Jose Cordeiro on Singularity 1 on 1: The Energularity is Near

This weekend I interviewed Jose Cordeiro for Singularity 1 on 1 and I have to admit that this was one of my favorite interviews so far with perhaps the strongest, most positive endings on the show.

Jose is a published book author, energy expert, futurist, transhumanist and Singularity University faculty member. So, even if Venezuela’s terribly slow internet connection did not make for the best video recording, the interview is absolutely worth watching. Furthermore, if you ever attend a public event or a lecture where you suddenly hear someone scream “Energyyyy!” on the top of their lungs – you will have no doubt that it can be no one else but our friend Cordeiro.

During our 48 min conversation we discuss a large variety of topics such as: Jose’s personal background and his failed attempt to become Venezuela’s energy minister; the staggering murder rates in Venezuela; his journey from MIT’s engineering department through the Oil and Gas Industry to renewable resources, Singularity Unviversity and futurism; the Energularity – its meaning and timeline; the Kardashev scale and the vulnerability of pre-type 1 civilizations such as ours; the biggest change in the largest industry on our planet – i.e. the Energy industry’s shift from fossil fuels to solar, wind, geothermal or fusion; the evolution of intelligence, our chances of surviving the technological singularity and the importance of optimism.

My favorite quote from Jose: “The world is just half full but it is beginning to become fuller and fuller and more beautiful."


. . .


Who is Jose Cordeiro?

José Luis Cordeiro is a world citizen in our small planet in a big unknown universe. He was born in Latin America, from European parents, was educated in Europe and North America, and has worked extensively in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. He has studied, visited and worked in over 130 countries in 5 continents.

Mr. Cordeiro studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, USA, where he received his Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) and Master of Science (M.Sc.) degrees in Mechanical Engineering, with a minor in Economics and Languages. His thesis consisted of a dynamic modeling for NASA’s “Freedom” Space Station (the “International” Space Station of today). He later studied International Economics and Comparative Politics at Georgetown University in Washington, USA, and then obtained his Masters of Business Administration (MBA) at the Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires (INSEAD) in Fontainebleau, France, where he majored in Finance and Globalization. During his studies, Mr. Cordeiro worked with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) in Vienna, Austria, and with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, USA. He started his doctoral work at MIT, which he continued later in Tokyo, Japan, and finally received his PhD at Universidad Simón Bolívar (USB) in Caracas, Venezuela. He is a lifetime member of the Sigma Xi (ΣΞ, Scientific Research) and Tau Beta Pi (ТΒΠ, Engineering) Honor Societies in North America, is also a honorary member of the Venezuelan Engineers College (CIV), and his name has been included in the Marquis Edition of Who’s Who in the World.

Following his graduation, Mr. Cordeiro worked as an engineer in petroleum exploration for the French company Schlumberger. For several years, he served as an advisor for many of the major oil companies in the world, including Agip, BP, ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil, PDVSA, Pemex, Petrobras, Repsol, Shell and Total. Later, in Paris, he initiated his relation with the international consulting company Booz-Allen & Hamilton, where he specialized in the areas of strategy, finance and restructuring. In Latin America, he has served as an advisor for some of the most important regional corporations and has taken part in the transformation and privatization of a number of oil companies in the continent. His experience and studies in monetary policy, currency boards, dollarization and monetary unions have taken him to participate in several monetary changes in Latin America and Eastern Europe.

At present, he is chair of the Venezuelan Node of the Millennium Project, Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies (IDE – JETRO) in Tokyo, Japan, and Energy Advisor and Faculty at Singularity University (SU) in NASA Ames, Silicon Valley, USA. He is also an independent consultant, writer, researcher, professor and “tireless traveler”. He has lectured as an Invited Professor at several major institutions, from MIT in the USA and Sophia University (上智大学) in Japan to the Institute for Higher Studies in Administration (IESA) and the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), where he created the first formal courses of Futures Studies (“Prospectiva”) and Austrian School of Economics in Venezuela.

Mr. Cordeiro is founder of the World Future Society (Venezuela Chapter), director of the Single Global Currency Association (SGCA) and the Lifeboat Foundation, cofounder of the Venezuelan Transhumanist Association and of the Internet Society (ISOC, Venezuela Chapter), board advisor to the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN), member of the Academic Committee of the Center for the Dissemination of Economic Knowledge (CEDICE), the World Future Society (WFS) and the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF), former director of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA, Humanity+), the Extropy Institute (ExI), the Club of Rome (Venezuela Chapter, where he was active promoting classical liberal ideas) and of the Association of Venezuelan Exporters (AVEX), where he participated in the original negotiations of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). He has also been advisor to the Venezuelan Business Association (AVE) and other companies and international organizations.

Thanks to his extensive work in technological foresight, futures studies, globalization, economic integration, long-term development, energy, education and monetary policy, Mr. Cordeiro has authored and coauthored several books. El Desafío Latinoamericano, his first book, is a continental bestseller originally published by McGraw-Hill and is used in more than 100 universities in the hemisphere (see introductory pages). Its second Spanish edition is now available completely free in electronic form by the author, who is also donating his book royalties. Arturo Uslar Pietri, the most universal and respected Venezuelan of the 20th century, described other two books of Mr. Cordeiro with the following words: “as important to Venezuela as the independence battle of Carabobo” (The Great Taboo) and “an impressive work that describes the grave economic malady… of Venezuela” (La Segunda Muerte de Bolívar). He has authored other books about Ecuador (La Segunda Muerte de Sucre) and Mexico (¿Pesos o Dólares?), and about special topics like education (Benesuela vs. Venezuela), energy (Energía para el Desarrollo de América del Sur and Cenários Energéticos 2020, in Portuguese) and transhumanism (2020: Transhuman & Economy of the Future, in Korean). He has written more than 10 books and co-written over 20 more in five languages, including sections of the State of the Future by the Millennium Project.

Mr. Cordeiro has a fortnightly opinion column in the largest and most prestigious Venezuelan general newspaper (El Universal) and has also written and has been interviewed in major media (press, radio and TV) including ABC, BBC,CNN, Chosun Ilbo (Korean Daily), El Comercio (Ecuador), El Comercio (Peru), El Tiempo (Colombia), El Universal (Mexico), El Universal (Venezuela), Los Andes (Argentina),O Estado de Sao Paulo (Brazil), Mainichi Shimbun (Japan Daily News), La Tribune (France), The New York Times, Univision and The Washington Times (USA).

by Singularity

DAVID J. CHALMERS

Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

David J. Chalmers
Philosophy Program
Research School of Social Sciences
Australian National University
Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

1 Introduction

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intractable, and that no good explanation can be given.

To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we have to confront it directly. In this paper, I first isolate the truly hard part of the problem, separating it from more tractable parts and giving an account of why it is so difficult to explain. I critique some recent work that uses reductive methods to address consciousness, and argue that these methods inevitably fail to come to grips with the hardest part of the problem. Once this failure is recognized, the door to further progress is opened. In the second half of the paper, I argue that if we move to a new kind of nonreductive explanation, a naturalistic account of consciousness can be given.

I put forward my own candidate for such an account: a nonreductive theory based on principles of structural coherence and organizational invariance and a double-aspect view of information.

2 The Easy Problems and the Hard Problem

There is not just one problem of consciousness. “Consciousness” is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena. Each of these phenomena needs to be explained, but some are easier to explain than others. At the start, it is useful to divide the associated problems of consciousness into “hard” and “easy” problems. The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.

The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following phenomena:

• the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
• the integration of information by a cognitive system;
• the reportability of mental states;
• the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
• the focus of attention;
• the deliberate control of behavior;
• the difference between wakefulness and sleep.

All of these phenomena are associated with the notion of consciousness. For example, one sometimes says that a mental state is conscious when it is verbally reportable, or when it is internally accessible. Sometimes a system is said to be conscious of some information when it has the ability to react on the basis of that information, or, more strongly, when it attends to that information, or when it can integrate that information and exploit it in the sophisticated control of behavior. We sometimes say that an action is conscious precisely when it is deliberate. Often, we say that an organism is conscious as another way of saying that it is awake.

There is no real issue about whether these phenomena can be explained scientifically. All of them are straightforwardly vulnerable to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. To explain access and reportability, for example, we need only specify the mechanism by which information about internal states is retrieved and made available for verbal report. To explain the integration of information, we need only exhibit mechanisms by which information is brought together and exploited by later processes. For an account of sleep and wakefulness, an appropriate neurophysiological account of the processes responsible for organisms’ contrasting behavior in those states will suffice. In each case, an appropriate cognitive or neurophysiological model can clearly do the explanatory work.

If these phenomena were all there was to consciousness, then consciousness would not be much of a problem. Although we do not yet have anything close to a complete explanation of these phenomena, we have a clear idea of how we might go about explaining them. This is why I call these problems the easy problems. Of course, ‘easy’ is a relative term. Getting the details right will probably take a century or two of difficult empirical work. Still, there is every reason to believe that the methods of cognitive science and neuroscience will succeed.

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs.

Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of “consciousness”, an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state.
Sometimes terms such as “phenomenal consciousness” and “qualia” are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of “conscious experience” or simply “experience”. Another useful way to avoid confusion (used by e.g., Newell 1990; Chalmers 1996) is to reserve the term “consciousness” for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term “awareness” for the more straightforward phenomena described earlier. If such a convention were widely adopted, communication would be much easier; as things stand, those who talk about “consciousness” are frequently talking past each other.

The ambiguity of the term “consciousness” is often exploited by both philosophers and scientists writing on the subject. It is common to see a paper on consciousness begin with an invocation of the mystery of consciousness, noting the strange intangibility and ineffability of subjectivity, and worrying that so far we have no theory of the phenomenon. Here, the topic is clearly the hard problem—the problem of experience. In the second half of the paper, the tone becomes more optimistic, and the author’s own theory of consciousness is outlined. Upon examination, this theory turns out to be a theory of one of the more straightforward phenomena—of ortability, of introspective access, or whatever. At the close, the author declares that consciousness has turned out to be tractable after all, but the reader is left feeling like the victim of a bait-and-switch. The hard problem remains untouched.

3 Functional Explanation

Why are the easy problems easy, and why is the hard problem hard? The easy problems are easy precisely because they concern the explanation of cognitive abilities and functions.
To explain a cognitive function, we need only specify a mechanism that can perform the function. The methods of cognitive science are well-suited for this sort of explanation, and so are well-suited to the easy problems of consciousness. By contrast, the hard problem is hard precisely because it is not a problem about the performance of functions. The problem persists even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained. (Here “function” is not used in the narrow teleological sense of something that a system is designed to do, but in the broader sense of any causal role in the production of behavior that a system might perform.)

To explain reportability, for instance, is just to explain how a system could perform the function of producing reports on internal states. To explain internal access, we need to explain how a system could be appropriately affected by its internal states and use information about those states in directing later processes. To explain integration and control, we need to explain how a system’s central processes can bring information contents together and use them in the facilitation of various behaviors. These are all problems about the explanation of functions.

How do we explain the performance of a function? By specifying a mechanism that performs the function. Here, neurophysiological and cognitive modeling are perfect for the task. If we want a detailed low-level explanation, we can specify the neural mechanism that is responsible for the function. If we want a more abstract explanation, we can specify a mechanism in computational terms. Either way, a full and satisfying explanation will result.
Once we have specified the neural or computational mechanism that performs the function of verbal report, for example, the bulk of our work in explaining reportability is over.

