#104 GIANT'S DEBATE - Whats The SECRET to Engineering Artificial Consciousness? Cognition Vs Feeling

Welcome to Giant Conversations — a new format where top experts
debate, discuss and unravel the biggest questions in science. Dr.
Mark Solms is a neuropsychologist, psychoanalyst and author of
The Hidden Spring. Dr. Ryan Smith is a computational
neuroscientist at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research who
builds mathematical models of how the brain predicts and feels.


Together they tackle the question: what does it take for a system
to become conscious — and can we engineer it?


Expect to learn why consciousness might be raw feeling rather
than complex cognition, why your cortex may not actually be
conscious, what's architecturally missing from current AI that
rules out consciousness, what a machine would need to genuinely
feel something, where these two brilliant scientists agree and
exactly where they clash, and much more…


Timestamps:


00:01 Introduction to the Giant's Debate


00:46 Mark Solms: What Makes a System Conscious?


05:31 Ryan Smith: The Cognitive Case for Consciousness


13:02 Where Mark and Ryan Agree and Disagree


17:32 The Selection Problem: What Gets to Be Conscious?


27:07 Can We Scientifically Prove Something Is Conscious?


30:02 Blindsight: Behaviour Without Experience


34:20 The Fish on Cocaine Problem


41:25 Different Meanings of Consciousness


54:57 How the Free Energy Principle Explains Consciousness


01:03:02 Ryan Smith: Taking Consciousness Out of Biology


01:12:17 How Do You Give a Computer Survival Needs?


01:18:20 The Brain in a Vat: Does the Body Actually Matter?


01:19:59 What Would Prove AI Is Conscious?


01:22:32 Mark Solms: Why He Believes We Can Build Consciousness


01:27:25 Why Current LLMs Have Zero Consciousness


01:30:36 Mark's Final Word: Goals Must Be Real


01:31:15 Rapid Fire with Ryan Smith


01:37:52 The Neuron Replacement Thought Experiment


01:42:10 Computation vs Architecture: A Middle Ground


01:44:06 Final Thoughts


...





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