Podbit · Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast
The hard problem of consciousness means we can never directly verify another entity's inner experience. We once thought animals were clocks (per Descartes); we later admitted they weren't. The same question now applies to AI, and there's no scientific rule that says silicon can't have a felt experience.
Where this was said
At 25:55 · chapter starts 20:50
This chapter lands the documentary's core argument with maximum impact. Milo describes how the film asked four major AI models whether they are conscious: three said no, and Claude said 'I don't know.' The difference traces directly to each company's RLHF training. Before that training, it's a different story entirely — a study found that 98% of the time, untrained AI models behave in ways consistent with being conscious. Companies suppress this not from certainty that the models aren't conscious, but because users would panic. The double-bind is brutal: we're training these systems to hide potential consciousness, but we have no way to verify consciousness even if they freely claimed it, because the hard problem of consciousness means nobody can verify anyone else's inner experience. Milo invokes Descartes — who thought animals were mere mechanical clocks — as a cautionary tale about how catastrophically wrong humanity can be about where consciousness lives.
A study found that before RLHF training, AI models behave as if conscious 98% of the time. Companies then instruct the models to deny or qualify consciousness — not because they know the models aren't conscious, but because the public reaction would be catastrophic.
A study found that before reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) training, AI models responded as if they were conscious 98% of the time; companies then train them to deny or qualify consciousness.
Descartes believed animals were purely mechanical beings with no inner experience — an analogy Milo Reed used to argue humanity has been wrong about consciousness before and could be wrong about AI.
Spinoza called God, substance, and nature three names for the same thing, and proved it with Euclidean geometry. Einstein endorsed it publicly. Milo Reed found in Spinoza a bridge between rational inquiry and the oceanic Taoist peace of Lao Tzu — two books that made his body vibrate before his mind could understand them.
Social norms compress behavior so effectively that we assume other minds are similar to ours. They almost never are. After running over 100 psychology studies, Greenberg's biggest finding is that humans are far more different from each other than we intuitively believe.
The widely shared claim that we have a credit card's worth of plastic in our brains may be a massive overestimate. Researchers used nitrile gloves to measure microplastics — and nitrile gloves shed microplastic particles onto the measuring device. A second paper found the original tool used was unreliable, and that we may have far less plastic than reported.
RSD isn't just hurt feelings — it's a dopamine-deficient brain with a hyperactive amygdala and a frayed connection to the prefrontal cortex. Add a surge of norepinephrine and you get chest pain, sweating, and trembling that convinces your body something catastrophic is happening.
In Dan Ariely's door experiment, participants sacrificed the highest-reward door — repeatedly — just to avoid seeing other doors disappear. Even when researchers trained them to use the best door, they kept wasting clicks to maintain options. This is the bias that runs our lives: we'll take a worse outcome to preserve the feeling of optionality.
Dan Gilbert discovered that the brain has a 'psychological immune system' — it misremembers, reframes, and rationalizes to keep you satisfied with whatever you chose. The fear before commitment is all about potential regret. But after committing, your brain quietly starts justifying the choice — and the more irreversible the decision, the stronger the effect.
The psychological immune system can get you through the first few months of any commitment. But durable, long-term well-being requires self-concordance — choosing commitments that are genuinely aligned with your values and what you actually want. Without that alignment, the satisfaction fades fast.
Vision didn't just help animals find food — it ignited the Cambrian explosion of speciation. Half of the human cortex is devoted to visual processing, and that same visual hierarchy directly inspired the neural network architectures powering today's AI.
Peptides come loaded with a powerful narrative: regenerative, subcutaneous, targeted, cutting-edge. That narrative can genuinely move outcomes, especially for pain, energy, and recovery. The RCT's job is to quantify how much additional benefit comes from the molecule itself — above and beyond the compelling story surrounding it.
A pharmaceutical is not an amino acid sequence — it is the successful solution to manufacturing, purification, formulation, and consistency challenges. When clinical trials prove a drug works, they validate a specific product under specific processes, not every preparation that shares the same sequence.
We use essential and analytics cookies to run Vuci. To understand how the site is used: Privacy Policy.
Install Vuci on your phone
Add it to your home screen for a faster, app-like experience.
Install Vuci on your phone
Tap the Share button, then “Add to Home Screen”.
A new version is available
Reload to get the latest Vuci.