I believe our official scientific worldview is incompatible with the reality of consciousness.
Do you think we're living in a simulation?
We could be in the matrix. This could be a very vivid dream.
There's going to be a few people that are now visualizing a pink elephant.
A hamster has consciousness.
Except for cats who are evil automatons that are void of consciousness.
Consciousness is the basis of moral value, moral concern.
Do you think there will be a time in like 20, 30, 50 years when we're not morally okay turning off the power to a robot?
The following is a conversation with Philip Goff,
philosopher specializing in the philosophy of mind and consciousness.
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.
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.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now here's my conversation with Philip Goff.
I opened my second podcast conversation with Elon Musk.
With a question about consciousness and panpsychism.
The question was, quote, does consciousness permeate all matter?
I don't know why I opened the conversation this way.
He looked at me like what the hell is this guy talking about?
So he said no, because we wouldn't be able to tell if it did or not.
So it's outside the realm of the scientific method.
Do you agree or disagree with Elon Musk's answer?
I disagree. I guess I do think consciousness pervades matter.
In fact, I think consciousness is the ultimate nature of matter.
So as for whether it's outside of the scientific method,
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 the ultimate nature.
It is not publicly observable.
I can't look inside your head and see your feelings and experiences.
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.
So it's qualitative.
Not quantitative, as you talk about.
Yeah, that's another aspect of it.
So there are a couple of reasons consciousness I think is not susceptible to the standard
or not fully susceptible to the standard scientific approach.
One reason you've just raised is that it's qualitative rather than quantitative.
Another reason is it's not publicly observable.
So science is used to dealing with unobservables, fundamental particles,
quantum wave functions, other universes, none of these things are.
They are observable, but there's an important difference.
With all these things, we postulate unobservables in order to explain what we can observe.
In the whole of science, that's how it works.
In the case of consciousness, in the unique case of consciousness,
the thing we are trying to explain is not publicly observable.
And that is utterly unique.
If we want to fully bring science into consciousness,
we need a more expansive conception of the scientific method.
So it doesn't mean we can't explain consciousness scientifically,
but we need to rethink what science is.
What do you mean publicly, the word publicly observable?
Is there something interesting to be said about the word publicly?
I suppose versus privately.
Yeah, it's tricky to define, but I suppose the data of physics are available to anybody.
If there were aliens who visited us from another planet,
maybe they'd have very different sense organs.
Maybe they'd struggle to understand our art or our music.
But if they were intelligent enough to do mathematics,
they could understand our physics.
They could look at the data of our experiments.
They could run the experiments themselves.
Whereas consciousness, is it observable?
Is it not observable?
In a sense, it's observable.
As you say, we could say it's privately observable.
I am directly aware of my own feelings and experiences.
If I'm in pain, it's just right there for me.
My pain is just totally directly evident to me.
But you from the outside cannot directly access my pain.
You can access my pain behavior, or you can ask me,
but you can't access my pain in the way that I can access my pain.
So I think that's a distinction.
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.
So you think there's a kind of direct observation
that you're able to do of your pain that I'm not.
So my observation, all the ways in which I can sneak up to observing your pain,
is indirect versus yours is direct.
Can you play devil's advocate?
Is it possible for me to get closer and closer and closer
to being able to observe your pain,
like all the subjective experiences,
you're yours in the way that you do?
Yeah, I mean, of course, it's not that we observe behavior and then we make an inference.
We are hardwired to instinctively interpret smiles as happiness, crying as sadness.
And as we get to know someone, we find it very easy to adopt their perspective,
get into their shoes, but strictly speaking, all we have perceptual access to is someone's behavior.
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.
You could just postulate some kind of mechanism if you were just trying to explain the behavior.
So someone like Daniel Dennett is very consistent on this.
So I think for most people, what science is in the business of is explaining the data of public
observation experiment. If you religiously followed that, you would not postulate consciousness
because it's not a datum that's known about in that way.
And Daniel Dennett is really consistent on this.
He thinks my consciousness cannot be empirically verified and therefore it doesn't exist.
Dennett is consistent on this. I think I'm consistent on this, but I think a lot of people
have a slightly confused middle way position on this. On the one hand, they think
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.
As we walk along this conversation, you keep opening doors that I don't want to walk into,
and I will, but I want to try to stay kind of focused.
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? Can you clarify his position?
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.
So it doesn't literally mean that everything is conscious, despite the meaning of the word pan,
everything, psyche, mind. So literally, that means everything has mind. 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, 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.
