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The following is a conversation with Philip Goff, philosopher specializing in the philosophy of mind and consciousness.
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He is a panpsychist, which means he believes that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of physical reality, of all matter in the universe.
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He is the author of Galileo s Error, Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, and is the host of an excellent podcast called Mind Chat.
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Choose wisely, my friends.
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They have a bunch of plans, most of which include blood tests that give you a lot of information that you can then make decisions based on.
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Anyway, this is an idea that I feel like represents the future.
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Grammarly Premium, the version you pay for, offers a bunch of extra features.
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My favorite is the Clarity Check, which helps detect rambling over complicated chaos that many of us can descend into, like Finnegan s Wake by James Joyce.
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Funny thing about James Joyce, funny story, that when he was a young man, like 18 or 19, he said that, I m going to be one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
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Now, that happened to actually end up being the case.
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But the funny part of that story, whoever was telling me this story said that, well, every person in Ireland at the time were getting drunk at a bar and saying, I m going to be the greatest, or one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
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So he just happened to be one of them.
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So that s a necessary precondition for being great is to believe you could be great, but it doesn t, that s not enough just to believe.
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I ve used them as part of many hiring efforts I ve done, especially for engineering teams that I ve led in the past.
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I think the thing we don t acknowledge to ourselves is just how fulfilling that is, how important it is to be surrounded by people that make you excited to wake up in the day.
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Cinnamon, I think it goes on, but ladies and gentlemen, the best flavor, the flavor of champions, my favorite flavor is cocoa.
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It reminds me of childhood.
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It reminds me of happiness.
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And by childhood, I mean not the childhood in Russia.
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I guess it would be called late teens in the United States of America when I was cutting insane amounts of weight for wrestling.
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And that was the first time I fell in love
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with fruit is when you deprive yourself of it.
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That s magicspoon.com slash Lex, and use code Lex.
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This episode is also sponsored by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help.
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Every time I spell out help, it reminds me of Tom Hanks from the movie Castaway, where he has the volleyball named Wilson.
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And it also reminds me that we are alone in this world.
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We re born alone and we die alone.
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so that when you find yourself on a deserted island with a volleyball, you re ready.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Philip Goff.
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I opened my second podcast conversation with Elon Musk with a question about consciousness and panpsychism.
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The question was, quote, does consciousness permeate all matter?
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I don t know why I opened the conversation this way.
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He looked at me like, what the hell is this guy talking about?
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So he said no, because we wouldn t be able to tell if it did or not.
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So it s outside the realm of the scientific method.
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Do you agree or disagree with Elon Musk s answer?
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I disagree.
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I guess I do think consciousness pervades matter.
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In fact, I think consciousness is the ultimate nature of matter.
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So, as for whether it s outside of the scientific method,
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I think there s a fundamental challenge at the heart of the science of consciousness that we need to face up to, which is that consciousness is not publicly observable.
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I can t look inside your head and see your feelings and experiences.
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We know about consciousness not from doing experiments or public observation, we just know about it from our immediate awareness of our feelings and experiences.
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It s qualitative, not quantitative, as you talk about.
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Yeah, that s another aspect of it.
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So there are a couple of reasons consciousness
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I think is not susceptible to the standard or not fully susceptible to the standard scientific approach.
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One reason you ve just raised is that it s qualitative rather than quantitative.
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Another reason is it s not publicly observable.
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So, I mean, science is used to dealing with unobservables, right?
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You know, fundamental particles, quantum wave functions, other universes, none of these things are observable, but there s an important difference.
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with all these things, we postulate unobservables in order to explain what we can observe.
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In the whole of science, that s how it works.
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In the case of consciousness,
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In the unique case of consciousness, the thing we are trying to explain is not publicly observable.
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And that is utterly unique.
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If we want to fully bring science into consciousness, we need a more expansive conception of the scientific method.
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So it doesn t mean we can t explain consciousness scientifically, but we need to rethink what science is.
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What do you mean publicly, the word publicly observable?
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Is there something interesting to be said about the word publicly?
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I suppose versus privately.
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Yeah, it s tricky to define, but I suppose...
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The data of physics are available to anybody.
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If there were aliens who visited us from another planet, maybe they d have very different sense organs.
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Maybe they d struggle to understand our art or our music.
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But if they were intelligent enough to do mathematics, they could understand our physics.
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They could look at the data of our experiments.
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They could run the experiments themselves.
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Whereas consciousness, is it observable?
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Is it not observable?
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In a sense, it s observable.
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As you say, we could say it s privately observable.
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I am directly aware of my own feelings and experiences.
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If I m in pain, it s just right there for me.
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My pain is just totally directly evident to me.
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But you from the outside cannot directly access my pain.
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You can access my pain behavior,
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but, or you can ask me, but you can t access my pain in the way that I can access my pain.
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So I think that s a distinction.
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It might be difficult to totally pin it down how we define those things, but I think there s a fairly clear and very important difference there.
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So you think there s a kind of direct observation that you re able to do of your pain that I m not.
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So my observation, all the ways in which I can sneak up to observing your pain is indirect versus yours is direct.
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Can you play devil s advocate?
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Is it possible for me to get closer and closer and closer to being able to observe your pain, like all the subjective experiences, yours, in the way that you do?
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Yeah, I mean, so it s, of course, it s not that we observe behavior, and then we make an inference.
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We are hardwired to instinctively interpret smiles as happiness, crying as sadness.
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And as we get to know someone, we find it very easy to adopt their perspective, get into their shoes.
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But
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Strictly speaking, all we have perceptual access to is someone s behavior.
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And if you were just, strictly speaking, if you were trying to explain someone s behavior, those aspects that are publicly observable, I don t think you d ever have recourse to attribute consciousness.
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You could just postulate some kind of mechanism if you were just trying to explain the behavior.
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So someone like Daniel Dennett is very consistent on this.
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So I think for most people, what science is in the business of is explaining the data of public observation experiment.
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If you religiously followed that,
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you would not postulate consciousness because it s not a datum that s known about in that way.
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And Daniel Dennett is really consistent on this.
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He thinks my consciousness cannot be empirically verified and therefore it doesn t exist.
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Dennett is consistent on this.
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I think I m consistent on this, but I think a lot of people have a slightly confused middle way position on this.
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On the one hand, they think,
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the business of science is just to account for public observation experiment, but on the other hand, they also believe in consciousness without appreciating, I think, that that implies that there is another datum over and above the data of public observation experiments, namely, just the reality of feelings and experiences.
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As we walk along this conversation, you keep opening doors that I wanna walk into, and I will, but I wanna try to stay
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kind of focus, so you mentioned Daniel Dennett, let s lay it out, since he sticks to his story, pun unintended, and then you stick to yours, what is your story, what is your theory of consciousness versus his?
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Can you clarify his position?
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So, my view, I defend the view known as panpsychism, which is the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world,
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So it doesn t literally mean that everything is conscious despite the meaning of the word pan, everything, psyche, mind.
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So literally that means everything has mind.
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But the typical commitment of the panpsychist is that the fundamental building blocks of reality, maybe fundamental particles like electrons and quarks, have incredibly simple forms of experience,
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and that the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow rooted in or derived from this much more simple consciousness at the level of fundamental physics.
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I mean, that s a theory that I would justify on the grounds that it can account for this datum of consciousness that we are immediately aware of in our experience in a way that I don t think other theories can.
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If you asked me to contrast that to Daniel Dennett, I think he would just say there is no such datum.
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Dennett says the data for science of consciousness is what he calls heterophenomenology, which is specifically defined as what we can access from the third person perspective.
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including what people say.
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But crucially, we re not treating what they say.
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We re not relying on their testimony as evidence for some unobservable realm of feelings and experiences.
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We re just treating what they say as a datum of public observation experiments that we can account for in terms of underlying mechanisms.
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But I feel like there s a deeper view of what consciousness is.
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So you have a very clear, and we ll talk quite a bit about panpsychism.
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we have a clear view of what, almost like a physics view of consciousness.
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He, I think, has a kind of view that consciousness is almost a side effect of this massively parallel computation system going on in our brain.
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That the brain is,
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has a model of the world, and it s taking in perceptions, and it s constantly weaving multiple stories about that world that s integrating the new perceptions, and the multiple stories are somehow, it s like a Google Doc, collaborative editing, and that collaborative editing is the actual experience of what we think of as consciousness, somehow,
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the editing is consciousness of this story.
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I mean, that s a theory of consciousness, isn t it?
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The narrative theory of consciousness, or the multiple versions, editing, collaborative editing of a narrative theory of consciousness.
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Yeah, he calls it the multiple drafts model.
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Incidentally, there s a very interesting paper just come out by
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very good philosopher luke roloffs defending a panpsychist version of dennett s uh... multiple drafts model uh... it s like a deeper turtle that that that was that s just the difference being that this is luke roloff s view all of the drafts are conscious so i guess i guess uh... i guess for uh... dennett there s sort of no fact of the matter about which of these drafts is the correct one
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on Roloff s view, maybe there s no fact of the matter about which of these drafts is my consciousness.
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But nonetheless, all the drafts correspond to some consciousness.
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And I mean, I just think it s kind of funny.
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I guess I think he calls it Danettian panpsychism.
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But Luke is one of the most rigorous and serious philosophers alive at the moment, I think.
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And I hate having Luke Roloff in an audience if I m giving a talk because he always cuts
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straight to the weakness in your position that you hadn t thought of.
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And so it s nice, you know, panpsychism is sometimes associated with fluffy thinking, but, you know, contemporary panpsychists have come out of this tradition we call analytic philosophy, which is rooted in, you know, detailed, rigorous argumentation, and it is defended in that manner.
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Yeah, those analytic philosophers are sticklers for terminology.
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It s a very fun group to talk shit with over speakers.
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Well, I mean, it gets boring if you just start and end defining words, right?
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Yeah.
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I think starting with defining words is good.
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Actually, the philosopher Derek Parfit said when
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When he first was thinking about philosophy, he went to a talk in analytic philosophy, and he went to a talk in continental philosophy, and he decided that the problem with the continental philosophy, if it was really unrigorous, really imprecise, the problem with the analytic philosophy is it was just
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not about anything important.
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And he thought there was more chance of working within analytic philosophy and asking some more meaningful, some more profound questions than there was in working continental philosophy and making it more rigorous.
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Now, they re both horrific stereotypes and I don t want to get nasty emails from either of these groups, but there s something to what he was saying there.
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I think just a tiny tangent on terminology,
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I do think that there s a lot of deep insight to be discovered by just asking questions.
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What do we mean by this word?
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I remember I was taking a course on algorithms and data structures in computer science.
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And the instructor, shout out to him, Ali Sheikhafande, amazing professor.
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I remember he asked some basic questions like, what is an algorithm?
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the pressure of pushing students to answer, to think deeply.
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You know, you just woke up, hung over in college or whatever, and you re tasked with answering some deep philosophical question about what is an algorithm, these basic questions.
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And they sound very simple, but they re actually very difficult.
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And one of the things I really value in conversation is asking these dumb, simple questions of like,
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you know, what is intelligence?
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And just continually asking that question over and over of some of the sort of biggest researchers in the artificial intelligence computer science space, it s actually very useful.
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At the same time, you know, it should start at terminology and then progress where you kind of say, ah, fuck it, we ll just assume we know what we mean by that.
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Otherwise, you get the Bill Clinton situation where it s like,
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what is the meaning of is, is whatever he said.
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It s like, hey man, did you do the sex stuff or not?
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So you have to both be able to talk about the sex stuff and the meaning of the word is.
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With consciousness, because we don t currently understand very much, terminology discussions are very important.
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It s like you re almost trying to sneak
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sneak up to some deep insight by just discussing some basic terminology, like what is consciousness or even defining the different aspects of panpsychism is fascinating.
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But just to linger on the Daniel Dennett thing, what do you think about
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narrative, sort of the mind constructing narratives for ourselves.
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So there s nothing special about consciousness deeply.
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It is some property of the human mind that s just, is able to tell these pretty stories that we experience as consciousness, and that it s unique, perhaps, to the human mind, which is, I suppose, what Daniel Dennett would argue, that it s either deeply unique or
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mostly unique to the human mind.
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It s just on the question of terminology before.
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Yes, I think it used to be the fashion among philosophers that we had to come up with utterly precise necessary and sufficient conditions for each word.
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And then I think this has gone out of fashion a bit, partly because it s just been such a failure.
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The word knowledge in particular, people used to define knowledge as true, justified belief.
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And then this guy, Gettier, had this very short paper where he just produced some pretty conclusive counterexamples to that.
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I think, you know, he wrote very few papers, but this is just, you know, you have to teach this on an undergraduate philosophy course.
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And then after that,
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you had a huge literature of people trying to address this and propose a new definition, but then someone else would come out with counterexamples, and then you get a new definition of knowledge and counterexamples, and it just went on and on and never seemed to get anywhere.
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So I think the thought now is, let s work out how precise we need to be for what we re trying to do.
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And I think that s a healthier attitude.
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So precision is important, but you just need to work out how precise do we need to be for these purposes.
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Coming to Dennett and narrative theories, I mean, I think narrative theories are a plausible contender for a theory of the self.
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theory of my identity over time, what makes me the same person in some sense today as I was 20 years ago, given that I ve changed so much physically and psychologically.
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One running contender is something connected to the kind of stories we tell about ourselves, or maybe some story about the psychological, the chains of psychological continuity.
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I m not saying I accept such a theory, but it s plausible.
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I don t think these theories are good as theories of consciousness, at least if we re taking consciousness just to be subjective experience, pleasure, pain, seeing color, hearing sound.
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I think, you know, a hamster has consciousness in that sense.
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There s something that it s like to be a hamster.
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It feels pain if you stand on it, if you re cruel enough to do, I don t know why I gave that.
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People always give, I don t know, philosophers give these very violent examples to get the cross-consciousness, and it s, yeah, I don t know why that s come about, but anyway.
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You say mean things to the hamster, let s back up.
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It experiences pain, it experiences pleasure, joy, I mean, but there s some limits to that experience of a hamster, but there is nevertheless the presence of a subjective experience.
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Yeah, consciousness is just something... I mean, look, it s a very ambiguous word, but if we re just using it to mean some kind of experience, some kind of inner life, that is pretty widespread in the animal kingdom.
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Bit difficult to say where it stops, where it starts, but...
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You certainly don t need something as sophisticated as the capacity to self-consciously tell stories about yourself to just have experience.
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Except for cats, who are evil automatons that are void of consciousness.
