"I think that no tradition, vitalists included, is ever fully wrong about the nature of the things that they’re describing. So a lot of times when I look at different ways that people have described things across human history, across different cultures, there’s always a seed of truth in them. And I think it’s really important to try to look for those, because if there are narratives that humans have been telling ourselves for thousands of years, for thousands of generations, there must be some truth to them. We’ve been learning about reality for a really long time and we recognize the patterns that reality presents us. We don’t always understand what those patterns are, and so I think it’s really important to pay attention to that. So I don’t think the vitalists were actually wrong."

"Well, I think people are going to have romantic relationships with them, and I also think that some people would be convinced already that they’re conscious, but I think in order… What does it take to convince people that something is conscious? I think that we actually have to have an idea of what we’re talking about. We have to have a theory that explains when things are conscious or not, that’s testable. Right? And we don’t have one right now. So I think until we have that, it’s always going to be this gray area where some people think it hasn’t, some people think it doesn’t because we don’t actually know what we’re talking about that we think it has."

"And so you and I are close in this temporal structure, but we’re so close because we’re really big and we only are very different and the most recent moments in the time that’s embedded in us. It’s hard to use words to visualize what’s in minds. I have such a hard time with this sometimes. Actually, I was thinking on the way over here, I was like, you have pictures in your brain and then they’re hard to put into words. But I realized I always say I have a visual, but it’s not actually I have a visual. I have a feeling, because oftentimes I cannot actually draw a picture in my mind for the things that I say, but sometimes they go through a picture before they get to words. But I like experimenting with words because I think they help paint pictures."