Read the full transcript of historian Yuval Noah Harari’s lecture titled “The Politics of Consciousness.”
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Nature of Consciousness and Suffering
Scientific studies often treat consciousness as a neutral observer of the world. In fact, consciousness is the only thing in the universe that involves suffering, which is the very opposite of neutral observation. While observation tries to capture the present reality as objectively as possible, at the core of any experience of suffering is a rejection of present reality. We might well define consciousness as the capacity to suffer.
This approach also highlights the crucial political and ethical implications of the science of consciousness. Since consciousness is linked to suffering, questions like “What is consciousness?” and “Who has consciousness?” have a deep impact on ethics, politics, and the law, as is apparent in debates about abortion, animal rights, and the legal status of AI. The study of consciousness is not just a scientific enterprise. It is also an ethical and political enterprise.
Questions like “What is consciousness?” and “Who has consciousness?” have a deep impact on ethics and politics, on law, and on the moral choices we make every day. Therefore, as scholars of consciousness, we should be aware of the political consequences or potential consequences of what we are researching and publishing. We have a heavy responsibility. In particular, we should remember that flawed scientific theories can have dangerous political fallout.
The Impact of Scientific Theories on Society
Just think about the impact of erroneous theories regarding race and gender. When, a century ago, scientists argued that Europeans constitute a superior race or that homosexuality is a sickness, these bogus theories did not remain confined to laboratories and seminar rooms. They had a terrible destructive impact on the lives of billions of people outside the academic ivory tower. Adopting a political perspective is not just a matter of responsibility.
It can also advance scientific work. This may sound counterintuitive because mixing politics with science is usually bad for science. But consciousness is a special case. A political outlook might actually help us make sense of the various scientific theories of consciousness.
At present, there are several competing scientific theories of consciousness. Sometimes it is difficult to understand what they really mean and how they differ from one another. Examining their potential political consequences can clarify the differences between these various theories. As an essential first step, let’s start with the definition of consciousness.
Defining Consciousness
What is consciousness? This is, of course, a controversial and confusing question. Perhaps the most confusing question in the whole of science. Some argue that it’s absolutely impossible to define consciousness. Others offer a bewildering list of different definitions. But for a political and ethical perspective, the definition of consciousness is extremely simple and extremely concrete. From a political and ethical perspective, consciousness is characterized by the potential to suffer. Consciousness is the capacity to suffer.
Conscious entities, like you and me, can suffer, which is why we are ethical and political subjects. What happens to conscious entities is a matter of ethics and politics. Stones, tables, and cars don’t have consciousness. They cannot suffer and are therefore not ethical or political subjects. They are mere objects. Stealing my car is a crime not because it makes the car suffer, but because it makes me suffer.
Consciousness and Political Authority
The link between consciousness and suffering and between consciousness and politics manifests itself in numerous political debates in the modern world. Modern societies assume that political authority ultimately rests on having consciousness and being able to suffer.
To be entitled to a voice in politics, you need the ability to feel pain and fear as well as pleasure and joy. Describing your experiences of pain and fear is often a necessary prelude for making your voice heard on questions ranging from race and gender to ecology and taxation. I feel, therefore I am entitled to speak.
This was not always the case. In many pre-modern societies, political authority had little to do with feelings. Authority did not come from our inner feelings. It came from outside. Authority came from either the gods or the laws of nature.
Rulers, for example, were allegedly chosen by the gods. Things were forbidden because the gods said so or because the laws of nature supposedly said so. The Ten Commandments, for example, forbade people to murder. Why? Because God said so.
The Shift in Authority
One of the biggest revolutions of the modern era was to shift the source of authority away from the alleged laws of the gods and of nature to the feelings of human beings. Modern-day rulers are not chosen by God. They are elected by people according to their feelings.
And note that in democratic elections, people are asked not, “What is the truth?” but rather, “What do you feel?” That’s why all people are given an equal vote. Some people may be more intelligent than others and certain people may understand physics and biology better than others. But all humans have a similar capacity to feel and that is why they are entitled to the same voting rights.
The pains and joys of an illiterate person are as important as the pains and joys of a Nobel Prize winner. As for forbidding things like murder or rape, the reason is not that God said so or some ancient book said so. We forbid these things because they make people suffer.
Victimless Crimes and Changing Perspectives
To understand this shift in authority from external laws to internal feelings, we can look at cases of so-called victimless crimes. Crimes that do not cause anyone to suffer. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam famously banned homosexuality. Why? Because God said so. Because scriptures said so. Or because allegedly, it was a crime against the laws of nature.
For thousands of years, for one man to fall in love with another man was one of the worst crimes imaginable, sometimes punished by death. In the modern world, people began questioning this taboo. They asked, “Who suffers?
