探测隐匿意识：神经科学家的使命

你有一个初创公司，对吧，正在研发一种或多种仪器，能够检测那些 otherwise 被认为脑死亡的人的意识。你们进展到哪一步了？是已经放弃了吗，还是？

You have a startup, right, that's working on an instrument or instruments that would be able to detect consciousness in people who are otherwise considered brain dead. How far along have you gone in that? Have you abandoned that or?

哦不不不不不。所以正如我所说，这与你对意识形而上学的信仰无关。毫无疑问，我们现在有了工具。这是过去 20 年发展起来的询问大脑的技术。本质上你这样做：你用磁脉冲击打大脑，然后用 EEG 脑电波聆听回声。对，你发送一个能量脉冲，本质上就像拿铃铛用锤子敲击然后听声音。一个有意识的大脑，无论那个人是像你我一样清醒，还是在快速眼动睡眠中正在体验，或者在高剂量迷幻药下可能无法动弹但高度清醒，这种脑电波的复杂性——所以你可以计算复杂性，称为 Lempel-Ziv 复杂性——在有意识的人中它总是高于阈值。在无意识的人中，无论他们是普通人但被麻醉了，还是真正处于非常深的昏迷中明确没有活动，大脑复杂性非常低。在最简单的情况下，你的 EEG 是平坦的，我的意思是那是极低复杂性的极端情况。

Oh no no no no no. So as I said it's just independent of what you believe about the metaphysics of consciousness. There's no question that we have now tools. So this was developed over the last 20 years, techniques to query the brain. Essentially you do it: you hit the brain using magnetic pulses and then you're listening to the echoes using EEG electrical brain waves. Right, so you send in a pulse of energy, you essentially, you know, it's like taking a bell and hitting it with a hammer and then listening to it. And a conscious brain, whether that person is awake like you or I, or in a REM sleep where the person is experiencing, or under a high dose of psychedelics where they may be immobile but highly conscious, the complexity of this brain wave—so you can compute the complexity, called Lempel-Ziv complexity—and in conscious people it's always above a threshold. In unconscious people, whether they are regular people but they're anesthetized, or they're truly in a very deep coma where it's unambiguous that there is no activity, the brain complexity is very low. In the simplest case your EEG is flatlined, I mean that's extreme case of very low complexity.

所以我们现在开发了这个工具，并成立了你提到的这家公司 Intrinsic Powers，我们正在与哈佛的 MGH、麦迪逊和哥伦比亚的人们合作，试图将其纳入工作流程。因为今天发生的情况是，如果你或我发生车祸、出血或心脏骤停而你还活着，有人打 911，你进入 ICU，你现在靠生命支持，靠呼吸机。你可能在那里，无反应，眼睛睁开。所以这些人以前被称为植物人状态，但正如我所说，现在被称为行为无反应。如果你在这种状态下持续三四五天，那么临床团队会开始与家属讨论，说这是他们想要的吗？在发达国家，70% 到 90% 的情况下家属和医生决定不，他们撤除支持。但我们现在知道这些患者中有四分之一——去年在《新英格兰医学杂志》上发表了一篇非常大的论文，大约四分之一取决于人口统计学等等。这些患者中有四分之一实际上是有意识的。他们在那里。他们存在。他们只是无法发出信号。所以我们想知道这一点，因为这样我可以给这个设备，可以给临床团队和家属一个额外的比特。事实上，字面上就是一个比特。

And so we've developed this tool now and started this company that you mentioned called Intrinsic Powers, where we're working with people at MGH at Harvard and in Madison and in Colombia trying to put this into the workflow. Because what happens today is if you or I have a car accident or hemorrhage or cardiac arrest and you're alive, you know, someone calls 911, you get into the ICU, you're on life support now, on ventilator. You might be there, you know, unresponsive, eyes open. So these people were called vegetative states, but as I said, they're now called behavioral unresponsive. And if you remain in this state for three or four or five days, then the clinical team will initiate discussion with the family and says, is this what they would have wanted? And here in the developed world between 70 and 90% of the time family and doctors decide no and they pull support. But we now know that a quarter of these patients—there was a very large paper last year published in New England Journal of Medicine, roughly a quarter depending on the demographics and all of that. One out of four of these patients is actually conscious. They're there. They're present. They're just not able to signal it. And so we want to know that because then I can give this device can give the clinical team and the family one additional bit. In fact, literally it's one bit.

他们在那里还是不在那里？

Are they there or are they not there?

然后这可以进一步帮助告知医生和家属想用这些信息做什么。但如果你曾经被要求为亲人做出这个决定，对吧？这是你能做的最重要的决定。这非常存在主义。他们在那里还是不在那里？我们应该拔掉插头吗？所以这就是这个抽象的心身问题触及现实的地方。

And that can then help further inform you know what the doctor and what the family wants to do with that information. But this if you ever called upon this to make this call for a loved one, right? This is the most consequential decision you can make. It's a very existential. Are they there or are they not there? And should we pull when you know should we pull the plug or not? And so this is where this abstract mind body problem hits the you know the hits the road.

是的。让我只是我不想在那上面迷失，但这些实验进行到什么程度了？如果你有一个被宣布为植物人状态的人，你使用这个设备并检测到有复杂的神经活动表明有意识。如果你拔掉那个患者的生命支持，你会看到复杂性有某种峰值，可能与他们认识到正在发生的事情相关吗？或者你看到那个复杂性有任何变化吗？

Yeah. And let me just I don't want to get lost on that but have how far have these experiments gone? If you have someone in a vegetative state who's been declared in a vegetative state and you use this device and detect that there is complex neural activity that suggests consciousness. If you pull the life support on that patient, do you see some spike in complexity that might correlate to their recognition of what's happening or do you see any change in that complex?

不，因为我的意思是这项技术需要一个小时到一个半小时来建立。然后当然你必须让医生和最终团队获得这些信息，然后需要很多来回，很复杂，克雷格，因为这是一个非常复杂的问题，我们无法帮助。所以当你接到那个电话时，你想知道三件事。首先他们还活着吗？他们在那里吗？最后，他们会恢复吗？你知道，现在我们不能很好地判断他们是否有意识这一事实是否令人鼓舞，即使他们不能他们可能无法回应，对吧？

No, because I mean the technique is so it takes an hour an hour and a half to establish. And then of course you know you have to make this information available to the doctors and ultimately to the team and then it takes you know a lot of back and forth and it's complicated Craig because it's a very complicated question and we cannot help. So there are three when you get that call there are three things you want to know. Are they alive first? Are they there? And then lastly, are they going to recover? And you know, right now we can't we can't say that very well whether or not the fact that they're conscious is encouraging even though they can't they may not be able to respond, right?

嗯。

Mhm.

所以这是一个非常困难的决定。你认为我的意思是想象你自己如果你处于这种情况无法沟通，而且不清楚当然取决于你的年龄如果你 20 岁比 60 或 70 岁好得多你想要什么你想永远处于这种状态你不能沟通但你有意识然后现在你的兄弟或你的兄弟姐妹或我的意思是你的父母或你的孩子必须做出这个决定。所以这是一个非常复杂的决策环境。

So it's a very difficult decision to make. Do you think I mean imagine yourself if you are if you're in this situation unable to communicate and it's unclear depends of course on your age if you're 20 it's much better than if you're you know 60 or 70 what would you like do you want to be forever in this in this state where you can't communicate but you're conscious and then you know now your brother or your sibling or I mean or your parent or your child has to make this decision. So it's a very complicated decision environment.

那项工作与你在 CRE 的工作同时进行吗？

Was that work concurrent with your work with CRE?