In a way, the point is trivial. It is a conceptual fact about these phenomena that their explanation only involves the explanation of various functions, as the phenomena are functionally definable. All it means for reportability to be instantiated in a system is that the system has the capacity for verbal reports of internal information. All it means for a system to be awake is for it to be appropriately receptive to information from the environment and for it to be able to use this information in directing behavior in an appropriate way. To see that this sort of thing is a conceptual fact, note that someone who says “you have explained the performance of the verbal report function, but you have not explained reportability” is making a trivial conceptual mistake about reportability. All it could possibly take to explain reportability is an explanation of how the relevant function is performed; the same goes for the other phenomena in question.

Throughout the higher-level sciences, reductive explanation works in just this way. To explain the gene, for instance, we needed to specify the mechanism that stores and transmits hereditary information from one generation to the next. It turns out that DNA performs this function; once we explain how the function is performed, we have explained the gene. To explain life, we ultimately need to explain how a system can reproduce, adapt to its environment, metabolize, and so on. All of these are questions about the performance of functions, and so are well-suited to reductive explanation. The same holds for most problems in cognitive science.

To explain learning, we need to explain the way in which a system’s behavioral capacities are modified in light of environmental information, and the way in which new information can be brought to bear in adapting a system’s actions to its environment. If we show how a neural or computational mechanism does the job, we have explained learning. We can say the same for other cognitive phenomena, such as perception, memory, and language. Sometimes the relevant functions need to be characterized quite subtly, but it is clear that insofar as cognitive science explains these phenomena at all, it does so by explaining the performance of functions.

When it comes to conscious experience, this sort of explanation fails. What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions. To see this, note that even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open.

There is no analogous further question in the explanation of genes, or of life, or of learning. If someone says “I can see that you have explained how DNA stores and transmits hereditary information from one generation to the next, but you have not explained how it is a gene”, then they are making a conceptual mistake. All it means to be a gene is to be an entity that performs the relevant storage and transmission function. But if someone says “I can see that you have explained how information is discriminated, integrated, and reported, but you have not explained how it is experienced”, they are not making a conceptual mistake. This is a nontrivial further question.

This further question is the key question in the problem of consciousness. Why doesn’t all this information-processing go on “in the dark”, free of any inner feel? Why is it that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap (a term due to Levine 1983) between the functions and experience, and we need an explanatory bridge to cross it. A mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere.

This is not to say that experience has no function. Perhaps it will turn out to play an important cognitive role. But for any role it might play, there will be more to the explanation of experience than a simple explanation of the function. Perhaps it will even turn out that in the course of explaining a function, we will be led to the key insight that allows an explanation of experience. If this happens, though, the discovery will be an extra explanatory reward. There is no cognitive function such that we can say in advance that explanation of that function will automatically explain experience.

To explain experience, we need a new approach. The usual explanatory methods of cognitive science and neuroscience do not suffice. These methods have been developed precisely to explain the performance of cognitive functions, and they do a good job of it. But as these methods stand, they are only equipped to explain the performance of functions. When it comes to the hard problem, the standard approach has nothing to say.

4 Some Case-studies

In the last few years, a number of works have addressed the problems of consciousness within the framework of cognitive science and neuroscience. This might suggest that the analysis above is faulty, but in fact a close examination of the relevant work only lends the analysis further support. When we investigate just which aspects of consciousness these studies are aimed at, and which aspects they end up explaining, we find that the ultimate target of explanation is always one of the easy problems. I will illustrate this with two representative examples.

The first is the “neurobiological theory of consciousness” outlined by Crick and Koch (1990; see also Crick 1994). This theory centers on certain 35-75 hertz neural oscillations in the cerebral cortex; Crick and Koch hypothesize that these oscillations are the basis of consciousness. This is partly because the oscillations seem to be correlated with awareness in a number of different modalities—within the visual and olfactory systems, for example—and also because they suggest a mechanism by which the binding of information contents might be achieved. Binding is the process whereby separately represented pieces of information about a single entity are brought together to be used by later processing, as when information about the color and shape of a perceived object is integrated from separate visual pathways.

Following others (e.g., Eckhorn et al. 1988), Crick and Koch hypothesize that binding may be achieved by the synchronized oscillations of neuronal groups representing the relevant contents. When two pieces of information are to be bound together, the relevant neural groups will oscillate with the same frequency and phase.

The details of how this binding might be achieved are still poorly understood, but suppose that they can be worked out. What might the resulting theory explain? Clearly it might explain the binding of information contents, and perhaps it might yield a more general account of the integration of information in the brain. Crick and Koch also suggest that these oscillations activate the mechanisms of working memory, so that there may be an account of this and perhaps other forms of memory in the distance. The theory might eventually lead to a general account of how perceived information is bound and stored in memory, for use by later processing.

Such a theory would be valuable, but it would tell us nothing about why the relevant contents are experienced. Crick and Koch suggest that these oscillations are the neural correlates of experience. This claim is arguable—does not binding also take place in the processing of unconscious information?—but even if it is accepted, the explanatory question remains: Why do the oscillations give rise to experience? The only basis for an explanatory connection is the role they play in binding and storage, but the question of why binding and storage should themselves be accompanied by experience is never addressed. If we do not know why binding and storage should give rise to experience, telling a story about the oscillations cannot help us.

Conversely, if we knew why binding and storage gave rise to experience, the neurophysiological details would be just the icing on the cake. Crick and Koch’s theory gains its purchase by assuming a connection between binding and experience, and so can do nothing to explain that link.
I do not think that Crick and Koch are ultimately claiming to address the hard problem, although some have interpreted them otherwise. A published interview with Koch gives a clear statement of the limitations on the theory’s ambitions.

Well, let’s first forget about the really difficult aspects, like subjective feelings, for they may not have a scientific solution. The subjective state of play, of pain, of pleasure, of seeing blue, of smelling a rose—there seems to be a huge jump between the materialistic level, of explaining molecules and neurons, and the subjective level. Let’s focus on things that are easier to study—like visual awareness. You’re now talking to me, but you’re not looking at me, you’re looking at the cappuccino, and so you are aware of it. You can say, “It’s a cup and there’s some liquid in it.” If I give it to you, you’ll move your arm and you’ll take it—you’ll respond in a meaningful manner. That’s what I call awareness. (What is Consciousness, Discover, November 1992, p. 96.)
The second example is an approach at the level of cognitive psychology. This is Bernard Baars’ global workspace theory of consciousness, presented in his book A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. According to this theory, the contents of consciousness are contained in a global workspace, a central processor used to mediate communication between a host of specialized nonconscious processors. When these specialized processors need to broadcast information to the rest of the system, they do so by sending this information to the workspace, which acts as a kind of communal blackboard for the rest of the system, accessible to all the other processors.

Baars uses this model to address many aspects of human cognition, and to explain a number of contrasts between conscious and unconscious cognitive functioning. Ultimately, however, it is a theory of cognitive accessibility, explaining how it is that certain information contents are widely accessible within a system, as well as a theory of informational integration and reportability. The theory shows promise as a theory of awareness, the functional correlate of conscious experience, but an explanation of experience itself is not on offer.

One might suppose that according to this theory, the contents of experience are precisely the contents of the workspace. But even if this is so, nothing internal to the theory explains why the information within the global workspace is experienced. The best the theory can do is to say that the information is experienced because it is globally accessible. But now the question arises in a different form: why should global accessibility give rise to conscious experience? As always, this bridging question is unanswered.

Almost all work taking a cognitive or neuroscientific approach to consciousness in recent years could be subjected to a similar critique. The “Neural Darwinism” model of Edelman (1989), for instance, addresses questions about perceptual awareness and the self-concept, but says nothing about why there should also be experience. The “multiple drafts” model of Dennett (1991) is largely directed at explaining the reportability of certain mental contents.
The “intermediate level” theory of Jackendoff (1988) provides an account of some computational processes that underlie consciousness, but Jackendoff stresses that the question of how these “project” into conscious experience remains mysterious.

Researchers using these methods are often inexplicit about their attitudes to the problem of conscious experience, although sometimes they take a clear stand. Even among those who are clear about it, attitudes differ widely. In placing this sort of work with respect to the problem of experience, a number of different strategies are available. It would be useful if these strategic choices were more often made explicit.

The first strategy is simply to explain something else. Some researchers are explicit that the problem of experience is too difficult for now, and perhaps even outside the domain of science altogether. These researchers instead choose to address one of the more tractable problems such as reportability or the self-concept. Although I have called these problems the “easy” problems, they are among the most interesting unsolved problems in cognitive science, so this work is certainly worthwhile. The worst that can be said of this choice is that in the context of research on consciousness it is relatively unambitious, and the work can sometimes be misinterpreted.

The second choice is to take a harder line and deny the phenomenon. (Variations on this approach are taken by Allport 1988; Dennett 1991; Wilkes 1988.) According to this line, once we have explained the functions such as accessibility, reportability, and the like, there is no further phenomenon called “experience” to explain. Some explicitly deny the phenomenon, holding for example that what is not externally verifiable cannot be real. Others achieve the same effect by allowing that experience exists, but only if we equate “experience” with something like the capacity to discriminate and report. These approaches lead to a simpler theory, but are ultimately unsatisfactory. Experience is the most central and manifest aspect of our mental lives, and indeed is perhaps the key explanandum in the science of the mind.

Because of this status as an explanandum, experience cannot be discarded like the vital spirit when a new theory comes along. Rather, it is the central fact that any theory of consciousness must explain. A theory that denies the phenomenon “solves” the problem by ducking the question.

In a third option, some researchers claim to be explaining experience in the full sense. These researchers (unlike those above) wish to take experience very seriously; they lay out their functional model or theory, and claim that it explains the full subjective quality of experience (e.g., Flohr 1992; Humphrey 1992). The relevant step in the explanation is usually passed over quickly, however, and usually ends up looking something like magic. After some details about information processing are given, experience suddenly enters the picture, but it is left obscure how these processes should suddenly give rise to experience. Perhaps it is simply taken for granted that it does, but then we have an incomplete explanation and a version of the fifth strategy below.

A fourth, more promising approach appeals to these methods to explain the structure of experience. For example, it is arguable that an account of the discriminations made by the visual system can account for the structural relations between different color experiences, as well as for the geometric structure of the visual field (see e.g., Clark 1992; Hardin 1992). In general, certain facts about structures found in processing will correspond to and arguably explain facts about the structure of experience. This strategy is plausible but limited. At best, it takes the existence of experience for granted and accounts for some facts about its structure, providing a sort of nonreductive explanation of the structural aspects of experience (I will say more on this later). This is useful for many purposes, but it tells us nothing about why there should be experience in the first place.

A fifth and reasonable strategy is to isolate the substrate of experience. After all, almost everyone allows that experience arises one way or another from brain processes, and it makes sense to identify the sort of process from which it arises. Crick and Koch put their work forward as isolating the neural correlate of consciousness, for example, and Edelman (1989) and Jackendoff (1988) make related claims. Justification of these claims requires a careful theoretical analysis, especially as experience is not directly observable in experimental contexts, but when applied judiciously this strategy can shed indirect light on the problem of experience. Nevertheless, the strategy is clearly incomplete. For a satisfactory theory, we need to know more than which processes give rise to experience; we need an account of why and how. A full theory of consciousness must build an explanatory bridge.

