okay, so let me just clarify the technical distinction and then I'll re-ask your question."
},
{
"end_time": 3548.387,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3518.49,
"text": " The technical consideration is that in this system, purusha and prakriti, prakriti is where buddhi and manas are. And buddhi and manas are things that in Cartesian system are associated with the mind. But the claim that is done in this literature, which is pretty vast now in the 20th century, is that the Samkhya people see a lot of what some traditions of Western philosophy see as functions of the mind, as functions in nature."
},
{
"end_time": 3567.756,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3548.78,
"text": " That's what they're saying. So they don't think"
},
{
"end_time": 3592.807,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3568.336,
"text": " that consciousness is part of nature. That is the whole dualism of this system. But that's because they also don't think of consciousness in the same way that Descartes does. Purusha and the notion of consciousness that is in this system is what's known as the suction, the disinterested witness or observer. It's a type of consciousness, it's like"
},
{
"end_time": 3620.196,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3593.131,
"text": " If you want to talk about what allows for a wave function to collapse, people say observation does, right? That's a very common idea. What they think Purusha is, is they think it's a disinterested witness. Now, they weren't thinking it's what collapses the wave function, but they're thinking of it as the observer, right? The disinterested observer. And they think that's outside of nature, right? So they don't connect in their system that with this. So what I did was I extracted"
},
{
"end_time": 3640.64,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3620.418,
"text": " Samkhya's view of nature, Prakriti, and then I attached it to a thesis called the PC band view. And that idea is that intelligence is ubiquitous in nature and consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, is what occurs at a certain band of intelligence and complexity, amount and complexity of it. But after that band, it goes away."
},
{
"end_time": 3665.52,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3640.64,
"text": " So the idea is that as intelligence increases, it's likely that we don't continue to find things that are phenomenally conscious. Rather, after a certain degree or increase in intelligence, phenomenal consciousness goes away. It's like boiling a soup and getting froth for a certain little while, and then the froth boils off, right? That's kind of the idea. So I would not tie the type of consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 3692.688,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3665.913,
"text": " that Sompke is talking about into nature because that would violate the distinction of their dualism. It's to tie the notion of phenomenal consciousness with qualities that's from Western philosophy as a band from their theory of nature which is full of intelligence and primitive intentionality. That's actually a project I'm working on with another friend of mine. Thank you."
},
{
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"index": 157,
"start_time": 3693.456,
"text": " pictures of less more sentences, two sentences, et cetera, et cetera. Five, six speakers have a moral duty to cause less amount of harm to lower six speakers. Cool."
},
{
"end_time": 3729.974,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3703.166,
"text": " Could artificial intelligence, if it becomes sufficiently advanced, have enough senses that it would have more greater moral standing? Excellent. Perfect. Yes. That's a very good question. I'm so happy you asked that question because there is a thesis that I've been working on for a year now that's related directly to this. It's called morism, which means if you have more of quantity phi, you have more moral standing. So if X has more of quantity"
},
{
"end_time": 3738.131,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3730.23,
"text": " f then y then x has more moral standing so someone might say if you have more consciousness you have more moral standing"
},
{
"end_time": 3764.701,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3738.592,
"text": " If you have more capacities, you have more moral standing. I think that thesis is clearly false, and I clearly think that Jains think it's false. So the claim, the reason why is because there's something called a threshold effect. That is sometimes two things can pass a threshold, and even though one has more of the property than the other, that doesn't make them taller than is kind of a bad example, but it works. Like you can be taller than me, but we both can be tall, right? So there could be something like that with moral standing."
},
{
"end_time": 3794.701,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3764.701,
"text": " I do think there are going to be cutoffs, though. So maybe what's going on with a one-sense creature and a two-sense creature definitely makes them have less moral standing than a three- and four-sense creature. But I don't know that, for example, a seven-sense creature like a super AI gets to have more than us just because it has more, because that would require that more-ism is true, but there are good reasons to deny more-ism. I think the reasons to deny more-ism are actually things Janes would actually textually find that support their view. So I don't think overall that's going to work."
},
{
"end_time": 3797.892,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3794.701,
"text": " But I think there will be cutoff points. Yes. Thank you."
},
{
"end_time": 3829.411,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 3804.411,
"text": " If you enjoyed this talk, then you're going to enjoy other talks from Florida Atlantic University's MindFest, which is about the intersection between artificial intelligence and consciousness spearheaded by professor of philosophy, Susan Schneider. The talks include Stephen Wolfram on chat GPT, as well as physics, another one with Ben Gortzel on the singularity and where AGI will be in just a few years. That one's actually quite disturbing."
},
{
"end_time": 3852.073,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 3829.411,
"text": " And then there's another talk on non-human consciousness. So plant consciousness, infant consciousness, petri brains. What happens when you grow a brain, which we do in petri dishes, just a few cells? Okay, we think that's ethically okay. But what happens as we add more and more cells? What happens when it becomes a functioning brain with the capacity to feel pain and suffer? That's talked about in this triage talk."
},
{
"end_time": 3881.237,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 3852.073,
"text": " The podcast is now concluded. Thank you for watching. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button now would be a great time to do so as each subscribe and like helps YouTube push this content to more people."
},
{
"end_time": 3911.425,
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"text": " You should also know that there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for theories of everything where people explicate toes, disagree respectfully about theories, and build as a community our own toes. Links to both are in the description. Also, I recently found out that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that when you share on Twitter, on Facebook, on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube that people are talking about this outside of YouTube, which in turn greatly aids the distribution on YouTube as well."
},
{
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"text": " Last but not least, you should know that this podcast is on iTunes, it's on Spotify, it's on every one of the audio platforms. Just type in theories of everything and you'll find it. Often I gain from re-watching lectures and podcasts and I read that in the comments, hey, toll listeners also gain from replaying. So how about instead re-listening on those platforms? iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whichever podcast catcher you use."
},
{
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"text": " If you'd like to support more conversations like this, then do consider visiting patreon.com slash curtjymungle and donating with whatever you like. Again, it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on Tou full-time. You get early access to ad-free audio episodes there as well. For instance, this episode was released a few days earlier. Every dollar helps far more than you think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough."
}
]
}No transcript available.