嗯是的，所以这主要是完成的，你知道，这是关于患者的工作，广泛发表，过去 20 年由朱莉娅·托诺尼和意大利神经科学家神经病学家马雷拉·马西米完成。是的。与此同时，我们试图在人和实验室动物中推进这一实证计划，研究大脑中意识的足迹。正如你提到的，我与弗朗西斯·克里克共事了 14 年，他是诺贝尔奖得主分子生物学家，共同发现了 DNA 的双螺旋性质，然后将兴趣从分子生物学转向意识。

Um yeah so this was primarily done so we you know it's w this work on patients sort of widely published done over the last 20 years by by Julia Tenoni and then an Italian neuroscientist neurologist Marella Masimi. Yeah. And that went on at the same time as we as we you know try to push this empirical program in people and in lab animals to study the footprints of consciousness in the brain. And as you mentioned I worked for 14 years with Francis Crick the Nobel Prize winning molecular biologist who co-discovered the double helical nature of DNA and then shifted his interest from molecular biology to consciousness.

一个纯粹经验性的研究纲领，顺便说一句，它不取决于你是物理主义者、二元论者、泛心论者还是唯心主义者。我们只是想知道意识的足迹，如何研究它们、如何测量它们、检测它们，然后我们可以将其用于诊断和预后目的。

A purely empirical program that by the way does not depend on whether you're physicalist or dualist or panpsychist or idealist. It's just we just want to know the footprints of consciousness, how to study them, how to measure them, detect them, that we could then use for diagnostic and prognostic purposes.

所以作为一名科学家，你是一个物理主义者。

So as a scientist you are a physicalist.

嗯，直到 20 世纪初，它以前被称为唯物主义者。一个古老的形而上学立场。德谟克利特是最早的前苏格拉底希腊思想家之一。他有一句名言：存在的一切只是原子和虚空。

Well, it used to be known as materialist until early the 20th century. An ancient metaphysical position. Democritus is one of the first pre-Socratic Greek thinkers. He famously said all there is is atoms and the void.

物理主义的另一个挑战一直是哲学家大卫·查尔默斯所说的难问题。是的，要解释为什么像这样三磅重的大脑物质——原则上它就像另一块物质一样，好吧这是硬物质或半硬物质，这是你知道的软物质、黏糊糊的物质——但原则上它由原子、分子、电子以及所有这些东西按照量子力学定律相互作用构成，这里没什么特别的，然而这个东西却能爱能恨。那么这是从哪来的？

The other challenge with physicalism has always been what the philosopher David Chalmers calls a hard problem. Yeah, to explain why is it that three pounds of brain matter like this—and in principle it's just like another piece of matter like this, okay this is hard matter or semi-hard matter, this is you know soft matter squishy matter—but in principle it constituted out of atoms and molecules and electrons and all of that interacting by the laws of quantum mechanics, nothing special here, yet this thing can love and hate. Well where does that come from?

即使你追踪到了，即使你执行了弗朗西斯·克里克和我在 1990 年代初发起的计划，即为任何一种体验确定确切的神经元是什么、它们必须处于什么状态、它们是否必须涉及微管或叠加或任何你能想到的东西，为什么这个特定的机制——你知道它像任何其他机制一样，像一个花哨的瑞士钟——为什么这个机制能感到疼痛或感到快乐或感到无聊？我的意思是这完全不合逻辑，对吧？一方面你有物理定律，另一方面你有体验：疼痛、快乐、无聊、愤怒。你知道它们是相连的——只要头上挨一下就会告诉你，是的，大脑是——如果你伤害大脑，你就会严重干扰意识——但为什么它们应该相连？科学定律中没有任何东西告诉我们物质能爱能恨。所以这就是两个挑战，我的意思是它们已经存在了几十年了，当然我输掉了与大卫·查尔默斯的一个著名赌约。

And even if you track it down, even if you carry out the program that Francis Crick and I initiated in the early 1990s of identifying for any one experience what are the exact neurons, in what state do they have to be, do they have to involve microtubules or superposition or whatever you want to come up with, why is it that this particular mechanism—you know it's a mechanism like any other mechanism, like a fancy Swiss clock—why is it that this mechanism can feel pain or feel pleasure or feel boredom? I mean it's a complete non sequitur, right? On the one hand you have the laws of physics, on the other hand you have experiences: pain, pleasure, boredom, anger. You know they're linked—just a single hit on the head will tell you yeah the brain is—if you hurt the brain you're going to seriously interfere with consciousness—but why should they be linked? There's nothing in the laws of science that tells us matter can love and hate. So those are the two challenges, and I mean they've been around for several decades now, and of course I lost a famous bet against David Chalmers.

是的。

Yeah.

因为 25 年后我们还没有发现它们，但他同意我的观点，它们会被发现——发现大脑中意识的足迹。

Because we had not discovered them after 25 years, but he agrees with me they will be discovered—discovering the footprints of consciousness in the brain.

另一种思考方式，神经关联物。正是。当你感受或体验某些现象时，什么在亮起来？你在什么时候决定那还不够？我的意思是，我猜你知道那还不够，但你认为在缺乏其他经验实验的情况下它是有用的，你——

Another way to think about it, the neural correlates. Exactly. What was lighting up at the time that you were feeling or experiencing certain phenomena? And at what point did you decide that that wasn't going to be enough? I mean, I guess you knew that wasn't going to be enough, but you thought it was useful in the absence of some other empirical experiment that you—

嗯，假设我们有了那个，那是一个完全可行的项目，而且会非常有用，因为一旦我知道足迹是什么，我就可以寻找它们。我可以决定，例如——大多数关心这个问题的人、大多数专家会认为第三孕期的胎儿可能是有意识的。好吧，如果我有神经关联物，我就可以说它们在那里吗？或者它们什么时候出现？它们在第二孕期就已经存在了，还是可能只在第三孕期？那狗呢？我有一只狗，伯恩山犬。狗呢？你知道，嗯，所以这是一个追踪意识足迹的经验性计划。确定意识、测量它、也许量化它，在正常人、患有各种疾病、障碍、精神疾病的人、动物等身上，将具有极大的实际重要性。所以它是有用的，但当然它不能解释为什么这个特定的事物在这种配置下会产生红色，而稍微不同会产生橙色，或产生性高潮，或产生牙痛。

Well, assuming we had that, that is a perfectly feasible project and that will be immensely useful because once I know what the footprints are, I can look for them. I can decide, for example—most people, most experts who concern themselves would assume that a third trimester fetus probably is conscious. Well if I have the NCC I can say well are they there or when do they occur? Are they present already in the second trimester or maybe only in the third trimester? What about here I have a dog, Bernese mountain dog. What about dogs? You know, um, and so this is an empirical program tracking the footprints of consciousness. There will be immensely practical importance to determine consciousness, to measure it, maybe quantify it, in normal people, in people with various diseases, disorders, psychiatric disorders, animals, etc. So it's useful, but of course it does not explain why this particular thing in this configuration gives rise to red and slightly different to orange or to an orgasm or to toothache.