5 The Extra Ingredient

We have seen that there are systematic reasons why the usual methods of cognitive science and neuroscience fail to account for conscious experience. These are simply the wrong sort of methods: nothing that they give to us can yield an explanation. To account for conscious experience, we need an extra ingredient in the explanation. This makes for a challenge to those who are serious about the hard problem of consciousness: What is your extra ingredient, and why should that account for conscious experience?

There is no shortage of extra ingredients to be had. Some propose an injection of chaos and nonlinear dynamics. Some think that the key lies in nonalgorithmic processing. Some appeal to future discoveries in neurophysiology. Some suppose that the key to the mystery will lie at the level of quantum mechanics. It is easy to see why all these suggestions are put forward. None of the old methods work, so the solution must lie with something new. Unfortunately, these suggestions all suffer from the same old problems.

Nonalgorithmic processing, for example, is put forward by Penrose (1989; 1994) because of the role it might play in the process of conscious mathematical insight. The arguments about mathematics are controversial, but even if they succeed and an account of nonalgorithmic processing in the human brain is given, it will still only be an account of the functions involved in mathematical reasoning and the like. For a nonalgorithmic process as much as an algorithmic process, the question is left unanswered: why should this process give rise to experience? In answering this question, there is no special role for nonalgorithmic processing.

The same goes for nonlinear and chaotic dynamics. These might provide a novel account of the dynamics of cognitive functioning, quite different from that given by standard methods in cognitive science. But from dynamics, one only gets more dynamics. The question about experience here is as mysterious as ever. The point is even clearer for new discoveries in neurophysiology. These new discoveries may help us make significant progress in understanding brain function, but for any neural process we isolate, the same question will always arise. It is difficult to imagine what a proponent of new neurophysiology expects to happen, over and above the explanation of further cognitive functions. It is not as if we will suddenly discover a phenomenal glow inside a neuron!

Perhaps the most popular “extra ingredient” of all is quantum mechanics (e.g., Hameroff 1994). The attractiveness of quantum theories of consciousness may stem from a Law of Minimization of Mystery: consciousness is mysterious and quantum mechanics is mysterious, so maybe the two mysteries have a common source. Nevertheless, quantum theories of consciousness suffer from the same difficulties as neural or computational theories. Quantum phenomena have some remarkable functional properties, such as nondeterminism and nonlocality. It is natural to speculate that these properties may play some role in the explanation of cognitive functions, such as random choice and the integration of information, and this hypothesis cannot be ruled out a priori. But when it comes to the explanation of experience, quantum processes are in the same boat as any other. The question of why these processes should give rise to experience is entirely unanswered.

(One special attraction of quantum theories is the fact that on some interpretations of quantum mechanics, consciousness plays an active role in “collapsing” the quantum wave function. Such interpretations are controversial, but in any case they offer no hope of explaining consciousness in terms of quantum processes. Rather, these theories assume the existence of consciousness, and use it in the explanation of quantum processes. At best, these theories tell us something about a physical role that consciousness may play. They tell us nothing about how it arises.)

At the end of the day, the same criticism applies to any purely physical account of consciousness. For any physical process we specify there will be an unanswered question: Why should this process give rise to experience? Given any such process, it is conceptually coherent that it could be instantiated in the absence of experience. It follows that no mere account of the physical process will tell us why experience arises. The emergence of experience goes beyond what can be derived from physical theory.

Purely physical explanation is well-suited to the explanation of physical structures, explaining macroscopic structures in terms of detailed microstructural constituents; and it provides a satisfying explanation of the performance of functions, accounting for these functions in terms of the physical mechanisms that perform them. This is because a physical account can entail the facts about structures and functions: once the internal details of the physical account are given, the structural and functional properties fall out as an automatic consequence. But the structure and dynamics of physical processes yield only more structure and dynamics, so structures and functions are all we can expect these processes to explain.

The facts about experience cannot be an automatic consequence of any physical account, as it is conceptually coherent that any given process could exist without experience. Experience may arise from the physical, but it is not entailed by the physical.

The moral of all this is that you can’t explain conscious experience on the cheap. It is a remarkable fact that reductive methods—methods that explain a high-level phenomenon wholly in terms of more basic physical processes—work well in so many domains. In a sense, one can explain most biological and cognitive phenomena on the cheap, in that these phenomena are seen as automatic consequences of more fundamental processes. It would be wonderful if reductive methods could explain experience, too; I hoped for a long time that they might. Unfortunately, there are systematic reasons why these methods must fail.

Reductive methods are successful in most domains because what needs explaining in those domains are structures and functions, and these are the kind of thing that a physical account can entail. When it comes to a problem over and above the explanation of structures and functions, these methods are impotent.

This might seem reminiscent of the vitalist claim that no physical account could explain life, but the cases are disanalogous. What drove vitalist skepticism was doubt about whether physical mechanisms could perform the many remarkable functions associated with life, such as complex adaptive behavior and reproduction. The conceptual claim that explanation of functions is what is needed was implicitly accepted, but lacking detailed knowledge of biochemical mechanisms, vitalists doubted whether any physical process could do the job and put forward the hypothesis of the vital spirit as an alternative explanation. Once it turned out that physical processes could perform the relevant functions, vitalist doubts melted away.

With experience, on the other hand, physical explanation of the functions is not in question. The key is instead the conceptual point that the explanation of functions does not suffice for the explanation of experience. This basic conceptual point is not something that further neuroscientific investigation will affect. In a similar way, experience is disanalogous to the élan vital. The vital spirit was put forward as an explanatory posit, in order to explain the relevant functions, and could therefore be discarded when those functions were explained without it. Experience is not an explanatory posit but an explanandum in its own right, and so is not a candidate for this sort of elimination.

It is tempting to note that all sorts of puzzling phenomena have eventually turned out to be explainable in physical terms. But each of these were problems about the observable behavior of physical objects, coming down to problems in the explanation of structures and functions. Because of this, these phenomena have always been the kind of thing that a physical account might explain, even if at some points there have been good reasons to suspect that no such explanation would be forthcoming. The tempting induction from these cases fails in the case of consciousness, which is not a problem about physical structures and functions. The problem of consciousness is puzzling in an entirely different way. An analysis of the problem shows us that conscious experience is just not the kind of thing that a wholly reductive account could succeed in explaining.

6 Nonreductive Explanation

At this point some are tempted to give up, holding that we will never have a theory of conscious experience. McGinn (1989), for example, argues that the problem is too hard for our limited minds; we are “cognitively closed” with respect to the phenomenon. Others have argued that conscious experience lies outside the domain of scientific theory altogether.

I think this pessimism is premature. This is not the place to give up; it is the place where things get interesting. When simple methods of explanation are ruled out, we need to investigate the alternatives. Given that reductive explanation fails, nonreductive explanation is the natural choice.

Although a remarkable number of phenomena have turned out to be explicable wholly in terms of entities simpler than themselves, this is not universal. In physics, it occasionally happens that an entity has to be taken as fundamental. Fundamental entities are not explained in terms of anything simpler. Instead, one takes them as basic, and gives a theory of how they relate to everything else in the world. For example, in the nineteenth century it turned out that electromagnetic processes could not be explained in terms of the wholly mechanical processes that previous physical theories appealed to, so Maxwell and others introduced electromagnetic charge and electromagnetic forces as new fundamental components of a physical theory. To explain electromagnetism, the ontology of physics had to be expanded. New basic properties and basic laws were needed to give a satisfactory account of the phenomena.

Other features that physical theory takes as fundamental include mass and space-time. No attempt is made to explain these features in terms of anything simpler. But this does not rule out the possibility of a theory of mass or of space-time. There is an intricate theory of how these features interrelate, and of the basic laws they enter into. These basic principles are used to explain many familiar phenomena concerning mass, space, and time at a higher level. I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental.

We know that a theory of consciousness requires the addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness. We might add some entirely new nonphysical feature, from which experience can be derived, but it is hard to see what such a feature would be like. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience.

Where there is a fundamental property, there are fundamental laws. A nonreductive theory of experience will add new principles to the furniture of the basic laws of nature. These basic principles will ultimately carry the explanatory burden in a theory of consciousness. Just as we explain familiar high-level phenomena involving mass in terms of more basic principles involving mass and other entities, we might explain familiar phenomena involving experience in terms of more basic principles involving experience and other entities.

In particular, a nonreductive theory of experience will specify basic principles telling us how experience depends on physical features of the world. These psychophysical principles will not interfere with physical laws, as it seems that physical laws already form a closed system. Rather, they will be a supplement to a physical theory. A physical theory gives a theory of physical processes, and a psychophysical theory tells us how those processes give rise to experience. We know that experience depends on physical processes, but we also know that this dependence cannot be derived from physical laws alone. The new basic principles postulated by a nonreductive theory give us the extra ingredient that we need to build an explanatory bridge.

Of course, by taking experience as fundamental, there is a sense in which this approach does not tell us why there is experience in the first place. But this is the same for any fundamental theory. Nothing in physics tells us why there is matter in the first place, but we do not count this against theories of matter. Certain features of the world need to be taken as fundamental by any scientific theory. A theory of matter can still explain all sorts of facts about matter, by showing how they are consequences of the basic laws. The same goes for a theory of experience.

This position qualifies as a variety of dualism, as it postulates basic properties over and above the properties invoked by physics. But it is an innocent version of dualism, entirely compatible with the scientific view of the world. Nothing in this approach contradicts anything in physical theory; we simply need to add further bridging principles to explain how experience arises from physical processes. There is nothing particularly spiritual or mystical about this theory—its overall shape is like that of a physical theory, with a few fundamental entities connected by fundamental laws. It expands the ontology slightly, to be sure, but Maxwell did the same thing. Indeed, the overall structure of this position is entirely naturalistic, allowing that ultimately the universe comes down to a network of basic entities obeying simple laws, and allowing that there may ultimately be a theory of consciousness cast in terms of such laws. If the position is to have a name, a good choice might be naturalistic dualism.

If this view is right, then in some ways a theory of consciousness will have more in common with a theory in physics than a theory in biology. Biological theories involve no principles that are fundamental in this way, so biological theory has a certain complexity and messiness to it; but theories in physics, insofar as they deal with fundamental principles, aspire to simplicity and elegance. The fundamental laws of nature are part of the basic furniture of the world, and physical theories are telling us that this basic furniture is remarkably simple. If a theory of consciousness also involves fundamental principles, then we should expect the same. The principles of simplicity, elegance, and even beauty that drive physicists’ search for a fundamental theory will also apply to a theory of consciousness.
(A technical note: Some philosophers argue that even though there is a conceptual gap between physical processes and experience, there need be no metaphysical gap, so that experience might in a certain sense still be physical (e.g., Hill 1991, Levine 1983, Loar 1990).

