Welcome to Giant Conversations — a new format where top experts debate, discuss and unravel the biggest questions in science. Dr. Mark Solms is a neuropsychologist, psychoanalyst and author of The Hidden Spring. Dr. Ryan Smith is a computational neuroscientist at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research who builds mathematical models of how the brain predicts and feels.
Together they tackle the question: what does it take for a system to become conscious — and can we engineer it?
Expect to learn why consciousness might be raw feeling rather than complex cognition, why your cortex may not actually be conscious, what's architecturally missing from current AI that rules out consciousness, what a machine would need to genuinely feel something, where these two brilliant scientists agree and exactly where they clash, and much more…
Timestamps:
00:01 Introduction to the Giant's Debate
00:46 Mark Solms: What Makes a System Conscious?
05:31 Ryan Smith: The Cognitive Case for Consciousness
13:02 Where Mark and Ryan Agree and Disagree
17:32 The Selection Problem: What Gets to Be Conscious?
27:07 Can We Scientifically Prove Something Is Conscious?
30:02 Blindsight: Behaviour Without Experience
34:20 The Fish on Cocaine Problem
41:25 Different Meanings of Consciousness
54:57 How the Free Energy Principle Explains Consciousness
01:03:02 Ryan Smith: Taking Consciousness Out of Biology
01:12:17 How Do You Give a Computer Survival Needs?
01:18:20 The Brain in a Vat: Does the Body Actually Matter?
01:19:59 What Would Prove AI Is Conscious?
01:22:32 Mark Solms: Why He Believes We Can Build Consciousness
01:27:25 Why Current LLMs Have Zero Consciousness
01:30:36 Mark's Final Word: Goals Must Be Real
01:31:15 Rapid Fire with Ryan Smith
01:37:52 The Neuron Replacement Thought Experiment
01:42:10 Computation vs Architecture: A Middle Ground
01:44:06 Final Thoughts
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