Snapshot · Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast
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.
Where this was said
At 26:04 · 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.
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.
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.
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