Usually this line of argument is supported by an appeal to the notion of a posteriori necessity (Kripke 1980). I think that this position rests on a misunderstanding of a posteriori necessity, however, or else requires an entirely new sort of necessity that we have no reason to believe in; see Chalmers 1996 (also Jackson 1994 and Lewis 1994) for details. In any case, this position still concedes an explanatory gap between physical processes and experience. For example, the principles connecting the physical and the experiential will not be derivable from the laws of physics, so such principles must be taken as explanatorily fundamental. So even on this sort of view, the explanatory structure of a theory of consciousness will be much as I have described.)

7 Outline of a Theory of Consciousness

It is not too soon to begin work on a theory. We are already in a position to understand certain key facts about the relationship between physical processes and experience, and about the regularities that connect them. Once reductive explanation is set aside, we can lay those facts on the table so that they can play their proper role as the initial pieces in a nonreductive theory of consciousness, and as constraints on the basic laws that constitute an ultimate theory.

There is an obvious problem that plagues the development of a theory of consciousness, and that is the paucity of objective data. Conscious experience is not directly observable in an experimental context, so we cannot generate data about the relationship between physical processes and experience at will. Nevertheless, we all have access to a rich source of data in our own case. Many important regularities between experience and processing can be inferred from considerations about one’s own experience. There are also good indirect sources of data from observable cases, as when one relies on the verbal report of a subject as an indication of experience. These methods have their limitations, but we have more than enough data to get a theory off the ground.

Philosophical analysis is also useful in getting value for money out of the data we have.
This sort of analysis can yield a number of principles relating consciousness and cognition, thereby strongly constraining the shape of an ultimate theory. The method of thought experimentation can also yield significant rewards, as we will see. Finally, the fact that we are earching for a fundamental theory means that we can appeal to such nonempirical constraints as simplicity, homogeneity, and the like in developing a theory. We must seek to systematize he information we have, to extend it as far as possible by careful analysis, and then make the nference to the simplest possible theory that explains the data while remaining a plausible candidate to be part of the fundamental furniture of the world.

Such theories will always retain an element of speculation that is not present in other scientific theories, because of the impossibility of conclusive intersubjective experimental tests. Still, we can certainly construct theories that are compatible with the data that we have, and evaluate them in comparison to each other. Even in the absence of intersubjective observation, there are numerous criteria available for the evaluation of such theories: simplicity, internal coherence, coherence with theories in other domains, the ability to reproduce the properties of experience that are familiar from our own case, and even an overall fit with the dictates of common sense. Perhaps there will be significant indeterminacies remaining even when all these constraints are applied, but we can at least develop plausible candidates. Only when candidate theories have been developed will we be able to evaluate them.

A nonreductive theory of consciousness will consist in a number of psychophysical principles, principles connecting the properties of physical processes to the properties of experience. We can think of these principles as encapsulating the way in which experience arises from the physical. Ultimately, these principles should tell us what sort of physical systems will have associated experiences, and for the systems that do, they should tell us what sort of physical properties are relevant to the emergence of experience, and just what sort of experience we should expect any given physical system to yield. This is a tall order, but there is no reason why we should not get started.

In what follows, I present my own candidates for the psychophysical principles that might go into a theory of consciousness. The first two of these are nonbasic principles—systematic connections between processing and experience at a relatively high level. These principles can play a significant role in developing and constraining a theory of consciousness, but they are not cast at a sufficiently fundamental level to qualify as truly basic laws. The final principle is my candidate for a basic principle that might form the cornerstone of a fundamental theory of consciousness. This final principle is particularly speculative, but it is the kind of speculation that is required if we are ever to have a satisfying theory of consciousness. I can present these principles only briefly here; I argue for them at much greater length in Chalmers (1996).

1 The principle of structural coherence.

This is a principle of coherence between the structure of consciousness and the structure of awareness. Recall that “awareness” was used earlier to refer to the various functional phenomena that are associated with consciousness. I am now using it to refer to a somewhat more specific process in the cognitive underpinnings of experience. In particular, the contents of awareness are to be understood as those information contents that are accessible to central systems, and brought to bear in a widespread way in the control of behavior. Briefly put, we can think of awareness as direct availability for global control. To a first approximation, the contents of awareness are the contents that are directly accessible and potentially reportable, at least in a language-using system.

Awareness is a purely functional notion, but it is nevertheless intimately linked to conscious experience. In familiar cases, wherever we find consciousness, we find awareness.
Wherever there is conscious experience, there is some corresponding information in the cognitive system that is available in the control of behavior, and available for verbal report.
Conversely, it seems that whenever information is available for report and for global control, there is a corresponding conscious experience. Thus, there is a direct correspondence between consciousness and awareness.

The correspondence can be taken further. It is a central fact about experience that it has a complex structure. The visual field has a complex geometry, for instance. There are also relations of similarity and difference between experiences, and relations in such things as relative intensity. Every subject’s experience can be at least partly characterized and decomposed in terms of these structural properties: similarity and difference relations, perceived location, relative intensity, geometric structure, and so on. It is also a central fact that to each of these structural features, there is a corresponding feature in the nformationprocessing structure of awareness.

Take color sensations as an example. For every distinction between color experiences, there is a corresponding distinction in processing. The different phenomenal colors that we experience form a complex three-dimensional space, varying in hue, saturation, and intensity.
The properties of this space can be recovered from information-processing considerations: examination of the visual systems shows that waveforms of light are discriminated and analyzed along three different axes, and it is this three-dimensional information that is relevant to later processing. The three-dimensional structure of phenomenal color space therefore corresponds directly to the three dimensional structure of visual awareness.
This is precisely what we would expect. After all, every color distinction corresponds to some reportable information, and therefore to a distinction that is represented in the structure of processing.

In a more straightforward way, the geometric structure of the visual field is directly reflected in a structure that can be recovered from visual processing. Every geometric relation corresponds to something that can be reported and is therefore cognitively represented. If we were given only the story about information-processing in an agent’s visual and cognitive system, we could not directly observe that agent’s visual experiences, but we could nevertheless infer those experiences’ structural properties.

In general, any information that is consciously experienced will also be cognitively represented. The fine-grained structure of the visual field will correspond to some finegrained structure in visual processing. The same goes for experiences in other modalities, and even for nonsensory experiences. Internal mental images have geometric properties that are represented in processing. Even emotions have structural properties, such as relative intensity, that correspond directly to a structural property of processing; where there is greater intensity, we find a greater effect on later processes. In general, precisely because the structural properties of experience are accessible and reportable, those properties will be directly represented in the structure of awareness.

It is this isomorphism between the structures of consciousness and awareness that constitutes the principle of structural coherence. This principle reflects the central fact that even though cognitive processes do not conceptually entail facts about conscious experience, consciousness and cognition do not float free of one another but cohere in an intimate way.
This principle has its limits. It allows us to recover structural properties of experience from information-processing properties, but not all properties of experience are structural properties. There are properties of experience, such as the intrinsic nature of a sensation of red, that cannot be fully captured in a structural description.

The very intelligibility of inverted spectrum scenarios, where experiences of red and green are inverted but all structural properties remain the same, show that structural properties constrain experience without exhausting it. Nevertheless, the very fact that we feel compelled to leave structural properties unaltered when we imagine experiences inverted between functionally identical systems shows how central the principle of structural coherence is to our conception of our mental lives. It is not a logically necessary principle, as after all we can imagine all the information processing occurring without any experience at all, but it is nevertheless a strong and familiar constraint on the psychophysical connection.

The principle of structural coherence allows for a very useful kind of indirect explanation of experience in terms of physical processes. For example, we can use facts about neural processing of visual information to indirectly explain the structure of color space. The facts about neural processing can entail and explain the structure of awareness; if we take the coherence principle for granted, the structure of experience will also be explained. Empirical investigation might even lead us to better understand the structure of awareness within a bat, shedding indirect light on Nagel’s vexing question of what it is like to be a bat. This principle provides a natural interpretation of much existing work on the explanation of consciousness (e.g., Clark 1992 and Hardin 1992 on colors, and Akins 1993 on bats), although it is often appealed to inexplicitly. It is so familiar that it is taken for granted by almost everybody, and is a central plank in the cognitive explanation of consciousness.

The coherence between consciousness and awareness also allows a natural interpretation of work in neuroscience directed at isolating the substrate (or the neural correlate) of consciousness. Various specific hypotheses have been put forward. For example, Crick and Koch (1990) suggest that 40-Hz oscillations may be the neural correlate of consciousness, whereas Libet (1993) suggests that temporally-extended neural activity is central. If we accept the principle of coherence, the most direct physical correlate of consciousness is awareness: the process whereby information is made directly available for global control. The different specific hypotheses can be interpreted as empirical suggestions about how awareness might be achieved. For example, Crick and Koch suggest that 40-Hz oscillations are the gateway by which information is integrated into working memory and thereby made available to later processes. Similarly, it is natural to suppose that Libet’s temporally extended activity is relevant precisely because only that sort of activity achieves global availability. The same applies to other suggested correlates such as the “global workspace” of Baars (1988), the “high-quality representations” of Farah (1994), and the “selector inputs to action systems” of Shallice (1972). All these can be seen as hypotheses about the mechanisms of awareness: the mechanisms that perform the function of making information directly available for global control.

Given the coherence between consciousness and awareness, it follows that a mechanism of awareness will itself be a correlate of conscious experience. The question of just which mechanisms in the brain govern global availability is an empirical one; perhaps there are many such mechanisms. But if we accept the coherence principle, we have reason to believe that the processes that explain awareness will at the same time be part of the basis of consciousness.

2 The principle of organizational invariance.

This principle states that any two systems with the same fine-grained functional
organization will have qualitatively identical experiences. If the causal patterns of neural organization were duplicated in silicon, for example, with a silicon chip for every neuron and the same patterns of interaction, then the same experiences would arise. According to this principle, what matters for the emergence of experience is not the specific physical makeup of a system, but the abstract pattern of causal interaction between its components. This principle is controversial, of course. Some (e.g., Searle 1980) have thought that consciousness is tied to a specific biology, so that a silicon isomorph of a human need not be conscious. I believe that the principle can be given significant support by the analysis of thought-experiments, however.

Very briefly: suppose (for the purposes of a reductio ad absurdum) that the principle is false, and that there could be two functionally isomorphic systems with different experiences.
Perhaps only one of the systems is conscious, or perhaps both are conscious but they have different experiences. For the purposes of illustration, let us say that one system is made of neurons and the other of silicon, and that one experiences red where the other experiences blue. The two systems have the same organization, so we can imagine gradually transforming one into the other, perhaps replacing neurons one at a time by silicon chips with the same local function. We thus gain a spectrum of intermediate cases, each with the same organization, but with slightly different physical makeup and slightly different experiences.

Along this spectrum, there must be two systems A and B between which we replace less than one tenth of the system, but whose experiences differ. These two systems are physically identical, except that a small neural circuit in A has been replaced by a silicon circuit in B.
The key step in the thought-experiment is to take the relevant neural circuit in A, and install alongside it a causally isomorphic silicon circuit, with a switch between the two.
What happens when we flip the switch? By hypothesis, the system’s conscious experiences will change; from red to blue, say, for the purposes of illustration. This follows from the fact that the system after the change is essentially a version of B, whereas before the change it is just A.

