Where does consciousness come from, and who (or what) gets to have it? The newest AI models have the power to convince users that they’re very much alive inside. But what if there were a test to check if they’re right? Consciousness science is working on just that.

In this episode, renowned neuroscientist Christof Koch chronicles his decades-long exploration of the biology of consciousness. Sharing the field’s leading theories and what they say about everything from brain bridging to quantifying the soullessness of LLMs, he reveals why his own beliefs have changed on the subject and where he thinks all this talk of self-awareness is headed next.

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Mentioned in this Episode:

Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It — Christof Koch (Book, 2024)

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature — William James (Book, 1902)

My Octopus Teacher — Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed (Documentary Film, 2020)

Website: https://christofkoch.com/

Tiny Blue Dot Foundation: https://www.tinybluedotfoundation.org/about-us

Allen Institute: https://alleninstitute.org/person/christof-koch/

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Credits 

Executive Producers: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Nils Gilman, Dawn Nakagawa, & Jason Hoch

Producers: Grant Slater, Alex Gardels, & Nathalia Ramos

Associate Producer: Elissa Mardiney

Theme Music: Marcus Bagala

Audio Engineer: Aaron Bastinelli & Kyle Scott Wilson

Futurology is a production of Studio B and Wavland for the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, California.

We live in a moment when the power to change the world often arrives before the wisdom to understand that power. CRISPR, a bacterial immunity process turned DNA editing tool, promises breakthroughs across scientific disciplines. But it also collapses long-standing boundaries between nature and human design.

In this episode, Jennifer Doudna – Nobel Prize-winning chemist and founder of the Innovative Genomics Institute – reflects on the thrilling discovery of CRISPR as a gene-editing tool and what it means to suddenly possess the ability to edit the code of life itself. From the ongoing explosion of new opportunities to the shock of seeing ethical boundaries crossed in real time, is there a safe path forward in shaping the future of biological life as we know it?

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Apple Podcasts

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Mentioned in this Episode:

The Double Helix — James D. Watson (Book, 1968) https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Double-Helix/James-D-Watson/9780743216302

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out — Richard P. Feynman (Book, 1999) https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/richard-p-feynman/the-pleasure-of-finding-things-out/9780465023951/

“The RNA World” — Walter Gilbert (Article, 1986) https://www.nature.com/articles/319618a0.pdf

A Programmable Dual-RNA–Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity — Martin Jinek, Krzysztof Chylinski, Ines Fonfara, Michael Hauer, Jennifer A. Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier (Paper, 2012). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1225829

“Generation of Gene-Modified Cynomolgus Monkey via Cas9/RNA-Mediated Gene Targeting in One-Cell Embryos” — Niu et al. (Paper, 2014) https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674(14)00171-6

Infant with rare, incurable disease is first to successfully receive personalized gene therapy treatment – (Article, May 2025) https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/infant-rare-incurable-disease-first-successfully-receive-personalized-gene-therapy-treatment

Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance — National Academies (Report, 2017) https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/24623/human-genome-editing-science-ethics-and-governance

“Can CRISPR Cut Methane Emissions From Cow Guts?” — UC Davis (Article, 2023) https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/can-crispr-cut-methane-emissions-cow-guts
Where to find Jennifer Doudna: 

Website, Innovative Genomics Institute: https://innovativegenomics.org/people/jennifer-doudna/

Instagram, Innovative Genomics Institute: https://www.instagram.com/innovativegenomics/

Bluesky, Innovative Genomics Institute: https://bsky.app/profile/innovativegenomics.bsky.social

Linkedin, Innovative Genomics Institute: https://www.linkedin.com/company/innovative-genomics-institute

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Credits 

Executive Producers: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Nils Gilman, Dawn Nakagawa, & Jason Hoch

Producers: Grant Slater, Alex Gardels, & Nathalia Ramos

Associate Producer: Elissa Mardiney

Theme Music: Marcus Bagala

Audio Engineer: Aaron Bastinelli & Kyle Scott Wilson

Futurology is a production of Studio B and Wavland for the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, California.

Big Tech already lives rent-free in our heads. The attention economy monetized and industrialized our mental real estate long ago. Now, with brain-computer interfaces, companies with ambitious names like Science are preparing to barge through the doors of perception and take up permanent residence inside our minds.