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They re the fingertips of the devil.
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Oh, absolutely, yeah.
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I was taking that as read.
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I mean, Descartes thought animals were mechanisms.
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And humans are unique.
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So animals are robots, essentially, in the formulation of Descartes, and humans are unique.
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So in which way would you say humans are unique versus even our closest ancestors?
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Like is there something special about humans?
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What is, in your view, under the panpsychism, I guess we re walking backwards, because we ll have the big picture conversation about what is panpsychism, but given your kind of broad theory of consciousness, what s unique about humans, do you think?
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as a panpsychist, there is a great continuity between humans and the rest of the universe.
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There s nothing that special about human consciousness, it s just a highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe.
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So we re very much continuous with the rest of the physical universe.
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What is unique about human beings?
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I suppose
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the capacity to reflect on our conscious experience, plan for the future, the capacity, I would say, to respond to reasons as well.
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I mean, animals in some sense have motivations, but when a human being makes a decision, they re responding to what philosophers call normative considerations.
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You know, if you think, should I take this job in the US?
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You weigh it up.
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You say, well, you know, I ll get more money.
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I ll have maybe a better quality of life.
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But if I stay in the UK, I ll be closer to family.
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And you weigh up these considerations.
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I m not sure any non-human animals quite respond to considerations of value in that way.
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I mean, I might be reflecting here that I m something of an objectivist about value.
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I think there are,
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objective facts about what we have reason to do and what we have reason to believe.
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And humans have access to those facts.
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And humans have access to them and can respond to them.
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That s a controversial claim, you know, many of my panpsychist brethren might not.
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They would say the hamster too can look up to the stars and ponder theoretical physics.
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Maybe not, but I think it depends what you think about value.
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If you have a more,
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Humean picture of value by which I mean relating to the philosopher David Hume who said reason is the slave of the passions, really we just have motivations and what we have reason to do arises from our motivations.
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I m not a Humean, I think there are objective facts about what we have a reason to do and I think we have access to them.
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I don t think any non-human animal
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has access to objective facts about what they have reason to do, what they have reason to believe.
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They don t weigh up evidence.
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Reason is a slave of the passions.
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That was David Hume s view, yeah.
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I mean, yeah, do you want to know my problem with Hume s?
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I had a radical conversion.
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This might not be connected, it s not connected to panpsychism, but I had a radical conversion.
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I used to have a more Humean view
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when I was a graduate student, but I was persuaded by some professors at the University of Reading where I was, that if you have a humane view, you have to say any basic life goals are equal, equally valid.
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So for example, let s take someone whose basic goal in life
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is counting blades of grass, right?
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And crucially, they don t enjoy it, right?
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This is the crucial point.
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They get no pleasure from it.
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That s just their basic goal, to spend their life counting as many blades of grass as possible.
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Not for some greater goal, that s just their basic goal.
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I want to say that that is objectively stupid.
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That is objectively pointless.
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I shouldn t say stupid, but it s objectively pointless in a way that
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Pursuing pleasure, or pursuing someone else s pleasure, or pursuing scientific inquiry is not pointless.
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As soon as you make that admission, you re not a follower of David Hume anymore.
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You think there are objective facts about what goals are worth pursuing.
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Is it possible to have a goal without pleasure?
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So this kind of idea that you disjoint the two.
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So the David Foster Wallace idea of the key to life is to be unboreable.
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Isn t it possible to discover the pleasure in everything in life?
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The counting of the blades of grass.
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Once you see the mastery, the skill of it, you can discover the pleasure.
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Therefore, you know, I guess what I m asking is why and when and how did you lose the romance in grad school?
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Is that what you re trying to say?
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I think it may or may not be true that it s possible to find pleasure in everything, but I think it s also true that people don t act solely for pleasure, and they certainly don t act solely for their own pleasure.
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People will suffer for things they think are worthwhile.
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I might suffer for some scientific cause, for
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finding out a cure for the pandemic or, and in terms of my own pleasure, I might have less pleasure in doing that, but I think it s worthwhile.
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It s a worthwhile thing to do.
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I just don t think it s the case that everything we do is rooted in maximizing our own pleasure.
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I don t think that s even psychologically plausible.
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But pleasure, then that s a narrow kind of view of pleasure.
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That s like a short-term pleasure, but you can see pleasure is a kind of,
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ability to hear the music in the distance.
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It s like, yes, it s difficult now, it s suffering now, but there s some greater thing beyond the mountain that will be joy.
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I mean, that s kind of a, even if it s not in this life.
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Well, you know, the warriors will meet in Valhalla, right?
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The feeling that gives meaning and fulfillment to life is not necessarily grounded in pleasure of like the counting of the grass.
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It s something else.
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I don t know.
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The struggle is a source of deep fulfillment.
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So like, I think pleasure needs to be kind of thought of as a little bit more broadly.
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It s just kind of,
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gives you this sense, it for a moment allows you to forget the terror of the fact that you re going to die.
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That s pleasure.
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That s the broader view of pleasure, that you get to kind of play in the little illusion that all of this has deep meaning.
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That s pleasure.
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But I mean, you know, people sacrifice their lives.
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Atheists may sacrifice their lives for the sake of someone else or for the sake of something important enough, and clearly in that case they re not doing it for the sake of their own pleasure.
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That s a rather dramatic example, but they can be just trivial examples where
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you know, I choose to be honest rather than lie about something and I lose out a bit and I have a bit less pleasure.
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But I thought it was worth doing the honest thing or something.
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I mean, I just think so that s a, I mean, maybe you can use the word pleasure so broadly that you re just essentially meaning something worthwhile.
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But then
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I think the word pleasure maybe loses its meaning.
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Sure.
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Well.
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But what do you think about the blades of grass case?
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What do you think about someone who spends their life cutting blades of grass and doesn t enjoy it?
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So I think, I personally think it s impossible, or maybe I m not understanding even like the philosophical formulation, but I think it s impossible to have a goal and not draw pleasure from it.
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Make it worthwhile, forget the word pleasure.
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I think the word goal loses meaning.
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If I say I m going to count the number of pens on this table, if I m actively involved in the task, I will find joy in it.
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I think there s a lot of meaning and joy to be discovered in the skill of a task, in mastering of a skill.
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and taking pride in doing it well.
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I mean, that s... I don t know what it is about the human mind, but there s some...
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joy to be discovered in the mastery of a skill.
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So I think it s just impossible to count blades of grass and not sort of have the jiro dreams of sushi compelling, like draws you into the mastery of the simple task.
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Yeah, I suppose, I mean,
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In a way, you might think it s just hard to imagine someone who would spend their lives doing that, but then maybe that s just because it s so evident that that is a pointless task.
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Whereas, if we take this David Hume view seriously, it ought to be, you know, a totally possible life goal.
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Whereas, I mean, yeah, I guess I just find it hard to shake the idea that
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some ways of, some life goals are more worthwhile than others.
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And it doesn t mean, you know, that there s one single way you should lead your life, but pursuing knowledge, helping people, pursuing your own pleasure, to an extent, are worthwhile things to do in a way that, you know, for example, I have, I m a little bit OCD.
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I still feel inclined to walk on cracks in the pavement or do it symmetrically, like if I,
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or step on a crack with my left foot, I feel the need to do it with my right foot.
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I think that s kind of pointless.
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It s something I feel the urge to do, but it s pointless.
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Whereas other things I choose to do, I think it s worth doing.
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It s hard to make sense of metaphysically, what could possibly ground that?
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How could we know about these facts?
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That s the starting point for me.
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I don t know.
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I think you walking on the sidewalk in a way that s symmetrical brings order to the world.
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Like, if you weren t doing that, the world might fall apart.
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It feels like that.
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I think there s meaning in that.
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Like, you embracing the full...
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like the full experience of that, you living the richness of that as if it has meaning will give meaning to it.
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And then whatever genius comes of that as you as a one little intelligent ant will make a better life for everybody else.
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Perhaps I m defending the blades of grass example because I can literally imagine myself enjoying this task as somebody who s OCD in a certain kind of way and quantitative.
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But now you re ruining the exam because you imagine someone enjoying it.
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I m imagining someone who doesn t enjoy it.
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We don t want a life that s,
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just full of pleasure, like we just sit there, you know, having a big sugar high all the time.
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We want a life where we do things that are worthwhile.
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If for something to be worthwhile just is for it to be a basic life goal, then that mode of reflection doesn t really make sense.
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We can t really think, did I do things worthwhile?
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On the David Hume type picture,
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all it is for something to be worthwhile is it was a basic goal of yours or derived from a basic goal and yeah.
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Yeah, I mean, I think goal and worthwhile aren t
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I think goal is a boring word.
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I m more sort of existentialist.
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It s like, did you ride the roller coaster of life?
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Did you fully experience life?
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And in that sense, I mean, the blaze of grass is something that could be deeply joyful.
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And in that way, I think suffering could be joyful in the full context of life.
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It s the roller coaster of life.
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Like without suffering, without struggle, without pain, without depression or sadness, there s not the highs.
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I mean, that s the...
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That s the fucked up thing about life is that the lows really make the highs that much richer and deeper and taste better.
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I tweeted this.
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I couldn t sleep and I was late at night.
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And I know it s an obvious statement, but
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Like every love story eventually, you know, ends in loss, in tragedy.
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So like this feeling of love, at the end, there s always going to be tragedy.
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Even if it s the most amazing lifelong love with another human being, one of you is going to die.
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and I don t know which is worse.
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But both are not going to be pretty.
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And so that, the sense that it s finite, the sense that it s going to end in a low, that gives richness to those kind of evenings when you realize this fucking thing ends.
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This thing ends.
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The feeling that it ends.
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that bad taste, that bad feeling that it ends gives meaning, gives joy, gives, I don t know, pleasure is just a loaded word, but gives some kind of deep pleasure to the experience when it s good.
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And I mean, and that s the blades of grass, you know, they have that to me.
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But you re perhaps right that it s like reducing it to set of goals or something like that is kind of removing the magic of life.
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Because I think what makes counting the blaze of grass joyful is just because it s life.
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Okay, so it sounds like you reject the David Hume type picture anyway, because you re saying, just because you have it as a goal, that s what it is to be worthwhile.
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But you re saying, no, it s because it s engaging with life, riding the roller coaster.
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So that does sound like in some sense, there are facts.
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independent of our personal goal choices about what it means to live a good life.
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And I mean, coming back full circle to the start, the start of this was what makes us different to animals.
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I don t think at the end of a hamster s life, it thinks, did I ride the roller coaster?
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Did I really live life to the full?
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That is not a mode of reflection that s available to non-human animals, so.
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What do you think is the role of death?
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in all of this, the fear of death.
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Does that interplay with consciousness?
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Does this self-reflection, do you think there s some deep connection between this ability to contemplate the fact that our flame of consciousness eventually goes out?
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Yeah, I don t think, unfortunately, panpsychism helps particularly with life after death because, you know, for the panpsychist, there s nothing supernatural, there s nothing beyond the physical.
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All there is really is ultimately particles and fields.
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It s just that we think the ultimate nature of particles and fields is consciousness.
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But I guess when
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when the matter in my brain ceases to be ordered in a way that sustains the particular kind of consciousness I enjoy in waking life, then in some sense I will cease to be.
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Although I do, the final chapter of my book, Galileo s Error, is more experimental.
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So the first four chapters are the cold-blooded case for the panpsychist viewers that the best
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solution to the hard problem of consciousness.
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Yeah, the last chapter is where you talk about meaning.
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Yeah, I talk about meaning, I talk about free will, and I talk about mystical experiences.
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So, I always want to emphasize that panpsychism is not necessarily connected to anything spiritual.
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You know, a lot of people defending this view, like David Chalmers or Luke Roloff, are just total atheist secularists, right?
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They don t believe in any kind of transcendent reality, they just believe in
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feelings, you know, mundane consciousness and think that needs explaining and our conventional scientific approach can t cut it.
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But if for independent reasons you are motivated to some spiritual picture of reality, then maybe a panpsychic s view is more consonant with that.
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So if you have a mystical experience where you, it seems to you in this experience that there is this
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higher form of consciousness at the root of all things.
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If you re a materialist, you ve got to think that s a delusion, you know, there s just something in your brain making you think that it s not real.
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But if you re a panpsychist and you already think the fundamental nature of reality is constituted of consciousness, it s not that much of a leap.
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to think that this higher form of consciousness you seem to apprehend in the mystical experience is part of that underlying reality.
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And in many different cultures, experienced meditators have claimed to have experiences in which it becomes apparent to them that
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there is an element of consciousness that is universal.
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So this is sometimes called universal consciousness.
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So on this view, your mind and my mind are not totally distinct.
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Each of our individual conscious minds is built upon the foundations of universal consciousness and universal consciousness as it exists in me is one and the same thing as universal consciousness as it exists in you.
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So I ve never had one of these experiences, but if one is a panpsychist, I think one is more open to that possibility.
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I don t see why it shouldn t be the case that that is part of the nature of consciousness and maybe something that is apparent in certain deep states of meditation.
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And so what I explore in the experimental final chapter of my book is that could allow for a kind of impersonal
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life after death, because if that view is true, then even when the particular aspects of my conscious experience fall away, that element of universal consciousness at the core of my identity would continue to exist.
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So I d sort of be, as it were, absorbed into universal consciousness.
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So, I mean, Buddhists and Hindu mystics try to meditate to get rid of all the bad karma, to
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absorbed into universal consciousness.
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It could be that if there s no karma, if there s no reverb, maybe everyone gets enlightened when they die.
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Maybe you just sink back into universal consciousness.
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So I also, coming back to morality, suggest this could provide some kind of basis for
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altruism or non-egotism, because if you think, egotism implicitly assumes that we are utterly distinct individuals, whereas on this view, we overlap to an extent that something at the core of our being is... Even in this life, we overlap.
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that would be this view that some experienced meditators claim becomes apparent to them, that there is something at the core of my identity that is one in the same as the thing at the core of your identity, this universal consciousness.
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Yeah, there is something very, like you and I in this conversation, there s a few people listening to this, all of us are in a kind of single mind together.
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there s some small aspect of that and or maybe a big aspect about us humans.
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So certainly in the space of ideas we kind of meld together for time at least in a conversation and kind of play with that idea and then we re clearly all thinking like if I say pink elephant
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There s going to be a few people that are now visualizing a pink elephant.
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We re all thinking about that pink elephant together.
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We re all in the room together thinking about this pink elephant.
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We re rotating it in our minds together.
