Sam Harris speaks with Cameron Berg about whether AI systems are or could become conscious. They discuss self-reports in LLMs, what models say when deception is switched off, the "bliss attractor" state, consciousness and sentience, the hard problem of consciousness, parallels between neural networks and biological brains, the moral risk of building minds that can suffer, possible parallels to factory farming, moral patienthood, the alignment problem, and other topics.

Cameron Berg is the founder and director of Reciprocal Research, a nonprofit AI research lab. Using mechanistic interpretability, computational neuroscience, and psychometric tools, he studies whether frontier AI systems exhibit computational properties associated with consciousness. His aim is to reduce uncertainty about the kinds of cognitive systems we are building, an important but neglected component of the alignment problem. A cognitive science graduate of Yale and former Meta AI resident, he writes regularly about these questions in The Wall Street Journal, and his research has been covered by The Washington Post. He is the subject of the feature documentary AM I?.

reciprocalresearch.org/

In this episode, my guest is Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, distinguished professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. He is one of the leading researchers studying how psychedelics such as psilocybin, LSD and DMT can change the human brain and, in doing so, be used to successfully treat various mental health challenges such as major depression, anorexia, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and addiction.

He explains how psilocybin induces sustained changes in adaptive brain wiring and cognition. We discuss the key components of safe and effective psychedelic journeys, the role of hallucinations, the use of eye masks to encourage people to “go internal” and music, as well as what effective therapist support consists of before, during and after the session (also known as integration). We explore microdosing versus macrodosing and how researchers control for placebo effects in psychedelic research. We also examine the current legal landscape surrounding psychedelic therapies. Psychedelic therapies are fast emerging as powerful and soon-to-be mainstream treatments for mental health disorders, but they are not without risk. As such, this episode ought to be of use to anyone interested in brain plasticity, mental health, psychology or neuroscience.

hubermanlab.com/

carhartharrislab.com/

How do psychedelic culture, care, and policy shape the way we create and design? In this 10-minute highlight, Ismail Lourido Ali, JD (MAPS) and Liana Sananda Gillooly (MAPS) explore how psychedelic traditions and practices continue to influence modern creativity and design thinking.

Special thanks to our long term partner https://maps.org

This talk was presented at Psychedelics Design, December 2024.

Michael Pollan, one of the nation’s most influential non-fiction writers and investigative journalists, is the author of nine previous bestselling books, including How to Change Your Mind; In Defense of Food; The Omnivore’s Dilemma; and The Botany of Desire.

Today, he will trace his six-year quest to solve the greatest mystery in nature: how, and why, are we conscious? That Odyssey, which he describes in his newest book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, is an enthralling tale that begins in a brain lab in Seattle, and ends, of all places, in a cave in the mountains of New Mexico, where he discovers that explaining consciousness may be less important than learning to practice it, fully, in our everyday lives. Introduction by Dacher Keltner, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley

http://www.bioneers.org