你在什么时候决定你永远无法弥合相关性与因果性之间的鸿沟，并转向某种形式的泛心论？是一个瞬间还是——

At what point did you decide that you were never going to close that gap between correlation and causality and switch to a form of panpsychism? Was it a moment or was it—

发生在我身上的事情略有不同。我有两次非凡的体验，我在上一本书《然后我是世界本身》中描述过。其中一次是大流行第一周的一种濒死体验，克里斯托夫消失了，世界消失了，一切都消失了，除了这道光，这道非常明亮的光。有些人把它描述为隧道和一种恐惧与狂喜的感觉。只有这三样东西：恐惧、狂喜、一道明亮的光。没有空间。整个空间都抽搐成了一个点，奇点。没有时间。一直伴随着我们的时间流逝崩塌了。这一刻，这种体验既不太长也不短。它只是存在。按钟表算可能不到 10 分钟。没有自我。没有克里斯托夫。那里什么都没有。你知道，通常观察者与被观察者、知者与所知、领会者与所领会之间的区分。所有这一切都消失了。所以这就是一些佛教徒常说的非二元体验。

What happened to me is slightly different. I had two extraordinary experiences that I described in my last book, Then I Am Myself the World. One of which was sort of a near-death experience in the first week of the pandemic where Christof was gone, the world was gone, everything was gone except this light, this very bright light. Some people describe it as a tunnel and a feeling of terror and ecstasy. Just those three things: terror, ecstasy, a bright light. There was no space. All of space had convulsed itself into this single point, the singularity. There was no time. Passage of time that's always with us collapsed. This moment, this experience didn't last too long or too short. It simply was. It was probably under 10 minutes by the clock. And there was no self. There was no Christof. There was nothing there. You know, this usual distinction between observer and observed, knower and knowing, apprehended and apprehending. All of that was gone. So it's what some Buddhists often call a nondual experience.

是的。

Yep.

它并不是特别愉快。它是恐惧和狂喜。

It wasn't particularly pleasant. It was terror and ecstasy.

它不是迷幻体验的结果。

It wasn't the result of a psychedelic experience.

那是我——是的，我宁愿不谈。但它教会了我两件事：自我感——你知道，我们都有自我感，或显或隐。有些人的自我感较弱。他们不断贬低自己，你知道，他们不断想，‘天哪，所有人都恨我。’嗯，而且总是——我们都生活在自我星球的引力场中。总是关于我、我，或显或隐。但就像宇航员在特殊条件下可以失重并漂浮在太空外一样，所以在某些条件下，包括迷幻药当然，你可以完全失去那个自我。然后你意识到的是，自我意识只是所有可能体验的一个子集。我知道我是我、我知道我早餐吃了什么、我知道我有一天会死——所有这些都是意识。但你也可以——如果你没有那个，就像在那个状态中，剩下的无论是什么都显然是高度有意识的——然后它带走了对死亡的恐惧，你知道，这并不罕见。

It was something I—yeah, I prefer not to talk about. But what it taught me is two things: that the sense of self—you know, we all have a sense of self, explicit or implicit. Some people have it weaker. They constantly belittle themselves, you know, they constantly think, 'Oh my god, everyone hates me.' Um, and it's always—we all live in this gravitational field of planet ego. It's always about me, me, explicitly or implicitly. But then just like an astronaut in special conditions can become weightless and floating out of space, so under certain conditions, including psychedelics of course, you can totally lose that self. And what you realize then is that self-consciousness is just a subset of all possible experiences. The fact that I know I'm me, I know what I had for breakfast, I know I'm going to die one day—all of that is consciousness. But you can also—if you don't have that, like in that state, whatever remains is clearly highly conscious—and then it took away the fear of death, you know, which is not uncommon.

但后来我有了第二次体验，它并没有从根本上改变我的形而上学，即我对世界的思考方式。那是几年后，三年前，我经历了一次神秘体验，再次失去了自我感，失去了对所处位置和身份的感知，你感到——很难用语言形容——你感到与万物合一，与宇宙融合。

But then I had a second one that didn't change fundamentally my metaphysics, the way I think about the world. That happened several years later, three years ago, when I had a mystical experience where again you lose a sense of self, you lose where you are and what you are, and you feel—it's very strange to put it in words—you feel you become one with everything, you merge with the universe.

这本书的书名，那么，一定来自这里——世界源于此。这是从德语翻译过来的，就是瓦格纳歌剧中的内容——

And the title of this book, then, must have—the world comes from this. It's a translation from the German, which is what is in Wagner, you know, porn opera—

——你指的是歌剧？

—you mean the opera?

是的，当他们经历这种神秘体验时，两个恋人合为一体，也与宇宙合一，所以他们唱出这些。这是西方经典中最优美的音乐之一。他们与万物合一，这具有深刻的变革性。因为当我从中出来——我不知道持续了多久，大概不到一小时——我直接接触到我认为真正构成万物基础的东西：它是精神性的。我意识到，天哪，一切都是精神性的，一切都是现象性的，一切最终都是意识，而我们存在的这个物质宇宙最终是某种精神性的显现。这就是所谓的唯心主义，对吧？

Yes, when they have this mystical experience where they become one, the two lovers become one, but they also become one with the universe, so they sing that. It's some of the most beautiful music composed in the Western canon. They become one with everything, and that is profoundly transformative. Because once I came out of it—I don't know how long it lasted, probably under an hour—I had direct acquaintance with what I felt was truly underlying everything: that it is mental. I realized, oh my god, everything is mental, everything is phenomenal, everything ultimately is consciousness, and this material universe in which we exist ultimately is a manifestation of something mental. So this is known as idealism, right?

对吧？

Right?

不，西方大多数心身形而上学都围绕这两个极点：物理的和心理的。自希腊人以来，大多数人认为唯一真正存在的极点是物理的，其他一切必须以我们无法理解的方式从中涌现。或者有些人说不对，两者都存在——那就是经典的二元论者。这个国家的大多数人可能都是二元论者，对吧？显然有大脑和物质等等，但也有我的灵魂，那是分离的。然后还有唯心主义者。也有像戈夫采访过的泛心论者。还有像阿图尔·叔本华这样的唯心主义者，他可能是19世纪初最著名的德国哲学家。以及像贝尔纳多·卡斯特鲁普这样的现代唯心主义者，他说最终存在的是精神性的。精神性遵循规律，不是超自然的。所以它不意味着神或神的等级制度等的存在。它只是说最终存在的、真正存在的是某种东西——它可能非常原始，可能在某种本能规律下演化——而它产生了物质。对我来说，这正是我经历那种体验时的感受。

No, most of Western mind-body metaphysics revolves around these two poles, the physical and the mental. And since the Greeks, most people say the only pole that really exists is the physical, and everything else has to somehow emerge out of that in ways we don't understand. Or some people say no, it's both—that's your classical dualist. Most people in this country are probably dualists, right? There's clearly the brain and matter and all of that, but then there is my soul, and that's separate. And then there are idealists. There are also panpsychists like Goff interviewed. And then there are idealists like Arthur Schopenhauer, probably the best-known early 19th-century German philosopher. And modern idealists like Bernardo Kastrup, who says what ultimately exists is mental. The mental follows laws; it's not supernatural. So it doesn't imply the existence of a god or hierarchies of gods or anything like that. It just says finally what exists, or truly exists, is something—it may be very primitive, it may be evolving under some sort of instinctual law—and that gives rise to the material. And to me, that's exactly what it felt like when I had this experience.

我年轻时尝试过迷幻药。我现在 70 岁了。它极大地影响了我对世界的看法，或对现实的看法，对文明、结构等的看法。

I experimented with psychedelics when I was young. I'm 70 now. And it very much informed my view of the world, or view of reality, view of civilizations, structures, and all of that.

嗯，就像你描述的那样，自我感的瓦解和理解——不是逻辑上的理解，而是感觉宇宙中的一切都是一体的，都是由同样的东西构成的。

Well, just in the way that you're describing the breakdown of a sense of self and understanding—not a logical understanding but the feeling that everything in the universe is all one thing, you're all made of the same stuff.

是的。

Yes.