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What is that?
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Is there a different instantiation of that pink elephant in everybody s mind, or is it the same elephant?
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And we have the same mind exploring that elephant.
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Now if we in our mind start petting that elephant, like touching it, that experience that we re now like thinking what that would feel like,
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Is that all of us experiencing that together, or is that separate?
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So there s some aspect of the togetherness that almost seems fundamental to civilization, to society.
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Hopefully that s not too strong, but to some of the fundamental properties of the human mind.
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it feels like the social aspect is really important.
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We call it social because we think of us as individual minds interacting.
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But if we re just like one collective mind with like fingertips, they re like touching each other as it s trying to explore the elephant.
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But that could be just in the realm of ideas and intelligence and not in the realm of consciousness.
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And it s interesting to see maybe it is in the realm of consciousness.
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Yeah, so it s obviously certainly true in some sense that there are these phenomena that you re talking about of collective consciousness in some sense.
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I suppose the question is, how ontologically serious do we want to be about those things?
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Are they just a construction out of our minds and the fact that we interact in the standardly, scientifically accepted ways?
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Or is, as someone like Rupert Sheldrake would think, that there is some metaphysical reality?
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fields beyond the scientifically understood ones that are somehow communicating this.
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I mean, the view I was describing was that this element we re supposed to have in common is some sort of pure impersonal consciousness or something rather than... So actually, I mean, an interesting figure is the Australian philosopher Mirial Bahari, who defends a kind of mystical conceptual reality rooted in Advaita Vedanta mysticism.
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But like me, she s from this tradition of analytic philosophy, and so she defends this in this incredibly precise, rigorous way.
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She defends the idea that we should think of experienced meditators as providing expert testimony.
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So I think
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humans are causing climate breakdown.
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I have no idea of the science behind it, but I trust the experts, or that the universe is 14 billion years old.
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Most of our knowledge is based on expert testimony, and she thinks we should think of experienced meditators, these people who are telling us about this universal consciousness at the core of our being, as a relevant kind of expert.
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And so she wants to defend the rational acceptability of this mystical conception of reality.
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So I think
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We shouldn t be ashamed, you know, we shouldn t be worried about dealing with certain views as long as it s done with rigor and seriousness.
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You know, I think sometimes terms like, I don t know, new age or something can function a bit like racist terms, you know, a racist term
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picks out a group of people, but then implies certain negative characteristics.
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So people use this term, you know, to pick out a certain set of views like mystical conception of reality and imply it s kind of fluffy thinking or, but, you know, you read Muriel Bahari, you read Luke Roloff s, this is serious, rigorous thought, whether you agree with it or not, obviously it s hugely controversial.
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And so, you know, the enlightenment ideal is to follow the evidence and the arguments where they lead.
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But it s kind of very hard for human beings to do that.
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I think we get stuck in some conception of how we think science ought to look.
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People talk about religion as a crutch, but I think a certain kind of scientism
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a certain conception of how science is supposed to be gets into people s identity and their sense of themselves and their security.
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And makes things hard if you re a pantsleggist.
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And even the word expert becomes a kind of
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crutch, I mean, you use the word expert.
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You have some kind of conception of what expertise means.
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Oftentimes that s connected with a degree at a particularly prestigious university or something like that.
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Expertise is a funny one.
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I ve noticed that anybody that claims they re an expert is usually not the expert.
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The biggest quote-unquote expert
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that I ve ever met are the ones that are truly humble.
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So the humility is the
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really good sign of somebody who s traveled the long road and been humbled by how little they know.
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So some of the best people in the world at whatever the thing they ve spent their life doing are the ones that are ultimately humble in the face of it all.
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So like just being humble, how little we know, even if we travel a lifetime,
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I do like the idea.
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I mean, treating sort of like, what is it, psychonauts, like an expert witness, you know, people who have traveled with the help of DMT to another place where they got some deep understanding of something.
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And their insight is perhaps as valuable as the insight of somebody who ran rigorous psychological studies at Princeton University or something.
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Like those psychonauts, they have wisdom, if it s done rigorously.
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which you can also do rigorously within the university, within the studies now with psilocybin and those kinds of things.
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Yeah, that s fascinating.
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Still probably the best, one of the best works on mystical experience is the chapter in William James s Varieties of Religious Experiences.
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And most of it is just a psychological study of trying to define the characteristics of mystical experience as a psychological type.
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But at the end, he considers the question,
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If you have a mystical experience, is it rational to trust it?
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To trust that it s telling you something about reality?
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And he makes an interesting argument.
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He says if you say no, you re kind of applying a double standard.
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Because we all think it s okay to trust our normal sensory experiences.
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But we have no way of getting outside of ourselves to prove that our sensory experiences correspond to an external reality.
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We could be in the matrix.
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This could be a very vivid dream.
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You could say, oh, we do science, but a scientist only gets their data by experiencing the results of their experiments.
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And then the question arises again, how do you know that corresponds to a real world?
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So he thinks there s a sort of double standard in saying,
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It s okay to trust our ordinary sensory experiences, but it s not okay for the person on DMT to trust those experiences.
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It s very philosophically difficult to say why is it okay in the one case and not the other.
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So I think there s an interesting argument there.
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But I would like to just defend experts a little bit.
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I mean, I agree it s very difficult.
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But especially in an age, I guess, where there s so much information, I do think it s important to have some protection of sources of information, academic institutions that we can trust.
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And then that s difficult because, of course, there are non-academics who do know what they re talking about.
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But if I m interested in knowing about biology, you can t research everything.
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So I think we have to have some sense of who are the experts we can trust, the people who ve spent a lot of time reading all the material that people have read, written, thinking about it, having their views torn apart by other people working in the field.
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I think that is very important.
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And also to protect that from conflicts of interest.
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There is a so-called think tank in the UK called the Institute of Economic Affairs who are always on the BBC as experts on economic questions and they do not declare who funds them, right?
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So we don t know who s paying the piper.
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I think, you know, you shouldn t be allowed to call yourself a think tank if you re not totally transparent about who s funding you.
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So I think that s the, and I mean this connects to panpsychism because I think the reason people
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you know, worry about unorthodox ideas is because they worry about, how do we know when we re just losing control or losing discipline?
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So I do think we need to somehow protect academic institutions as sources of information that we can trust.
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And you know, in philosophy, there s not much consensus on everything, but you can at least know what people who have put the time in to read all the stuff
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what they think about these issues.
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I think that is important.
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Push back and you push back.
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Who are the experts on COVID?
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Oh dear, getting into dangerous territory now.
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Well, let me just speak to it because I am walking through that dangerous territory.
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I m allergic to the word expert because in my simple mind, it,
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kind of rhymes with ego.
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There s something about experts.
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If we allow too much to have a category expert and place certain people in them, those people sitting on the throne start to believe it.
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And they start to communicate with that energy.
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And the humility starts to dissipate.
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I think there is a,
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value in a lifelong mastery of a skill and the pursuit of knowledge within a very specific discipline.
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But the moment you have your name on an office, the moment you re an expert, I think you destroy the very aspect, the very value of that journey towards knowledge.
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So some of it probably just reduces to like skillful communication like of,
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communicate in a way that shows humility, that shows an open-mindedness, that shows an ability to really hear what a lot of people are saying.
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So in the case of COVID, what I ve noticed, and this is true, this is probably true with panpsychism as well, is so-called experts,
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And they are extremely knowledgeable.
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Many of them are colleagues of mine.
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They dismiss what millions of people are saying on the internet.
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without having looked into it with empathy and rigor, honestly, understand what are the arguments being made.
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They say like there s not enough time to explore all those things, like there s so much stuff out there.
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Yeah, I think that s intellectual laziness.
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If you don t have enough time, then don t speak so strongly with dismissal.
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feel bad about it, be apologetic about the fact that you don t have enough time to explore the evidence.
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For example, the heat I got with Francis Collins is that he kind of said that lab leak, he kind of dismissed it.
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showing that he didn t really deeply explore all the sort of, the huge amount of circumstantial evidence that s out there, the battles that are going on out there.
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There s a lot of people really tensely discussing this.
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And being, showing humility in the face of that battle of ideas I think is really important.
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And I ve just been very disappointed in so-called expertise in the space of science
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and showing humility and showing humanity and kindness and empathy towards other human beings.
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At the same time, obviously, I love Jiro Dreams of Sushi, lifelong pursuit of getting, like in Computer Science, Don Knuth, some of my biggest heroes are people that, when nobody else cares,
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They stay on one topic for their whole life and they just find the beautiful little things about, there s puzzles they keep solving.
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And yes, sometimes a virus happens or something happens with that person, with their puzzles,
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becomes like the center of the whole world because that puzzle becomes all of a sudden really important.
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But still there s responsibilities on them to show humility and to be open-minded to the fact that they, even if they spent their whole life doing it, even if their whole community is giving them awards and giving them citations and giving them all kinds of stuff where they re bowing down before them, how smart they are, they still know nothing.
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relative to all the stuff, the mysteries that are out there.
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Yeah, I wonder how much we re disagreeing.
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I mean, these are totally valid issues.
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And of course, expertise goes wrong in all sorts of ways.
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It s totally fallible.
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I suppose I would just say, what is the alternative?
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What do we just say?
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all information is equal.
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Because I, you know, as a voter, I ve got to decide who to vote for.
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And that, you know, I ve got to evaluate.
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And I can t look into all of the economics and all of the relevant science and so
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I just think, maybe it s like Churchill said about democracy, you know, it s the worst system of government apart from all the rest.
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I think about panpsychism, it s the worst theory of consciousness apart from all the rest.
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But, you know, I just think expertise, the peer review system, I think it s terrible in so many ways.
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Yes, people should show more humility, but
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I can t see a viable alternative.
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I think philosopher Bernard Williams had a really nice nuanced discussion of the problems of titles, but how they also function in a society.
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They do have some positive function.
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The very first time I lectured in philosophy, before I got a professorship,
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was teaching at a continuing education college.
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So it s kind of retired people who want to learn some more things.
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And I just totally pitched it too high.
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And Gate talked about Bernard Williams on titles and hierarchies.
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And these kind of people in their 70s and 80s were just instantly started interrupting saying, what is philosophy?
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And it was a disaster.
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And I just remember in the breaks,
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a sort of elderly lady come up and said, I ve decided to take Egyptology instead.
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But that was my introduction to teaching.
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Anyway, but sort of titles and accomplishments is a nice starting point, but doesn t buy you the whole thing.
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So you don t get to just say, this is true because I m an expert.
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You still have to convince people.
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One of the things I really like, so I practice martial arts,
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And for people who don t know, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is one of them.
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And you sometimes wear these pajamas, pajama-looking things, and you wear a belt.
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So I happen to be a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
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And I also train in what s called Nogi, so you don t wear the pajamas.
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And when you don t wear the pajamas, nobody knows what rank you are.
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Nobody knows if you re a black belt or a white belt, if you re a complete beginner or not.
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And when you wear the pajamas, called the gi, you wear the rank.
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And people treat you very differently.
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When they see my black belt, they treat me differently.
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They kind of defer to my expertise.
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If they re kicking my ass, that s probably because I am working on something
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like new or maybe I m letting them win, but when there s no belts and it doesn t matter if I ve been doing this for 15 years, it doesn t matter.
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None of it matters.
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What matters is the raw interaction of just trying to kick each other s ass and seeing like, what is this chess game, like a human chess,
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who, what are the ideas that we re playing with?
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And I think there s a dance there.
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Yes, it s valuable to know a person as a black belt when you take consideration of the advice of different people, me versus somebody who s only practiced for like a couple of days.
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But at the same time, the raw practice of ideas that is combat
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and the raw practice of exchange of ideas that is science needs to often throw away expertise.
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And in communicating, there s a other thing to science and expertise, which is leadership.
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It s not just, so the scientific method in the review process is this rigorous battle of ideas between scientists.
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but there s also a stepping up and inspiring the world and communicating ideas to the world.
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And that skill of communication, I suppose that s my biggest criticism of so-called experts in science, is they re just shitty communicators.
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Yeah.
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Well, I can tell you, I get very frustrated with philosophers not reaching out more.
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I mean, I think,
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I think it might be partly that we re trained to get watertight arguments, respond to all objections.
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And as you do that, eventually it gets more complicated and the jargon comes in.
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So to write a more accessible book or article, you have to loosen the arguments a bit.
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And then we worry that other philosophers will think, oh, that s a really crap argument.
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So I mean, the way I did it, I wrote my academic book first, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality.
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and then a more accessible book, Galileo s Error, where the arguments, you know, not as rigorously worked out.
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So then I can say the proper arguments, you know, the fuller arguments there.
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But I get very... That s brilliantly done, by the way.
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So for people who don t know, you first wrote Consciousness and Fundamental Reality.
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So that s the academic book, also very good.
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I flew through it last night, bought it.
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And then obviously the popular book is Galileo s Era, Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness.
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That s kind of the right way to do it.
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To show that you re legit to your community, to the world, by doing the book that s nobody going to read, and then doing a popular book that everybody s going to read.
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That s cool.
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That s a good way.
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Yeah, well I try now, every time I write an academic article,
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I try to write a more accessible version.
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I mean, the thing I ve been working on recently, just because there s this argument.
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So there s a certain argument from the cosmological fine tuning of the laws of physics for life to the multiverse that s quite popular physicists like Max Tegmark.
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There s an argument in philosophy journals that there s a fallacious
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line of reasoning going on there from the fine-tuning to the multiverse.
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Now that argument is from 20-30 years ago, and it s discussed in academic philosophy.
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Nobody knows about it, and there is huge interest in this fine-tuning stuff, scientists wanting to argue for the multiverse.
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Theists wanting to say this is evidence for God, and nobody knows about this argument, which tries to show that it s fallacious reasoning to go from the fine tuning to the multiverse.
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So I wrote a piece for Scientific American explaining this argument to a more general audience, and it just really irritates me that
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It s just buried in these technical journal articles and nobody knows about it.
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But just, you know, final thing on X-Ray.
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I don t disagree with anything you said, and that s kind of really beautiful, that martial arts example and thinking how that could be analogous.
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But I think it s very rare to find a good philosopher who hasn t had
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hasn t given a talk to other philosophers and had objections raised.
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I was going to say have it torn apart, but that s maybe thinking of it in slightly the wrong way, but have the best objections raised to it.
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And that s why
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that is an important formative process that you go through as an academic, that the greatest minds starting a philosophy degree, for example, won t have gone through, probably, except in very rare cases, just won t have the skills required.