If two men love each other, how does this harm anyone? And if nobody suffers, why should it be considered a crime?”
Ethics and politics are no longer about divine commandments or about alleged laws of nature. They are about feelings. Even religious zealots who oppose homosexuality have shifted their arguments accordingly, at least when they want to influence public opinion.
To take an example from my home country of Israel, every year the Israeli LGBT community holds a gay pride parade in Jerusalem. Since LGBT people are often excluded from public spaces, threatened by humiliation and even violence, the parade is meant to demonstrate that they are equal and valued members of society who should feel safe and honored in public.
Yet, the Jerusalem parade seldom goes unchallenged. Fundamentalist Jews, Muslims, and Christians, who quarrel with each other throughout the year, find a common cause on this one day, and fume in accord against the LGBT parade. What’s really interesting, however, is the arguments they use. The religious zealots do not say, “These sinners shouldn’t hold a gay parade because God forbids homosexuality.” No, the zealots explain to every available microphone and television camera that seeing a gay pride parade passing through the holy city of Jerusalem hurts their feelings.
“Just as LGBT people want us to respect their feelings, they should respect our feelings.” So in this case, to determine whether it’s okay to hold a gay parade in Jerusalem, we need to weigh one feeling against another feeling. Some people will feel humiliated and even endangered if we ban the parade. Other people will feel hurt if we allow the parade. Which feelings count for more?
This is not the place to answer this question, but the key takeaway for our purpose is that in the modern world, many ethical and political conflicts pit one feeling against another feeling.
Weighing Feelings in Public Spaces
Consider another scenario, featuring the statue of a dead leader that is placed in a prominent public square. Some people demand to remove the statue because they see it as an offensive racist symbol. Other people object, claiming that for them it signifies pride in their own group identity. Assuming that both sides are sincere, the argument again boils down to the question: whose feelings count for more?
If a statue makes some people feel threatened or ignored, while making other people feel proud and valued, how do we weigh these feelings against each other?
Such conflicts raise the more general question of how we measure feelings and how we measure suffering. Much of modern ethics and modern politics revolve around the attempt to measure and scale suffering. I mentioned earlier that politics can help us make sense of the various scientific theories of consciousness. One question I would ask about any theory of consciousness is: can it help us measure suffering? Can it help us formulate a scale of suffering? If it cannot, I would doubt whether it is truly a theory of consciousness.
The Scale of Suffering
One very important part of any scale of suffering is the lowest end of the scale, zero capacity for suffering. Zero capacity for suffering means that you fall completely outside the ethical and political domain.
For instance, in the aforesaid debate about the statue, we take into account the feelings of people who abhor the statue, and we take into account the feelings of people who admire the statue, but we don’t take into account the feelings of the statue itself, because the statue has no feelings. When it’s up on its pedestal, it doesn’t feel happy. If you cut off its head and throw it in a ditch, it doesn’t feel pain. So the statue itself is not an ethical and political subject. It is merely an object.
Consciousness and Ethical Subjects
This is why the questions of who is conscious and who can feel something and who can suffer are extremely important political questions. Consider abortion. For many people, the heated argument about abortion revolves around the questions: are fetuses conscious in any way? Can a fetus feel something or not? Can a five-week-old fetus feel pain? How about a 10-week-old fetus? Can it suffer?
If not, then the fetus is not an ethical subject. The question of abortion should then focus on the feelings and potential suffering of the mother and perhaps of other people, but the fetus itself has no ethical and political standing. It is a bunch of cells that lack the capacity to feel anything.
If you advocate a particular theory of consciousness, can your theory tell us what is the stage of pregnancy when fetuses gain the capacity to suffer? Would you be willing to say so publicly? To testify in court? To testify in Congress? And if your theory cannot say anything relevant on the consciousness of fetuses, is it really a theory of consciousness?
Animal Welfare and Consciousness
Another case in point concerns animal welfare. Can cows suffer? Can chickens suffer? Can fish suffer? If the answer is yes, this has far-reaching implications. It means that these animals are ethical subjects. It means that we should think very carefully about how we treat these animals in the meat industry, in the dairy industry, and in our university laboratories.
In 2012, a group of prominent neuroscientists signed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which states that “convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states, along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”
This declaration was one of the reasons why three years later, in 2015, the New Zealand Parliament passed the Animal Welfare Amendment Act. The Act stipulates that it is obligatory to recognize animals as conscious, and hence attend properly to their welfare in contexts like animal husbandry. New Zealand thereby became the first country in the world to legally recognize animals as conscious beings. This is a far from trivial fact, especially in a country where sheep outnumber humans six to one.