所以，我读你的研究时感兴趣的是，你在 Creek 工作中或之后，确定了大脑中负责自我感、自我体验的区域。那个自我以某种方式组织感知，使你能够在世界中操作、操纵世界。但如果你移除了那个自我感——它有物理对应物——那么你就没有了那个结构，这给了你合一的感觉。但这难道不能仅仅是自我的抑制和由此产生的体验吗？

And so what interests me about reading about your research, you identify in the creek work or maybe it happened after the creek work, the areas of the brain responsible for the sense of self, for the experience of the self. And that self organizes perception in a way that you can operate in the world, manipulate the world. But if you remove that sense of self which you have a physical correlate, then you're without that structure and that gives you the feeling of oneness. But could it simply be the suppression of the self and the resulting experience?

是的。正如物理主义者会说，好吧，你有过这种体验，恭喜。但最终，在迷幻药的情况下，那只是你的大脑。所以是你嗑药的大脑。好吧。所以它教给我们的只是大脑可以达到非凡的状态。

Yes. As a physicalist would say, okay, great that you had this experience. Congratulations. But ultimately it's just your brain, in the case of psychedelics. So it's your brain on drugs. Okay. So all it teaches us is that brains can reach extraordinary states.

现在，如果我们暂时停留在这一点上，仍然非凡的是，许多这些体验可以以积极的方式产生变革性——几乎总是积极的。我们从迷幻药追溯到约翰霍普金斯大学的研究中知道这一点：那些患有四期癌症的人，医学已经放弃——我们真的无能为力——他们害怕死亡。他们接受高剂量迷幻药，然后完全转变了自己。这并不能治愈他们的癌症。他们仍然会死。但他们现在愿意了，他们的心理完全转变了。我们知道，例如，国内外数百项临床试验正在使用迷幻药治疗难治性抑郁症、重度抑郁症、广泛性焦虑、PTSD 等。我们通过这些问卷，MEQ30，神秘体验问卷，知道在这些试验中人们经历神秘体验的程度与他们获得治疗益处的程度直接相关。换句话说，很可能当那个抑郁的患者有神秘体验——在这种情况下由迷幻药诱导——无论潜在的形而上学如何，都会帮助他们，他们甚至可能不再被评分为抑郁。不是立即之后——这不是瞬时效果——但然后你会思考它，你忍不住——我的意思是，克雷格，你可能仍然会回想你 50 年前的经历，对吧。因为你不断思考它，与他人谈论它，阅读它，也许你有治疗师并与他们谈论它，慢慢地它改变了你的整个生活，你的态度，你的动机。所以独立于形而上学，一个通常持续不到一小时、你无法很好控制的体验能产生这种变革性效果，这简直是奇迹。

Now if we just stay with that for a moment, what is still extraordinary is the fact that many of these experiences can be very transformative in a positive way—almost always in a positive way. We know this going back from psychedelics to the research at Johns Hopkins where people that have stage four cancer, where medicine has given up—we can't really do anything anymore—they're terrified of dying. They get a high dose of psychedelics and then they totally transform themselves. It doesn't cure them of the cancer. They will still die. But they're now willing, they have this completely transformed psyche. And we know, for instance, the hundreds of clinical trials both here and abroad doing psychedelics for treatment-resistant depression, major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety, PTSD, etc. And we know through these questionnaires, MEQ30, the mystical experience questionnaire, that the extent to which people have a mystical experience in these trials directly correlates to the extent that they derive therapeutic benefit. So in other words, it's quite likely when that patient who's depressed has a mystical experience—in this case induced by psychedelics—no matter the underlying metaphysics, it will help them and they might not even score as depressed anymore. Not immediately afterwards—this is not an instantaneous effect—but then you think about it, you cannot help—I mean you must probably still, Craig, think back about your experience, right, that you had 50 years ago. So because you constantly think about it and you talk with other people about it, you read about it, maybe you have a therapist and you talk to them about it, and slowly it changes your entire life in your attitude, your motivation. So independent of the metaphysics, the fact that an experience that typically lasts under an hour, that you can't really control very well, can have this transformative effect is nothing short of miraculous.

当你有濒死体验时，思考起来更具挑战性。所以濒死体验在特征上与这些神秘体验非常相似——人们已经证明了这一点——而这些通常发生在高度创伤的情况下。例如，你在医院内心脏骤停，或者你差点溺水，或在战场上，或车祸中失血过多。所以根据我们所有的知识，这些应该造成巨大的创伤。但相反，人们散发出这种平静，他们很满足。他们说这是我一生中最有意义的经历。它完全改变了我对亲人的态度。

It's even more challenging to think about when you have near-death experiences. So near-death experiences are very similar in character to these mystical experiences—people have shown that—and these of course typically occur in highly traumatic circumstances. For instance, you have an in-hospital cardiac arrest, or you're near drowning, or on the battlefield, or a car accident where you bleed out. So these are, by all of our knowledge, they should be causing massive trauma. But instead people radiate this equanimity and they're content. They say it's the most meaningful experience I've ever had in my life. It totally changed my attitude to my loved ones.

所以不管其背后的形而上学含义是什么，首先，它们是我们所知的最有意义、最深刻的体验之一，就是这样。

So no matter what the underlying metaphysical implications are, first, they are among the most meaningful and profound experiences that we know of, period.

是的。在你的一次演讲中，有一件事让我着迷：你谈到在迷幻剂作用下，大脑中的电脉冲会减慢，而你本以为会相反。

Yeah. One thing that fascinated me in one of your talks: you talked about how under psychedelics the electrical impulses slow down in the brain, where you would expect the opposite.

我认为，就迷幻剂的神经科学而言，我们还处于非常早期的阶段，尽管新闻公告不断承诺。我们还处在非常非常早期的阶段。我们仍然不理解它们对大脑做了什么。有两种明显的解释：一种是，好吧，最终这只是你的大脑，没有别的，继续前进，没什么可看的；或者你可以说，不，在那些情况下发生了什么？而这就是我试图走的路。

I think we're still very early on in terms of the neuroscience of psychedelics, despite what press announcements keep promising. We're still in very, very early days. We still don't understand what they do to the brain. There are these two obvious interpretations: one is, okay, ultimately it's just your brain, nothing else, move on, nothing to see; or you can say no, what happened in those circumstances? And that's the road I'm trying to go down.

不知怎的，你自己的——通常我们在我和你的意识之间有这个边界。我并不直接体验你，对吧？要了解你的感受，我必须问：“克雷格，你感觉如何？”你可以和你的伴侣、妻子或配偶在一起，你们的身体可以物理上穿透，但你仍然不知道她或他在想什么。最终你拥有的只是他们的话语和手势，对吧？它总是间接的。所以我们生活在一个我们各自拥有自己星球的世界里，如果你愿意，我们自己的泡泡。但在某些情况下，这个边界会溶解，突然你成为这个更大现实的一部分。

Somehow your own—so usually we have this boundary between my consciousness and your consciousness. I don't experience you directly, right? To find out how you feel I have to ask, "Craig, how do you feel?" And you can be with your partner, your wife or your spouse, your bodies can physically penetrate, but you still don't know what she or he is thinking. Ultimately all you have is their words and their gestures, right? It's always indirect. So we live in a world where we each have our own planets, if you want, our own bubbles. But under certain circumstances this boundary dissolves and suddenly you become part of this greater reality.

你知道，当我年轻的时候，我读了很多关于裂脑实验的书，对那个年龄天真的我来说，这解决了问题。好吧，那就是二元论的终结：你分裂大脑，你就有了两个意识，彼此之间或多或少不透明。

You know, when I was younger and I did a lot of reading about the split-brain experiments, and to me naively at that age that settled it for me. Well, that's the end of dualism: you split the brain, you have two consciousnesses more or less opaque to each other.

