1
00:00:09,487 --> 00:00:10,324
Hi.

2
00:00:10,324 --> 00:00:12,874
I have no idea
what Milton just said, so -

3
00:00:12,874 --> 00:00:13,894
(Laughter)

4
00:00:13,894 --> 00:00:16,194
If it was bad,
you will tell me, won't you?

5
00:00:16,194 --> 00:00:19,024
(Laughter)

6
00:00:21,022 --> 00:00:24,552
We human beings can be
quite clever when we try,

7
00:00:24,702 --> 00:00:28,752
and over the centuries
we've managed to solve

8
00:00:28,752 --> 00:00:31,982
many of the great mysteries
of the world, of life.

9
00:00:33,312 --> 00:00:37,312
We know now that the sky is not really
held up with four tent poles

10
00:00:37,829 --> 00:00:40,589
and that stars are not really
tiny little things.

11
00:00:40,589 --> 00:00:42,791
They're just a very long way away.

12
00:00:44,139 --> 00:00:48,909
We even know that teenagers
are not really possessed by demons.

13
00:00:48,909 --> 00:00:50,399
(Laughter)

14
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They're just clinically insane.

15
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(Laughter)

16
00:00:55,071 --> 00:00:57,458
But there are still some mysteries left.

17
00:00:57,966 --> 00:01:01,121
There's the origin of the universe.

18
00:01:01,378 --> 00:01:03,218
That's quite a big one.

19
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And there's a lot of mysteries
about how a tiny little egg cell

20
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can grow and develop

21
00:01:11,023 --> 00:01:17,573
into something as complex and wonderful
and tremendously attractive as you.

22
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And there's the mystery of consciousness,
the great secret of consciousness.

23
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How come there's a me
inside my head looking out?

24
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I'd love to talk to you
about all three of those things,

25
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but I only have thirteen minutes,

26
00:01:37,284 --> 00:01:40,694
so I'm just going to solve
the secret of consciousness.

27
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I don't want to leave you in suspense,

28
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because frankly, when you hear the answer,

29
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you're just going to be
bitterly disappointed anyway.

30
00:01:51,710 --> 00:01:54,100
So I'll tell you the secret straightaway,

31
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and then I'll try to make you
feel better about it.

32
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So, okay, here we go. Are you ready?

33
00:02:02,122 --> 00:02:06,202
The great secret of consciousness is ...

34
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No, actually, I'll tell you a story first.

35
00:02:10,894 --> 00:02:13,004
(Laughter)

36
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When my son Christopher
was a little boy, about that big,

37
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one of his teachers asked him

38
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what he wanted to be,
what he wanted to do when he grew up.

39
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And Christopher very confidently answered,

40
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"I want to study how one thing
affects another."

41
00:02:31,914 --> 00:02:34,434
And as career plans go,

42
00:02:34,434 --> 00:02:38,154
I think his teacher felt
that was a little bit vague,

43
00:02:38,816 --> 00:02:41,016
but I was really proud of him.

44
00:02:41,953 --> 00:02:45,393
For a start, you can never be unemployed
with a skill like that, can you?

45
00:02:45,393 --> 00:02:46,533
(Laughter)

46
00:02:46,533 --> 00:02:48,496
You want to solve the problems of cancer,

47
00:02:48,496 --> 00:02:51,693
you want to find out why wars get started,

48
00:02:51,693 --> 00:02:53,673
you want to design better spacecraft,

49
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who better to ask than somebody who knows
how one thing leads to another?

50
00:03:00,584 --> 00:03:01,954
But he was right.

51
00:03:01,954 --> 00:03:04,414
You can study how one thing
affects another.

52
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It's called cybernetics, in fact.

53
00:03:09,271 --> 00:03:12,991
Because there's not that many ways
in which one thing can affect another.

54
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And if you're quite good at patterns,

55
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you start to see that the same
kinds of dynamics

56
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occur in many, many levels of scale.

57
00:03:22,941 --> 00:03:26,521
Chris was kind of simplifying -
because it was a teacher, you know -

58
00:03:26,891 --> 00:03:31,561
and what he really meant
was not how one thing affects another,

59
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but how one thing affects another
that affects the first thing again.

60
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So something called
circular causality or feedback,

61
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and cybernetics is the study of feedback.

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This is really important

63
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because basically everything
you see around you

64
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exists because of feedback.

65
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The atoms in the seat in front of you,

66
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the mind and the body
of the person sitting in that seat,

67
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the words I'm using, Portugal, even TED.

68
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All of these things exist
because of feedback,

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

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

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So everything is feedback
and feedback is everything.

72
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Anyway, where was I?
Consciousness. Alright. This time.

73
00:04:31,243 --> 00:04:32,923
(Laughter)

74
00:04:32,923 --> 00:04:36,945
The great secret of consciousness is ...

75
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By the way,

76
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(Laughter)

77
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have you ever spent much time
thinking about the fact

78
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that you are actually
a colony of single-celled creatures?

79
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It's kind of freaky,
but it's also quite wonderful.