But given the assumptions, there is no way for the system to notice the changes! Its causal organization stays constant, so that all of its functional states and behavioral dispositions stay fixed. As far as the system is concerned, nothing unusual has happened.
There is no room for the thought, “Hmm! Something strange just happened!”. In general, the structure of any such thought must be reflected in processing, but the structure of processing remains constant here. If there were to be such a thought it must float entirely free of the system and would be utterly impotent to affect later processing. (If it affected later processing, the systems would be functionally distinct, contrary to hypothesis). We might even flip the switch a number of times, so that experiences of red and blue dance back and forth before the system’s “inner eye”. According to hypothesis, the system can never notice these “dancing qualia”.

This I take to be a reductio of the original assumption. It is a central fact about experience, very familiar from our own case, that whenever experiences change significantly and we are paying attention, we can notice the change; if this were not to be the case, we would be led to the skeptical possibility that our experiences are dancing before our eyes all the time. This hypothesis has the same status as the possibility that the world was created five minutes ago: perhaps it is logically coherent, but it is not plausible. Given the extremely plausible assumption that changes in experience correspond to changes in processing, we are led to the conclusion that the original hypothesis is impossible, and that any two functionally isomorphic systems must have the same sort of experiences. To put it in technical terms, the philosophical hypotheses of “absent qualia” and “inverted qualia”, while logically possible, are empirically and nomologically impossible.

(Some may worry that a silicon isomorph of a neural system might be impossible for technical reasons. That question is open. The invariance principle says only that if an isomorph is possible, then it will have the same sort of conscious experience.)
There is more to be said here, but this gives the basic flavor. Once again, this thought experiment draws on familiar facts about the coherence between consciousness and cognitive processing to yield a strong conclusion about the relation between physical structure and experience. If the argument goes through, we know that the only physical properties directly relevant to the emergence of experience are organizational properties. This acts as a further strong constraint on a theory of consciousness.

3 The double-aspect theory of information.

The two preceding principles have been nonbasic principles. They involve high-level notions such as “awareness” and “organization”, and therefore lie at the wrong level to constitute the fundamental laws in a theory of consciousness. Nevertheless, they act as strong constraints. What is further needed are basic principles that fit these constraints and that might ultimately explain them.

The basic principle that I suggest centrally involves the notion of information. I understand information in more or less the sense of Shannon (1948). Where there is information, there are information states embedded in an information space. An information space has a basic structure of difference relations between its elements, characterizing the ways in which different elements in a space are similar or different, possibly in complex ways. An information space is an abstract object, but following Shannon we can see information as physically embodied when there is a space of distinct physical states, the differences between which can be transmitted down some causal pathway. The states that are transmitted can be seen as themselves constituting an information space. To borrow a phrase from Bateson (1972), physical information is a difference that makes a difference.

The double-aspect principle stems from the observation that there is a direct isomorphism between certain physically embodied information spaces and certain phenomenal (or experiential) information spaces. From the same sort of observations that went into the principle of structural coherence, we can note that the differences between phenomenal states have a structure that corresponds directly to the differences embedded in physical processes; in particular, to those differences that make a difference down certain causal pathways implicated in global availability and control. That is, we can find the same abstract information space embedded in physical processing and in conscious experience.

This leads to a natural hypothesis: that information (or at least some information) has two basic aspects, a physical aspect and a phenomenal aspect. This has the status of a basic principle that might underlie and explain the emergence of experience from the physical.
Experience arises by virtue of its status as one aspect of information, when the other aspect is found embodied in physical processing.

This principle is lent support by a number of considerations, which I can only outline briefly here. First, consideration of the sort of physical changes that correspond to changes in conscious experience suggests that such changes are always relevant by virtue of their role in constituting informational changes—differences within an abstract space of states that are divided up precisely according to their causal differences along certain causal pathways.
Second, if the principle of organizational invariance is to hold, then we need to find some fundamental organizational property for experience to be linked to, and information is an organizational property par excellence.

Third, this principle offers some hope of explaining the principle of structural coherence in terms of the structure present within information spaces. Fourth, analysis of the cognitive explanation of our judgments and claims about conscious experience—judgments that are functionally explainable but nevertheless deeply tied to experience itself—suggests that explanation centrally involves the information states embedded in cognitive processing. It follows that a theory based on information allows a deep coherence between the explanation of experience and the explanation of our judgments and claims about it.

Wheeler (1990) has suggested that information is fundamental to the physics of the universe. According to this “it from bit” doctrine, the laws of physics can be cast in terms of information, postulating different states that give rise to different effects without actually saying what those states are. It is only their position in an information space that counts. If so, then information is a natural candidate to also play a role in a fundamental theory of consciousness. We are led to a conception of the world on which information is truly fundamental, and on which it has two basic aspects, corresponding to the physical and the phenomenal features of the world.
Of course, the double-aspect principle is extremely speculative and is also underdetermined, leaving a number of key questions unanswered. An obvious question is whether all information has a phenomenal aspect. One possibility is that we need a further constraint on the fundamental theory, indicating just what sort of information has a phenomenal aspect. The other possibility is that there is no such constraint. If not, then experience is much more widespread than we might have believed, as information is everywhere. This is counterintuitive at first, but on reflection I think the position gains a certain plausibility and elegance. Where there is simple information processing, there is simple experience, and where there is complex information processing, there is complex experience. A mouse has a simpler information-processing structure than a human, and has correspondingly simpler experience; perhaps a thermostat, a maximally simple information processing structure, might have maximally simple experience? Indeed, if experience is truly a fundamental property, it would be surprising for it to arise only every now and then; most fundamental properties are more evenly spread. In any case, this is very much an open question, but I believe that the position is not as implausible as it is often thought to be.

Once a fundamental link between information and experience is on the table, the door is opened to some grander metaphysical speculation concerning the nature of the world. For example, it is often noted that physics characterizes its basic entities only extrinsically, in terms of their relations to other entities, which are themselves characterized extrinsically, and so on. The intrinsic nature of physical entities is left aside. Some argue that no such intrinsic properties exist, but then one is left with a world that is pure causal flux (a pure flow of information) with no properties for the causation to relate. If one allows that intrinsic properties exist, a natural speculation given the above is that the intrinsic properties of the physical—the properties that causation ultimately relates—are themselves phenomenal properties. We might say that phenomenal properties are the internal aspect of information.

This could answer a concern about the causal relevance of experience—a natural worry, given a picture on which the physical domain is causally closed, and on which experience is supplementary to the physical. The informational view allows us to understand how experience might have a subtle kind of causal relevance in virtue of its status as the intrinsic nature of the physical. This metaphysical speculation is probably best ignored for the purposes of developing a scientific theory, but in addressing some philosophical issues it is quite suggestive.

8 Conclusion

The theory I have presented is speculative, but it is a candidate theory. I suspect that the principles of structural coherence and organizational invariance will be planks in any satisfactory theory of consciousness; the status of the double-aspect theory of information is less certain. Indeed, right now it is more of an idea than a theory. To have any hope of eventual explanatory success, it will have to be specified more fully and fleshed out into a more powerful form. Still, reflection on just what is plausible and implausible about it, on where it works and where it fails, can only lead to a better theory.

Most existing theories of consciousness either deny the phenomenon, explain something else, or elevate the problem to an eternal mystery. I hope to have shown that it is possible to make progress on the problem even while taking it seriously. To make further progress, we , more refined theories, and more careful analysis. The hard problem is a hard problem, but there is no reason to believe that it will remain permanently unsolved.

From: http://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf

ROGER PENROSE

Quantum Consciousness

Sir Roger Penrose, OM, FRS (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College. He has received a number of prizes and awards, including the 1988 Wolf Prize for physics which he shared with Stephen Hawking for their contribution to our understanding of the universe. He is renowned for his work in mathematical physics, in particular his contributions to general relativity and cosmology. He is also a recreational mathematician and philosopher.

Born in Colchester, Essex, England, Roger Penrose is a son of Lionel S. Penrose and Margaret Leathes. Penrose is the brother of mathematician Oliver Penrose and correspondence chess grandmaster Jonathan Penrose. Penrose was precocious as a child. He attended University College School. Penrose graduated with a first class degree in mathematics from University College London. In 1955, while still a student, Penrose reinvented the generalized matrix inverse (also known as Moore-Penrose inverse, (see Penrose, R. 'A Generalized Inverse for Matrices.' Proc. Cambridge Phil. Soc. 51, 406-413, 1955). Penrose earned his Ph.D. at Cambridge (St John´s College) in 1958, writing a thesis on 'tensor methods in algebraic geometry' under algebraist and geometer John A. Todd. He devised and popularised the Penrose triangle in the 1950s, describing it as "impossibility in its purest form" and exchanged material with the artist M. C. Escher, whose earlier depictions of impossible objects partly inspired it. In 1965 at Cambridge, Penrose proved that singularities (such as black holes) could be formed from the gravitational collapse of immense, dying stars (Ferguson, 1991: 66).

In 1967, Penrose invented the twistor theory which maps geometric objects in Minkowski space into the 4-dimensional complex space with the metric signature (2,2). In 1969 he conjectured the cosmic censorship hypothesis. This proposes (rather informally) that the universe protects us from the inherent unpredictability of singularities (such as the one in the centre of a black hole) by hiding them from our view behind an event horizon. This form is now known as the "weak censorship hypothesis"; in 1979, Penrose formulated a stronger version called the "strong censorship hypothesis". Together with the BKL conjecture and issues of nonlinear stability, settling the censorship conjectures is one of the most important outstanding problems in general relativity. Also from 1979 dates Penrose's influential Weyl curvature hypothesis on the initial conditions of the observable part of the Universe and the origin of the second law of thermodynamics. Penrose wrote a paper on the Terrell rotation.

Roger Penrose is well known for his 1974 discovery of Penrose tilings, which are formed from two tiles that can only tile the plane nonperiodically, and are the first tilings to exhibit fivefold rotational symmetry. Penrose developed these ideas from the article Deux types fondamentaux de distribution statistique (1938; an English translation Two Basic Types of Statistical Distribution) of Czech geographer, demographer and statistician Jaromír Korcák. In 1984, such patterns were observed in the arrangement of atoms in quasicrystals. Another noteworthy contribution is his 1971 invention of spin networks, which later came to form the geometry of spacetime in loop quantum gravity. He was influential in popularizing what are commonly known as Penrose diagrams (causal diagrams). In 2004 Penrose released The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, a 1,099-page book aimed at giving a comprehensive guide to the laws of physics. He has proposed a novel interpretation of quantum mechanics. Penrose is the Francis and Helen Pentz Distinguished (visiting) Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University.

Penrose is married to Vanessa Thomas, with whom he has one child. He has three sons from a previous marriage to American Joan Isabel Wedge (1959).

From Wikipedia

Quantum Consciousness

Polymath Roger Penrose takes on the ultimate mystery

John Horgan Scientific American Nov 89

Roger Penrose is slight in figure and gentle in mien, and he is an Roddly diffident chauffeur for a man who has just proposed how the entire universe-including the enigma of human consciousness-might work. Navigating from the airport outside Syracuse, N.Y., to the city's university, he brakes at nearly every crossroad, squinting at signs as if they bore alien runes. Which way is the right way? he wonders, apologizing to me for Ins indecision. He seems mired in mysteries. when we finally reach his office, Penrose finds a can labeled "Superstring" on a table. He chuckles. On the subject of superstrings-not the filaments of foam squirted from this novelty item but the unimaginably minuscule particles that some theorists think may underlie all matter-his mind is clear: he finds them too ungainly, inelegant. "It's just not the way I'd e.,cpect the answer to be," he observes in his mild British accent. lvhen Penrose says "the answer," one envisions the words in capital letters. He confesses to agreeing with Plato that the truth is embodied in mathematics and e@sts "out there," independent of the physical world and e%-en of human thought. Scientists do not invent the truth-thev discover it.