So 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. If you asked me to contrast that to Daniel Dennett,
I think he would just say there is no such datum. Dennett says the data for science of
consciousness is what he calls heterophonomenology, which is specifically defined as what we can
access from the third person perspective, including what people say. But crucially,
we're not treating what they say, we're not relying on their testimony
as evidence for some unobservable realm of feelings and experiences. We're just treating
there what they say as a datum of public observation experiments that we can account for
in terms of underlying mechanisms. But I feel like there's a deeper view of what consciousness is.
So you have a very clear, and we'll talk quite a bit about panpsychism. We have a clear view of what,
almost like a physics view of consciousness. He, I think, has a kind of view that consciousness
is almost the side effect of this massively parallel computation system going on in our brain,
that the brain 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 the editing is consciousness of this
story. I mean, that's a theory of consciousness, isn't it? The new theory of consciousness is
that that's a theory of consciousness, isn't it? The narrative theory of consciousness,
or the multiple versions editing, collaborative editing of a narrative theory of consciousness.
Yeah, he calls it the multiple drafts model. Incidentally, there's a very interesting paper
just come out by very good philosopher, Luke Rolofs, defending a panpsychist version of Dennett's
multiple drafts model. It's like a deeper turtle that that's just the difference being that this
is Luke Rolofs view, all of the drafts are conscious. So I guess for Dennett, there's
sort of no fact of the matter about which of these drafts is the correct one. On Rolofs view,
maybe there's no fact of the matter about which of these drafts is my consciousness,
but nonetheless, all the drafts correspond to some consciousness. And I mean, it just sounds
kind of funny. I guess I think he calls it Dennettian panpsychism. But Luke is one of the most rigorous
and serious philosophers alive at the moment, I think. And I hate having Luke Rolofs in an
audience if I'm giving a talk because he always cuts straight to the weakness in your position
that you hadn't thought of. And so it's nice. Panpsychism is sometimes associated with
fluffy thinking, but contemporary panpsychists have come out of this tradition, we call
analytic philosophy, which is rooted in detailed, rigorous argumentation, and it is defended in
that manner. Yeah, those analytic philosophers are sticklers for terminology. It's very fun,
very fun group to talk shit with. Yeah, well, I mean, it gets boring if you just start and then
defining words, right? Yeah, I think starting with defining words is good. Actually, the
philosopher Derek Parfit said 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 on rigorous, really on precise,
the problem with the analytic philosophy is it was just not about anything important. 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. 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. I think just a tiny tangent on
terminology. I do think that there's a lot of deep insight to be discovered by just asking
questions. What do we mean by this word? I remember I was taking a course on algorithms and data
structures in computer science. And the instructor, shout out to him, Ali Shekafande, amazing professor.
I remember he asked some basic questions like, what is an algorithm? The pressure of pushing
students to answer, to think deeply. You just woke up, hung over in college or whatever,
and you're tasked with answering some deep philosophical questions about what is an algorithm.
These basic questions. And they sound very simple, but they're actually very difficult. And one of
the things I really value in conversation is asking these dumb, simple questions of, what is
intelligence? And just continually asking that question over and over of some of the biggest
researchers in the artificial intelligence computer science space. It's actually very useful.
At the same time, it should start a terminology and then progress where you say,
fuck it. We'll just assume we know what we mean by that. Otherwise, you get the Bill Clinton
situation where it's like, what is the meaning of is, is whatever he said. It's like, hey man,
did you do the sex stuff or not? You have to both be able to talk about the sex stuff and
the meaning of the word is with consciousness because we don't currently understand very much.
Terminology discussions are very important because it's like, you're almost trying to 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.
But just to linger on the Daniel Dennett thing, what do you think about narrative,
sort of the mind constructing narratives for ourselves? So there's nothing special about
consciousness deeply. 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
mostly unique to the human mind. It's just on the question of terminology before.
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. And then I think this
has gone out of fashion a bit, partly because it's just been such a failure. The word knowledge
in particular, people used to define knowledge as true justified belief. And then this guy,
Getier, had this very short paper where he just produced some pretty conclusive counter-examples
to that. I think he wrote very few papers, but you have to teach this on an
undergraduate philosophy course. And then after that, you had a huge literature of people trying to
address this and propose a new definition, but then someone else would come out with counter-examples.