80
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You are.

81
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You are a society
of 100 trillion little creatures,

82
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and 90% of them are bacteria,
which is kind of embarrassing,

83
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but you can't live without them,
so collectively they're you.

84
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And even the ones that have human genes,

85
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they're really just
little single-celled animals,

86
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and they reproduce asexually;

87
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they divide into two, then four,
then eight and sixteen.

88
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And almost the only thing
that's special about them

89
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is the fact that they're covered in glue,

90
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so they kind of end up
stuck together in a lump

91
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instead of swimming off and living
happy independent lives.

92
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So basically you are a lump
of sticky little creatures.

93
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The reason I tell you this partly is

94
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that it kind of explains
what I do for a living.

95
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I work in a field called artificial life,

96
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which basically means
using technology to explore biology.

97
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And so I spend my days
making artificial creatures.

98
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Sometimes robots.

99
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In fact I have a full-sized female,
mini-skirted robot sitting in my bedroom,

100
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(Laughter)

101
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which causes a big shock
to anyone who comes in

102
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to do something in my apartment.

103
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But mostly, I make virtual creatures
that live inside a computer.

104
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The only thing worth knowing about this
is that they are also communities.

105
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So I don't try to program computers
to behave like animals;

106
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I try to program computers
to behave like brain cells

107
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and kidney cells and liver cells,

108
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and then I try to find ways
to plug them together into systems,

109
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into communities,

110
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that collectively have thoughts
and feelings and hopes and dreams.

111
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And many, many years ago,
about 20,000 years ago,

112
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I took some of my little creatures
and put them into a computer game

113
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and let people play with them,

114
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and the results were wonderful.

115
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At least a million people
started looking after my little creatures,

116
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and they did great things.

117
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They would set up adoption agencies,

118
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write lots of stories,

119
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do scientific experiments on them,

120
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study their genetics.

121
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Actually quite a lot of them went on,

122
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when they grew up,

123
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they went on to become
scientists and stuff,

124
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because of the experiments
they had been doing

125
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on my little artificial life forms.

126
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But the most important thing
was that they asked a lot of questions,

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

128
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And I just loved that;
it made my whole life worth living.

129
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Because these questions really matter.

130
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How do we know,
how can we make good judgements

131
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about ethical questions
like abortion or animal cruelty

132
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if we don't know what consciousness is?

133
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You can't be cruel to something
unless it knows you're being cruel to it.

134
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But how do we know whether it knows?

135
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I live in America,

136
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and over there, abortion
is a huge political subject.

137
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It sometimes seems to me
like half the population believe this,

138
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and the other half
of the population believe that.

139
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They can't both be right.
They could of course both be wrong.

140
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Are they sitting down
around a really long table,

141
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having discussions and trying to work out
what the right answer is about abortion?

142
00:09:03,491 --> 00:09:06,641
Well no, of course not. It's America.
They just shoot each other.

143
00:09:06,641 --> 00:09:09,002
(Laughter)

144
00:09:10,424 --> 00:09:11,604
So it's a mess.

145
00:09:11,604 --> 00:09:13,464
We don't know what we're talking about,

146
00:09:13,874 --> 00:09:18,544
and part of the reason is,
I think, that we're stuck.

147
00:09:19,364 --> 00:09:21,934
We're stuck, we can't move
forward with these problems,

148
00:09:21,934 --> 00:09:26,474
because we don't know
what the secret of consciousness is.

149
00:09:28,979 --> 00:09:34,029
I guess that's me there.
Third time lucky, I'll tell you.

150
00:09:34,029 --> 00:09:37,279
This time, I'll tell you,
and you're not going to like it.

151
00:09:37,869 --> 00:09:42,779
Alright, so the great secret
of consciousness is ...

152
00:09:45,099 --> 00:09:47,509
that there is no secret of consciousness.

153
00:09:47,509 --> 00:09:49,099
(Laughter)

154
00:09:49,981 --> 00:09:52,304
I'll tell you the bad news first,

155
00:09:52,304 --> 00:09:55,602
and then I'll try to convince you
that it's actually good news.

156
00:09:58,196 --> 00:09:59,513
The thing is -

157
00:10:01,361 --> 00:10:04,496
Over the last few years,
I've been building some new creatures,

158
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and I really think that now,

159
00:10:08,263 --> 00:10:12,653
I am starting to get a glimmer
of consciousness out of these creatures.

160
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And for me that's great.

161
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I really wanted to bring them along.

162
00:10:19,935 --> 00:10:23,815
I'm so sorry, but they misbehaved
and I just couldn't do it.

163
00:10:23,815 --> 00:10:25,595
(Laughter)

164
00:10:25,595 --> 00:10:28,365
So for me it's great
because this is my life's work.

165
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I've spent 35 years doing this stuff,

166
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and it's nice to feel that I'm starting
to get close to something.

167
00:10:34,723 --> 00:10:38,343
But a lot of people don't feel
that way about these things,

168
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because these creatures are artificial.

169
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They live in a computer.