A genuine discovery should do more than merely conform to the facts: it should feel right, it should be beautiful. In this sense, Penrose feels somewhat akin to Einstein, who judged the validity of propositions about the world by asking: Is that the way God would have done it? "Aesthetic qualities are important in science," Penrose remarks, "and necessary, I think, for great science."

I interviewed Penrose in September while he was visiting Syracuse University, on leave from his full-time post at the University of Oxford. At 58 he is one of the world's most eminent mathematicians and/or physicists (he cannot decide which category he prefers). He is a "master," says the distinguished physicist John A. Wheeler of Princeton University, at exploiting "the magnificent power of mathematics to reach into everything." An achievement in astrophysics first brought Penrose fame. In the 1960's he collaborated with Stephen W. Hawking of the University of Cambridge in showing that singularities-objects so crushed by their own weight that they become infinitely dense, beyond the ken of classical physics-are not only possible but inevitable under many circumstances. This work helped to push black holes from the outer bmits of astrophysics to the center.

In the 1970's Penrose's lifelong passion for geometric puzzles yielded a bonus. He found that as few as two geometric shapes, put together in jigsaw-puzzle fashion, can cover a flat surface in pattems that never repeat themselves. "To a small extent I was thinking about how simpie structures can force complicated arrangements," Penrose says, "but mainly I was doing it for fun;" Called Penrose tiles, the shapes were initially considered a curiosity unrelated to natural phenomena. Then in 1984 a researcher at the National Bureau of Standards discovered a substance whose molecular structure resembles Penrose tiles. This novel form of solid matter, called quasicrystals, has become a major focus of materials research [see "Quasicrystals," by David R. Nelson; Scientific American August, 1986].

Quasicrystals, singularities and almost every other oddity Penrose has puzzled over figure into his current magnum opus, The Emperor's New Mind. The book's ostensible purpose is to refute the view held by some artificial-intelligence enthusiasts that computers wifl someday do all that human brains can doand more.

The reader soon realizes, however, that Penrose's larger goal is to point the way to a grand synthesis of classical physics, quantum physics and even neuropsychology. He begins his argument by slighting computers' ability to mimic the thoughts of a mathematician. At first glance, computers might seem perfectly suited to this endeavor: after all, they were created to calculate. But Penrose points out that Alan M. Turing himself, the original champion of artificial intelligence, demonstrated that many mathematical problems are not susceptible to algorithmic analysis and resolution. The bounds of computability, Penrose says, are related to Godel's theorem, which holds that any mathematical system always contains self-evident truths that cannot be formally proved by the system's initial a)doms. The human mind can comprehend these truths, but a rule-bound computer cannot.

In what sense, then, is the mind unlike a computer? Penrose thinks the answer might have something to do with quantum physics. A system at the quantum level (a group of hydrogen atoms, for instance) does not have a single course of behavior, or state, but a number of different possible states that are somehow "superposed" on one another. When a physicist measures the system, however, all the superposed states collapse into a single state; only one of all the possibilities seems to have occurred. Penrose finds this apparent dependence of quantum physics on human observation-as well as its incompatibility with macroscopic events-profoundly unsatisfying. If the quantum view of reality is absolutely true, he suggests, we should see not a single cricket ball resting on a lawn but a blur of many balls on many lawns. He proposes that a force now conspicuously absent in quantum physics-namely gravity-may link the quantum realm to the classical, deterministic world we humans inhabit. That idea in itself is not new: many theorists-including those trying to weave reality out of supersmngshave sought a theory of quantum gravity.

But Penrose takes a new approach. He notes that as the various superposed states of a quantum-level system evolve over time, the distribution of matter and energy within them begins to diverge. At some level-intermediate between the quantum and classical realms-the differences between the superposed states become gravitationally significant; the states then collapse into the single state that physicists can measure. Seen this way, it is the gravitational influence of the measuring apparatus-and not the abstract presence of an observer that causes the superposed states to collapse. Penrosian quantum gravity can also help account for what are known as non-local effects, in which events in one region affect events in another simultaneously. The famous Einstein-Podoisky-Rosen thought experiment first indicated how nonlocality could occur: if a decaying particle simultaneously emits two photons in opposite directions, then measuring the spin of one photon instantaneously 'fixes" the spin of the other, even if it is light-years away. Penrose thinks quasicrystals may involve nonlocal effects as well. Ordinary crystals, he explains, grow serially, one atom at a time, but the complexity of quasicrystals suggests a more global phenomenon: each atom seems to sense what a number of other atoms are doing as they fall into place in concert. This process resembles that required for laying down Penrose tiles; the proper placement of one tile often depends on the positioning of other tiles that are several tiles removed.

What does all this have to do with consciousness? Penrose proposes that the physiological process underlying a given thought may initially involve a number of superposed quantum states, each of which performs a calculation of sorts. When the differences in the disnibution of mass and energy between the states reach a gravitationally significant level, the states collapse into a single state, causing measurable and possibly nonlocal changes in the neural structure of the brain. This physical event correlates with a mental one: the comprehension of a mathematical theorem, say, or the decision not to tip a waiter.

The important thing to remember, Penrose says, is that this quantum process cannot be replicated by any computer now conceived. With apparently genuine humility, Penrose emphasizes that these ideas should not be called theories yet: be prefers the word "suggestions.' But throughout his conversation and writings, he seems to imply that someday humans (not computers) will discover the ultimate answer-to everything. Does he really believe that? Penrose mulls the question over for a moment. "I guess I rather do," he says finally "although perhaps that's being too pessimistic." Why pessimistic? Isn't that the hope of science? "Solving mysteries, or trying to solve them, is wonderful," he replies, "and if they were all solved that would be rather boring."

From: http://www.dhushara.com/book/quantcos/penrose/penr.htm#anchor720208

Natasha Vita-More

What is transhumanism? And, by extension, what is extropy?

Natasha Vita-More (born 1950 as Nance Clark, New York) is a media artist and theorist known for designing "Primo Posthuman. This future human prototype incorporates biotechnology, robotics, information technology, nanotechnology, cognitive and neuroscience for human enhancement and extreme life extension.

Vita-More is the Director of H Lab for scientific and artistic design collaborations. Vita-More is currently a Visiting Scholar at Twenty-First Century Medicine. She is a PhD candidate at the Planetary Collegium, University of Plymouth. Her thesis concerns human enhancement and extreme life extension. She holds a B.F.A., University of Memphis; filmmaker-in-residence, University of Colorado; M.Sc., University of Houston; M.Phil. University of Plymouth.

Philosophy

In 1982, Vita-More authored the Transhuman Statement; produced and hosted cable TV show TransCentury Update on human futures reaching over 100,000 viewers in Los Angeles and Telluride 1985-1992; founded Transhumanist Arts and Culture 1993. She was the Chair of “Vital Progress Summit” 2004, establishing a precedent for proaction of human enhancement. She was the president of the Extropy Institute 2002-2006. She currently advises non-profit organizations including Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, Adaptive A.I., and LifeBoat Foundation, is a Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and has been a consultant to IBM on the future of human performance.

This interview was conducted by Venessa Posavec 12/20/07

V: What is transhumanism? And, by extension, what is extropy?

NVM: Transhumanism reflects philosophies of life, such as extropy, that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond currently human biological form, and addresses human limitations by means of science and technology guided by, basically, ethical life-promoting positive and practical priniciples and values. In specific, transhumanism is a set of ideas which represents a worldview to improve the current situation that we as humanity are facing, which includes short lifespan, limited cognitive abilities, limited sensoral abilities, erratic emotions, and going to the larger sector of peoples – the problem with so many people suffering in the world from starvation, or lack of housing, or lack of, basically, getting any of the necessary fundamental needs met that very much affects transhumanism as looking at a world view. And, therein, we support critical thinking in the development of sciences and technologies to extend life, eradicate aging, solve problems of disease, and encourage and enhance intellectual, creative, physical and mental well-being. In this regard, it is essential to be aware of the possible dangers that lie ahead. That is why the proactionary principle is so vital in fighting the bias towards advancing the human condition. And there lies the crucial examination of potential dangers, that not only affect transhumanists, but the entire world. We look ardently at how technologies, including the NBIC technologies – nanoscience, bioscience, information science, and cognitive science – can possibly be used to help solve some of the problems in the world that address humans being stuck in a state of stasis. It’s about time we really knuckle down and started helping people around the world rather than just talking about it, so transhumanism does look at that, of course.

V: How do you address the argument that transhumanism is not an extension of humanism, but rather in direct opposition to what it means to be human?

NVM: Well, there is some issues with that. I’ve heard this, and thank you for bringing it up, because it is a very important problem to be looked at very carefully – not strategically – but carefully. Actually, transhumanism is not in opposition to what it means to be human, but in order to understand humanism and what it means to be human, we have to discuss first, what is a human and what does it mean to be human. For example, a father, a new father of a child, might have a different opinion than a politician. Or a literary scholar may have a different opinion than a religious fundamentalist. There’s no codified, definitive definition for what it means to be human, because the question, in large part, is subjective. Each human has a value system and a set of emotions and a set of experiences that determine for him or her what it means to be human. But in its simplist sense, what it means to be human is based on our biology. A human has a body, and that body is biological. As such, it has a set of chromosomes and genes, intelligence, and sensory and perceptual awareness. The single most complex issue is in accepting mortality of humans. And that’s where humanism comes in. Humanism accepts the mortality of being human in a biological state. The single most complex issue and aim for transhumanism is the emotive desire and the intellectual reason to extend life past the accepted human lifespan, which is, what, 121, 122 years, or somewhere around that particular timeframe. In order to achieve the aim of extending life, the human mind, body, and identity would have to become something other than strictly biological. It will have to incorporate technological methods to construct a regenerative existence for humans. So, that’s the crux of the matter. Humanists do not look at the next step of human evolution like the transhuman or posthuman or whatever we might become in the future. Humanism deals with the here and now pretty much. Transhumanism, on the other hand, looks ahead, is planning, is more critically minded and progressive about dealing with those things. But I think the real issue lies with what it means to be human.


V: Do you think the transhumanist meme is spreading?

NVM: Oh yes, I do. I think so because the ideas which were so avant-garde in the 1980s and even in the 1990s are now headlining the world’s most popular literature. The ideas which were so visionary and radical early on now have become the fodder for political debate. And once ideas get into the arena of political arguments and academic arguments, philosophical arguments, ethical arguments, and even in the business sector, it means that there’s a maturation process that has occurred, and the ideas we talked about early on in the 80s and the early 90s are now issues to be considered practical, probable, and even preferred futures for many people. So I think the true sign of it is we’ve caused enough trouble where people have taken us seriously. We’re no longer just science fiction or avant-gardes, we’re people with views and vision that is alarming and frightening a heck of a lot of people, but at the same time, thank goodness, a lot of people are starting to go, “Wow. This is possible. We could do these things.” And the world sorely, desperately needs a bit of practical optimism and some problem solving.

