Counterfactuals and Inert Machinery

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Tim Maudlin is a philosopher of physics at NYU and founder of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics. In 1989 he published a paper proving that consciousness cannot arise from computation — thirty-five years before the world started panicking about whether ChatGPT can think.

Expect to learn why no computer programme will ever be sufficient for consciousness, why large language models operate nothing like human brains, the critical difference between intelligence and consciousness that the AI industry keeps collapsing, why Penrose's arguments about consciousness are wrong, why quantum mechanics has nothing to do with the mind, why the mind-body problem may be the most intractable problem in all of science, and much more…

Timestamps:

00:00 Why Consciousness Is Not Computable

02:35 Maudlin's 1989 Paper: Computation and Consciousness

06:01 The Thought Experiment: Beer Cans, Windmills and Conscious Machines

08:11 Why Running a Programme Can't Be Enough for Consciousness

10:36 Counterfactuals: What the Machine Would Have Done

13:56 The Cog and Wheel Machine: Stripping It Down

16:18 The Strange Anaesthesia: Jamming the Gears

19:10 Why Computational Structure Is the Wrong Level

20:08 Is This For or Against Computationalism?

23:01 The 2026 AI Consciousness Debate

25:06 Why the Turing Test Is Trivially Defeatable

27:00 Neural Nets Are Nothing Like Brains

29:12 Why the Brain Is Far More Than Neurons

31:01 HAL 9000 and How Children Actually Learn

33:27 The Car Wash Question That Breaks ChatGPT

35:18 Defining Intelligence and Consciousness

37:53 Twin Earth: Why Definitions Don't Work the Way You Think

43:06 Locked-In Syndrome and the Lobster Problem

47:08 Computation Can't Explain Pain Either

48:01 Intelligence vs Consciousness: Why You Must Separate Them

50:45 Can Anything Be Intelligent Without Being Conscious?

53:09 Is the Turing Machine Argument About Intelligence Too?

54:04 What Does Memory Actually Mean?

57:00 Can Mathematics Capture the Structure of Qualia?01:00:02 Scott Aaronson's Demolition of Integrated Information Theory

01:03:26 Why Formalising Consciousness Is a Fetishisation of Maths

01:09:00 Why There Is No Simple State Space for Vision

01:13:22 Does Quantum Mechanics Explain Consciousness?

01:18:25 The Problem with Penrose and Hameroff's Microtubule Theory

01:21:31 How Do We Actually Make Progress on Consciousness?

01:24:45 Does the Body Matter or Is It All in the Brain?

01:27:00 The Mysterian View: Why the Mind-Body Problem May Be Unsolvable

01:29:47 Could Someone Invent a New Explanatory Framework?

01:31:13 Why Pain Hurts: The Evolutionary Story

01:33:12 What Newton Would Think of General Relativity

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