Arjun Khemani

Tom Hyde

 Now anyone familiar with the Deutschian picture sees this as the disaster case.

 It's not utopia, it is dystopia. Utopia is in the Deutschian 

 view, by definition, a dystopia because it is a state that cannot

 be improved. So the idea that we can reach a static position whereby 

 should not progress is anathema to everything I've been talking about.

 Not only is it an incredibly pessimistic position with regard to ageing and death, because implicit

 to the theory is that everyone who is born 

 should die, because if they didn't, they would

 linger past the point of equilibrium, population equilibrium, and that would destroy the economic balance.

 It is also just incredibly unambitious, with regards to a 

 utopian ideal set with economics maybe 50% or 100% greater than today.

 To think that that is the state from which we 

 don't need to improve upon is disastrous and so sad.

 And it relies upon this fallacy that you alluded 

 to, that nature, the natural world, the biosphere,

 is fundamentally balanced, peaceful, safe. Which, looking at history and prehistory,

 is the most easily refuted theory you can imagine. The history of biological harmony

 is the history of biological torture, death, destruction, genocide, specicide.

 99.9% of all species have gone extinct and naturalists 

 this system as some higher ethical ideal. And it's ridiculous.

 I've often thought at the centre of both naturalist 

 and animal rights logics is this glaring contradiction

 between the fact of abiotic and biotic factors basically being at war since biology's inception

 3.8 billion years ago and the fact that 

 do not live in harmony with their environments,

 they live at the mercy of their environments 

 and more often than not are murdered by those

 environments. So the logical next conclusion for an animal rights activist should be

 to remove all animals from nature. We should domesticate all animals or potentially

 there's no real difference between the genetic code of an animal and the actual animal being

 alive. If you think animals are conscious 

 then there is, we can get into that if you want,

 but we could sequence the genomes of all extant species, store them digitally and robustly and

 then when we're wealthy enough we can create a nature reserve somewhere where they are not

 at the mercy of each other and of the poverty of their surroundings.

 But yeah, back to degrowth, I think is the Shoggoth demon behind the mask of emissions.

 And what I mean by that is, when most people criticise fossil fuels, they use emissions

 as the main proxy, the point of target for that criticism, because emissions are a specific

 type of atmospheric pollution which create the greenhouse effect, which increases temperatures,

 which increases the hazards associated with a hotter climate.

 And for the record, all those hazards associated with warmth and heat are real. Human-induced

 climate change is real and accelerating, and it is a problem that needs to be solved.

 The problem with the mainstream Paris Agreement-type solutions is that they take emissions

 and the hazards as the only aspect affecting climate risk, which is entirely false.

 Now I wrote an article titled One Equation to Make You Rethink the Climate Crisis, because

 as I've said, when we think about climate issues, we think about the hazards alone.

 We think about heat and hurricanes and floods 

 and forest fires, but they are just one aspect,

 one of four, that impact risk. So if you take 

 climate risk, hazard is one of those positive features.

 It scales positively also with exposure, which is a measure of how much things there are

 to be destroyed. For example, a nuclear warhead 

 tested in the Nevadan desert, there's a lot less exposure

 in that desert than there is in Las Vegas, because there's more people and there's more

 property to be destroyed. There's also vulnerability.

 Risk increases with vulnerability. People have more vulnerability to nuclear weapons than they do to rainwater.

 And that's so the proclivity to be harmed or damaged by a hazard.

 And then risk scales negatively with resilience, which is your ability to return back to initial

 conditions. So for example, you need to have some 

 vulnerability to have resilience, you need to be damaged

 by a hazard. So a good example of this is a 

 that burns down in a fire, but has insurance that

 makes the process of rebuilding that house cheap and effective.

 The hazard remains, but the risk is minimized.

 How this relates to fossil fuels is that when you burn hydrocarbons, you do create this

 greenhouse effect and you do increase temperatures, which does increase hazard.

 It also increases wealth because energy is probably the best proxy for wealth because

 in every industry, energy has its hands, its footprint.

 So we can say, as a rough estimate, 80% of 

 our wealth is indebted to fossil fuel energy,

 the burning of hydrocarbons, which has increased hazard, but it's also decreased vulnerability

 and increased resilience to the point where risk has actually fallen compared with the

 alternative, which is where we curb cheap, plentiful, scalable energy, which is fossil

 fuel energy for poorer countries who are 

 falling prey to this false idea of a natural

 harmony and are poor and have higher vulnerability, less 

 resilience to natural hazard, and the risk is actually higher.

 Now I'm very pro-innovating green technologies to the point where they compete with fossil

 fuels on the market without subsidy in their aspects of like cost, scalability, portability,

 all these aspects we need from a wide-spanning energy system.

 moment too expensive and takes too long to

 build. It's about 10 years for a big fission reactor for developing countries.

 So there are plans to make modular fission reactors where the reactors are built on production

 lines and then shipped by rail to wherever needs them in literal sea containers.

 The quickest way for us to achieve this goal, to innovate green technologies so that they

 out-compete with fossil fuels, is to increase and accelerate our 

 use of fossil fuels. This is the effective accelerationist argument.

 And this ties back to the resource arguments from earlier, in that energy is a resource

 because we want to fuel our cars, we want 

 to heat our homes, and the burning of fossil

 manganese in steel alloying actually contributes to the

 wealth creation which allows for its replacement and superseding. So the use of fossil fuels

 has created the wealth for us to discover 

 physics and to discover both fission and fusion.

 And again, in the Deutschland picture, this process is fundamentally unbounded.

 The use of fission and fusion energies will contribute to the development of their energy

 successors. And the use of carbon nanotubes will create 

 wealth and the resources to create its material successor.