V: What events or medical advances have you seen that support the ideal of being a transhuman?

NVM: Well, you know, it’s interesting that you ask this question, because I just finished a paper for an inclusion in a book on forecasting what is probable within the next 25, 30 years, so I had to do a lot of research in looking at what is possible, not just fairy tale or Pollyanna looking at it, but really what’s going on. I looked at the issues that face people, and what people – humanity and society – is really concerned about. And that is, number one, dealing with specific diseases that cause problems for children, Tay Sachs, sickle cell anemia, other diseases that totally degenerate the body and the mind. And at the same time, looking at the enormous number of people who desperately need transplants – their organ has become diseased and they need a new organ, and what’s going on in that realm. As well as, the enormous number of people who suffer from paralysis, whether it’s full-body paralysis or semi-body paralysis. So, I looked at those particular areas, and it’s amazing to realize what’s going on. For example, zenoplantation, using pig organs to transplant into humans has been a really radical step in medicine, however that’s becoming, not passe, but becoming overlooked by the possibility of regenerating our own organs. So, in short, what we’re looking at in all these different areas of disease and paralysis and difficulty getting organs is the up and coming area of medicine, technology, and science – well, basically, biotechnology – which is looking at regenerative medicine. What is happening in biotechnology is regenerating the areas of the body that have become disesased so that those areas repgenerat the cells and repair the cell damage and the organ. For example, if you have a diseased organ, you can clone your own organ, put it back in the body, or better yet, regenerate the cells that are diseased. This, in and of itself, will affect the entire body and mind. So, you take the brain, and you have a neurological disease, and the regenerative process of the neurons in the brain will help return you to a state of better cognitive capability.

V: So, if the transhumanist philosophy was actualized, and we lived in this posthuman world, unaffected by aging or degeneration, what would that world look like?

NVM: Oh boy. I just love this question. What an exciting idea to think about. Well, this morning I was watching testa(?) on YouTube at a rave, and I was looking at the enormous light and color and fascination and sound and movement, and I thought, this is what the future could be. One big, giant rave. But seriously, I think that there’s a lot to be said about the rhythm of music, and the rhythm of people in a state of bliss or trance in expressing a communicative and mobile attitude of exchange and communication. So, in short, for me, if I could be an instrumental part of the design team, it would be stunningly pleasant, fluid, and interconnected. Where we could connect with each other 24/7, or just drop out at our whim and not communicate with anyone, where we would be able to teleport to any location at any time, where our ability to NVM: and boulders in the road.



V: I just read a post somewhere about the Fermi Paradox, and the reason that we haven’t made contact with any other intelligent civilization is because perhaps their world is exactly like that, and they’re just in this perfect utopian pleasure world, and they have no desire to explore out any further.

NVM: That’s an interesting thing that you bring that up. I find that the concept of perfection and perfect is such an oxymoron, because if one was to reach a state of perfection, that would be so disingenuous to our creative process and our cognitive process. Perfection is a state of statis, and therefore it would no longer be a state of bliss, it would be a state of almost erosion and entropy, because perfection is a dead end. So, I like the idea of becoming, and that continuous becoming and exploring. So, in my vision of the posthuman future, it wouldn’t stop at a state of perfection, it would continually be achieving and looking and pursuing. And I’m kind of a nice person, so I would have to say that my world would be different than the Fermi Paradox world, it would be reaching out to help. Maybe that’s the woman in me, I don’t know.

V: What kind of an impact do you think that these different advances would have on our society – societal impacts – of these regenerative methods and technologies. What would that do to population, if we’re all healthy and living forever?

NVM: Ok, good question. I think that we have to multi-track, and it’s one thing that many of us don’t do, and I have to catch myself at it as well. If we multi-track, that would be looking at the different domains of expertise and knowledge simultaneously, and oftentimes one domain, like science will exceed and maybe culture will lag behind, or maybe the arts will shoot far ahead in vision and potential, and perhaps economics or politics or education will lag behind. So, looking at it from a strategist point of view, and looking at a schema of events, not all domains of knowledge move forward at the same pace. So, one may lead, then the other may lead, in this massive complex adaptive system. If human beings live for longer periods of time – I try not to use “immortal” or “forever”, because I don’t know what the future holds, and I don’t know what forever means. But let’s just say extreme life extension or extended or super-longevity, if that were to occur, and regenerative medicine did help people with disease and keep us in a state of health and well-being, which would be absolutely lovely, that means that the population would not only balance out, but would probably grow, unless people, as the trend is now, had less and less children. But, having children is lovely, so let’s not take that out of the equation. What would happen in all practical purposes, would be that we develop habitats, environments off the planet, and we start building habitats on the moon, and near Earth orbit, and we start expanding out into our solar system. And this is really a practical thing to do, because society has always reached out to the next island or the next continent to expand and explore and develop. So, it’s part of our innate humanness, or what it means to be human, one of the characteristics or behavioral characteristics I would include would be the essential desire and almost need to expand beyond, to go to the next place, and build and explore and develop. With the XPrize having done so well recently, and new advances in getting our rocket boosters off the planet, and developing new types of architecture for near Earth orbit and perhaps on the moon and Mars, I think it’s reasonable if not just common sensical that we would be building habitats off planet, and I’m sure they would eventually become very lovely and soothing and enjoyable. So, I think that would eradicate a problem of overpopulation. But, the interesting thing there is, this whole myth that the old should die and make way for the young, may suit people in their middle ages, but there’s a lot of old people who don’t really want to die. They want to make room for the young to be sure, for their grandchildren or their friends’ grandchildren. But, their life is very valuable too. My mother is in her 90s, and she is still a very valuable, lovely, generous, spontaneous person, and I think she’s enjoying life, so I wouldn’t want her to die just to make room for someone else. So, I think we have to have a whole paradigm shift in our reasoning about life and sustainability. Life is not something just to throw away because it gets wrinkled. Life is something to nurture. And here’s the paradox of getting old: we become wiser and more knowledgeable and more compassionate as we get older, and then we are expected to die. I would like to change that, very much.

V: A few questions about some of the institutes that you have contributed to. What is the Extropy Institute?

NVM: Extropy Institute is the founding organization of transhumanism. It was developed in the late 1980s, early 1990s, as a pioneering transhumanist organization known for its visionary foresight in the future. And it was the pioneering organization that put transhumanism on the map. It had conferences and high gloss magazines sold in bookstores, and brought the ideas of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, cloning, extreme life extension, space exploration, biotechnology, all of these emerging technologies, it brought it out into the mainstream as much as possible. So, it has been a crucial pioneering catalyst for transhumanism.

V: What future plans are there for the institute?

NVM: Well, the institute closed down 2 years ago, but it’s not forgotten to be sure. We closed it down because we achieved our first and most finessed goal which was to memetically engineer transhumanism through the codified philosophy of extropy. And once that was realized, we felt that it was time for the board and our advisors and all our members to go out on their own and build their own organizations, because that is part and parcel of the philosophy of extropy. Spread more memes, and sprout more fruit. That is what is occurring now. We are rebuilding an extropian network, or a network of extropy, currently, and will continue having summits, probably will have a summit in 2008. The extropy network bringing high minds to high places. I’m not sure what the goal will be. Our last summit was on countering the precautionary principle in the United States and in a few other countries, where President Bush’s bioethics committee was saying transhumanism is the most dangerous idea, and ardently fighting levels of progress to improve the human condition. And we thought that was a really terrible, disingenuous thing to do for humankind, especially Americans, since we’ve had so much trouble with our reputation and our behavior across the planet. So, we took that on. I think we did quite well. Our keynotes were Marvin Minsky and Ray Kurzweil, and Greg Fay and Max More, and myself and Anders Sandberg, and it was a great conference. It was a great summit. It was all virtual, it was the first virtual summit, and so we were very pleased with the success of that. So, I will organizing one in 2008.

V: What is Transhumanist Arts & Culture?

NVM: Transhumanist Arts & Culture was developed in the early 1980s, when I had my cable television show in Los Angeles and in Tellyride, Colorado, called Transcentury Update, based on the transhuman condition. It was basically to bring together creative people in the arts and the sciences, and technologies, to consider what the role of artist’s art is today and in the future. Throughout history, artists, including science and technology, have been a voice and vision of civilization. And artists as communicators, have an ability, a marvelous ability, to reach out to others and introduce insight and vision about society and culture. So I thought that artists and the arts, bringing that together based on transhumanism, could engender some passion and dreams and hopes for humanity, and express it through various mediums, like NET, and media art, robotics, artificial general intelligence, interactive media, animation, film, etc. Basically, it was just to get this group of creative people together artistically, whether they were pronounced artists or not.

V: What are some resources that could help people better understand the transhumanist philosophy?

NVM: I think the best resources still is, and I mean this in all objectivity, is Extropy Institute, because it was the pioneering organization of transhumanism, and the website is still up, so it’s a great resource. That’s at www.extropy.org. I think Transhumanist Arts & Culture is a good site too, because it has a FAQ, and approaches transhumanism from a more creative, visionary perspective of arts and technology, and that’s www.transhumanist.biz. Another site is Anders Sandberg’s website. He’s now in England, but it was a Swedish website, and I think it was the original encyclopedic website for transhumanism, so that’s . The World Transhumanist website is pretty good. It does have a bit of bias, because it tends to be overtly political and not inclusive, so I’m hoping that will be changed through the new executive director James Clemet and the new board. I am an honorary vice-chair of that organization, and I’m hoping that its future is going to be positive. But, basically just Googling ‘transhumanism’ is pretty good. I think some of the most ardent writing is done by Max More, who is the author of the philosophy of transhumanism. Some of his papers are excellent.

V: What is the Singularity?

NVM: In one sentence, the Singularity is a time when supercomputers become smarter than human intelligence.

V: Ok. And, what would that mean?

NVM: That would mean that supercomputers, through artificial general intelligence, are able to teach themselves and outsmart humans in all practical sense. The thinking processes of supercomputers will far exceed our human ability to solve problems and reason. The interesting thing therein with the Singularity and supercomputing power, is that the computers will teach themselves. So it will be this dynamo effect where the supercomputers get smarter and smarter and smarter. And, the smarter you are, the more knowledge you have. It might happen very quickly, it could happen more slowly, no one knows what the timeframe of the Singularity will be, but the assumption is that when it hits, it will hit hard, unless our human potential, our human cognitive ability, our human sensibility takes a look at this, and we say to ourselves, “Ok, we’re going to merge more with machines”. Because, if supercomputers became smarter than us, more intelligent than us, then it would not be very good for our future as a species. So, that’s the threat of the Singularity. If we don’t prepare for it, then we could be left behind. And I think this is not science fiction, it is something we need to very seriously consider. And I think transhumanism is one social movement that is considering this very deeply and seriously and with all force ahead, because it is possible that this could happen.

V: How do you think transhumanism is related to the Singularity? Or, do you think the Singularity is a necessity in order to achieve the advances that will give us the richer, healthier life that the transhumanist ideals cover?