In this episode, Hodak – a co-founder of Neuralink and now the founder and CEO of Science – is more familiar with how to create this mind meld with machines than nearly anyone on Earth. Hodak is part of a growing cadre of true believer tech accelerationists who  argue that humanity’s best chance to endure is to evolve alongside computers, wired together tightly enough that the boundary between tool and self starts to blur.

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Catch up on the Futurology https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyYCSKWs8iYgjg-mhu-EuhTrG0-adrb0c conversation with full episodes on YouTube.

Apple Podcasts

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Mentioned in this Episode:

Pantheon — Craig Silverstein; based on short stories by Ken Liu (Animated Television Series, 2022)

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories — Ken Liu (Book, 2021)

The Problems of Plenty: America, Abundance, and the Crisis of Global Power — Francis J. Gavin (Book, 2024)
Where to find Max Hodak: 

Website: maxhodak.com

Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/maxhodak.bsky.social

X: https://x.com/maxhodak

Learn more about the Berggruen Institute 

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Follow Futurology!

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Credits 

Executive Producers: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Nils Gilman, Dawn Nakagawa, & Jason Hoch

Producers: Grant Slater, Alex Gardels, & Nathalia Ramos

Associate Producer: Elissa Mardiney

Theme Music: Marcus Bagala

Audio Engineer: Aaron Bastinelli & Kyle Scott Wilson

Futurology is a production of Studio B and Wavland for the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, California.

Daniel Kwan – the Oscar-winning co-director of Everything Everywhere All at Once – is a 21st-century filmmaker in the purest sense. He came up in the internet’s attention economy, making over-the-top viral videos that harnessed absurdity to cut through the noise. But as AI starts to generate its own strange media at scale, the surreal risks losing its charge in a world that already feels unreal.

In this episode, Kwan argues that Hollywood is on the verge of industrializing imagination in the way we mass-produce food. If machines become the default authors of culture, we may end up awash in highly processed creativity – empty calories with an aftertaste of authenticity. To safeguard creativity in the age of AI, he co-founded the Creators Coalition on AI: a push for a new creative contract where the tools can change, but authorship stays human.

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Apple Podcasts

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Mentioned in this Episode:

Chromeo - When The Night Falls (feat. Solange Knowles) (Music Video, 2011)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkyYxAv6kB4

Turn Down for What — DJ Snake & Lil Jon / Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert (Music Video, 2014)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_Down_for_What

So Sorry Man — The Lonely Island / Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert (Music Video, 2009)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Island#Digital_shorts_and_music_videos

The Power of Myth — Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers (Book, 1988)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Myth

The Selfish Gene — Richard Dawkins (Book, 1976)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
Where to find Dan Kwan:

Website, The Daniels: https://www.danieldaniel.us/ 

X, Dan Kwan:  https://x.com/dunkwun 

X, The Daniels: https://x.com/Daniels 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dunkwun

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Credits 

Executive Producers: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Nils Gilman, Dawn Nakagawa, & Jason Hoch

Producers: Grant Slater, Alex Gardels, & Nathalia Ramos

Associate Producer: Elissa Mardiney

Theme Music: Marcus Bagala

Audio Engineer: Aaron Bastinelli & Kyle Scott Wilson

Futurology is a production of Studio B and Wavland for the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, California.

As AI floods the world with answers that merely sound right, math  tethers them to the need to be actually right.  New machine learning tools and collaboration platforms are pushing theoretical mathematics toward something bigger: large, open projects where progress is shared early; rabbit holes are avoided; and more people can contribute.

In this episode, Terence Tao, a Fields Medal-winning mathematician at UCLA, lays out his case for “big math.” He explains what AI can do well — and where it still fails. The question isn’t whether machines can produce answers. It’s whether we can build systems, human and technical, that keep those answers tethered to truth.

Resources

Mentioned in this Episode:

Green-Tao Theorem

The Primes Contain Arbitrarily Long Arithmetic Progressions — Ben Green & Terence Tao (Paper, 2004)

Observation of a New Boson at a Mass of 125 GeV With the CMS Experiment at the LHC — The CMS Collaboration (Paper, 2012)

Where to find Terence Tao: 

Mastodon: mathstodon.xyz/@tao 

Blog: terrytao.wordpress.com

Home Page: www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/teorth.bsky.social
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Credits 

Executive Producers: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Nils Gilman, Dawn Nakagawa, & Jason Hoch

Producers: Grant Slater, Alex Gardels, & Nathalia Ramos

Associate Producer: Elissa Mardiney

Theme Music: Marcus Bagala

Audio Engineer: Aaron Bastinelli & Kyle Scott Wilson

Futurology is a production of Studio B and Wavland for the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, California.