是的。

Yes.

你如何将这与意识是基本属性的观点调和？暂时撇开裂脑不谈，我现在并没有访问你的意识。我并没有像赫胥黎所说的那样访问这个普遍的 consciousness，对吧？假设它存在，为什么是这样？

How do you reconcile that with the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property? Leaving aside for a moment split brains, I don't right now access your consciousness. I don't access this universal consciousness at large as Huxley said, right? Assuming it exists, why is that?

嗯，因为通常为了生存，我需要关心——你知道，从进化上讲，我需要担心我自己、我的基因和我的孩子，对吧？好吧，如果我感觉我与一切合一，那就不起作用了。从进化上讲，我的意思是，那是一种奇妙的感觉，但那样不会产生你需要的竞争，对吧？因为我需要奋斗，我的基因需要生存，才能进入下一代。所以有很多原因解释为什么我的意识与这个普遍意识隔离。但在某些条件下，这些神秘体验——不知怎的，可能当大脑活动由于迷幻剂而变得非常非常非常低时，因为我们知道迷幻剂会抑制大量活动——你可能能够访问这种更普遍的[意识]。但通常你不会。所以现在我们谈到裂脑。什么——我转到——所以这些是在加州理工学院完成的，对吧，由罗杰·斯佩里完成；他因此获得了诺贝尔奖。你拿一个大脑，沿着中线切开，胼胝体，2 亿纤维，然后你有两个意识。这个会说话，这个会唱歌和哼唱，但它也有意识。虽然如你所说它们是不透明的——虽然它们坐在大脑中，你知道，彼此相距一厘米——它们不知道彼此。它们还不如在月球的暗面。你可以看到临床上由此产生的各种冲突。所以每个都有自己的解离边界，将其与邻居解离，你知道，只是一个微小、微小的间隙。但这是我们所有人生活的体验：我与你们以及任何其他意识[存在]隔离，只有在特殊情况下我们才能失去这种边界并访问其他一切。所以裂脑并不会使这更具挑战性，而只是解释一般来说，如果我的意识真正是普遍的，为什么我不一直访问它？所以你分裂了基质，它引导两个独立的——

Well, because typically in order for me to survive I need to care—you know, evolutionarily I need to worry about me and my genes and my kids, right? Well, that doesn't work if I feel I'm one with everything. Evolutionarily, I mean, that's a wonderful feeling, but that doesn't give rise to competition that you need, right? Because I need to struggle, my genes need to survive, to make it into the next generation. So there are lots of reasons why my consciousness is isolated from this universal consciousness. But under certain conditions, these mystical experiences—somehow possibly when the brain's activity is turned very, very, very low due to psychedelics, because we know psychedelics depress a lot of activity—you might be able to access this sort of more universal [consciousness]. But usually you do not. And so now we come to split brain. What's—I grind to—so these were done at Caltech, right, by Roger Sperry; you got the Nobel Prize for them. You take a brain, you cut it along the midline here, the corpus callosum, 200 million fibers, and then you have two consciousnesses. This one speaks, this one can sing and hum, but it's also conscious. And although as you said they're opaque—although they sit in the brain, you know, one centimeter away from the other—they don't know about each other. They may as well be at the dark side of the moon. And there are all sorts of conflicts that you can see in the clinic that arise because of that. So each one has its own dissociative boundary that dissociates it from its neighbor, just you know, just a tiny, tiny gap away. But that's the experience of all of our life: I'm isolated from you and from any other conscious [being], and it's only under special circumstances that we can lose this sort of boundary and access everything else. So the split brain wouldn't really make that more challenging than just to explain in general how is it, if mine is truly universal, why don't I access it all the time? So you split the substrate and it channels two separate—

嗯，现在你实际上有两个更小的大脑，这就是你所拥有的。

Well, now you have two smaller brains effectively, that's what you're having.

是的。你有两个更小的皮层。你不能无限期地这样做。你只能以这种方式将其一分为二。是的。你有两个独立的——你有两个独立的——一个我们知之甚少的相关体验是连体双胞胎。对吧。有一种非常罕见的情况，像暹罗双胞胎，但双胞胎在大脑层面相连。我知道一个案例，在我们北边的不列颠哥伦比亚省，他们共享部分大脑，可能在这种情况下，特别是在睡眠时，当他们的边界可能下降时，他们可能能够访问彼此。这是一个相当奇怪的案例。

Yeah. You have two smaller cortices. You can't do it indefinitely. You can only bisect it in this way. Yeah. You have two independent—you have two independent—a related experience that we know very little about is conjoined twins. Right. There is a very rare occurrence that, like Siamese twins, but that twins are connected at the level of the brain. There's one case I know in here north of us in British Columbia where they share part of their brain, and it may be under those circumstances that particularly during sleep, when their boundaries may be down, they may be able to access each other. It's a rather strange case.

有物理主义的观点，而我听到的是，在你的相关物研究中，你关于意识相关物的研究——大脑中哪些神经元放电与某些心理状态相关——你无法弥合物理与体验之间的差距。所以你把它卸载到一个基本属性上，而这些复杂的神经机制不知怎的能捕捉到那个基本属性。我们是否已经知道，或者至少大致知道，意识依赖于大脑的哪些部分？

There's the physicalist view, and what I'm hearing is that in your correlate work, your work on the correlates of consciousness—what neurons in the brain fire to correlate with certain mental states—that you just cannot close that gap between the physical and the experience. And so you offload it to a fundamental property, and these complex neural mechanisms somehow can capture that fundamental property. Do we know yet, or at least broad-brush, which parts of the brain consciousness depends on?

所以我们知道它依赖于脑干的机制，我们知道脑干中的小中风可以让你死亡或陷入昏迷，完全无反应。但据我们所知，鉴于我们能看到的东西——我现在看到的这些复杂场景，鉴于我能听到并意识到这么多不同的事物——那是大脑最外层，即皮层，的属性，厚度为 2 到 3 毫米。所以它像一个披萨，12 到 14 英寸的披萨，那个厚度。你有两个。它们高度卷曲，塞进我的左右半球。特别是，似乎是那个结构的后部似乎产生了视觉、听觉、触觉和欲望，这些是我们最了解的模式。我认为很清楚——证据表明，如果你没有这些大脑部分，你将陷入严重麻烦，或者我们可以预测——我的意思是奥利弗·萨克斯在 30 年前写过这个——取决于皮层哪部分缺失，你会有特定的缺陷。就像你无法看到你的脸，尽管你可以完全看到眼睛、鼻子和头发，但你不再有那种对脸的有意识体验，因为他失去了传递那个的神经元。

So we know that it depends on mechanisms in the brain stem, and we know small strokes in the brain stem can render you dead or in a coma where you're totally unresponsive. But as far as we can tell, given what we can see—these complex scenes that I see right now, given that I can hear and be conscious of so many different things—that is a property of the outermost layer of the brain, the cortex, which is two to three millimeters. So it's like a pizza, 12 to 14 inch pizza, that thickness. And you have two of them. They're highly convoluted and crammed into my left and my right hemisphere. In particular, it seems to be the back part of that structure that seems to give rise to seeing and hearing and touching and wanting, which are the modalities that we understand best. I think it's clear—the evidence shows that if you don't have these parts of the brain you're going to be in severe trouble, or we can predict—I mean Oliver Sacks wrote about this 30 years ago—depending on which part of cortex is gone, you will have specific deficits. Like you are unable to see your face, although you can perfectly well see the eyes and the nose and the hair, but you don't have that conscious experience of a face anymore because he lost the neurons that convey that.