NVM: A paradigm shift is necessary. The Singularity could be the paradigm shift that would shake up the world. But, it may not look like a Singularity to people within the environment of change. It could come in slow strides, or one big wave. Transhumanism is related to this because, whether it comes in slow strides or one big wave, we are aware of it, we are thinking about it, we’re talking about it, we’re writing about it, we’re holding conferences on it, we’re bringing it to the mainstream, so that everyone can understand that supercomputing power, bringing about supercomputing intelligence could be something we’d want to be totally aware of, not dumbed down to it. So, transhumanism’s role here, one of its key roles, is to look at the issues, look at the possibilities, strategically plan for it, come up with scenarios, and help educate the public about the effects of high-end supercomputing power. With artificial intelligence, one might say, “ok, let’s look at this big soup or this smorgasbord, how does artificial intelligence relate to the Singularity”? Well, artificial intelligence is the intelligence of supercomputing. That’s what it is, basically. Now, it could be top down, bottom up, neural networks, whatever the formula is to create a vast strong heavy-handed intelligence is the issue. If that’s not human intelligence, what is it? For the history of our species and civilization, the human mind, the human capability, the cognitive ability, has been said to be smarter, more intelligent than all other species, and we’ve held that as our amulet, ‘we have it, you don’t’ type of thing, which is a hierarchy of species, to be sure. But, one thing that is vital to human nature in most people’s standards is that we are the most intelligent animal. Well, ok, what if we’re not? How would we deal with that? How would we look at that? How would that affect our species, our culture, our humanity, if indeed, the human being is no longer the most intelligent, the most capable, the most able to problem solve species on the planet? So, that would reduce us to a position of being secondary to something else. And what if that something else is an artificial intelligence or supercomputing power? How would we deal with that? Probably not very well. So, what can we do now? What we can do now is be aware of it, understand it, make preparation for it, and integrate with it. So what we could do, in my estimation, is become the supercomputers. And that’s what the posthuman is. And that’s one aspect of looking at the future, that would be one scenario, that we merge with the machines, the supercomputing capability, and we become the future species, the evolution of human with this new animal, let’s call it. It’s not an animal, obviously, it’s not biological, but its mechanism is based on regenerative processes. If we merge with that, and that’s what the posthuman could be, then we might better situate ourselves.

V: What, in your words, is a futurist?

NVM: I think there are several different types of futurists. There’s the normative futurist, there’s the strategic futurist, there’s the artistic futurist, there’s the visionary futurist. So, if I put all these together, and sculpted a quintessential futurist, I think it would be someone who was able to look at the future with scrutinizing eyes and not get lost in Pollyanna reasoning, but to ardently consider how timeframes involve various domains, which like I said, multi-tracking, various domains where one could take the lead and the other lag behind, but how this is a shifting type of environment.. It’s crucial for a futurist to be wide-eyed and bushy-tailed about the future, without allowing his or her desire to…. no, I’m gonna stop here, because I don’t think that’s right. I think I’m just gonna say, what is a futurist? A futurist is a person who considers the consequences of the future and does his or her best to help strategize and develop scenarios that would help educate others about the future.

V: What trends are you aware of that people should be looking at?

NVM: Regenerative medicine, how that might affect their life and the lives of their loved ones. A second trend that I think that we all need to be aware of, is the religious dogma, the pervasiveness of religious wars, will eventually become a moot point, so I think we need to start preparing, and start practicing in earnest a compassion and understanding and sense of diversity and acceptance of different people’s religious views, because that is the trend of the future. This “I’m right, you’re wrong”, is passe, it’s so 20th Century. I think that we all need to be practicing a new framework and language in accepting the differences and the different beliefs and gods that many people share. Another trend that I think is crucial for people to start paying attention to is equal to the religious dogma – is political dogma. There is no 21st Century politics that actually is 21st Century. Most of the political platforms and behaviors are very 20th Century, theyr’e based on ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’, it’s very talking heads, and two-dimensional. The future of politics is going to be very immersive, very connected. It’s going to be an interactive connection intelligence of determining individual rights, and self ownership of rights. I think that preparing for that would be to start moving away from ‘I’m a Democrat, you’re a Republican’, or “I’m a Liberatarian, you’re a Socialist”, or any of these languages and mindsets that keep us really in a state of dogma, and are so inappropriate today. Another trend that I think is crucial to pay attention is the sense that space exploration is coming about, and to start looking at what it might be like to actually live in different habitats, in near Earth orbit, or on the moon. With that in mind, another trend that I think is crucial is that we are going to live longer. So, I think people need to start preparing their finances. I mean, it’s never too late to put aside 10% of your income. People think if they’re over 50, if they didn’t do that when they were 20, then what’s the point now, because I’m going to die in 20 years. Well, that’s an old world mindset. I think that if you start preparing anytime, that is just fine. So, this whole retirement vision, and ageist vision, I think is going to become wiped from our memories. So, the trend there is to think youthful, think vital, think healthy. As far as all the technology trends and scientific trends, I’m sure most of your guests have already gone over them. Artificial general intelligence will come about in 20-30 years, and that’s going to be very exciting. Nano, molecular manufacturing, where each person has an MM machine on their desktop rather than a printer to build molecular manufacturing projects, just like you’d print out a color picture, will be a trend of the future. Nanotechnology is pretty much the buzzword these days. And therein nanomedicine. Going back to regenerative medicine, nanomedicine is going to just totally change the face of medicine. Nanomedicine, giving credit to Robert Freitas, nanomedicine is taking nanorobots into the body and repairing cell damage that way, which is part of the regenerative process indeed. Other trends, I think, are how we look at ourselves as humans. I think for the first time in the history of our humanity, our civilization, we’re going to realize that we may not be the end result. And this is going to cause an enormous paradigm shift for all of humanity. Similar to, perhaps, the paradigm shift that was caused when we realized that we were not at the center of the universe, or that the world was not flat, that the world was actually round and we wouldn’t fall off an edge. So, some of the biggest trends leading up to these major shifts may seem not as exciting as some of the greatest technologies and sciences. But, sometimes, just the self realization, that this little shift of perception can cause enormous reverberations that if we’re not prepared to think about, could really cause some backlashes in society and in the behavior of society.

V: So, 2008 is right around the corner. Do you have any specific predicitons for this upcoming year?

NVM: Wikipedia falls short. It is unveiled that Wikipedia is run by a few people that dominate its information base. Wikipedia has to stand up and get a good attorney. I think that Wikipedia may find itself in a lot of trouble for manipulating knowledge, and presenting itself as a knowledge bowl media source of information, where it’s not such. I think that could be very news-worthy. I don’t know, 2008, that’s right here. So, what could happen in a year? What could happen in a year? I think one of the maybe obvious things that will happen in 2008, so it’s not really a prediction, it’s just an insight, is that we will develop a new species. It’s already on the drawing board, and has been happening. I’m not saying I support it or I don’t support it. But it looks like it’s going to happen. May or may not be a good thing, I don’t know. As far as investing in technologies, I think nanotechnology will be developing more and more patents. But as far as a real forecast of something terribly exciting, i have no idea. I’m not very good at making predictions, because I don’t think it’s smart for futurists to make predictions, because they only turn around and slap us in the ass afterwards. We always find you predict something, and then it doesn’t happen, and that hits the news. So, to protect from making a fool out of myself, I’m not going to make any hard and fast predictions. But, I think it would be absolutely fabulous if we actually figured out a way to have space tourism. I just think in 2008 that would be fabulous. I’m going to give you my hopeful prediction. This is my hopeful prediction, that the United States becomes loved by the world again. (laughs) That would be my hope, that something extraordinary happens, where the United States quits dictating other cultures of people how to live and how to behave, and we just kind of take a step backwards and become a kinder, more intelligent nation again.

V: That’s a tall order.

NVM: I know. But, wouldn’t that be lovely. Because, Americans are such generous people. We need to just clean up our act, for goodness sakes.

V: How about some predictions for the next 5 years, through 2012?

NVM: Through 2012 – I think we’re going to be able to regenerate many organs of the body instead of having transplants, and that could be through cloning a cell from that organ, or having nanomedicine, or genetic engineering regenerate the organs. I think that would be astounding, and beneficial to people all over the world, the hundreds and thousands and even millions of people who are suffering from disease in their organs. So, I think that is a major trend, I think it’s totally possible, if not probably. I think reversing aging will take even greater strides within this timeframe, because plastic surgery and regenerative medicine there is really taking leaps and bounds. As far as transportation – I don’t know if we’re going to be able to fix some of the problems with pollution and transportation, it’s just so vile. I really just don’t like it. I’ve been hopeful in the past, and my dreams didn’t come true. And it’s not that I’m being pessimistic about it at all, I’m being practical. People want to have their cars. And they want their cars their way. And they want to drive faster, and bigger, and whatever. I’m gonna leave that one alone, because i would like cars to be put in prison. I think they’re just vile killers. It would be lovely if there was a new methodology for transportation, like we shared automobiles – picked one up and dropped one off at locations, I think that would eradicate a lot of the problems. I think one of the trends in this timeframe that would be near and dear to everyone, that science and technology and smart thinking develops ways to actually reverse global warming trends. This could be done through a number of engineering, but I think nanotechnology will be crucial in that, as well as regenerative medicine. I think a lot of our promise for making trends or predictions for this timeframe would be based on the ability to get nanotechnology through and get it working and solving some problems. Some of the downsides of that is legislation, and a lot of conservatives, and technoconservatives, basically, that would fight nanotechnology because of a fear of runaway technology or gray goo assemblers or whatever. But I think we have to really deal with the problems on the planet. I think this timeframe would be looking at the planet and dealing with some of the problems and that we all become more ardent environmentalists, but not crazy environmentalists like Greenpeace, or the ‘greens’, or any of these people that want to go back to villages without telephones. I think we need to be really smart about it. We’re kind of on the cusp of things happening. It’s hard to say things are going to happen in 5 or 10 years because you don’t know what discontinuities will come about, so making any type of prediction within any given timeframe is difficult, unless you go off, say, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. I think what happens is the least expected thing to happen. I’m not very good at this, I’m sorry.

V: Do you have any general predictions for the next 10 years, through 2017?

NVM: In ten years, I think we will have a very different voting system on politics, and a very different outlook on how to govern nations, how to govern people. I think that in 10 years, there may be a revitalizing of the United Nations, and there will be new types of world councils to deal with specific problems, so the United Nations will not hold a monopoly on how the world communicates. I think we need more rigorous organizations. I think in 10 years we will see a very bountiful shift in the way women allow themselves to be treated in some of the areas of the world where there rights are extremely limited, and their whole personhood, their bodies, are shamed. In 10 years, that will be sorely addressed, because it’s been on the drawing table for so long, and it’s reaching a point of almost where it’s at a vortex, something has to happen quickly. So I think in 10 years, because things don’t happen as quickly as we like, that women in the Middle East, women in Africa, women in India and China, and lots of the areas around the world where their rights have been limited and they’ve been sequestered to suffer in very confined living sensibilities, I think that will shift, and it will be one of the most marvelous shifts in the world, because I think that women have been treated so devastatingly poorly. So, that’s something I look forward to, and I think it will happen. I feel very confident. With communication, and especially the internet and getting word out and these small grassroots groups that are helping these women, I think it will reach point where the self esteem and the pride and the sense of being will far exceed the rule of thumb posed on them by their religious brutes.

From: http://memebox.com/futureblogger/show/99