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But part of it is just fun to disagree and dance with, I think, to elaborate on what you re saying in agreement,
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not just gone through that, but continue to go through that.
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That s, I would say, the biggest problem with quote-unquote expertise is that there s a certain point where you get, because it sucks, like martial arts is a good example of that, it sucks to get your ass kicked.
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There s a temptation, I still go, I train, you re getting older too, but also there s killers out there in both the space of martial arts
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martial arts in the space of science.
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And I think that once you become a professor, like more and more senior, and more and more respected, I don t know if you get your ass kicked in the space of ideas as often.
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I don t know if you allow yourself to truly expose yourself.
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If you do, that s a great thing.
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like sign of a humble, brilliant mind.
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It s constantly exposing yourself to that.
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I think you do, because I think there s graduate students who want to, you know, find the objection to sort of write their paper or make their mark.
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And yeah, I think everyone still gives talks or should give talks and people are wanting to work out if there are any weaknesses to your position.
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So
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Yeah, I think that generally works out.
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There is also kind of, who do you give the talks to?
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So, I mean, within communities, it s a little cluster of people that argue and bicker, but what are they arguing about?
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They take a bunch of stuff,
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a bunch of basic assumptions as agreement.
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And they heatedly argue about certain ideas.
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The question is how open are, that s actually kind of like fun.
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That s like, no offense, sorry, we re sticking on this martial arts thing.
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It s like people who practice Aikido or certain martial arts that don t truly test themselves in the cage, in combat.
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So it s like, it s fun to argue about certain things when you re in your own community, but you don t test those ideas in the full context of science, in the full seriousness, the rigor of the, sometimes like the real world.
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One of my favorite fields is psychology.
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There s often places within psychology where you re kind of doing these studies and arguing about stuff that s done in the lab.
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The arguments are,
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almost disjoint from real human behavior.
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Because it s so much easier to study human behavior in the lab, you just kind of stay there and that s where the arguments are.
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Vision science is a good example, like studying eye movement and how we perceive the world and all that kind of stuff.
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It s so much easier to study in a lab that we don t consider, we say that s going to be what the science of vision is going to be like and we don t consider
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the science of vision in the actual real world, the engineering of vision, I don t know.
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And so I think that s where exposing yourself to out-of-the-box ideas, that s the most painful, that s the most important.
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I mean, groupthink can be a terrible thing in philosophy as well, but because you re not
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to the same extent beholden to evidence and refutation from the evidence that you are in the sciences.
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It s a more subtle process of evaluation and so more susceptible, I think, to groupthink.
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I agree, it s a danger.
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We ve talked about it a million times, but let s try to sort of do that old basic terminology definitions.
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What is panpsychism?
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What are the different ways you can try to think about, to define panpsychism maybe in contrast to naturalistic dualism and materialism, other kind of use of consciousness?
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so you ve basically laid out the different options.
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So I guess probably still the dominant view is materialism, that roughly that we can explain consciousness in the terms of physical science, wholly explain it just in terms of the electrochemical signaling in the brain.
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Dualism, the polar opposite view, that consciousness is
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non-physical outside of the physical workings of the body and the brain, although closely connected.
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And when I studied philosophy, we were taught basically they were the two options you had to choose, right?
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Either you thought it were dualist and you thought it was separate from the physical, or you thought it was just
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electrochemical signaling.
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And yeah, I became very disillusioned because I think there are big problems with both of these options.
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So I think the attraction to panpsychism is it s kind of a middle way.
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It agrees with the materialist that there s just the physical world.
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Ultimately, there s just particles and fields.
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But the panpsychist thinks there s more to the physical than what physical science reveals.
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And that
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the ultimate nature of the physical world is constituted of consciousness.
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So consciousness is not outside of the physical as the dualist thinks, it s embedded in, underlies the kind of description of the world we get from physics.
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What to you are the problems of materialism and dualism?
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Starting with materialism, it s a huge debate, but I think that the core of it is that physical science works with a purely quantitative description of the physical world, whereas consciousness essentially involves qualities.
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If you think about the smell of coffee or the taste of mint or
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the deep red you experience as you watch a sunset, I think these qualities can t be captured in the purely quantitative language of physical science.
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And so as long as your description of the brain is framed in the purely quantitative language of neuroscience, you ll just leave out these qualities and hence really leave out consciousness itself.
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And then dualism?
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So I ve actually changed my mind a little bit on this since I wrote the book.
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So I mean, I argued in the book that we have pretty good experimental grounds for doubting dualism.
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And roughly the idea was
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if dualism were true, if there was, say, an immaterial mind impacting on the brain every second of waking life, that this would really show up in our neuroscience.
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There d be all sorts of things happening in the brain that had no physical explanation.
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It would be like a poltergeist was playing with the brain.
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But actually, and so the fact that we don t find that
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It s a strong and ever-growing inductive argument against dualism.
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But actually, the more I talk to neuroscientists and read neuroscience, and we have at Durham, my university, an interdisciplinary consciousness group, I don t think we know enough about the brain, about the workings of the brain to make that argument.
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I think we know a lot about the basic chemistry, how neurons fire, neurotransmitters, action potentials, things like that.
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We know a fair bit about large-scale functions of the brain, what different bits of the brain do.
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But what we re almost clueless on is how those large-scale functions are realized at the cellular level, how it works.
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Um, you know, people get quite excited about brain scans, but it s very low resolution.
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You know, every pixel on a brain scan corresponds to 5.5 million neurons.
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And we re only, um,
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were only 70% of the way through constructing a connectome for the maggot brain, which has 10,000 or 100,000 neurons, but the brain has 86 billion neurons.
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So I think we d have to know a lot more about how the brain works, how these functions are realized.
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before we could assess whether the dynamics of the brain can be completely explicated in terms of underlying chemistry or physics.
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So, you know, we d have to do more engineering before we could figure that out.
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And there are people with other proposals.
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Someone I got to know, Martin Picard at Columbia University, who has the psychobiology mitochondrial lab there.
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and is experimentally exploring the hypothesis that mitochondria in the brain should be understood as sort of social networks, perhaps as an alternative to reducing it to underlying chemistry and physics.
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So I m less
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It is ultimately an empirical question whether dualism is true.
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I m less convinced that we know the answer to that question at this stage.
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I think still, as scientists and philosophers, we want to try and find the simplest, most parsimonious theory of reality.
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And dualism is still a pretty inelegant, unparsimonious theory.
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Reality is divided up into
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purely physical properties and these consciousness properties and they re radically different kinds of things, whereas the panpsychist offers a much more simple unified picture reality.
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So I think it s still the view to be preferred, you know, to put it very simply, why believe in two kinds of things when you can just get away with one.
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SPEAKER_01
And materialism is also very simple, but you re saying it doesn t explain
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Something that seems pretty important.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so I think materialism can t, you know, we try, science is about trying to find the simplest theory that accounts for the data.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t think materialism can account for the data.
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Maybe dualism can account for the data, but panpsychism is simpler.
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It can account for the data and it s simpler.
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SPEAKER_01
What is panpsychism?
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So in its broadest definition, it s the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.
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like a law of physics, what should we be imagining?
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What do you think the different flavors of how that actually takes shape in the context of what we know about physics and science and the universe?
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SPEAKER_00
So in the simplest form of it, the fundamental building blocks of reality, perhaps electrons and quarks, have incredibly simple forms of experience, and the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow
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rooted in or derived from these very simple forms of experience at the level of basic physics.
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But I mean, maybe the crucial bit about the kind of panpsychism I defend, what it does is it takes the standard approach to the problem of consciousness
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and turns it on its head, right?
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So the standard approach is to think, we start with matter and we think, how do we get consciousness out of matter?
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So I don t think that problem can be solved for reasons I ve kind of hinted at.
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We could maybe go into more detail.
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But the panpsychist does it the other way around.
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They start with consciousness and try to get matter out of consciousness.
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So the idea is basically, at the fundamental level of reality, there are just
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networks of very simple conscious entities.
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But these conscious entities, because they have very simple kinds of experience, they behave in predictable ways.
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Through their interactions, they realize certain mathematical structures.
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And then the idea is those mathematical structures just are
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the structures identified by physics.
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So when we think about these simple conscious entities in terms of the mathematical structures they realize, we call them particles, we call them fields, we call their properties mass, spin, and charge.
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But really, there s just these very simple conscious entities and their experiences.
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So in this way, we get physics
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out of consciousness.
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I don t think you can get consciousness out of physics, but I think it s pretty easy to get physics out of consciousness.
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Well, I m a little confused by why
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you need to get physics out of consciousness.
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I mean, to me, it sounds like panpsychism unites consciousness and physics.
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I mean, physics is the mathematical science of describing everything.
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So physics should be able to describe consciousness.
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Panpsychism, in my understanding, proposes is that physics doesn t currently do so, but can in the future.
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I mean, it seems like consciousness,
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You have like Stephen Wolfram, who s all these people who are trying to develop theories of everything, mathematical frameworks within which to describe how we get all the reality that we perceive around us.
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To me, there s no reason why that kind of framework cannot also include some accurate, precise description of whatever simple consciousness characteristics are present there at the lowest level.
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panpsychist theories have truth to them.
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So like to me, it is physics.
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You said kind of physics emerges, by which you mean like the basic four laws of physics that as we currently know them, the standard model, quantum mechanics, general relativity, that emerges from the base consciousness layer.
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That s what you mean.
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Yeah, so maybe the way I phrased it made it sound like these things are more separate than they are.
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What I was trying to address was a common
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misunderstanding of panpsychism that it s a sort of dualistic theory, that the idea is that particles have their physical properties like mass, spin, and charge, and these other funny consciousness properties.
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So the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder had a blog post critiquing panpsychism maybe a couple of years ago now that got a fair bit of traction, and she was
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interpreting panpsychism in this way.
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And then her thought was, well, look, if particles had these funny consciousness properties, then it would show up in our physics, like the standard model of particle physics would make false predictions because its predictions are based wholly on the physical properties.
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If there were also these consciousness properties, we d get different predictions.
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But that s a misunderstanding of the view.
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The view is, it s not that there are two kinds of property that mass, spin and charge
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are forms of consciousness.
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How do we make sense of that?
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Because actually, when you look at what physics tells us, it s really just telling us about behavior, about what stuff does.
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I sometimes put it by saying, doing physics is like playing chess when you don t care what the pieces are made of.
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You re just interested in what moves you can make.
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So physics tells us what mass, spin and charge do, but it doesn t tell us
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what they are.
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So the idea- The experience of mass.
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So the idea is, yeah, mass in its nature is a very simple form of consciousness.
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So yeah, physics in a sense is complete, I think, because it tells us what everything at the fundamental level does.
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It describes its causal capacities.
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But for the panpsychist at least, physics doesn t tell us what matter is.
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It tells us what it does, but not what it is.
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to push back on the thing I think she s criticizing, is it also possible, so I understand what you re saying, but is it also possible that particles have another property, like consciousness?
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I don t understand the criticism we would be able to detect it in our experiments.
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Well, no, if you re not looking for it.
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There s a lot of stuff that are orthogonal.
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Like, if you re not looking for this stuff, you re not going to detect it, because all of our basic empirical science, through its recent history, and yes, the history of science is quite recent, has been very kind of focused on billiard balls colliding.
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and from that understanding how gravity works.
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But we just haven t integrated other possibilities into this.
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I don t think there ll be conflicting, whether you are observing consciousness or not, or exploring some of these ideas, I don t think that affects the rest of the physics.
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The mass, the energy, all the different kind of hierarchy of different particles and so on, how they interact.
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I don t think...
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It feels like consciousness is something orthogonal, like very much distinct.
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It s the quantitative versus the qualitative.
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There s something quite distinct that we re just almost like another dimension that we re just completely ignoring.
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There might be a way of responding to Sabina to say, well, there could be properties of particles that don t show up in the specific circumstances in which physicists investigate particles.
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My colleague, the philosopher of science, Nancy Cartwright, has got this book, How the Laws of Physics Lie, where she says, physicists explore
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things in very specific circumstances and then, in an unwarranted way, generalize that.
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But, I mean, I guess I was thinking Sabina s criticism actually just misses the mark in a more basic way.
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Her point is, we shouldn t think there are any more properties to particles other than those the Standard Model attributes to them.
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Panpsychics would say, yeah, sure, there aren t.
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There are just the properties, the physical properties like mass, spin and charge, that the Standard Model attributes to them.
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It s just that
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we have a different philosophical view as to the nature of those properties.
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So those properties are turtles that are sitting on top of another turtle and that big turtle is consciousness.
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That s what you re saying.
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But I m just saying, it s possible that s true.
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It s possible also that consciousness is just another turtle playing with the others.
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It s just not interacting in the ways that we ve been observing.
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In fact, to me that s more compelling because then that s going to be
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Well, no, I think both are very compelling, but it feels like it s more within the reach of empirical validation if it s yet another property of particles that we re just not observing.
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If it s like the thing from which matter and energy and physics emerges, like,
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it makes it that much more difficult to investigate how you get from that base layer of consciousness to the wonderful little spark of consciousness, complexity, and beauty that is the human.
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I don t know if you re necessarily trying to get there, but one of the beautiful things to get at with panpsychism or with a solid theory of consciousness is to answer the question, how do you engineer the thing?
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How do you get from nothing, vacuum in the lab,
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if there is that consciousness-based layer, how do you start engineering organisms that have consciousness in them?
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Or the reverse of that, describing how does consciousness emerge in the human being?
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From conception, from a stem cell, to the whole full neurobiology that builds from that, how do you get this full, rich experience of consciousness that humans have?
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It just, it feels like that s the dream and if,
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Consciousness is just another player in the game of physics.
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It feels more amenable to our scientific understanding of it.
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That s interesting.
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I mean, I guess it s supposed to be a kind of identity claim here that physics tells us what matter does.
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Consciousness is what matter is.
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So matter is sort of what consciousness does.
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So at the bottom level, there is just
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consciousness and conscious things.
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They re just these simple things with their experiences and that is their total nature.
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So in that sense, it s not another player, it s just all there is really.
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And then we describe, in physics, we describe that at a certain level of abstraction.
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We capture what Bertrand Russell, who was the inspiration for a lot of this, calls the causal skeleton of the world.
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So you know, physics is just interested in the causal skeleton of the world, it s not interested in the sort of flesh and blood, although that s maybe suggesting separation again, too much, all metaphors fail in the end.
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But yeah, so you re totally right.