 So to conclude, not only do fossil fuels, the burning of hydrocarbons, make us safer

 from climate hazards, they also increase, accelerate 

 rate at which we can eliminate the use of fossil fuels.

 Okay, so let's talk about animal consciousness.

 Do we yet have a good explanation to think that animals are conscious creatures and that

 they can feel pain and suffer and hence eating meat is cruel?

 And while we're at it, we could discuss human consciousness as well.

 Is it just an assumption on my end to think that you, Tom, are conscious?

 Or is there a good explanation to think that you, me, and 

 everyone listening to and understanding this conversation is conscious?

 So it's important to note, before we speak about consciousness, that compared with the

 other arguments we've discussed in this talk, and other arguments and topics that both Popper

 and Deutsch discuss, it's built on a lot 

 shakier ground. So compared to, for example, the many

 worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, Deutsch would argue that is not only the best

 explanation of quantum mechanics, it is the only explanation of quantum mechanics. Now,

 animal consciousness and consciousness more broadly, the hard problem of consciousness,

 qualia, we have no single theory, let alone competing theories to distinguish between.

 So we can't lend anything the status of 

 our best explanation. We are very much in the

 realm of raw conjecture. But I do think 

 there are some key insights from both Popper

 and Deutsch that serve as valid criticisms towards the theory that animals are conscious

 For the purpose of this discussion, I'm going to ignore panpsychism and other arguments

 of that kind, and just focus on arguments that posit that consciousness arises from

 information processing, computation, physical processes in the universe.

 The mainstream view takes the shape of a 

 spectrum we can imagine from, for example, rocks and

 atoms at the one end, which most people, apart from panpsychists, would think are not conscious,

 biological life, like an amoeba, and then to a flea,

 and then to an ant and a fish, and dogs, 

 cats, dolphins, large apes, and then humans at the

 top end. And potentially, a lot of people would maybe even posit that super-intelligent AGIs would

 have a higher level of consciousness relative to us, because they're doing some quote-unquote

 quasi-magical thinking that humanity people can't do.

 So, in this sense, the level of consciousness directly 

 relates to the perceived cognition of that entity, that system.

 Where the Deutschian view as I understand it diverges from this picture is in that smooth

 continuous transition between states of consciousness depending on animal cognition.

 In the Deutschian view, cognition and creativity and computation is a binary thing.

 You are either too incomplete with universal computation or you are not.

 And you are either a universal explainer, the software running on the hardware of a

 too incomplete universal computer, or you are not.

 So in the Deutschian view, if we're linking consciousness as an emergent phenomena from

 a certain type of cognition, a certain type of information processing, which we'll call

 creativity, then it is literally binary. Only people have it because only people are universal explainers.

 I think the best criticism of the animal conscious position, the most intuitive insight that

 I've seen in this, comes from Popper's maxim that all knowledge is theory-laden, which

 if we're tying consciousness to cognition, the process of knowledge creation, then we

 can say, and this is potentially my own 

 but it seems to make sense to me and I think

 it's a valid criticism of the opposing position, that all experience is theory-laden. There

 is no such thing as naked, unadorned, raw experience in the Sam Harris sense, for example.

 So if we look at animals and how knowledge is created in the biosphere, genetically across

 generations by mutation and selection, there isn't the analogous connection between states

 of knowledge that you have within minds in people.

 All the knowledge existing in an animal exists in its genetics and is just being run.

 It is not actively creating new knowledge and it is in that 

 active creation where I conjecture that consciousness arises.

 This holds true also for large language models who analogously operate off of a single algorithmic

 base code or a search function in a data set 

 and they don't actively create new knowledge.

 So to say that large language models are conscious would go against this theory.

 And conversely, me speaking with you now and every person 

 listening to this podcast and every person I've met in my real life,

 I can see are using creativity to solve problems in their life.

 Now, unfortunately, we live in an age that does squash creativity.

 There is scarcity and there are anti-rational means.

 But I think this is going to increase with time, with longevity research, as we've discussed.

 In the future, people will be far more creative and 

 solve their problems more rapidly and with more vigour.

 Now, so I think based on this theory, which I tentatively accept,

 it is then rational to say that every person, every human,

 unless they have some major impairment in their brain 

 whereby they can't function, are people and have consciousness.

 So to summarise, if you exhibit knowledge that you weren't born with, that wasn't present at

 your inception in either genetics or base code, an example would be, you know, rockets flying

 to the moon I don't think exist via variation selection in our genetics, if that knowledge

 is present then you must have created it 

 during your life and the creation of that knowledge

 is in this theory where consciousness arises from. No other animals other than humans do this,

 so in this theory we can say that no other animals other than humans are conscious.

 Most gender discourse is pretty toxic. What 

 gender and how many genders are there? Can you

 help divorce all the politicizing and wokeness from the true and interesting aspect of gender theory?

 So unfortunately, gender theory has fallen smack bang into the middle of the culture

 war discourse and has been politicised to destruction, pretty much, to the point where

 many smart people don't want to think about it.

 which is as far from the truth as can be possible

 because gender theory is, in reality, a subset of the theory of personhood and the theory

 of knowledge and knowledge creation. It's about epistemology and it's about 

 individualism and it is, in reality, one of the most interesting topics you can possibly think about.

 And as a quick side note, to moralise certain 

 ideas and certain discussions is a very powerful

 species of anti-rational meme, whereby thinking about that thing is incredibly risky.

 There is reputation destruction associated with it, and you can be ostracised and you

 can lose friends and lose relationships. Many of us will have had 

 this experience, and it's unfortunate there are some very interesting

 topics including anti-racism and gender theory within quote-unquote woke discourse, which

 have been moralised completely out of reason, whereby it turns these people off from thinking

 about them. So I think it's important that we 