Through a Glass, Darkly: Part Two

Last week we ended in a laboratory in Melbourne, with a man who grows human brain cells in a dish and teaches them to play Doom. He told us they’re about as complex as a cockroach. He also told us where the cells come from. Human blood. Some of it his own.This is the half where it stops being a question about machines.Hon Weng Chong, CEO and founder of Cortical Labs, draws a red line, and it isn’t at intelligence. It’s at suffering. He won’t build a system that could be conscious, because a system that can be conscious is a system that can be hurt. If that sounds familiar, it should: it is David Benatar’s argument against having children, arriving from the opposite side of the world and pointed at a dish. Hon also explains why he doesn’t think a large language model will ever get there, and why the reason is embodiment. You can’t be a self, he argues, without a body running at the same speed as the world.Then a detour through the three things people believe when there’s nothing to measure. Panpsychism, which says consciousness is everywhere, in you and in the rock and in the weather system. Solipsism, which says it’s only in you, and every other mind you’ve ever loved could be running empty. And integrated information theory, which is the attempt to make it a science, to put an actual number on how much consciousness a system has. A brain. A dish of neurons. A chatbot. In 2023, a hundred and twenty-four researchers signed an open letter calling that one pseudoscience.Three positions, one hole in the middle. There is no test for consciousness. There never was.Philosopher Timothy Morton, who gave us the word hyperobject, explains why artificial intelligence qualifies: it is a thing so massively distributed across time and space that you can understand it but never perceive the whole of it. And why describing it as demonic is, in the original and precise sense of the word, simply accurate.Dr. Michael Ferguson of Harvard’s Neurospirituality Research Lab arrives at embodiment from inside a scanner. Spirituality, he says, is wired to the periaqueductal gray, a knot of tissue in the brain stem whose entire job is carrying signals up from the body. Two men, two disciplines, two hemispheres, who have never spoken to each other, landing on the same word. Which is a problem for Hans Moravec, who in 1988 wrote the book this whole future is built on, correctly predicted the decade the machines would catch up, proved the body carries a billion years of knowledge, and th