Had the pleasure of speaking with @Philip_Goff , philosopher and panpsychist, about AI consciousness. Key moments: - On AI sentience: consciousness is biological, not computational. In his view, no current AI is conscious, nor would computation based AI be. How does this relate to his panpsychist worldview of consciousness? There are different takes on panpsychism within the community. His own view is that it's not clear how micro-conscious particles actually create a unified conscious system. - We need collaboration between scientists and philosophers on consciousness research. On a practical level, divide scientists into teams that work on separate philosophical assumptions and see what comes out of it (granted there are resources to run such experiments). - Perhaps consciousness brings new causal dynamics not reducible to known physics/chemistry — "strong emergence," as Philip calls it. As a contrast: Sean Carroll argues physics runs the whole show, but neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell argues that biological complexity might behave in ways physics wouldn't predict. In other words, we look to physics to solve the consciousness problem, but that might be the wrong path, especially if consciousness is biological rather than computational. The link to the full discussion below.