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Marvin Minsky - The idea of consciousness is at odds with evolution (115/151)

3,680 views · Published 17 October 2016 · 2:05 · Indexed 29 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2016 · Science & Technology

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The scientist, Marvin Minsky (1927-2016) was one of the pioneers of the field of Artificial Intelligence, having founded the MIT AI Lab in 1970. Since the 1950s, his work involved trying to uncover human thinking processes and replicate them in machines. [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2011]

TRANSCRIPT: It’s 400 million years since the first multi-cellular animals appeared. And then we have 100 million years of… of evolving toward… toward fish and getting vertebrae and things like that. Then, it’s 100 million more years of the fish becoming amphibians and moving on to the land and also – of course – continuing to evolve in the sea. And then, it’s 100 million years of... then, they’re amphibians. And it’s 100 million years of being reptiles and land-living animals. And… and then, in the last 100 million years, the mammals started to appear. The warm-blooded animals with... and all through this process, the nervous system was becoming more elaborate and complicated and having more… different parts of the spinal cord and brain. And in the last five or six million years, the… our ancestors the orangutan and the… the gorilla and the… baboons and the chimpanzees... and we split from the chimpanzees pretty much in the last 50 or 100… 50 million years or less. And all of this involved developing more and more complicated structures in the brain. And so, to me it’s sort of pathetic that people say, and the wonderful thing is that it suddenly became conscious and this new thing appeared instead of 30 different things. And so I’m sort of ashamed of my colleagues who say, well this is a philosophically difficult problem. How could… what is consciousness? It’s not matter, it’s not material. Where did it come from? It’s kind of… inexplicable spirit. Surely, it’s something that cannot be explained scientifically. The answer is, they're… they’re absolutely right because there isn’t any such thing.

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