#111 - Tim Maudlin: Consciousness, Turing Machines, Problems with Quantum Mechanics and Ai

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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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