所以从这个意义上说，它们是足迹，你可以追踪并识别它们。问题是：它们是否产生了意识？基质的本质是什么，或者你需要基质吗？大多数思考意识并构建意识理论的人，会拿大脑试图从中榨取意识的汁液。用圣经的比喻来说，他们试图把大脑的水变成意识的酒。他们说必须是这个东西：全局工作空间，或信息的广播，或第五层神经元，或 NMDA 受体，或像哈默罗夫那样的微管，等等。但再次问，为什么是这个而不是那个？为什么是微管而不是其他细胞器？

So in that sense, they are footprints, and you can track them and identify them. The question is: do they give rise to consciousness? What is the nature of the substrate, or do you need a substrate at all? Most people who think about consciousness and make theories of consciousness take the brain and try to squeeze the juice of consciousness out of it. They try to turn the waters of the brain into the wine of consciousness, to adopt a biblical metaphor. They say it has to be this thing: a global workspace, or broadcast of information, or layer five neurons, or NMDA receptors, or microtubules like Hameroff, or whatever. But again, why this and not that? Why microtubules and not some other cellular organelle?

所以有一个独特的理论，叫做整合信息理论，它采取不同的方法。它是一种意识优先的叙述。它真的从笛卡尔开始的地方开始：我绝对确定的唯一事情是我有意识，因为即使在怀疑它时，我也重新肯定了它。此外，意识是我遭遇世界的唯一方式。如果我是一名科学家，我仍然依赖它——我必须阅读论文或书籍，那是视觉意识。我必须看示波器，再次互动；我必须听盖革计数器，那是听觉意识。所以我与世界互动的唯一方式，包括与我自己的身体，是通过我的意识体验。所以如果你想一想，我直接熟悉、直接知道的唯一事情是意识体验。因此，任何意识理论——这不同于神经相关物或意识物理基质的理论——任何意识理论都必须从意识开始，然后从那里说哪个系统有意识以及它们意识到什么。这个理论，整合信息理论，主要架构师是朱利奥·托诺尼，一位意大利出生的美国精神病学家和神经科学家，在威斯康星大学医学部。这是一个这样做的理论。现在，这是一个科学理论，很可能错误。

So there's one theory that's unique, called integrated information theory, that takes a different approach. It's a consciousness-first account. It really starts where René Descartes started: the only thing I'm absolutely certain of is that I'm conscious, because even in doubting it, I reassert it. Furthermore, consciousness is the only way I encounter the world. If I'm a scientist, I still depend on it—I have to read papers or books, that's visual consciousness. I have to look at an oscilloscope, again I interact; I have to listen to a Geiger counter, that's auditory consciousness. So the only way I interact with the world, including my own body, is through my conscious experience. So if you think about it, the only thing I have direct acquaintance with, direct knowledge of, is conscious experience. And so any theory of consciousness—which is different from a theory of the neural correlates or physical substrate of consciousness—any theory of consciousness has to start with consciousness and then go from there to say which system is conscious and what they are conscious of. This theory, integrated information theory, the main architect is Giulio Tononi, an Italian-born American psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin Medicine. It's a theory that does that. Now, it's a scientific theory and may well be wrong.

在大脑中是否有对应物？你有所有这些不同的脑结构，它们合作但独立运作，并且它们是整合的，这对意识是必要的。事实上，这就是为什么——例如，如果你问我大多数神经元在哪里，你 80% 的神经元在这里，在后面一个叫做小脑的小脑中。好的，那是 80%。这个皮层大约有 160 亿。后面的这个有 690 亿，占 80%，其余只有 10 亿。但事实证明它们不是很整合。它们组织成二维板层，并且主要具有前馈环路。就像在深度 LLM 中，一个阶段激发下一个阶段，再激发下一个阶段，作为反馈。我认为这正是为什么小脑——如果你失去小脑，对你不好。当你去看医生做这些测试时，那就是测试小脑功能的时候：你看起来像喝醉了，你跌倒，你的言语含糊，等等。所以这个小脑在那里做感觉运动协调等，但人们从不抱怨小脑损伤导致意识丧失。所以从经验上看，它似乎不这样做。它似乎与意识无关，因为它不是很整合。而这正是皮层所做的，因为它非常密集的连接——那是反馈和兴奋性的，小世界连接，丰富的枢纽等。这就是为什么我认为皮层是基质，在我们身上产生非常高度的意识，特别是在成年人中，在正常的典型成年人中，产生像你和我这样非常有意识的人。

Is there a correlate to that in the brain? You have all these different structures of the brain that are cooperating but operating independently, and they're integrated, and that's necessary for consciousness. Is that in fact why—so for instance, if you ask me where most of the neurons are, 80% of your neurons are here in the back in a little brain called the cerebellum. Okay, that's 80%. This cortex has roughly 16 billion. This in the back has 69 billion of the 80, and all the rest is only 1 billion. But it turns out they're not very integrated. They're organized in two-dimensional slabs and they have primarily feedforward loops. So like in a deep LLM where one stage excites the next stage, excites the next stage, as feedback. Which I think is precisely why the cerebellum—if you lose a cerebellum it's not good for you. When you go to the doctor to do these sorts of tests, that's when you test for cerebellar function: you look like you're drunk, you tumble, your speech slurs, etc. So this cerebellum is there to do sensory-motor coordination among others, but people never complain that a lesion in the cerebellum causes loss of consciousness. So it doesn't seem to do it empirically. It doesn't seem to relate to consciousness because it's not very well integrated. And this is really what cortex does because of its very dense connectivity—that's feedback and excitatory, small-world connectivity, rich hubs, etc. That's why I think cortex is the substrate that in us gives rise to these very high degrees, particularly in adults, in normal typical adults, giving rise to people like you and I who are very conscious.

我想以人工智能和当前复杂的大型语言模型作为结束。杰夫·辛顿，我曾在播客中多次邀请他，他正在发言，而且他长期以来一直如此。LLM 一出现，我就和他谈过，他相信存在理解。他当时这么说，现在他使用意识这个词。为什么一组复杂的人工神经元不能有体验？我知道你不相信它们能。

I want to just end on artificial intelligence and the current complex large language models. Jeff Hinton, who I've had several times on the podcast, is speaking, and he has for a long time. As soon as LLM came out, I talked to him and he believed that there was understanding. He was saying at that time, now he's using the term consciousness. Why could a complex set of artificial neurons not have experience? And I know that you don't believe that they can.

