Just over a year ago, for the third time in my life, I ceased to exist I was having a small operation, my brains filling with anesthetic, I remember a sense of detachment and falling apart and coldness. And then I was back drowsy and disoriented, but definitely there. Now when you wake from a deep sleep, you might feel confused about the time or anxious about oversleeping. 

But there's always a basic sense of time having passed that the continuity between then and now and coming out from anesthesia is very different. I could have been under for five minutes, five hours, five years or even 50 years, I simply wasn't there was total oblivion. anesthesia, it's a modern kind of magic, it turns people into objects. And then we hope back again into people, and in this process is one of the greatest remaining mysteries in science and philosophy. How does consciousness happen? Somehow, within each of our brains, the combined activity of many billions of neurons, each one, a tiny biological machine is generating a conscious experience. And not just any conscious experience your conscious experience right here and right now, how does this happen? Well, answering this question is so important, because consciousness for each of us, is all there. It's without it, there's no world. There's no self, there's nothing at all. And when we suffer, we suffer consciously, whether it's through mental illness or pain. And if we can experience joy and suffering, what about other animals? might they be conscious to do they also have a sense of self and as computers get faster, and smarter, maybe there'll come a point maybe not too far away, when my iPhone develops a sense of its own existence.

Now, I actually think the prospects for a conscious AI are pretty remote. And I think this because my research is telling me that consciousness has less to do with pure intelligence, and more to do with nature as living and breathing. organisms. consciousness and intelligence are very different things. You don't have to be smart to suffer, but you probably do have to be alive. And the story I'm going to tell you are conscious experiences of the world around us. And if our sounds within us are kinds of controlled hallucinations, that happen with through and because of our living bodies.

Download Transcript