Of course, recognizing that animals have consciousness and the capacity to suffer does not mean that we should immediately ban all experimental animals and all meat and dairy products. The debate is still raging, but the terms of the debate must change. Any serious discussion of animal welfare depends on what we think about animal consciousness. Do animals have consciousness? Do they have the same kind of consciousness as humans? Can they suffer like humans?
Someone might agree that cows do have consciousness, but it’s nevertheless okay to slaughter and eat them because their capacity to suffer is somehow smaller than the human capacity to suffer. Now, this is an empirical claim. Can the science of consciousness prove or disprove this empirical claim? The fate of billions of sentient beings may depend on this.
Measuring Consciousness and Suffering
So, again, we come to the question of how we measure and scale consciousness and how we measure and scale suffering. Can we measure cow consciousness and compare it to human consciousness? Can we place cows and humans on the same scale of suffering? Once we get into such a debate about scales of consciousness and scales of suffering, it’s unlikely to stop with animals.
The question will inevitably be raised about humans too. Perhaps within humankind itself, there is a scale of consciousness and significant differences in the capacity to suffer. What about babies? What about people with dementia? What about all kinds of other diseases? This is an important scientific question, but it also has far-reaching ethical and political implications, some of them extremely dangerous.
So, if you advocate a scientific theory of consciousness, can you somehow scale and measure the capacity of different animals and different humans to suffer? To me, this question would be one of the most important yardsticks with which to evaluate your theory.
Evaluating Theories of Consciousness
Scholars constantly come up with claims that they have solved the mystery of consciousness. If you have indeed solved the mystery of consciousness, what can you tell us about fetuses and abortion? What can you tell us about cows and animal welfare? What can you tell us about measuring and weighing human feelings one against the other?
If your theory cannot tell us anything meaningful about such things, then I would doubt whether you have indeed solved the riddle of consciousness. At present, some theories of consciousness, such as the integrated information theory, do indeed claim that they can potentially tell us new things about such matters and give a scientific answer to questions like, do fetuses have consciousness? And can cows suffer like humans? If they are correct, their potential ethical and political impact will be enormous.
Scholars working on such theories should therefore be very careful about the claims they make. They should remember that since consciousness is the basis for modern ethics and politics, a new theory of consciousness is likely to have explosive ethical and political impact. Consequently, if scholars have doubts about their theory, they should always err on the side of caution, meaning on the side that is less likely to cause mass suffering. In particular, scholars should be extremely careful when making claims about the ability to measure and scale consciousness.
The Implications of Scaling Consciousness
There are few strong theories in science that don’t translate into measurements and scales. If and when we get a strong theory of consciousness, it would probably mean measuring and scaling in the most explosive ethical and political field. A scaling of consciousness would almost inevitably translate into a hierarchy of consciousness. We already have an unproven hierarchy of consciousness between humans and other animals.
Most people believe that humans have some kind of superior consciousness, which is what justifies the way we treat billions of other animals. This unproven theory that human consciousness is superior to animal consciousness may have caused more suffering than any other single idea in the whole of history. Now think of the potential impact of having a scale of consciousness within humanity itself, which places some humans or some feelings above other humans and other feelings. Remember, for example, the fact that voting rights today are based on the assumption that all humans have equal feelings rather than equal intelligence.
What might happen if it turns out that not all humans have the same capacity to feel? What will that do to voting rights? It should also be remembered that a theory of consciousness might be completely wrong and still have a huge ethical and political impact. History is full of examples of wrong theories that reshape the world like the bogus racial theories of the 19th and early 20th century.
The Ethical Responsibility of Consciousness Research
We are now in the initial stage of formulating theories of consciousness. Researchers are merely sowing the seeds of these theories. But even as we sow a seed, we should think of the fruit it could bear. From the very beginning, we should be aware of the ethical and political implications of such theories.
Reminding ourselves of the political implications is one reason we had better define consciousness as the capacity to suffer. But on a deeper level, this definition also reminds us of the unique nature of consciousness and of how it differs from all the other known phenomena in the universe. Too often, in the studies of consciousness, scholars tend to treat consciousness as something neutral, as if consciousness is mainly about perception, observation, calculation, and so on. As if consciousness is like a camera that just observes the world without feeling anything.
The Unique Nature of Consciousness
This observational view of consciousness is a byproduct of the fact that when scientists try to understand something very complicated, we often start with the least complicated part of it. Accordingly, when studying consciousness, we don’t begin with the ability to feel love or hate, which is very complicated, but rather with far simpler things like the ability to see red. Unfortunately, this may mislead us into having a sanitized and neutral attitude towards consciousness. It might cause us to erroneously understand consciousness as a neutral observational phenomenon, as if consciousness is mainly about observing things, and as if seeing red is at the core of consciousness, while things like love and hate are peripheral add-ons.
