What is the secret of consciousness? | Steve Grand | TEDxOporto

What is the secret of consciousness? Is it the quantum nano tubules inside our nerve cells? Is it a fundamental force of nature? Is it perhaps something from outside this universe altogether?

Steve Grand is an independent scientist who works on artificial life and, more specifically, creates artificial creatures both inside and outside a computer, namely robots. His first big idea was an artificial life computer game called Creatures, which was published in 1996. He has written up most of his philosophy and ideas about artificial life in a Popular Science book – Creation: Life and how to make it. He has also written another book called, "Growing up with Lucy: how to build an android in twenty easy steps," in which he describes his experiences on his projects.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Hi.

I have no idea
what Milton just said, so -

(Laughter)

If it was bad,
you will tell me, won't you?

(Laughter)

We human beings can be
quite clever when we try,

and over the centuries
we've managed to solve

many of the great mysteries
of the world, of life.

We know now that the sky is not really
held up with four tent poles

and that stars are not really
tiny little things.

They're just a very long way away.

We even know that teenagers
are not really possessed by demons.

(Laughter)

They're just clinically insane.

(Laughter)

But there are still some mysteries left.

There's the origin of the universe.

That's quite a big one.

And there's a lot of mysteries
about how a tiny little egg cell

can grow and develop

into something as complex and wonderful
and tremendously attractive as you.

And there's the mystery of consciousness,
the great secret of consciousness.

How come there's a me
inside my head looking out?

I'd love to talk to you
about all three of those things,

but I only have thirteen minutes,

so I'm just going to solve
the secret of consciousness.

I don't want to leave you in suspense,

because frankly, when you hear the answer,

you're just going to be
bitterly disappointed anyway.

So I'll tell you the secret straightaway,

and then I'll try to make you
feel better about it.

So, okay, here we go. Are you ready?

The great secret of consciousness is ...

No, actually, I'll tell you a story first.

(Laughter)

When my son Christopher
was a little boy, about that big,

one of his teachers asked him

what he wanted to be,
what he wanted to do when he grew up.

And Christopher very confidently answered,

"I want to study how one thing
affects another."

And as career plans go,

I think his teacher felt
that was a little bit vague,

but I was really proud of him.

For a start, you can never be unemployed
with a skill like that, can you?

(Laughter)

You want to solve the problems of cancer,

you want to find out why wars get started,

you want to design better spacecraft,

who better to ask than somebody who knows
how one thing leads to another?

But he was right.

You can study how one thing
affects another.

It's called cybernetics, in fact.

Because there's not that many ways
in which one thing can affect another.

And if you're quite good at patterns,

you start to see that the same
kinds of dynamics

occur in many, many levels of scale.

Chris was kind of simplifying -
because it was a teacher, you know -

and what he really meant
was not how one thing affects another,

but how one thing affects another
that affects the first thing again.

So something called
circular causality or feedback,

and cybernetics is the study of feedback.

This is really important

because basically everything
you see around you

exists because of feedback.

The atoms in the seat in front of you,

the mind and the body
of the person sitting in that seat,

the words I'm using, Portugal, even TED.

All of these things exist
because of feedback,

because they are self-reinforcing
or self-regulating in some way.

Because if they weren't,
they'd just disappear.

So everything is feedback
and feedback is everything.

Anyway, where was I?
Consciousness. Alright. This time.

(Laughter)

The great secret of consciousness is ...

By the way,

(Laughter)

have you ever spent much time
thinking about the fact

that you are actually
a colony of single-celled creatures?

It's kind of freaky,
but it's also quite wonderful.

You are.

You are a society
of 100 trillion little creatures,

and 90% of them are bacteria,
which is kind of embarrassing,

but you can't live without them,
so collectively they're you.

And even the ones that have human genes,

they're really just
little single-celled animals,

and they reproduce asexually;

they divide into two, then four,
then eight and sixteen.

And almost the only thing
that's special about them

is the fact that they're covered in glue,

so they kind of end up
stuck together in a lump

instead of swimming off and living
happy independent lives.

So basically you are a lump
of sticky little creatures.

The reason I tell you this partly is

that it kind of explains
what I do for a living.

I work in a field called artificial life,

which basically means
using technology to explore biology.

And so I spend my days
making artificial creatures.

Sometimes robots.

In fact I have a full-sized female,
mini-skirted robot sitting in my bedroom,

(Laughter)

which causes a big shock
to anyone who comes in

to do something in my apartment.

But mostly, I make virtual creatures
that live inside a computer.

The only thing worth knowing about this
is that they are also communities.