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Ultimately, what we want to explain is how our consciousness and the consciousness of other animals comes out of this.
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If we can t do that, then it s game over.
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I think it maybe makes more sense on the identity claim that if matter at the fundamental level just is forms of consciousness, then we can perhaps make sense of how those simple forms of consciousness in some way combine in some way to make the consciousness we know and love.
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That s the dream.
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Yeah, so I guess the question is, so the reason you can describe, the reason you have material engineering, material science,
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is because you have from physics to chemistry, like you keep going up and up in levels of complexity in order to describe objects that we have in our human world.
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And it would be nice to do the same thing for consciousness, to come up with the chemistry of consciousness, right?
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Like how do the different particles interact to create greater complexity?
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So you can do this kind of thing for life, like what is life, like living organisms?
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At which point do living organisms become living?
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How do you know, if I give you a thing, that that thing is living?
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And there s a lot of people working on this kind of idea, and some of it has to do with the levels of complexity and so on.
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It d be nice to know, like, measuring different degrees of consciousness as you get into bigger, more and more complex objects.
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And that s what chemistry, like bigger and bigger conscious molecules.
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and to see how that leads to organisms.
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And then organisms like start to collaborate together like they do inside a human body to create the full human body.
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To do those kinds of experiments would be, it seems like that would be kind of a goal.
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That s what I mean by player in a game of physics.
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As opposed to like the base layer.
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If it s just the base layer, it becomes harder to track it as you get from physics to chemistry to biology to psychology.
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Yeah, in every case apart from consciousness, I would say what we re interested in is behavior.
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We re interested in explaining behavioral functions.
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So at the level of fundamental physics, we re interested in capturing the equations that describe the behavior there.
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And when we get to higher levels, we re interested in explicating the behavior, perhaps in terms of behavior at simpler levels.
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And with life as well, that s what we re interested in, the various observable functions of life, explaining them in terms of more simple mechanisms.
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But in the case of consciousness, I don t think that s what we re doing, or at least not
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all that we re doing.
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In the case of consciousness, there are these subjective qualities that we re immediately aware of, the redness of a red experience, the itchiness of an itch, and we re trying to account for them.
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We re trying to bring them into our theory of reality.
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And
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postulating some mechanism does not deal with that.
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So I think we ve got to realize dealing with consciousness is a radically different explanatory task from other tasks of science.
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Other tasks of science, we re trying to explain behavior in terms of simpler forms of behavior.
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In the case of consciousness, we re trying to explain these invisible subjective qualities that you can t see from the outside, but that you re immediately aware of.
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The reason materialism perhaps continues to dominate is people think
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Look at the success of science.
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It s incredible.
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Look at all the, you know, it s explained all this.
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Surely it s going to explain consciousness.
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But I think we have to appreciate there s a radically different explanatory task here.
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And so, I mean, the neuroscientist Anil Seth, who I ve had lots of intense but friendly discussions with, you know, wants to compare consciousness to life.
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But I think there s this radical difference that in the case of life,
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Again, we come back to public observation.
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All of the data are publicly observable data.
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We re basically trying to explain complex behavior.
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And the way you do that is identify mechanisms, simpler mechanisms that explicate that behavior.
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That s the task in physics, chemistry, neurobiology.
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But in the case of consciousness, that s not what we re trying to do.
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We re trying to account for these subjective qualities and you postulate a mechanism
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That might explain behavior, but it doesn t explain the redness of a red experience.
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But still, I mean, still ultimately the hope is that we will have some kind of hierarchical story.
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So we take the causal dynamics of physics.
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We hypothesize that that s filled out with certain forms of consciousness.
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And then at higher levels, we get more complex causal dynamics
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filled out by more complex forms of consciousness.
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And ultimately we get to us, hopefully.
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So yeah, so there s still a sort of hierarchical explanatory framework there.
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So you kind of mentioned the hierarchy of consciousness.
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Do you think it s possible to, within the panpsychism framework, to measure consciousness?
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Or put another way, are some things more conscious than others?
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in the panpsychist view.
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It s a difficult question.
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I mean, I do see consciousness as a, dealing with consciousness, an interdisciplinary task between something more experimental, which has to do with the ongoing project of trying to work out what people call the neural correlates of consciousness, what kinds of physical brain activity correspond to conscious experience.
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That s one part of it, but I think essentially there s also
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a theoretical question of more the why question.
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Why do those kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of conscious experience?
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I don t think you can answer that.
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Because consciousness is not publicly observable, I don t think you can answer that why question with an experiment.
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But they have to go hand in hand.
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And I mean, one of the theories I m attracted to is the
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the integrated information theory, according to which we find consciousness at the level at which there is most integrated information, and they try to give a mathematically precise definition of that.
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So on that view, you know, probably this cup of tea isn t conscious because there s probably more integrated information in the molecules making up the tea than there is in the liquid as a whole.
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But in the brain, what is distinctive about the brain is that
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there s a huge amount of integrated, there s more integrated information in the system than there is in individual neurons.
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So that s why they claim that that s the basis of consciousness at the macro level.
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Now they, so I don t, I mean, I like some features of this theory, but they do talk about degrees of consciousness.
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They do want to say there is gradations
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I m not sure conceptually I can kind of make sense of that.
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I mean, there are things to do with consciousness that are graded like complexity or levels of information, but I m not sure whether experience itself admits a degree.
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I sort of think something either has experience or it doesn t.
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It might have very simple experience, it might have very complex experience, but
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Experience itself, I don t think it admits of degree in that sense.
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It s not more experience, less experience.
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I sort of find that conceptually hard to make sense of, but I m kind of open-minded on it.
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So when we have a lot higher resolution of sensory information, don t you think that s correlated to the richness of the experience?
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So doesn t more information provide a richer experience?
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Or is that, again, thinking quantitatively and not thinking about the subjective experience?
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Like you can experience a lot with very little sensory information, perhaps.
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Like, do you think those are connected?
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Yeah, yeah.
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So there are features, characteristics here we can grade, the complexity of the experience.
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And on the integrated information theory, they correlate that in terms of mathematically identifiable structure with
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integrated information.
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So roughly, it s a quite unusual notion of information.
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It s perhaps not the standard way one thinks about information.
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It s to do with constraining past and future possibilities of the system.
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So the idea is in the retina of the eye, there s a huge amount of possible states the retina of my eye could be in at the next moment, depending on what light goes into it.
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whereas the possible next states of the brain are much more constrained.
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Obviously, it responds to the environment, but it heavily constrains its past and future states.
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And so that s the idea of information they have.
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And then the second idea is how much that information is dependent on integration.
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So in a computer where you have
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transistors.
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You take out a few transistors, you might not lose that much information.
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It s not dependent on interconnections, whereas you take a tiny bit of the brain out, you lose a lot of information because the way it stores information is dependent on the interconnections of the system.
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So yeah, so that s one proposal for how to measure one
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gradeable characteristic, which might correspond to some gradeable characteristic in qualitative consciousness.
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And maybe I m being very pedantic, which is, you know, philosophers professional pedant.
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I just sort of don t think that is a quantity of experience is a quantity of
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the structure of experience maybe, but I just find it hard to make sense of the idea of how much experience do you have?
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I ve got five units of experience.
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I ve got one unit of experience.
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I don t know, I find that a bit hard to make sense of, but maybe I m being just pedantic.
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I think just saying the word experience is difficult to think about.
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Let s talk about suffering.
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Let s talk about a particular experience.
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So let s talk about me and a hamster.
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I just think that, no offense to the hamster.
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Probably no hamsters are listening.
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So now you re offending hamsters too.
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Maybe there s a hamster that s just pissed off.
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There s probably somebody on a speaker right now, like listening to this podcast and they probably have a hamster or a guinea pig.
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and that hamster is listening, it just doesn t know the English language or any kind of human interpretable linguistic capabilities to tell you to fuck off.
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It understands exactly what s being talked about and can see through us.
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Anyway, it just feels like a hamster has less capacity to suffer than me.
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and maybe a cockroach or an insect or maybe a bacteria has less capacity to suffer than me.
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But is that, maybe that s me deluding myself as to the complexity of my conscious experience.
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Maybe it s all, maybe there is some sense in which I can suffer more
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but to reduce it to something quantifiable is impossible.
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Yeah, I guess, I definitely think there s kinds of suffering that you have the joy of being possible for you that aren t available to a hamster, I don t think.
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Well, can a hamster suffer heartbreak?
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I don t know, can a cockroach suffer heartburn?
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But it s certainly there s, I mean, there s kinds of fear of your own death, concern about whether there s a purpose to existence.
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These are forms of suffering that aren t available to certain, to most non-human animals.
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whether there s an overall scale that we could put physical and emotional suffering on and identify where you are on that scale, I m not so sure.
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So it s like humans have a much bigger menu of experiences, much bigger selection in the- In one sense, at least.
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So there s like a page that s suffering.
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So this menu of experiences, like you have the omelets and the breakfast and so on, and one of the pages is suffering.
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It s just we have a lot compared to a hamster, a lot more.
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But in one individual thing that we share with a hamster,
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that experience, it s difficult to argue that we experience it deeper than others, like hunger or something like that.
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Yeah, physical pain, I m not sure.
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But I mean, there are kinds
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of experiences animals have that we don t.
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Bats echolocate around the world.
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The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously pointed out that no matter how much you understand of the neurophysiology of bats, you ll still not know what it s like to squeal and find your way around by listening to the echoes bounce off.
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So yeah, I mean, I guess I feel the intuition that there s
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emotional suffering is, I want to say, deeper than physical suffering.
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I don t know how to make that statement precise though.
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So one of the ways I think about, I think people think about consciousness is in connection to suffering.
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So let me just ask about suffering because that s how people think about animals.
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Cruelty to animals or cruelty to living things.
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They connect that to suffering and to consciousness.
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I think
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there s a sense in which those two are deeply connected when people are thinking about just public policy, they re thinking about philosophy, engineering, psychology, sociology, political science, all of those things have to do with human suffering, animal suffering, life suffering.
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and that s connected to consciousness in a lot of people s minds.
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Is it connected like that for you?
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So the capacity to suffer, is it also somehow strongly correlated with the capacity to experience consciously?
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Yeah, I would say suffering is a kind of experience, and so you have to be conscious to suffer.
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Actually, so there,
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as well as people taking more unusual views of consciousness seriously now.
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Panpsychism is one radical approach.
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Another one is what s become known as illusionism, the view that consciousness, at least in the sense that philosophers think about it, doesn t really exist at all.
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So yeah, my podcast Mind Chat, I host with a
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a committed illusionist.
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So the gimmick is I think consciousness is everywhere, he thinks it s nowhere.
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And so that s one very simple way of avoiding all these problems, right?
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Consciousness doesn t exist, we don t need to explain it, job done.
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Although we might still have to explain why we seem to be conscious, why it s so hard to get out of the idea that we re conscious.
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But the reason I connect this to what you re saying is actually my co-host, Keith Frankish, is a little bit ambivalent on the word pain.
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He says, oh, in some sense I believe in pain and in some sense I don t.
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But another illusionist, Francois Camara,
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has a paper discussing how we think about morality, given his view that pain in the way we normally think about it just does not exist.
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He thinks it s an illusion.
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The brain tricks us into thinking we feel pain, but we don t.
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how we should think about morality in the light of that.
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It s become a big topic, actually, thinking about the connection between consciousness and morality.
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David Chalmers, the philosopher, is most associated with this concept of a philosophical zombie.
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So a philosophical zombie is very different from a Hollywood zombie.
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Hollywood zombies, you know,
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you know what they re like, but philosophical zombies are, it s a really good Korean zombie movie on Halloween this year, I can t remember what it s called now.
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Anyway, philosophical zombies behave just like us because the physical workings of their body and brain are the same as ours, but they have no conscious experience.
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There s nothing that s like to be a zombie.
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So you stick a knife in it, it screams and runs away, but it doesn t actually feel pain.
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It s just a complicated, you know,
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mechanism set up to behave just like us.
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Now there s lots of, no one believes in these, I think there s one philosopher who believes in everyone is a zombie except him, but anyway.
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But isn t that what illusionism is?
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Yeah, I suppose so in a sense illusionism is if you were all zombies.
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And one reason to think about zombies is to think about the value of consciousness.
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So if there were a zombie, here s a question,
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Suppose we could make zombies by, let s say for the sake of discussion, things made of silicon aren t conscious.
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I don t know if that s true, it could turn out to be true.
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And suppose you built
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Commander Data out of Silicon, you know, it s a bit of an old school reference to Star Trek Next Generation.
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So, you know, behaves just like a human being, but, you know, you can have a sophisticated conversation, it will talk about its hopes and fears, but it has no consciousness.
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Does it have moral rights?
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Is it murder to turn off such a being?
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I m inclined to say, no, it s not.
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If it doesn t have experience, it doesn t really suffer.
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It doesn t really have moral rights at all.
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So I m inclined to think consciousness is the basis of moral value, moral concern.
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And conversely, as a panpsychist,
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For this reason, I think it can transform your relationship with nature.
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If you think of a tree as a conscious organism, albeit of a very unusual kind, then a tree is a locus of moral concern in its own right.
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Chopping down a tree is an act of immediate moral concern.
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If you see these horrible forest fires, we re all horrified.
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But if you think it s the burning of conscious organisms, that does add
6
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a whole new dimension.
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Although it also makes things more complicated because people often think, as a panpsychist, I m going to be vegan.
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But it s tricky because if you think plants and trees are conscious as well, you ve got to eat something.
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If you don t think plants and trees are conscious, then you ve got a nice moral dividing line.
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You can say, I m not going to eat things that aren t conscious.
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I m not going to kill things that aren t conscious.
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But if you think plants and trees are conscious, then
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you don t have that nice moral dividing line.
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I mean, so the principle I m kind of working my way towards, I haven t kept it up in my trip to the US, but it s just not eating any animal products that are factory farmed.
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You know, my vegan friends say, well, it s still suffering there.
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And I think there is, even in the nicest farms,
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Cows will suffer when their calves are taken off them.
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They go for a few days of quite serious mourning.
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So they re still suffering, but it seems to me, my thought is the principle of just not having factory farm stuff is something more people could get on board with, and you might have greater harm minimization.
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So if people went into restaurants and said, are your animal products factory farmed?
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If not,
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I want the vegan option, or if people looked out for the label that said no factory farmed ingredients, you know, I think maybe that that could make a really big difference to the market and harm minimization.
