WEBVTT

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Hi.

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I have no idea
what Milton just said, so -

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(Laughter)

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

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(Laughter)

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We human beings can be
quite clever when we try,

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and over the centuries
we've managed to solve

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

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

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and that stars are not really
tiny little things.

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They're just a very long way away.

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

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(Laughter)

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They're just clinically insane.

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(Laughter)

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But there are still some mysteries left.

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There's the origin of the universe.

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That's quite a big one.

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

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can grow and develop

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

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

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

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

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but I only have thirteen minutes,

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

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I don't want to leave you in suspense,

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because frankly, when you hear the answer,

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you're just going to be
bitterly disappointed anyway.

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So I'll tell you the secret straightaway,

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

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

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The great secret of consciousness is ...

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

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(Laughter)

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

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one of his teachers asked him

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

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And Christopher very confidently answered,

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

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And as career plans go,

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

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but I was really proud of him.

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

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(Laughter)

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You want to solve the problems of cancer,

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you want to find out why wars get started,

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you want to design better spacecraft,

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

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But he was right.

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You can study how one thing
affects another.

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It's called cybernetics, in fact.

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

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And if you're quite good at patterns,

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you start to see that the same
kinds of dynamics

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occur in many, many levels of scale.

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

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

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

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So something called
circular causality or feedback,

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and cybernetics is the study of feedback.

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This is really important

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because basically everything
you see around you

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exists because of feedback.

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The atoms in the seat in front of you,

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

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

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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.

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

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(Laughter)

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The great secret of consciousness is ...

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By the way,

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(Laughter)

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have you ever spent much time
thinking about the fact

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

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

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You are.

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You are a society
of 100 trillion little creatures,

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

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

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And even the ones that have human genes,

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they're really just
little single-celled animals,

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and they reproduce asexually;

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

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And almost the only thing
that's special about them

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is the fact that they're covered in glue,

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so they kind of end up
stuck together in a lump

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instead of swimming off and living
happy independent lives.

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So basically you are a lump
of sticky little creatures.

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The reason I tell you this partly is

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

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I work in a field called artificial life,

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which basically means
using technology to explore biology.

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And so I spend my days
making artificial creatures.

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Sometimes robots.

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

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(Laughter)

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which causes a big shock
to anyone who comes in

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to do something in my apartment.

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

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

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

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I try to program computers
to behave like brain cells

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and kidney cells and liver cells,

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

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into communities,

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that collectively have thoughts
and feelings and hopes and dreams.

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

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

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and let people play with them,

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and the results were wonderful.

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

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and they did great things.

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They would set up adoption agencies,

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write lots of stories,

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do scientific experiments on them,

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study their genetics.

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Actually quite a lot of them went on,

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when they grew up,

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they went on to become
scientists and stuff,

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because of the experiments
they had been doing

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on my little artificial life forms.

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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.

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

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Because these questions really matter.

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How do we know,
how can we make good judgements

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about ethical questions
like abortion or animal cruelty

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if we don't know what consciousness is?

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

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But how do we know whether it knows?

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I live in America,

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and over there, abortion
is a huge political subject.

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

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and the other half
of the population believe that.

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

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Are they sitting down
around a really long table,

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

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

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(Laughter)

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So it's a mess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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that there is no secret of consciousness.

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(Laughter)

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I'll tell you the bad news first,

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

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The thing is -

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

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and I really think that now,

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

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And for me that's great.

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I really wanted to bring them along.

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

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(Laughter)

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

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I've spent 35 years doing this stuff,

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

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

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because these creatures are artificial.

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They live in a computer.

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So they can't have a supernatural soul,

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

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

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

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They're machines,

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

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and nobody wants to be called a machine.

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

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

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So what do I do?

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What do you do if it bothers you?

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Well, all that stuff I was telling you

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about Christopher and feedback
and collections of little cells,

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that's where the answer lies.

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

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how to deal with the fact
that we are machines -

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

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But let me try and finish
with a cosmogony,

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a little story of a better origins,

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the creation story.

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You know the biblical creation story.

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Basically, God created the universe
perfect and fully formed,

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

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and it's all been downhill ever since.

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So that creation story
is all about decline and decay.

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But in my field, complexity studies,

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complexity theory,

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we can offer a different kind
of creation story.

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

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

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

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

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all the time.

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Essentially thanks
to the power of feedback,

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

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And once it had figured out
how to make matter

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and the matter cooled down enough,

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it discovered it could do
chemistry with it.

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

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and eventually figured out
it could make life.

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

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so it experimented with different ways

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of plugging cells together
into communities

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to do different things
that enabled it to survive,

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made it self-sustaining,

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and during that process, eventually,

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it needed to build models of the world

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so that it could make plans
and predict things,

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and I think that's where
consciousness came from.

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

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There's nothing freaky about it.

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But this is a pretty cool universe

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because we emerged out of all this.

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So what I'm saying is that,

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

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we're amazing machines.

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We're the product
of 14 billion years of experiment

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by an incredibly creative universe.

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And so hopefully that makes you
feel a little bit better

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about being a machine.

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

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and it's not a bad thing to be.

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So thank you.

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(Applause)