It’s extremely difficult to doubt that you’re conscious, but still nearly impossible to explain why. As AI starts to speak in a voice that feels familiar, this ancient philosophical puzzle is becoming practical. If a system can persuade us it has an inner life, what does that do to the way we decide who – or what – matters?

In this episode, philosopher David Chalmers makes the case that consciousness needs to move beyond the realm of mystery. Over the past three decades, serious work on the subject has gone from fringe curiosity to an active research frontier, but the central enigma remains. As the virtual infiltrates ‘IRL,’ the line between human and machine blurs. Or maybe it never mattered at all.

Find more episodes of Futurology:

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All Futurology Episodes:

Apple Podcasts

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/futurology/id1821718921

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Mentioned in this Episode:

The Conscious Mind — David Chalmers (Book, 1996)

Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy — David Chalmers (Book, 2022)

The Emperor’s New Mind — Roger Penrose (Book, 1989)

Neurophilosophy — — Patricia Churchland (Book, 1986)

Is the Hard Problem of Consciousness Universal?— David Chalmers (Article, 2020)

The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis — David Chalmers (Article, 2010) 

“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” — Thomas Nagel (Article, 1974)

The Puzzle of Conscious Experience – David Chalmers (Article, 1995)

Could a Large Language Model Be Conscious? — David Chalmers (Paper, 2023)

The Meta-Problem of Consciousness — David Chalmers (Paper, 2018)

Does Thought Require Sensory Grounding? From Pure Thinkers to Large Language Models – David J. Chalmers (Talk, 2023)

Find David Chalmers Here:

Website: https://consc.net/

On X: https://x.com/davidchalmers42?lang=en

Show ideas and feedback? Email:

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Learn more about the Berggruen Institute 

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Credits 

Executive Producers: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Nils Gilman, Dawn Nakagawa, & Jason Hoch

Producers: Grant Slater, Alex Gardels, & Nathalia Ramos

Associate Producer: Elissa Mardiney

Theme Music: Marcus Bagala

Audio Engineer: Aaron Bastinelli & Kyle Scott Wilson

Futurology is a production of Studio B and Wavland for the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, California.

We live in a culture that flattens the world into yes or no. Hot takes and hard binaries promise simplicity. But complexity is leaking through the cracks. Opposites depend on each other. If you try to tease out the uncertain from the certain, you destroy the reality of the thing itself.

In this episode, Taoist scholar Brook Ziporyn makes the case that Taoism and Buddhism aren’t puzzles to solve but tools for living. Reckoning with Eastern paradoxes can help us navigate the desire to end desire. Modern science has unlocked humanity's potential to see the emptiness of both the far-away universe and the vast space within the building blocks of matter. Buddhism and Taoism give us the capacity to reckon with the fact that there is "no there there."

Resources

Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) — Laozi; translated/edited by Brook Ziporyn (Book, 2023)

Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings — translated by Brook Ziporyn (Book, 2020)

Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism — Brook Ziporyn (Book, 2016)

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid — Douglas R. Hofstadter (Book, 1979)

Find Professor Brook Ziporyn here: https://divinity.uchicago.edu/directory/brook-ziporyn

https://voices.uchicago.edu/ziporyn/

Want to share suggestions or feedback? 

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Credits 

Executive Producers: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Nils Gilman, Dawn Nakagawa, and Jason Hoch.

Producers: Grant Slater, Alex Gardels, and Nathalia Ramos.

Associate Producer: Elissa Mardiney

Theme Music: Marcus Bagala

Audio Engineer: Aaron Bastinelli & Kyle Scott Wilson

Futurology is a production of Studio B and Wavland for the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, California.

The current world order seeks to make sovereignty simple. One map. One flag. One final authority. But in Indian Country, the borders break down. Tribal nations govern alongside the United States, and sovereignty overlaps in real, everyday ways. This isn’t a historical footnote. It’s the future, hiding in plain sight.