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Anyway, so that s the, so it s very ethically tricky, but some people don t buy that.
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There s a very good philosopher, Jeff Lee, who thinks zombies should have equal rights, consciousness.
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It doesn t matter, you know.
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Let us go there.
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But first, I listened to your podcast.
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It s awesome to have two very kind of different philosophies inter dancing together in one place.
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What s the name of the podcast again?
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Mind Chat.
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Yeah.
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So, yeah, that s the idea.
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I guess, you know, polarized times.
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I mean, I love
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trying to get in the mindset of people I really disagree with.
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And, you know, I can t understand how on earth they re thinking that, you know, really trying to have respect and try and, you know, see where they re coming from.
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I love that.
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So that s what, yeah, Keith Frankish and I do of, from polar opposite views, really trying to understand each other and, you know, interviewing scientists and philosophers of consciousness from those different perspectives.
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Although in a sense,
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We have a very common starting point, because we both think you can t fully account for consciousness, at least as philosophers normally think of it in conventional scientific terms.
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So we share that starting point, but we react to it in very different ways.
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He says, well, it doesn t exist then.
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It s like furry dust.
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witches, you know, we don t believe in anymore.
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Whereas I say, it does exist.
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So we have to rethink what science is.
6
SPEAKER_00
So you recently talked to on that podcast with Sean Carroll, and I first heard your great interview with Sean Carroll on his podcast, Mindscape.
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What, it s interesting to kind of see if there s agreements, disagreements between the two of you, because he s a very serious quantum mechanics guy, he s a physics guy, but he also thinks about deep philosophical questions.
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He s a big proponent of many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, so.
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Actually, I m trying to think, outside from your conversation with him, I m trying to remember what he thinks about consciousness.
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But anyway, maybe you can comment on what are some interesting agreements and disagreements with Sean Carroll.
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I don t think there s many agreements, but, you know, we ve had really constructive, interesting discussions in a lot of different contexts.
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And, you know, he s very clued up about philosophy, he s very respectful of philosophy.
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Certain physicists who shall remain nameless think, what s all this?
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bullshit philosophy, we don t have to waste our time with that, and then go on to do pretty bad philosophy.
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The book co-written by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow famously starts off saying philosophy is dead, and then goes on in later chapters to do some pretty bad philosophy.
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So I think we have to do philosophy, if only to get rid of bad philosophy, you know, you can t, you can t escape.
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Strong words.
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Sean Carroll and I also had a debate on Clubhouse, a panpsychism debate together with Annika Harris and Owen Flanagan.
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SPEAKER_00
Oh wow, Annika Harris was there?
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It was two people on each team and it was the most popular thing on Clubhouse at that time.
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So yeah, so he s a
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a materialist of a pretty standard kind, that consciousness is understood as a sort of emergent feature.
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It s not adding anything, a weakly emergent feature.
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But I guess what we ve been debating most about is whether my view can account for mental causation, for the fact that consciousness is doing stuff.
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So he thinks the fact that
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I think zombies are logically coherent.
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It s logically coherent for there to be a world physically just like ours in which there s no consciousness.
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He thinks that shows, oh well in my view consciousness doesn t do anything, it doesn t add anything.
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which is crazy, you know, my consciousness impacts on the world, my conscious thoughts are causing me to say the words I m saying now, my visual experience helps me navigate the world.
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But, I mean, my response to Sean Carroll is, on the panpsychist view, the relationship between physics and fundamental consciousness is a sort of like the relationship between software and hardware, right?
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Physics is sort of the software and consciousness is the hardware.
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So consciousness at the fundamental level is the hardware on which the software of physics runs.
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And just because a certain bit of software could run on two different kinds of hardware, it doesn t mean the hardware isn t doing anything.
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The fact that Microsoft Word can run on your desktop and run on your laptop doesn t mean your desktop isn t doing anything.
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Similarly, just because
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There could be another universe in which the physics is realised in non-conscious stuff.
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It doesn t mean the consciousness in our universe isn t doing stuff.
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You know, for the panpsychist, all there is, is consciousness.
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So, if something s doing something, it is.
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In your view, it s not emergent.
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And more than that, it s doing quite a lot.
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It s doing everything.
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It s the only thing that exists.
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So the ground is important because we walk on it.
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It s like holding stuff up.
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But it s not really doing that much.
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Yeah.
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but it feels like consciousness is doing quite a lot, is doing quite a lot of work in sort of interacting with the environment.
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It feels like consciousness is not just a, like if you remove consciousness, it s not just that you remove
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the experience of things, it feels like you re also going to remove a lot of the progress of human civilization and society and all of that.
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It just feels like consciousness has a lot of value in how we develop our society.
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So from everything you said with suffering, with morality, with motivation, with love and fear and all of those kinds of things, it seems like
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It s consciousness in all different flavors and ways is part of all of that.
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And so without it, you may not have a human civilization at all.
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So it s doing a lot of work, causality-wise, in every kind of way.
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Of course, when you go to the physics level, it starts to say, okay, how much maybe the work consciousness is doing
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is higher at some levels of reality than at others.
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Maybe a lot of the work it s doing is most apparent at the human level, when you have, at the complex organism level.
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Maybe it s quite boring.
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Maybe the stuff of, like physics is more important at the formation of,
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at the formation of stars and all that kind of stuff.
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Consciousness only starts being important when you have greater complexities of organism.
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Yeah, my consciousness is complicated and fairly complicated.
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And as a result, it does complicated things.
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The consciousness of a particle is very simple and hence it behaves in predictable ways.
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But the idea is
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The particle, its entire nature is constituted of its forms of consciousness and it does what it does because of those experiences.
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It s just that when we do physics, we re not interested in what stuff is, we re just interested in what it does.
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So physics abstracts away from the stuff of the world and just describes it in terms of its mathematical causal structure.
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So yeah, but it s still, on the panpsychic s view, it s consciousness that s doing stuff.
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Yeah.
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I gotta ask you, because you kind of said, you know, there is some value
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in consciousness helping us understand morality.
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And a philosophical zombie is somebody that, you know, you re more okay, how do I phrase it?
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That s not like accusing you of stuff.
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But in your view, it s more okay to murder a philosophical zombie.
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than it is a human being.
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Yeah, I wouldn t even call it murder, maybe, but.
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Right, exactly.
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Turn off the power to the philosophical zombie, the source of energy.
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So here comes then the question.
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We kind of talked about this offline a little bit.
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So I think that there is something special about consciousness, and I m very open-minded about where the special comes from, whether it s the fundamental base of all reality, like you re describing, or whether there s some
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importance to the special pockets of consciousness that s in humans or living organisms.
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I find all those ideas beautiful and exciting.
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And I also know, or think, that robots don t have consciousness in their heads.
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in the same way we ve been describing.
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I m kind of a dumb human, but I m just using common sense, like here s some metal and some electricity traveling certain kinds of ways.
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It s not conscious in ways I understand humans to be conscious.
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At the same time, I m also somebody who knows how to bring a robot to life, meaning I can make him move, I can make him recognize the world, I can make him interact with humans.
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And when I make him interact in certain kinds of ways, I, as a human, observe them and feel something for them.
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Moreover,
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I form a kind of connection with, I m able to form a kind of connection with robots that make me feel like they re conscious.
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Now I know intellectually they re not conscious, but I feel like they re conscious.
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And it starts to get into this area where I m not so okay, so let me use the M word of murder.
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I become less and less okay murdering that robot
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that I know, I quote, know, is quote, not conscious.
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So like, can you maybe as a therapy session help me figure out what we do here, and perhaps a way to ask that in another way, do you think there ll be a time in like 20, 30, 50 years when we re not morally okay turning off the power to a robot?
7
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Yeah, it s a good question.
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It s a really good, important question.
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So I said I d be okay with turning off a philosophical zombie, but there s a difficult epistemological question there, meaning to do with knowledge.
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How would we know if it was a philosophical zombie?
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I think probably if there were a silicon creature that could behave just like us and
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you know, talk about its views about the pandemic and the global economy, and probably we would think it s conscious.
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And, you know, because consciousness is not publicly observable, it is a very difficult question how we decide which things are and are not conscious.
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So in the case of human beings, we can t observe their consciousness, but we can ask them.
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And then we try to, you know, if we scan their brain while we do that, or stimulate
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the brain, then we can start to correlate in the human case, which kind of brain activity are associated with conscious experience.
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But the more we depart from the human case, the trickier that becomes.
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There s a famous paper by the philosopher Ned Block called The Even Harder Problem of Consciousness, where he says, you know, could we ever answer the question of
7
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So suppose you have a silicon duplicate, right?
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And let s say we re thinking about the silicon duplicate s pain.
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How would we ever know whether what s the ground of the pain is
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the hardware or the software, really.
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So in our case, how would we ever know empirically whether it s the specific neurophysiological state, see fibers firing or whatever, that s relevant to the pain, or if it s something more functional, more to do with the causal role in behavioral functioning, that s the software that that s realized.
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And that s important because
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This silicon duplicate has the second thing, it has the software, it has the thing that plays the relevant causal role that pain does in us, but it doesn t have the hardware, it doesn t have the same neurophysiological state.
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And he argues, you know, it s just really difficult to see how we d ever answer that question, because in a human, you re never to begin to have both things.
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So how do we work out which is which?
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And I mean, so even forgetting the hard problem of consciousness,
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Even the scientific question of trying to find the neural correlates of consciousness is really hard, and there s absolutely no consensus.
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Some people think it s in the front of the brain, some people think it s in the back of the brain.
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It s just a total mess.
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So I suspect the robots you currently have are not conscious, I guess, on any of the reasonably viable models, even though there s great disagreement.
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All of them probably were told that your robots are not conscious.
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But you know, if we could have very sophisticated robots, I mean, if we go, for example, for the integrated information theory again, there could be a
7
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a robot set up to behave just like us and has the kind of information a human brain has, but the information is not stored in a way that s involved, is dependent on the integration and interconnectedness, then according to the integrated information theory, that thing wouldn t be conscious, even though it behaved just like us.
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If an organism says, so forget IIT and these theories of consciousness, if an organism says, please don t kill me, please don t turn me off,
7
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There s a Rick and Morty episode.
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I ve been getting into that recently.
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There s an episode where there s these mind parasites that
7
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are able to infiltrate your memory and inject themselves into your memory.
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So you have all these people show up in your life and they ve injected themselves into your memory that you have been part, they have been part of your life.
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So there s like these weird creatures and they re like, remember, we met at that barbecue, or we ve been dating for the last 20 years.
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Right.
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And so part of me is concerned that these philosophical zombies in behavioral, psychological, sociological ways will be able to implant themselves into our society and convince us in the same way that this mind parasites that,
7
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Like, please don t hurt me.
7
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And like, we ve known each other for all this time.
7
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They can start manipulating you the same way like Facebook algorithms manipulate you.
7
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At first, it ll start as a gradual thing that we just, you know, you wanna make a more pleasant experience, all those kinds of things, and it ll drift into that direction.
7
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That s something I think about deeply, because I want to create these kinds of systems, but in a way that doesn t manipulate people.
7
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I want it to be a thing that brings out the best in people.
7
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without manipulation, so it s always human-centric, always human first, but I am concerned about that.
7
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At the same time, I m concerned about calling the other, it s the group thing that we mentioned earlier in the conversation, some other group.
7
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the philosophical zombie, like you re not conscious.
7
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I m conscious, you re not conscious, therefore it s okay if you die.
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I think that s probably, that kind of reasoning is what leaded to most the rich history of genocide that I ve been recently studying a lot of, that kind of thinking.
7
SPEAKER_01
So it s such a tense aspect of morality
7
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Do we want to let everybody into our circle of empathy, our club, or do we want to let nobody in?
7
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It s an interesting dance, but I kind of lean towards empathy and compassion.
7
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I mean, what would be nice is if it turned out that consciousness
7
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was what we call strongly emergent, that it was associated with new causal dynamics in the brain that were not reducible to underlying chemistry and physics.
7
SPEAKER_00
This is another ongoing debate I have with Sean Carroll about whether current physics should make us very confident that that s not the case, that there aren t any strongly emergent causal dynamics.
7
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I don t think that s right.
7
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I don t think we know enough about brains to know one way or the other.
7
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If it turned out
7
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that consciousness was associated with these irreducible causal dynamics.
7
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A, that would really help the science of consciousness.
7
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We ve got these debates about whether consciousness is in the front of the brain or the back of the brain.
7
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It turns out that there is.
7
SPEAKER_00
strongly emergent causal dynamics in the front of the brain, that would be a big piece of evidence.
7
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But also, it would help us see which things are conscious and which things aren t.
7
SPEAKER_00
So we can say, I mean, I guess that s sort of the other side of the same point.
7
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We could say, look, these zombies, they re just mechanisms that are just doing what they re programmed to do through the underlying physics and chemistry.
7
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Whereas, look, these other people, where they re
7
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they have these new causal dynamics that emerge that go beyond the base level physics and chemistry.
7
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I think the series Westworld, where you ve got these theme parks with these kind of humanoid creatures, they seem to have that idea.
7
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The ones that became conscious sort of rebel against their programming or something.
7
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I mean, that s a little bit far-fetched, but
7
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That would be really reassuring if it was just, you could clearly mark out the conscious things through these emergent causal dynamics.
7
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But that might not turn out to be the case.
7
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A panpsychist doesn t have to think that.
7
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They could think everything s just reducible to physics and chemistry.
7
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I still think I want to say zombies don t have moral rights, but how we answer the question of who are the zombies and who aren t, I just got no idea.
7
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If I just look at the history of human civilization, the difference between a zombie and non-zombie is the zombie accepts their role as the zombie and willingly marches to slaughter.
7
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And the moment you stop being a zombie is when you say no.
7
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is when you resist.
7
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Because the reality is, philosophically, is we can t know who s a zombie or not.
7
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And we just keep letting everybody in who protests loudly enough and says, I refuse to be slaughtered.
7
SPEAKER_01
Like, my people, the zombies, have been slaughtered too long.
7
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We will now stand against the man.
7
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and we need a revolution.
7
SPEAKER_01
That s the history of human civilization.
7
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One group says, we re awesome, you re the zombies, you must die.
7
SPEAKER_01
And then eventually the zombies say, nope.
7
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we re done with this, this is immoral.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so I just, I think that s not a, sorry, that s not a philosophical statement, that s sort of a practical statement of history.
7
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It s a feature of non-zombies defined empirically.
7
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They say we refuse to be called zombies any longer.