And then you get a new definition of knowledge and counter-examples and it just went on and on
and never seemed to get anywhere. So I think the thought now is, let's work out how precise we need
to be for what we're trying to do. And I think that's a healthier attitude. So precision is
important, but you just need to work out how precise do we need to be for these purposes. Come
into it, Dennett and narrative theories. I mean, I think narrative theories are a plausible contender
for a theory of the self, theory of my identity over time. What makes me the same person in some
sense today as I was 20 years ago weren't given that I've changed so much physically and psychologically.
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. I'm not
saying I accept such a theory, but it's plausible. 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. I think a hamster has consciousness in that sense.
There's something that it's like to be a hamster. It feels pain if you stand on it,
if you're cruel enough to do it. I don't know why I gave that. 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 coming about, but anyway.
To say mean things to the hamster, let's back. 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.
Yeah, consciousness is just something, I mean, because 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. A bit difficult to say where it stops, where it
starts, but you certainly don't need something as sophisticated as the capacity to self-consciously
tell stories about yourself to just have experience.
Except for cats who are evil automatons that are void of consciousness. They're the fingertips of
the devil. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I was taking that as read. I mean, Descartes thought animals
were mechanisms. And humans are unique. So the animals are robots essentially in the formulation
of Descartes and humans are unique. So in which way would you say humans are unique
versus even our closest ancestors? Like, is there something special about humans?
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?
As a panpsychist, there is a great continuity between humans and the rest of the universe.
There's nothing that special about human consciousness. It's just a highly evolved form
of what exists throughout the universe. So we're very much continuous with the rest of
the physical universe. What is unique about human beings? I suppose the capacity to reflect on our
conscious experience, plan for the future, the capacity, I would say, to respond to reasons
as well. 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. If you're
saying, should I take this job in the US? You weigh it up. You say, well, I'll get more money.
I'll have maybe a better quality of life. But if I stay in the UK, I'll be closer to family.
And you weigh up these considerations. I'm not sure any non-human animals quite respond to
considerations of value in that way. I mean, I might be reflecting here that I'm something
of an objectivist about value. I think there are objective facts about what we have reason to do
and what we have reason to believe. And humans have access to those facts.
And humans have access to them and can respond to them. That's a controversial claim. Many of
my pun-psychist brethren might not... They would say the hamster too can look up to the stars and
ponder theoretical physics. Maybe not. But I think it depends what you think about value. If you have
a more humane picture of value, by which I mean relating to the philosopher David Hume, who said
that reason is the slave of the passions. Really, we just have motivations. And what we have reason
to do arises from our motivations. I'm not a Hume. And I think there are objective facts about what
we have reason to do. And I think we have access to them. I don't think any non-human animal
has access to objective facts about what they have reason to do, what they have reason to
believe. They don't weigh up evidence. The reason is the slave of the passions.
That was David Hume's view. Yeah. Do you want to know my problem with Hume's? I had a radical
conversion. This might not be connected to pun-psychism, but I had a radical conversion. I used
to have a more humane view 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 the humane view, you have to say,
any basic life goals are equal, equally valid. So for example, let's take someone whose basic
goal in life is counting blades of grass. And crucially, they don't enjoy it. This is the
crucial part. They get no pleasure from it. That's just their basic goal to spend their life counting
as many blades of grass as possible, not for some greater goal. That's just their basic goal.
I want to say that that is objectively stupid. That is objectively pointless. I shouldn't say
stupid, but it's objectively pointless in a way that pursuing pleasure or pursuing someone else's
pleasure or pursuing scientific inquiry is not pointless. As soon as you make that admission,
you're not a follower of David Hume anymore. You think there are objective facts about what goals
are worth pursuing. Is it possible to have a goal without pleasure? So this kind of
idea that you disjoint the two. So the David Foster Wallace idea of the key to life is to
be unboreable. Isn't it possible to discover the pleasure in everything in life, the counting of the
the blades of grass? Once you see the mastery, the skill of it, you can discover the pleasure.
Therefore, I guess what I'm asking is why and when and how did you lose the romance and grad
school of life? Is that what you're trying to say? Well, 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. People will suffer for
things they think are worthwhile. I might suffer for some scientific cause for finding out a cure
for the pandemic. And in terms of my own pleasure, I might have less pleasure in doing that. But I
think it's worthwhile. It's a worthwhile thing to do. I just don't think it's the case that
everything we do is rooted in maximizing our own pleasure. I don't think that's even psychologically
plausible. But pleasure, then that's a narrow kind of view of pleasure. That's like a short-term
pleasure. But you can see pleasure is a kind of ability to hear the music in the distance. 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. Even if it's not in this life, the warriors will meet in Valhalla. The feeling
that gives meaning and fulfillment to life is not necessarily grounded in pleasure of the
counting of the grass. It's something else. I don't know. The struggle is a source of deep
fulfillment. I think pleasure needs to be kind of thought of as a little bit more broadly. It just
gives you this sense. For a moment, it allows you to forget the terror of the fact that you're going
to die. That's pleasure. 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. That's pleasure.