In this episode, Graham Brewer – the AP’s National Correspondent covering native lands and peoples – traces what sovereignty looks like when power overlaps and treaty promises from the 19th century adapt to the 21st. That negotiation is now playing out in the cloud: as languages are revived and culture moves onto servers. By its nature, the training of AI frontier models plunders native wisdom, but fully opting out risks another century of invisibility.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity — David Graeber & David Wengrow (Book, 2021) 

The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears — Theda Perdue & Michael D. Green (Book, 2007)

Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance — Leonard Peltier (Book, 1999)

Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) — U.S. Congress (U.S. law, 1990)

United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) — United Nations General Assembly (UN declaration, 2007)

Music Modernization Act — U.S. Congress (U.S. law, 2018)

McGirt v. Oklahoma — Supreme Court of the United States (Supreme Court case, 2020)

Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta — Supreme Court of the United States (Supreme Court case, 2022)

Treaty of New Echota — Cherokee Nation and United States Government (Treaty, 1835)

https://apnews.com/author/graham-lee-brewer#

https://x.com/grahambrewer

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Credits 

Executive Producers: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Nils Gilman, Dawn Nakagawa, and Jason Hoch.

Producers: Grant Slater, Alex Gardels, and Nathalia Ramos.

Associate Producer: Elissa Mardiney

Theme Music: Marcus Bagala.

Audio Engineer: Aaron Bastinelli

Futurology is a production of Studio B and Wavland.

For Artist Refik Anadol, data is not just information. It is pigment. He feeds weather records, river flows, forests and archives into custom AI models and treats the outputs as brushstrokes. The point is to let AI learn from our memories and then push beyond them, catching the moments when the machine’s vision glitches out and creates something truly novel.In this episode, Anadol talks Claire Web, the head of the Berggruen Institute’s Future Humans program, about how this collaboration has changed his sense of nature, authorship, and the edges of reality. They explore how training a model on the textures of rainforests, rivers, and archives can produce a visual language that feels both familiar and strange, and why the future of art may depend less on controlling a system than on listening to where it leads.

Resources

Blade Runner – (Film, 1982)

The Poetics of Augmented Space  — Lev Manovich (Essay, 2006)

TED Talk Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality — Anil Seth (Talk, April 2017)

Large Nature Model — Refik Anadol Studio (AI Model, ongoing)

Refik Anadol

https://refikanadol.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/refik-anadol-studio/

https://www.instagram.com/refikanadol/?hl=en

https://dataland.art/?utm_source

https://refikanadolstudio.com/

Want to share suggestions or feedback? 

Email [email protected]

Keep up to Date with the Berggruen Institute at: 

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Credits 

Executive Producers: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Nils Gilman, Dawn Nakagawa, and Jason Hoch.

Producers: Grant Slater, Alex Gardels, and Nathalia Ramos.

Associate Producer: Elissa Mardiney

Theme Music: Marcus Bagala.

Audio Engineer: Aaron Bastinelli

Futurology is a production of Studio B and Wavland and distributed by Realm.

Humans are built for pattern recognition. It is the engine behind perception, emotion, and the fragile sense of self that feels so solid from the inside. For Anil Seth, this pattern-making power explains why consciousness is not a light inside but a process the brain assembles from guesses about the world. And it matters that each of us perceives that world differently.

In this episode of Futurology, Seth talks with Nils Gilman about what these differences reveal about the nature of consciousness and why they matter for the debate over artificial minds. LLMs are pattern-recognition machines of a different kind, uncanny enough to gain our sympathy but Seth argues there is no there there. Caring for conscious AI could quickly become more than a harmless curiosity. It may turn into a zero-sum game that diminishes how we treat one another long before the machines ‘wake up’ in any meaningful way, if that is even possible at all.

Anil Seth

Anil Seth’s Website: https://www.anilseth.com/

Instagram: @profanilseth https://www.instagram.com/profanilseth/

BlueSky @anilseth.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/anilseth.bsky.social

Twitter: https://x.com/anilkseth

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — John Locke (Book, 1689)

How to Change Your Mind About Psychedelics — Michael Pollan (Book, 2018)

Ex Machina — Alex Garland (Film, 2014)

The Perception Census — Anil Seth et al. (Online Study, Ongoing)

The Dress — Viral Internet Illusion (Internet Phenomenon, 2015)

Müller-Lyer Illusion — Franz Carl Müller-Lyer (Visual Illusion, 1889)

Want to share suggestions or feedback? 

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Credits 

Executive Producers: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Nils Gilman, Dawn Nakagawa, and Jason Hoch.

Producers: Grant Slater, Alex Gardels, and Nathalia Ramos.

Associate Producer: Elissa Mardiney

Theme Music: Marcus Bagala.

Audio Engineer: Aaron Bastinelli

Futurology is a production of Studio B and Wavland and distributed by Realm.