If consciousness is about seeing red and distinguishing red from green, maybe cameras that distinguish between red and green also have consciousness. Maybe thermostats that measure temperature also have consciousness. In fact, what makes consciousness so unique and so important is that it is the least neutral phenomenon in the universe. It is the only thing in the universe, as far as we can tell, that involves suffering.
Suffering and Consciousness
And in many ways, suffering is the very opposite of pure observation. While observation tries to capture the present reality as objectively as possible, at the core of any experience of suffering is a rejection of present reality and a preference of something else, something that doesn’t exist at present. You feel something, but you want to feel something else instead. You feel pain and you want the pain not to be there.
Suffering is not the pain itself. Pain is just a sensation. Suffering is the mental reaction to that sensation. It is a reaction of rejecting and hating the reality we encounter and preferring something else which is not there.
This rejection of reality and the craving for something else can happen not only in reaction to pain. Anger, greed, depression and other kinds of misery also involve the same kind of reaction. Even a sensation of pleasure might result in suffering if we react to the pleasing sensation by craving more of it and becoming disappointed when we don’t get more. A child might cry while eating a delicious apple because they wanted ice cream instead.
A tycoon with a billion dollars in the bank might be extremely frustrated because he wanted two billion. It is, of course, an open empirical question whether consciousness always involves preferring one thing over another. Can conscious entities ever experience moments of pure observation when they don’t prefer anything and they don’t reject anything? That is something we need to explore further.
The Unique Ability to Reject Reality
But it would be extremely misleading to embark on a study of consciousness without first noting the remarkable ability of consciousness to at least sometimes reject reality. What kind of thing can reject reality? Electrons, atoms, molecules, stars, black holes and galaxies are all neutral entities. They can’t reject reality and they can’t suffer.
They have no consciousness. As for cameras and thermostats, they can measure light and temperature, but cameras do not suffer when it’s very dark and thermostats don’t suffer when it’s very hot. When we set an air conditioner to 25 degrees Celsius and its thermostat detects that the room temperature is now 28 degrees, the thermostat activates the cooling unit in order to lower the temperature. But the thermostat doesn’t generate any feelings of depression or embarrassment from what it measures.
It never rejects what it measures. This is why throwing a thermostat into a boiling cauldron is not a crime. The same goes for computers. And this is a crucial point.
Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
Thermostats are not revolutionizing the world. Computers are. We are now in the midst of an enormous revolution in artificial intelligence. Understanding the vital link between consciousness and suffering will help us deal better with a whole host of difficult questions raised by artificial intelligence.
As computers and robots become more and more intelligent and actually surpass human intelligence in some fields, questions arise about our ethical and political attitude to AI. Should robots have rights? Should AI be authorized to make ethical decisions? Should we, for example, produce autonomous weapon systems that can decide on their own initiative who to kill?
Too many people, both scholars and non-scientists, scholars and non-academics come to such debates with a wrong assumption. They unfortunately tend to confuse intelligence with consciousness and assume that artificial intelligence will inevitably develop consciousness. This, for example, is the assumption in almost all science fiction movies that feature AI. Almost all these movies focus on the magical moment a computer or robot gains consciousness and then either the human falls in love with the robot or the robot tries to kill the human or both things happen at the same time.
The Distinction Between Intelligence and Consciousness
But this is a big mistake. Intelligence and consciousness are very different things. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things like pain, love and hate.
In humans and other animals, intelligence goes hand-in-hand with consciousness. Humans, chimps, cows and chickens rely on their feelings in order to solve certain problems. However, computers solve problems in a very different way from animals. And there is absolutely no reason to think that they are anywhere on the road to developing consciousness.
Over the past 50 years or so, there has been an immense advance in computer intelligence but there has been exactly zero advance in computer consciousness. As far as we know, computers today are no more conscious than the prototypes were in the 1950s. By 2050, computers may be far more intelligent than humans and still have zero consciousness. It seems that there are several alternative roads leading to intelligence and only some of these roads involve gaining consciousness.
In mammals, the evolution of intelligence involved the evolution of consciousness too. But computers may be developing along a very different path. Just as airplanes fly faster than birds without ever developing feathers, so computers may come to solve problems much better than humans without ever developing feelings. Unless we remind ourselves of the deep connection between consciousness and suffering, it will be very difficult to deal with the ethical and political implications of the rise of artificial intelligence.
If we confuse intelligence with consciousness, then as computers become more intelligent than humans, we might end up privileging intelligent computers over conscious humans. Thank you.