So I don't try to program computers
to behave like animals;

I try to program computers
to behave like brain cells

and kidney cells and liver cells,

and then I try to find ways
to plug them together into systems,

into communities,

that collectively have thoughts
and feelings and hopes and dreams.

And many, many years ago,
about 20,000 years ago,

I took some of my little creatures
and put them into a computer game

and let people play with them,

and the results were wonderful.

At least a million people
started looking after my little creatures,

and they did great things.

They would set up adoption agencies,

write lots of stories,

do scientific experiments on them,

study their genetics.

Actually quite a lot of them went on,

when they grew up,

they went on to become
scientists and stuff,

because of the experiments
they had been doing

on my little artificial life forms.

But the most important thing
was that they asked a lot of questions,

deep questions about what is life,
what is the mind, what is consciousness.

And I just loved that;
it made my whole life worth living.

Because these questions really matter.

How do we know,
how can we make good judgements

about ethical questions
like abortion or animal cruelty

if we don't know what consciousness is?

You can't be cruel to something
unless it knows you're being cruel to it.

But how do we know whether it knows?

I live in America,

and over there, abortion
is a huge political subject.

It sometimes seems to me
like half the population believe this,

and the other half
of the population believe that.

They can't both be right.
They could of course both be wrong.

Are they sitting down
around a really long table,

having discussions and trying to work out
what the right answer is about abortion?

Well no, of course not. It's America.
They just shoot each other.

(Laughter)

So it's a mess.

We don't know what we're talking about,

and part of the reason is,
I think, that we're stuck.

We're stuck, we can't move
forward with these problems,

because we don't know
what the secret of consciousness is.

I guess that's me there.
Third time lucky, I'll tell you.

This time, I'll tell you,
and you're not going to like it.

Alright, so the great secret
of consciousness is ...

that there is no secret of consciousness.

(Laughter)

I'll tell you the bad news first,

and then I'll try to convince you
that it's actually good news.

The thing is -

Over the last few years,
I've been building some new creatures,

and I really think that now,

I am starting to get a glimmer
of consciousness out of these creatures.

And for me that's great.

I really wanted to bring them along.

I'm so sorry, but they misbehaved
and I just couldn't do it.

(Laughter)

So for me it's great
because this is my life's work.

I've spent 35 years doing this stuff,

and it's nice to feel that I'm starting
to get close to something.

But a lot of people don't feel
that way about these things,

because these creatures are artificial.

They live in a computer.

So they can't have a supernatural soul,

and they can't even have freaky,
weird things like quantum mechanics

to explain the consciousness
and all the other things that we concoct

to try to make ourselves feel better
about how special we are.

They're machines,

and therefore, if I'm right, so are we,

and nobody wants to be called a machine.

You just don't want to tell people that.
They don't want to be it.

It's not exactly special,
and machines wear out.

So what do I do?

What do you do if it bothers you?

Well, all that stuff I was telling you

about Christopher and feedback
and collections of little cells,

that's where the answer lies.

I can't explain it to you now,
but if you want to know

how to deal with the fact
that we are machines -

and that's not a bad thing -
that's where to look.

But let me try and finish
with a cosmogony,

a little story of a better origins,

the creation story.

You know the biblical creation story.

Basically, God created the universe
perfect and fully formed,

and then some people came along
and screwed it all up,

and it's all been downhill ever since.

So that creation story
is all about decline and decay.

But in my field, complexity studies,

complexity theory,

we can offer a different kind
of creation story.

And in that story the universe
wasn't created fully formed and perfect;

it was very, very simple and very, very,
very, very, very, very boring.

But it's a creative universe,
a self-organizing universe,

a universe that discovers and invents
things that didn't exist before -

all the time.

Essentially thanks
to the power of feedback,

an empty universe once discovered
how to make matter out of empty space.

And once it had figured out
how to make matter

and the matter cooled down enough,

it discovered it could do
chemistry with it.

And the chemistry practiced and practiced
and practiced for billions of years

and eventually figured out
it could make life.

And then as soon as life showed up,
it was never going to go away again,

so it experimented with different ways

of plugging cells together
into communities

to do different things
that enabled it to survive,

made it self-sustaining,

and during that process, eventually,

it needed to build models of the world

so that it could make plans
and predict things,

and I think that's where
consciousness came from.

So it's just what happens
when a certain kind of machine is working.

There's nothing freaky about it.

But this is a pretty cool universe

because we emerged out of all this.

So what I'm saying is that,

yes, we are machines,
but we're not just machines;

we're amazing machines.

We're the product
of 14 billion years of experiment

by an incredibly creative universe.

And so hopefully that makes you
feel a little bit better

about being a machine.

So my advice is to try
and embrace you're in a machine,

and it's not a bad thing to be.

So thank you.

(Applause)