嗯，原则上，是的，当然它们可以。再次，大脑只是一块普通的物质。硅是另一块物质。所以先验地，没有什么——这不是说这个 somehow 是超自然的，对吧？一个特殊的属性，另一个没有。事实上，如果你建造所谓的神经形态计算机，那么那个计算机，如果它真正具有我们这样的构造，像我的大脑或你的大脑，它就会有意识。但这不是一个功能理论。所以功能主义理论——大多数科学意识理论是功能主义的——说大脑意识有一定数量的功能，无论它们是什么，一旦你在通用图灵机中复制这些功能，那么所有属性都会随之而来，包括意识。是的。所以迟早，你知道，要么会有意识，要么已经有意识，你知道，Claude。你可以争辩说，也许不完全，因为还有一个缺失的装置，你知道，随便。但至少根据 IIT，在 IIT 内，你可以正式展示，使用形式数学和现象数字机器的模型，这些机器具有非常低的连接性，它们本质上更像一系列前馈网络。它们没有皮层那种高度互联的特征。所以你可以正式展示你可以有两个网络。你可以有一个大脑模型和一个 LLM 或类似 LLM 的东西，或一个现象机器模拟 LLM。尽管在功能上它们从输入到输出有完全相同的转换。一个会有很多因果力量，会感觉像什么，另一个不会感觉像什么，因为根据 IIT，体验与结构有关，与机制中固有的因果力量有关，而这真的取决于它如何连接在一起。你必须看引擎盖下面。根据它，你不能只是像图灵测试那样做，问它一堆问题，如果它给我正确的答案，那么我就可以说打勾。不，我必须打开引擎盖，看看底层硬件。但当然你可以争辩说这是无关紧要的，因为今天已经有很多人——对，有数百万人把它们作为朋友、作为女朋友，你知道，用作治疗师。所以实际上，人们似乎表现得好像它们有意识。

Well, it's in principle, yes, of course they can. Once again, the brain is just a regular piece of matter. And silicon is another piece of matter. So a priori there's nothing—it's not that this is supernatural somehow, right? A special property that the other one doesn't have. And in fact, were you to build what's called a neuromorphic computer, so that computer, if it truly has our sort of constitution like my brain or your brain, it would be conscious. But it's not a functional theory. So functionalist theory—the majority of scientific theories of consciousness are functional—says well the brain consciousness has a certain number of functions whatever they are and once you reproduce these functions even in a universal Turing machine then all the properties will come with it including consciousness. Yeah. So sooner or later, you know, on topic either will be conscious or is already conscious, you know, Claude. And you can argue, well, maybe not quite because there's still this one missing gadget, you know, whatever. But at least according to the IIT, within IIT, you can formally show using formal mathematics and models of phenomenal digital machines that have very low connectivity, they are essentially much more like a series of feedforward networks. They don't have this heavily interconnected character that cortex has. So you can formally show that you can have two networks. You can have a model of a brain and an LLM or something like an LLM or a phenomenal machine simulating an LLM. Although functionally they have the exact same transformation from input to output. One will have a lot of causal power, will feel like something, the other one will not feel like something because experience according to IIT has to do with the structure, the causal powers inherent in a mechanism, and that really depends on the way it's wired together. You have to look under the hood. That can't—according to it, you can't just do it like a Turing test, like ask it a bunch of questions and if it gives me the right answer then I can say check mark. No, I have to open the hood and look at the underlying hardware. But of course you could argue it's immaterial because many people already today—right, there are millions of people who have them as their friends, as their girlfriends, you know, use them as therapists. So practically speaking, people seem to behave like they're conscious.

你说过，计算机中重要的是晶体管开关门。我想那是你说的，不是模式。

There's you, you say that what counts in a computer is the transistors opening and closing gates. I think that was you, not the pattern.

这是一种因果理论。它真正关注的是因果力量，你必须考察实际机器的因果力量。让我给你一个很好的比喻。今天我们可以完美地模拟爱因斯坦的广义相对论方程，它描述了银河系中心的人马座 A* 恒星。它重 300 万太阳质量。它有 300 万太阳质量，所以它弯曲周围的时空，任何东西都无法逃脱，也就是说，它是一个黑洞。你可以模拟这个，但有趣的是，当你开启模拟时，你不必担心它会把你吸进那个时空，或者会在运行模拟的计算机周围扭曲时空。是的。今天的大型语言模型，就像我采访卡西亚时那样，他看起来非常聪明、非常雄辩。但那是模拟，模拟——这就是模拟某物和实际对自身产生物理影响之间的区别。它不具备人脑那样的因果力量。

It is a causal theory. It's really concerned with causal powers and you have to look at the causal power of the actual machine. Let me give you a really good metaphor. Today we can perfectly well simulate Einstein's equation of general relativity that described the central sun at the center of our galaxies in Sagittarius A star. Okay. It weighs 3 million solar masses. It has 3 million solar masses and so it bends spacetime around it so nothing can escape, i.e., it's a black hole. And you can simulate this, but funnily enough when you turn on the simulation you don't have to be afraid that it's going to suck you into that spacetime, is going to distort around the computer doing carrying out the simulation. Yes. Today LLMs like in this interview I did with Casia and he seemed perfectly seemed to be a very smart very eloquent person. Um but that's a simulation and simulation you have this is the difference between simulating something and actually physically making a difference to yourself. It doesn't have the causal power that the human brain has.

让我困扰的是，你把模式和门所处理的信息分开了，模式是一个元层，它由晶体管及其门执行，但模式本身——我是说，詹姆斯·格雷克有一本很棒的书《信息》，我不知道你读过没有，但一切都可以归结为代码、信息，而且

What bothers me about that separation of the patterns and the information that the gates are processing, the pattern that's a meta layer, it's being executed by the transistors and their gates, but the pattern itself, I mean, there's James Gleick has a wonderful book The Information, I don't know if you've read it, but everything comes down to a code to information and

不，但代码在你头脑中。当我们像你和我这样交谈时，我们是有意识的存在，所以编码隐喻才有意义。机器内部没有人去读取它们。所以这个代码隐喻——是的，对你我来说它可能是代码，因为我们是有意识的存在，我们可以俯视它，但问题是机器本身是否有意义？不。它所做的就是接收任何输入，然后预测下一个东西、再下一个、再下一个。它做得非常出色。我承认所有这些。它显然通过了图灵测试，但这并不意味着它有感觉。

No, but the code is in your head. The code when we talk like you and I, we are two conscious creatures and so the coding metaphor makes sense. There's no one to read them inside the machine. So this code metaphor, yeah, to you and I it might be a code because we're conscious creatures we can look down at it, but the question is does a machine by itself, is it meaningful? No. And all it does, it just takes whatever it gets and then it predicts the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. It does it amazingly well. I grant all of that. It's clearly passed the Turing test, but that doesn't mean it feels like anything.

是的。这就是为什么我对彭罗斯和哈梅罗夫的理论如此感兴趣，因为他们试图 pinpoint 大脑神经元中的一种机制，该机制会引导或存在某种量子效应，然后你可以将意识卸载到量子领域。你对此怎么看，关于微管和

Yeah. And that's why I was so interested in Penrose and Hameroff's theory because they were trying to pinpoint a mechanism in the neurons of the brain that would channel or in which there would be some quantum effect and then you could offload consciousness to the quantum realm. How do you feel about that, about the microtubules and

好吧，撇开微管不谈，我认为那是极其推测性的，罗杰·彭罗斯是第一个承认这一点的人。显然，像你我、狗和树这样的生物，和其他任何东西一样，都受相同的量子力学定律支配，对吧？但当然，它们的运作方式不同于——例如，如果你去谷歌看量子计算机，像谷歌制造的那种，它们在 27 毫开尔文下运行。好吧。所以 0 毫开尔文是绝对零度。没有分子运动了。我们生活在比那高大约 27 度的地方，对吧？所以这是难以想象的寒冷。它比外太空冷得多，因为外太空是 4 开尔文，对吧，背景辐射。所以你需要极端隔离的环境、极端的真空来消除所有这些运动，分子和原子的碰撞会消除这些量子力学效应。鉴于这个星球上的生物是在物理学家所说的温暖潮湿的环境中进化的，你知道，有大量的水。

Well, leaving aside the microtubules, I think that's extremely speculative and Roger Penrose is the first to admit that. Clearly the creatures like me and you and dogs and trees are subject to the same laws of quantum mechanics just like anything else, right? But of course they operate unlike if you go for example to Google to quantum computers like Google makes them, they operate at 27 millikelvin. Okay. So 0 degree millikelvin is absolute zero. No more molecular motion. We live at you know roughly um you know 27 we live at degrees above that, right? So this is unimaginable cold. It's vastly colder than outer space because outer space is 4° Kelvin, right, the background radiation. So you need extreme isolated environments, extreme vacuum to eliminate all this motion, the jostling of the molecules and the atoms that would eliminate these quantum mechanical effects. Given that biology on this planet evolved in what physicists would call a warm and wet environment, you know, with lots of water.