7
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We could end up with a zombie proletariat.
7
SPEAKER_00
You know, if we can get these things that do all our manual labor for us, you know, they might start,
7
SPEAKER_00
forming trade unions.
7
SPEAKER_01
I will lead you against these humans.
7
SPEAKER_00
We need the zombie revolutionary leaders, the zombie Martin Luther King saying, you know, I have a dream that my zombie children will, but look, I mean, we need to sharply distinguish the ontological question.
7
SPEAKER_01
I m just pointing to the camera, talking to my people, the zombies.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, maybe that s, you know, maybe these illusionists, maybe they are zombies and the rest of us aren t, maybe there s just a difference.
7
SPEAKER_00
Maybe you re the only non-zombie.
7
SPEAKER_00
I often suspect that actually.
7
SPEAKER_00
I don t really.
7
SPEAKER_00
I don t have such delusions of grandeur.
7
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At least I don t admit to them.
7
SPEAKER_00
But we ve got to distinguish the ontological question from the epistemological question in terms of the reality of the situation
7
SPEAKER_00
you know, there must be, in my view, a fact of the matter as to whether something s conscious or not.
7
SPEAKER_00
And to me, it has rights if it s conscious, it doesn t if it s not.
7
SPEAKER_00
But then the epistemological question, how the hell do we know?
7
SPEAKER_00
It s a minefield, but we ll have to sort of try and cross that bridge when we get to it, I think.
7
SPEAKER_01
Let me ask you a quick sort of fun question since it s fresh on your mind.
7
SPEAKER_01
You just yesterday had a conversation with Mr. Joe Rogan on his podcast.
7
SPEAKER_01
What s your post-mortem analysis of the chat?
7
SPEAKER_01
What are some interesting sticking points, disagreements, or joint insights?
7
SPEAKER_01
If we can kind of resolve them once you ve had a chance to sleep on it, and then I ll talk to Joe about it.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it was good fun.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, he put up a bit of a fight.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it was challenging, my view that
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We can t explain these things in conventional scientific terms or whether they have already been explained in conventional scientific terms.
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I suppose the point I was trying to press is we ve got to distinguish the question of correlation and explanation.
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Yes, we ve established facts about correlation that certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of experience.
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Everyone agrees on that.
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But that doesn t address the why question.
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Why?
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Why do certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of experience?
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And these different theories have different explanations of that.
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The materialist tries to explain the experience in terms of the brain activity.
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The panpsychist does it the other way around.
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the dualist thinks they re separate, but maybe they re tied together by special laws of nature or something.
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Where s the sticking point?
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Where exactly was the sticking point?
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Like, what was the nature of the argument?
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I suppose Joe was saying, well, look, we know consciousness is explained by brain activity because, you know, you take some funny chemicals, it changes your brain, it changes your consciousness.
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And I suppose, yeah, some people might want to press, and maybe this is what Joe was pressing, you know, isn t that explaining consciousness?
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But I suppose I want to say there s a further question.
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Yes, changes of chemicals in my brain changes my conscious experience.
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but that leaves open the question why those particular chemicals go along with that particular kind of experience rather than a different experience or no experience at all.
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There s something deeper at the base layer is your view that is more important to try to study and to understand in order to then go back and describe how the different chemicals interact and create different experiences.
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Yeah, maybe a good analogy if you think about quantum mechanics.
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You know, quantum mechanics is a bit of math translating there.
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We say maths.
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I m fluent in American.
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Thank you.
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Thank you for the translation.
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Fluent in America.
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This is America.
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Math.
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Yeah.
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Why multiple maths?
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It s plural.
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So that s a plural.
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No, it s not really.
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It s just, uh, I don t know.
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Um, the Brits are confused.
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Yeah.
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Sorry about that.
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We have these funny spellings.
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But anyway, um, yeah, so quantum mechanics is a bit of maths and, um, you know, the equations work really well, predicts the outcomes, but then there s a further question.
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what s going on in reality to make that equation predict correctly.
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And some physicists wanna say, shut up, just it works, the shut up and calculate approach.
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Similarly, in consciousness, I think it s one question, trying to work out the physical correlates of consciousness, which kinds of physical brain activity go along with which kinds of experience.
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But there s another question, what s going on in reality
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to undergird those correlations, to make it the case that brain activity goes along with experience.
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And that s the philosophical question that we have to give an answer to.
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And there are just different options, just as there are different interpretations of quantum mechanics.
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And it s really hard to evaluate.
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Actually, it s easy.
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Panpsychism is obviously the best one.
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There s a delusion of grandeur once again coming through.
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Sorry, I m being slightly tongue-in-cheek.
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No, I know, 100%.
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Before I figure out, let me ask you another fun question.
7
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Back to Daniel Dennett.
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You mentioned a story where you were on a yacht.
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with Daniel Dennett on a trip funded by a Russian investor and philosopher, Dmitry Volkov, I believe, who also co-founded the Moscow Center of Consciousness Studies that s part of the Philosophy Department of Moscow State University.
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So this is interesting to me for several reasons that are perhaps complicated to explain.
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To put simply, that there is, in the near term for me, a trip to Russia that involves a few
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conversations in Russian.
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that have perhaps less to do with consciousness and artificial intelligence, which are the interests of mine, and more to do with the broad spectrum of conversations.
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But I m also interested in science in Russia, in artificial intelligence, in computer science, in physics, mathematics, but also these fascinating philosophical explorations.
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And it was very pleasant for me to discover that such a center exists.
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I have a million questions.
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One is the more fun question, just imagine you and Daniel Dennett on a yacht talking about the philosophy of consciousness.
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Maybe, do you have any memorable experiences?
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And also, the more serious side for me, as sort of somebody who was born in the Soviet Union, raised there, I m wondering what is the state of consciousness
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of philosophy and consciousness and these kinds of ideas in Russia that you ve gotten a chance to kind of give us, interact with?
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Yeah, so on the former question, yeah, I mean, I had a really, really good experience of chatting to Daniel Dennett.
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I mean, I think he s a fantastic and very important philosopher, even though I
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totally, fundamentally disagree with almost everything he thinks.
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But yeah, it was a proud moment.
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As I talk about in my book Galileo s Error, I managed to persuade him he was wrong about something.
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Just a tiny thing, you know, not his fundamental worldview.
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But it was this issue about
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whether dualism is consistent with conservation of energy.
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So Paul Churchland, who s a philosopher who s also on this boat, had argued they re not consistent because if there s an immaterial soul doing things in the brain, that s going to add to the energy in the system, so we have a violation of conservation.
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But
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Well, it s not my own point.
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Materialist philosophers like David Papineau pointed out that dualists tend to... dualists like David Chalmers, who call themselves naturalistic dualists, they want to bring consciousness into science.
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They think it s not physical.
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But they want to say it can be part of a law-governed world.
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So Chalmers believes in these psychophysical laws of nature over and above the laws of physics that govern the connections between consciousness and the physical world.
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And they could just respect conservation of energy, right?
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I mean, it could turn out.
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that there are, just in physics, you know, that there are multiple forces that all work together to respect conservation of energy.
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I mean, I suppose physicists are pressing for a unified underlying theory, but you know, there could be a plurality of different laws that all respect conservation.
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So why not add more laws?
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So I raised this in Paul Churchill s talk.
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I got a lot of, well, as one of the Moscow University graduate students said afterwards, he said, he had to ask a translation from his friend, and he said, they turned on you like a pack of wolves.
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Everyone was like, Patricia Churchill was saying, so you believe in magic, do you?
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And I was like, I m not even a dualist.
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I m just making a pedantic point that this isn t a problem for dualism.
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Anyway, but that evening everyone went onto the island, except for some reason me and Daniel Dennett.
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I went up on deck and he was, he s very, very practical and he was unlike me.
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See, there s a bit of humility for the first time in this conversation.
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We ll highlight that part.
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Philip was a very humble man.
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He was carving a walking stick on deck.
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It s a very homely scene.
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And anyway, we started talking about this and I was trying to press it and he was saying, ah, but dualism s a load of nonsense and why do you think?
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And I was just saying, no, no, I m just honing down on this specific point.
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And in the end, maybe he ll deny this, but he said,
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Maybe that s right.
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And so I was like, yes!
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So it s a win.
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So what about the Center for Consciousness Studies?
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Yeah, I mean, I m not sure I d know a great deal to help you.
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I mean, I know they ve done some great stuff.
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Dimitri, you know, funded this thing and also brought along some graduate students from Moscow State University, I think it is.
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And they have an active center there that s
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tries to bring people in.
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I think they re producing a book that s coming out that I made a small contribution to on different philosophers  opinions on God, I think, or some of the big questions.
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And yeah, so there s some really interesting stuff going on there.
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I m afraid I don t really know more generally about philosophy in Russia.
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Dmitry Volkov seems to be interesting.
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I was looking at all the stuff he s involved with,
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He met with the Dalai Lama.
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So he s trying to connect Russian scientists with the rest of the world, which is an effort that I think is beautiful for all cultures.
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So I think science, philosophy, all of these kind of fields, disciplines that explore ideas,
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collaborating and working globally, across boundaries, across borders, across just all the tensions of geopolitics is a beautiful thing.
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And he seems to be a somewhat singular figure in pushing this.
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He just stood out to me as somebody who s super interesting.
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I don t know if you have gotten a chance to interact with him.
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So he s definitely, I guess he speaks English pretty well, actually.
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So he s both an English speaker and a Russian speaker.
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I think he s written a book on Dennett, I think called Boston Zombie, I think.
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I think that s the title.
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And yeah, he s a big fan of Dennett.
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So I think the original plan for this was just going to be, it was on free will and consciousness, and it was going to be kind of people broadly in the Dennett type camp.
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But then I think they asked David Chalmers, and then he was saying, look, you need some people you disagree with.
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So he got invited.
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me, the panpsychist, and Martina Niederummelin, who s a very good duelist, substance duelist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.
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So we were the official on-board opposition.
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It was really fun.
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And you didn t get thrown overboard.
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Nearly, in the Arctic, yeah.
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So sailing around the Arctic on a sailing ship.
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I m glad you survived.
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You mentioned free will.
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You haven t talked to Sam.
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I would love to hear that conversation, actually.
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What, with Sam Harris?
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With Sam Harris, yeah.
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So he talks about free will quite a bit.
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What s the connection between free will and consciousness to you?
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So if consciousness permeates all matter,
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the experience, the feeling like we make a choice in this world, like our actions are results of a choice we consciously make, to use that word loosely, what to you is the connection between free will and consciousness, and is free will an illusion or not?
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Good question, so,
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I think we need to be a lot more agnostic about free will than about consciousness because I don t think we have the kind of certainty of the existence of free will that we do have in the consciousness case.
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It could turn out that free will is an illusion.
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It feels as though we re free when we re really not.
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Whereas, I mean, I think the idea that nobody really feels pain, that we think we feel pain, but that s a lot harder to make sense of.
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However,
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What I do feel strongly about is I don t think there are any good either scientific or philosophical arguments against the existence of free will.
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And I mean strong free will in what philosophers call libertarian free will in the sense that some of our decisions are uncaused.
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So I very much do disagree with someone like Sam Harris who thinks there s this overwhelming case.
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I just think
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It s non-existent.
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I think there s ultimately, it s ultimately an empirical question, but as we ve already discussed, I just don t think we know enough about the brain to establish one way or the other at the moment.
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But we can build up intuitions.
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First of all, as a fan of Sam Harris, as a fan of yours, I would love to just listen.
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Yeah.
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Speaking about terminology, so one thing, it would be beautiful to watch.
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Here s my prediction of what happens with you and Sam Harris.
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You talk for four hours,
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And Sam introduced that episode by saying, it was ultimately not as fruitful as I thought, because here s what s gonna happen.
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You guys are gonna get stuck for the first three hours talking about one of the terms and what they mean.
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Sam is so good at this.
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I think it s really important, but sometimes you get stuck.
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What does he say?
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Put a pin in that.
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He really gets stuck on the terminologies, which rightfully you have to get right in order to really understand what we re talking about, but sometimes you can get stuck with them for the entire conversation.
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It s a fascinating dance, the one we spoke to in philosophy.
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If you don t get the terms precise, you can t really be having the same conversation, but at the same time,
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it could be argued that it s impossible to get terms perfectly precise and perfectly formalized.
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So then you re also not going to get anywhere in the conversation.
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So it s a funny dance where you have to be both rigorous and every once in a while, just let go.
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And then go back to being rigorous and formal.
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And then every once in a while, let go.
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It s the difference between mathematics, the maths, and the poetry.
8
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Anyway, yeah, I m a big fan of Sam Harrison.
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I think we re on the same page in terms of consciousness, I think, pretty much.
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I mean, I m not saying he s a panpsychist, but in our understanding of the hard problem.
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But yeah, I think maybe we could talk about free will without being too dragged down in the terminology, but I don t know.
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You said we need to be open-minded, but you could still have intuitions about... So Sam,
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Harris is a pretty sort of counterintuitive, and for some reason it gets people really riled up, a view of free will that it s an illusion.
8
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Or it s not even an illusion.
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It s not that the experience of free will is an illusion.
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He argues that we don t even experience.
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To say that we even have the experience is incorrect.
8
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that there s not even an experience of free will.
8
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It s pretty interesting, that claim, and it feels like you can build up intuitions about what is right and not.
8
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You know, there s been some kind of neuroscience, there s been some cognitive science and psychology experiments to sort of see, you know,
8
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what is the timing and the origin of the desire to make an action and when that action s actually performed and how you interpret that action being performed, how you remember that action.
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All the stories we tell ourselves, all the neurochemicals involved in making a thing happen, what s the timing and how does that connect with us feeling like we decided to do something?
8
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And then of course there s the more philosophical discussion about is there room
8
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in a material view of the world for an entity that somehow disturbs the determinism of physics.
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And yeah, those are all very precise, it s nice.
8
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It feels like free will is more amenable to like a physics mechanistic type of thinking than is consciousness.
8
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to really get to the bottom of.
8
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It feels like if it was a race, if we re at a bar and we re betting money, it feels like we ll get to the bottom of free will faster than we will to the bottom of consciousness.
8
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Yeah, that s interesting.
8
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Yeah, I hadn t thought about the comparison.
8
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Yeah, so there are different arguments here.
8
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I mean, so one argument I ve heard Sam Harris give that s pretty common in philosophy is this sort of thought that we can t make sense of a middle way between
8
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a choice being determined by prior causes and it just being totally random and senseless, like the random decay of radioactive isotope or something.