170
00:10:44,220 --> 00:10:47,620
So they can't have a supernatural soul,

171
00:10:48,434 --> 00:10:53,118
and they can't even have freaky,
weird things like quantum mechanics

172
00:10:53,154 --> 00:10:57,544
to explain the consciousness
and all the other things that we concoct

173
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to try to make ourselves feel better
about how special we are.

174
00:11:04,687 --> 00:11:06,328
They're machines,

175
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and therefore, if I'm right, so are we,

176
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and nobody wants to be called a machine.

177
00:11:14,174 --> 00:11:17,924
You just don't want to tell people that.
They don't want to be it.

178
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It's not exactly special,
and machines wear out.

179
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So what do I do?

180
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What do you do if it bothers you?

181
00:11:30,521 --> 00:11:33,231
Well, all that stuff I was telling you

182
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about Christopher and feedback
and collections of little cells,

183
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that's where the answer lies.

184
00:11:40,970 --> 00:11:45,220
I can't explain it to you now,
but if you want to know

185
00:11:45,220 --> 00:11:48,585
how to deal with the fact
that we are machines -

186
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and that's not a bad thing -
that's where to look.

187
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But let me try and finish
with a cosmogony,

188
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a little story of a better origins,

189
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the creation story.

190
00:12:01,312 --> 00:12:03,552
You know the biblical creation story.

191
00:12:05,703 --> 00:12:12,213
Basically, God created the universe
perfect and fully formed,

192
00:12:13,212 --> 00:12:15,882
and then some people came along
and screwed it all up,

193
00:12:15,882 --> 00:12:18,952
and it's all been downhill ever since.

194
00:12:19,854 --> 00:12:24,274
So that creation story
is all about decline and decay.

195
00:12:25,537 --> 00:12:29,227
But in my field, complexity studies,

196
00:12:29,227 --> 00:12:30,627
complexity theory,

197
00:12:31,982 --> 00:12:35,982
we can offer a different kind
of creation story.

198
00:12:37,074 --> 00:12:42,164
And in that story the universe
wasn't created fully formed and perfect;

199
00:12:43,261 --> 00:12:49,161
it was very, very simple and very, very,
very, very, very, very boring.

200
00:12:50,330 --> 00:12:55,310
But it's a creative universe,
a self-organizing universe,

201
00:12:55,660 --> 00:12:59,861
a universe that discovers and invents
things that didn't exist before -

202
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all the time.

203
00:13:04,916 --> 00:13:09,506
Essentially thanks
to the power of feedback,

204
00:13:10,129 --> 00:13:15,789
an empty universe once discovered
how to make matter out of empty space.

205
00:13:16,700 --> 00:13:18,890
And once it had figured out
how to make matter

206
00:13:18,890 --> 00:13:20,510
and the matter cooled down enough,

207
00:13:20,510 --> 00:13:22,880
it discovered it could do
chemistry with it.

208
00:13:23,951 --> 00:13:28,071
And the chemistry practiced and practiced
and practiced for billions of years

209
00:13:28,071 --> 00:13:30,861
and eventually figured out
it could make life.

210
00:13:31,605 --> 00:13:35,795
And then as soon as life showed up,
it was never going to go away again,

211
00:13:36,815 --> 00:13:39,615
so it experimented with different ways

212
00:13:39,615 --> 00:13:42,165
of plugging cells together
into communities

213
00:13:42,165 --> 00:13:45,345
to do different things
that enabled it to survive,

214
00:13:45,345 --> 00:13:47,840
made it self-sustaining,

215
00:13:47,840 --> 00:13:50,597
and during that process, eventually,

216
00:13:50,709 --> 00:13:53,655
it needed to build models of the world

217
00:13:53,826 --> 00:13:58,486
so that it could make plans
and predict things,

218
00:13:58,595 --> 00:14:01,135
and I think that's where
consciousness came from.

219
00:14:01,135 --> 00:14:06,425
So it's just what happens
when a certain kind of machine is working.

220
00:14:06,425 --> 00:14:08,708
There's nothing freaky about it.

221
00:14:10,510 --> 00:14:14,642
But this is a pretty cool universe

222
00:14:14,912 --> 00:14:16,980
because we emerged out of all this.

223
00:14:16,980 --> 00:14:19,410
So what I'm saying is that,

224
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yes, we are machines,
but we're not just machines;

225
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we're amazing machines.

226
00:14:28,305 --> 00:14:32,305
We're the product
of 14 billion years of experiment

227
00:14:33,013 --> 00:14:35,323
by an incredibly creative universe.

228
00:14:35,323 --> 00:14:38,963
And so hopefully that makes you
feel a little bit better

229
00:14:40,222 --> 00:14:41,832
about being a machine.

230
00:14:42,000 --> 00:14:46,560
So my advice is to try
and embrace you're in a machine,

231
00:14:47,033 --> 00:14:50,483
and it's not a bad thing to be.

232
00:14:50,771 --> 00:14:52,001
So thank you.

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00:14:52,001 --> 00:14:54,872
(Applause)