Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

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Dr. Ned Block, professor of philosophy and psychology at NYU, joins me to discuss theories of consciousness, functionalism, the difference between access and phenomenal consciousness, the limitations of current Large Language Models, and how far away artificial general intelligence is from our current capacities.

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EPISODE CHAPTERS:
00:00 Introduction
00:22 Hard vs. easy problems of consciousness
07:39 Reductive vs. non-reductive physicalism
12:19 The Chinese nation thought experiment
19:14 Can ChatGPT fool you into thinking it's a human? The Turing test
28:31 Rules vs. patterns-based reasoning
34:16 Blockhead thought experiment
37:53 Phenomenal vs. access consciousness
44:09 What is artificial intelligence?
46:27 The limits of LLMs
49:48 Does thinking require a brain?
50:34 Narrow vs. general AI
51:57 Is AI about to surpass human intelligence?