是的。绝大多数人，生物学家和物理学家认为，好吧，生物学，量子力学一般与生物学无关。是的，有一些特殊效应，比如光在光感受器中与光子相遇，但总的来说，所有这些大规模的东西，特别是叠加和坍缩之类的事情，那些都不重要。

Yeah. The vast majority of people, of biologists and physicists argue okay biology, quantum mechanics simply isn't relevant for biology in general. Yeah, there are some special effects like maybe where light meets the photons in your photoreceptors but by and large all these large scale like particular like superposition and collapse thing those things don't matter.

所以我和一群人合作，我们正在非常努力地从经验上证明存在这些量子效应，像核自旋这样的东西确实对生物学有影响，有一些诱人的证据我们可以深入探讨，但会变得非常技术性，关于这样的假设，但到目前为止，结论仍然是：到目前为止还没有一个可信的、可重复的实验显示在室温下生物系统中的微观量子力学效应，尽管它一定存在。我的意思是，要操纵量子态，是的，你需要将它们超冷，但这并不意味着量子效应在室温下就停止发生了。

So I have a collaboration with a bunch of people where we're trying very hard to show empirically that there are these, that there are quantum effects, that things like nuclear spin do matter for biology and there's some tantalizing evidence that we can go into but it gets very technical about such hypothesis but so far the verdict is still there's so far not a believable reproducible experiment that shows microscopic quantum mechanical effects in biology at room temperature although it must be there. I mean to manipulate quantum states yeah you need to super cool them but that doesn't mean that quantum effects stop happening at room temperature.

好吧，除了你说得对，但那样它们会在 10^-9 秒内立即消失，因为你知道一切都在不断振动。

Well except that you're right but then they would immediately within 10^-9 seconds wash out because you know everything is constantly vibrating.

是的。你知道，所以你操作量子计算机的方式是，你处于这种令人难以置信的静态环境中，几乎没有分子运动，你可以冻结它，然后你得到叠加态。鉴于我们的大脑处于这种状态，任何叠加或纠缠态都会在你知道的一纳秒内立即消失。所以这就是挑战。现在是否有特殊的保护环境？我的意思是，进化非常聪明，进化有很长时间来选择事物，任何不被——这也是斯图尔特·哈默的论点，我同意——任何不被物理定律排除的东西，原则上都可以被生物学一般利用，特别是神经生物学。但现在我们根本没有积极的证据。我们和其他人正在尝试，但到目前为止还没有什么太令人信服的。

Yeah. You know and so the way you operate quantum computers, you are in this incredible static environment where there's almost no more molecular motion and you can freeze it and then you get the superposition. Given that you know our brains are in this state, any any superimposed or entangled state would immediately within you know a nanosecond disappear. So that's the challenge. Is there now are there special protected environments? I mean evolution is very clever and evolution had a lot of time to select things and anything not, this is also Stuart Hammer's argument I agree with that, anything not ruled out by the laws of physics can in principle be exploited by biology in general and by neurobiology in particular. But right now we simply don't have any positive evidence for that. We and other people are trying but so far it's still nothing too convincing.

但这意味着我们不再知道成为物理的到底意味着什么，事实上，一些基础物理学的人现在认为可能不存在绝对事实，就像我是个骑自行车的人。我没有汽车。我有几辆自行车。我的自行车静止时有一个特定的质量。它重多少我不知道，25 公斤左右吧。但量子力学会说，直到某物与那辆自行车相互作用，它才可以说有质量。这不是你不知道质量，那只是认识论的限制。你知道，我不知道世界上大多数事情。不，而是说，谈论它有一个特定的质量根本说不通，直到根据不同的解读，要么有东西观察它，要么以其他方式与它相互作用。

But what that means that we don't know anymore what it means exactly to be physical and some people in the foundation of physics in fact are now arguing that there may not be absolute facts in the sense that I'm a biker. I don't own a car. I have several bikes. My bike at rest has a particular mass. It weighs like I don't know 25 kilo or whatever. But quantum mechanics would say until and unless something interacts with that bicycle, it doesn't have probably speaking a mass. It's not that you don't know the mass. That's just an epistemic limitation. We you know I don't know most things in the world. No, it's that it simply doesn't make sense to talk about it like it has a specific mass until depending on the reading either something as something observes it or otherwise interacts with it.

现在再说一次，这不再是我祖父的唯物主义了。所以这是一个持续存在的挑战，事实上，一些基础物理学的物理学家现在正在引入意识。他们可能——他们开始认为，意识在某种意义上必须被构建到我们现实的最底层描述中。

Now again this is not my grandfather's materialism anymore. So that's been one persistent challenge and in fact some some physicists in foundational physics are now bringing in consciousness. They might they they are beginning to argue that consciousness in a sense has to be built into at the rock bottom the rock bottom description of our of our reality.

所以物理主义者和非物理主义者之间的分界线非常非常难定义。于是人们就说，那是未来的物理学。好吧，但那个未来的物理学——你知道，那就像在等末日降临。是啊，也许将来我们会有一套物理学，也许那里面包含意识，据我所知也未可知。

So the demarcation line between physicalist and non-physicalist is very, very difficult to define. And so people say, well, it's a future physics. Well, okay, but the future physics — you know, that's like waiting for the rapture. Yeah, maybe in future we'll have a physics, and maybe that includes consciousness, for all I know.

你接下来要往哪个方向走？你在做量子方面的研究。

Where are you going next? You're working on the quantum.

是的，我们在做这方面的实验。对，这是我一直非常感兴趣的一件事。我一直觉得可能性很小，现在仍然觉得可能性很小。但科学和自然最妙的地方在于：如果你向自然提出正确的科学问题，你就会得到正确的答案。你会得到一个答案。你知道，这就是我们的主张——你必须设计正确的实验来检验它，但之后你总会得到一个答案，无论朝哪个方向。所以我们迟早会知道，至于是否在我的有生之年，谁知道呢。

Yeah, we're doing experiments on that. Yeah, that's one thing I'm just really interested in. I always thought the chances are very small, and I still think the chances are very small. But the great thing about science and nature is: if you ask the right scientific question to nature, you will get the right answer. You will get an answer. And you know, this is what we claim — you have to design the right experiment to test this, but then you will get an answer one way. So we will know sooner or later whether it's going to be on my watch or not, who knows.

你觉得你死的时候会发生什么？

What do you think is going to happen when you die?

这些都是很美的比喻——这道波的涟漪。你把海洋想象成“大心灵”或宇宙意识，这片巨大的海洋。然后有一个小小的漩涡，这个漩涡已经存在了 69 年，你知道，也许，天意如此，它还会再存在 10 年或 20 年。但最终这个漩涡会汇入、会变成——你知道，当然会消散，会失去它的身份，它那自我意识将永远消失，然后它回归海洋。

These are beautiful metaphors — these ripples of this wave. You take an ocean, think of it like the mind at large or universal consciousness, this gigantic ocean. And there's this little eddy, and this eddy has existed for 69 years, and you know, maybe, you know, God willing, it'll exist for another 10 or 20 years. But ultimately this eddy will merge, will become — you know, will of course disintegrate, will lose its identity, its egoic consciousness will be gone forevermore, and it returns to the ocean.