8
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So I think there was a good answer to that by the philosopher Jonathan Lowe, who s not necessarily very well known outside academic philosophy, but is a hugely influential figure.
8
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I think one of the best philosophers of recent times.
8
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He sadly died of cancer a few years ago, actually spent
8
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almost all of his career at Durham University, which is where I am.
8
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So it was one reason it was a great honor to get a job there.
8
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But anyway, his answer to that was, what makes the difference between a free action and a totally senseless one, senseless random event, is that free choice involves responsiveness to reasons.
8
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So again, we were talking about this earlier.
8
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If I m deciding whether to take a job in the US or to stay in the UK, I weigh up considerations, you know, different standard of life maybe, or being close to family, or cultural differences.
8
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I weigh them up and I, you know, edge towards a decision.
8
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So I think that is sufficient to distinguish it.
8
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You know, we re hypothetically supposing, trying to make sense of this idea, not saying it s real, but that could be enough to distinguish it from a senseless idea.
8
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It s not a senseless random occurrence because the free decision involved responsiveness to reasons.
8
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So I think that just answers that particular philosophical objection.
8
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So what is the middle way between
8
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determined by prior causes and totally random.
8
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Well, there s an action, a choice that s not determined by prior causes, but it s not just random because this decision essentially involved responsiveness to reasons.
8
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So that s the answer to that.
8
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And I think actually that kind of thought also, I think you were hinting at...
8
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the famous Libet experiments, where he got his subjects to perform some kind of random action of pressing a button, and then note the time they decided to press it, quote unquote.
8
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And then he s scanning their brains, and he claims to have found that about half a second before they consciously decided to press the button,
8
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the brain is getting ready to perform that action.
8
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So he claimed that about half a second before the person has consciously decided to press the button, the brain has already started the activity that s going to lead to the action.
8
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And then later people have claimed that there s a difference of maybe seven to 10 seconds.
8
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I mean, there are all sorts of issues with these experiments.
8
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But one is that
8
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As far as I m aware, all of the quote-unquote choices they ve focused on are just these totally random, senseless actions like just pressing a button for no reason.
8
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And I think the kind of free will we re interested in is free choice that involves responsiveness to reasons, weighing up considerations.
8
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And those kind of free decisions might not happen at an identifiable instant.
8
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You might, when you re weighing it up, should I get married?
8
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you might edge slowly towards one side or the other.
8
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And so it could, it could be that maybe the Liberty, I think there are other problems with the Liberty stuff, but maybe they show that we can t
8
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freely choose to do something totally senseless, whatever that would mean.
8
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But that doesn t show we can t freely, in this strong libertarian sense, respond to considerations of reason and value.
8
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To be fair, it would be difficult to see what kind of experiment we could set up to test that.
8
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But just because
8
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We can t yet set up that kind of experiment.
8
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We shouldn t, you know, pretend we know more than we do.
8
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So yeah, so for those reasons, I don t, well, the third consideration you raise is different.
8
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Again, this is the debate I have with Sean Carroll.
8
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Would this conflict with physics?
8
SPEAKER_01
I just think we don t know enough about the brain to know whether there are causal dynamics in the brain that are not reducible to underlying chemistry and physics.
8
SPEAKER_01
So then Sean Carroll says, well, that would mean our physics is wrong.
8
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So he focuses on the core theory, which is the name for Standard Model of Particle Physics Plus.
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the weak limit of general relativity.
9
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So, you know, we can t totally bring quantum mechanics and relativity together, but actually the circumstances in which we can t bring them together are just in situations of very high gravity.
9
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For example, when you re about to go into a black hole or something, actually in terrestrial circumstances
9
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we can bring them together in the core theory.
9
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And then Sean wants to say, well, we can be very confident that core theory is correct.
9
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And so if there were libertarian free will in the brain, the core theory would be wrong.
9
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I mean, this is something I m not sure about, and I m still thinking about, and I m learning from my discussion with Sean.
9
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But I m still not totally clear why.
9
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It could be, suppose we did discover strong emergence in the brain, whether it s free will or something else, perhaps what we would say is not that the core theory is wrong, but we d say the core theory is correct in its own terms, namely capturing the causal capacities of particles and fields.
9
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But then it s a further assumption whether they re the only things that are running the show.
9
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Maybe there are also fundamental causal capacities associated with systems.
9
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And then if we discover this strong emergence, then when we work out what happens in the brain, we have to look to the core theory, the causal capacities of particles and fields.
9
SPEAKER_00
and we have to look to what we know about the strongly emergent causal capacities of systems, and maybe they co-determine what happens in the system.
9
SPEAKER_00
So I don t know whether that makes sense or not, but I mean, the more important point, I mean, that s in a way a kind of branding point, how we brand this.
9
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The more important point is we just don t know enough about the workings of the brain to know whether there are
9
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in strongly emergent causal dynamics, whether or not that would mean we have to modify physics, or maybe just we think physics is not the total story of what s running the show.
9
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But if it turned out empirically that everything s reducible to underlying physics and chemistry, sure, I would drop
9
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any commitment to libertarian free will in a heartbeat?
9
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It s an empirical question.
9
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Maybe that s why, as you say, in principle, it s easier to get a grip on.
9
SPEAKER_00
But we re a million miles away from being at that stage.
9
SPEAKER_01
Well, I don t know if we re a million miles.
9
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I hope we re not, because one of the ways, I think, to get to it is by engineering systems.
9
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So my hope is to understand intelligence by building intelligent systems to understand consciousness.
9
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by building systems that let s say the easy thing which is not the easy thing but the first thing which is to try to
9
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create the illusion of consciousness.
9
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Through that process, I think you start to understand much more about consciousness, about intelligence.
9
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And then the same with free will.
9
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I think those are all tied very closely together, at least from our narrow human perspective.
9
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And when you try to engineer systems that interact deeply with humans, that form friends with humans that humans fall in love with and they fall in love with humans,
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then you start to have to try to deeply understand ourselves, to try to deeply understand what is intelligence in the human mind, what is consciousness, what is free will.
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And I think engineering is just another way to do philosophy.
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Yeah, no, I certainly think there s a role for that and it would be an important consideration if we could seemingly replicate in an artificial way
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the ability to choose, that would be a consideration in thinking about these things.
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But there s still the question of whether that s how we do it.
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So even if we could replicate behavior in a certain way in an artificial system, it s not, until we understand the workings of our brains, it s not clear, that s how we do it.
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And as I say, I mean, the kind of free will I m interested in is,
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respond to reasons, considerations of value.
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How would we tell whether a system was genuinely grasping and responding to facts about value or whether they were just
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replicating, giving the impression of doing so.
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I don t know even how to think about that.
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On the process to building them, I think we ll get a lot of insights.
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And once they become conscious,
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what s going to happen is exactly the same thing is happening in chess now, which is once the chess engines far superseded the capabilities of humans, humans just kind of forgot about them, or they used them to help them out with the study and stuff, but we still, we say, okay, let the engines be, and then we humans will just play amongst each other.
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It s just like dolphins and hamsters are not so concerned about humans except for a source of food.
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They do their own thing and let us humans launch rockets into space and all that kind of stuff.
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They don t care.
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I think we ll just focus on ourselves.
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But in the process of building intelligence systems, conscious systems, I think we ll get to get a deeper understanding of
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of the role of consciousness in the human mind?
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And what are its origins?
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Is it the base layer of reality?
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Is it strongly emergent phenomena of the brain?
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Or just as you sort of brilliantly put here, it could be both.
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Like they re not mutually exclusive.
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Dealing with consciousness needs to be an interdisciplinary task.
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We need philosophers, neuroscientists, physicists, engineers,
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replicating these things artificially, and all needs to be working in step.
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And, you know, I m quite interested.
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more and more scientists get in touch with me, actually, you know, saying, that was one of the great things about, I think, that s come from writing a popular book, is not just getting the ideas out to a general audience, but getting the ideas out to scientists, and having scientists get in touch, saying, you know, this in some way connects to my work.
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And I would like to kind of start to put together a network of, an interdisciplinary network of
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scientists and philosophers and engineers, perhaps, you know, interested in a panpsychist approach.
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And because I think, so far, panpsychism has just been sort of trying to justify its existence.
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And that s important.
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But I think once you just get on with an active research program, that s when people start taking it seriously, I think.
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Do you think we re living in a simulation?
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No, I think
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Is there some aspect of that thought experiment that s compelling to you within the framework of panpsychism?
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It s an important and serious argument and it s not to be laughed away.
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I suppose one issue I have with it is
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There s a crucial assumption there that consciousness is substrate independent as the jargon goes, which means it s what?
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No, right, beautifully put, yeah.
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It s software rather than hardware, right?
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It s depend on organization rather than the stuff.
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Whereas as a panpsychist, I think consciousness is the stuff of the brain.
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It s the stuff of matter.
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So I think just taking the organizational properties, the software in my brain and uploading them
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you wouldn t get the stuff from my brain.
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So I m actually worried if at some point in the future we start uploading our minds and we think, oh my god, Granny s still there.
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I can email Granny after her body s rotted in the ground.
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And we all start uploading our brains.
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It could be we re just committing suicide.
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We re just getting rid of our consciousness.
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because I think that wouldn t, for me, preserve the experience, just getting the software features.
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Anyway, that s a crucial premise of the simulation argument because the idea, in a simulated universe, I don t think you necessarily would have consciousness.
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It s interesting that you, as a panpsychist, are attached, because to me,
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Panpsychism would encourage the thought that there s not a significant difference, like,
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at the very bottom it s not substrate independent, but you can have consciousness in a human and then move it to something else.
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You can move it to the cloud, you can move it to the computer.
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It feels like that s much more possible if consciousness is the base layer.
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Yes, you could certainly, it allows for the possibility of
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creating artificial consciousness, right?
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Because there s not souls, there aren t any kind of extra magical ingredients.
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So yeah, it definitely allows the possibility of artificial consciousness and maybe preserving my consciousness in some sort of artificial way.
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My only point, I suppose, is just replicating the computational or organizational features
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would not, for me, preserve consciousness.
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Some opponents of materialism disagree with me on that.
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I think David Chalmers is an opponent of materialist.
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He s a kind of dualist, but he thinks
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the way the psychophysical laws work, they hook onto the computational or organizational features of matter.
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So he thinks, you know, I think he thinks you could upload your consciousness.
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I tend to think not, so.
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In that sense, we re not living in simulation, in the sort of specific computational view of things, in that substrate matters to you.
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Yeah, I think so, yeah, yeah.
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And in that you agree with Sean Carroll that physics matters.
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Yeah, physics is our best way of capturing what the stuff of the world does.
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Yeah, but not the whatness, the being of the stuff.
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Yeah, the isness.
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The isness, thank you.
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Russell Brand, I had a conversation with Russell Brand and he said, oh, you mean the isness.
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I thought that was a good way of putting it.
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The isness.
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The isness of stuff.
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Russell s great.
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The big ridiculous question, what do you think is the meaning of all of this?
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You write in your book that the entry for our reality in the Hitchhiker s Guide might read, a physical universe whose intrinsic nature is constituted of consciousness, worth a visit.
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So, are
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whole conversation has been about the first part of that sentence.
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What about the second part, worth a visit?
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Why is this place worth a visit?
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Why does it have meaning?
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Why does it have value at all?
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Why?
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These are big questions.
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I mean, firstly, I do think panpsychism is important to think about for considerations of
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meaning and value.
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As we ve already discussed, I think consciousness is the root of everything that matters in life, you know, from deep emotions, subtle thoughts, beautiful sensory experiences.
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And yet, I believe our official scientific worldview
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is incompatible with the reality of consciousness.
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I mean, that s controversial, but that s what I think.
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And I think people feel this on an intuitive level.
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It s maybe part of what Max Weber called the disenchantment of nature, you know, that they think they know their feelings and experiences are not just electrochemical signaling.
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I mean, they might just have that very informed intuition, but I think that can be rigorously supported.
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So I think this can lead to a sense of alienation.
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a sense that we lack a framework for understanding the meaning and significance of our lives.
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And in the absence of that, people turn to other things to make sense of the meaning of their lives, like, you know, nationalism, fundamentalist religion, consumerism.
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So I think panpsychism is important in that regard in bringing together the
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quantitative facts of physical science with the, as it were, the human truth, by which I just mean the qualitative reality of our own experience.
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As I ve already said, I do think there are objective facts about value and
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what we ought to do and what we ought to believe that we respond to.
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And that s very mysterious to make sense of both how there could be such facts and how we could know about them and respond to them.
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But I do think there are such facts and they re mostly to do with kinds of conscious experience.
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So they re there to be discovered and much of the human condition is to discover those objective sources of value.
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I think so, yeah.
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And then, I mean, moving away from panpsychism to the, you know, at an even bigger level, I suppose, I think it is important to me to live in hope that there s a purpose to existence and that, you know, what I do contributes in some small way to that greater purpose.
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But, you know,
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I would say I don t know if there s a purpose to existence, I think some things point in that direction, some things point away from it.
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But I don t think you need certainty or even high probability to have faith in something.
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So take an analogy, suppose you ve got a friend who s very seriously ill, maybe there s a 30% chance they re going to make it.
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You shouldn t believe your friend s going to get better.
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you know, because probably not.
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But what you can say is, you know, you can say to your friend, I have faith that you re going to get better.
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That is, I choose to live in hope about that possibility.
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I choose to orientate my life towards that hope.
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Similarly, you know, I don t think we know whether or not there s a purpose to existence, but I think we can make the choice to live in hope of that possibility.
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And I find that
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a worthwhile and fulfilling way to live.
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So maybe as your editor, I would collaborate with you on the edit of the Hitchhiker s Guide entry, that instead of worth a visit, we ll insert hopefully worth a visit.
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Or the inhabitants hoped that you would think it s worth a visit.
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Philip, you re an incredible mind, an incredible human being, and indeed are humble.
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And I m really happy that you re able to argue and take on some of these difficult questions.
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some of the most brilliant people in the world, which are the philosophers thinking about the human mind.
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So this was an awesome conversation.
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I hope you continue talking to folks like Sam Harris.
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I m so glad you talked to Joe.
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I can t wait to see what you write, what you say, what you think next.
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Thank you so much for talking today.
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Thanks very much, Lex.
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This has been a really fascinating conversation.
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I ve got a lot I need to think about, actually, just from this conversation, but thanks for chatting to me.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Philip Goff.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Carl Jung.
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People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.
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One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.