An interesting frame on a fundamental question. I like the specificity of “consciousness” here—not intelligence, not agency, just qualia. The ability to experience and feel.
Given its extreme importance, it’s surprising how little we know. Max describes consciousness as the source of all moral value in the universe, which is ultimately a theological claim, but one which is hard to argue with. Consider the counterfactual- a universe with no consciousness, containing intelligent agents but no subjective experience or emotion of any kind. A 100% pure unadulterated autism void of inanimate objects and unconscious automata who feel nothing, a lights-out warehouse at galactic scale. Clearly such a universe is a moral no-op, its existence carrying no weight.
So consciousness is the most important “substance” in the universe, the soul in “souls onboard”. Yet we cannot measure it or even define it. We know so little. What is conscious? Are some people more conscious than others? Is a mouse conscious? Could degree of consciousness ever be quantified, such that a human might be 90% while a mouse is 20% conscious and a fruit fly 2%?
We apply what little we do know inconsistently and hypocritically. Doctors were taught that babies don’t feel pain as recently as the 1980s, performing surgeries without anesthesia. Factory farming visits vast horrors on conscious animals. A rigorous understanding of consciousness would make these abuses harder to ignore.
These questions are key, but I remain unconvinced by Max’s handwavy answers. The gist sounds much like medieval Christian musings about the weight in grams of a soul. His talk is unfortunately a bait and switch, promising answers to fundamental questions and then delivering a tour of how the brain works at a mechanical level—oh look, here’s how your visual cortex recognizes a dog.
Consciousness remains elusive to science and the principle domain of spirituality and religion.
Are emotions beneficial to humans at the scale we currently live at? Could it not be argued that plants releasing sounds in response to being cut are emotions? Would the biological development of systematizers lead to their own forms of emotion and expression as incomprehensible to most humans today as plant emotions are?
A part of higher consciousness seems to be simulating lower levels of consciousness. Imagine oneself as a dog, a cow, or a simple human, which lets you say things to run around them.
Most people don't have this feeling part of consciousness to be another, which is why they can justify such abuses to animals and babies.