Yeah. Well, people sacrifice their lives. Atheists may sacrifice their lives for the
sake of someone else or for the sake of something important enough. Clearly, in that case, they're
not doing it for the sake of their own pleasure. That's a rather dramatic example. But there can
be just trivial examples where I choose to be honest rather than lie about something. Can I
lose out a bit? I have a bit less pleasure, but I thought it was worth doing the honest thing or
something. Maybe you can use the word pleasure so broadly that you're just essentially meaning
something worthwhile, but then I think the word pleasure maybe loses its meaning.
Sure. Well, but what do you think about the blades of grass case? What do you think about
someone who spends their life counting blades of grass and doesn't enjoy it?
I personally think it's impossible or maybe I'm not understanding even the philosophical
formulation, but I think it's impossible to have a goal and not draw pleasure from it.
Make it worthwhile. Forget the word pleasure. I think the word goal loses meaning. 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. I think there's a lot of meaning and joy to be discovered in the skill of
a task, in mastering of a skill and taking pride in doing it well. I don't know what it is about
the human mind, but there's some joy to be discovered in the mastery of a skill. I think it's
just impossible to count blades of grass and not have the giro dreams of sushi
compelling, like draws you into the mastery of the simple task.
Yeah. I suppose, I mean, 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. Whereas if we take this David Hume view seriously, it ought to be a totally
possible life goal. Whereas I mean, I guess I just find it hard to shake the idea that
some ways of some life goals are more worthwhile than others. And it doesn't mean that there's
a one single way you should lead your life, but pursuing knowledge, helping people, pursuing
your own pleasure to an extent are a worthwhile things to do in a way that, for example, I have,
I'm a little bit OCD, I still feel inclined to walk on cracks in the pavement or do it
symmetrically like if I step on a crack with my left foot, I feel the need to do it my right foot.
And I think that's kind of pointless. It's something I feel the urge to do,
but it's pointless. Whereas other things I choose to do, I think it's worth doing. And
it's hard to make sense of metaphysically, what could possibly ground that? How could we
know about these facts? But that's the starting point for me.
I don't know. I think you walking on the sidewalk in a way that's symmetrical
brings order to the world. Like if you weren't doing that, the world might fall apart.
It feels like that. I think there's meaning in that. You embracing the full experience of that,
you living the richness of that as if it has meaning will give meaning to it. And then whatever
genius comes of that as you as a one little intelligent aunt will make a better life for
everybody else. 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.
But now you're ruining these, I'm gonna imagine someone enjoying it. I'm
imagining someone who doesn't enjoy it. We don't want a life that's
just full of pleasure. Like we just sit there having a big sugar high all the time.
We want a life where we do things that are worthwhile. 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. We can't really think, did I do things worthwhile? On the David Hume type picture,
all it is for something to be worthwhile is it was a basic goal of yours or derived from a
basic goal and yeah. Yeah, I mean I think goal and worthwhile aren't. I think goal is a boring word.
I'm more sort of existentialist like did you ride the roller coaster of life? Did you fully
experience life that and in that sense I mean the blades of grass is something that could be
deeply joyful and that's in that way I think suffering could be joyful in the full context
of life. It's the roller coaster of life. Like without suffering, without struggle, without pain,
without depression, or sadness, there's not the highs. I mean that's the that's the fucked up
thing about life is that the lows really make the highs that much richer and deeper and
and like taste better. Like I tweeted this, I couldn't sleep and I was late at night
and I know it's an obvious statement but every love story eventually ends in loss
in tragedy. So like this feeling of love at the end there's always going to be tragedy even if
it's the most amazing lifelong love with another human being. One of you is going to die and I
don't know which is worse but both both are not going to be pretty and so that the sense that it's
finite the sense that it's going to end in a low that gives like richness to those kind of
evenings when you realize this fucking thing ends this thing ends the feeling that it ends
the that that that that bad taste that bad feeling that it ends gives meaning gives joy
gives pleasure this loaded word but gives some kind of a deep pleasure to the experience
when it's good and I mean and that's the blades of grass you know they they have that to me
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 because I think what makes counting the blades of grass
joyful is it's just because it's life. Okay so it sounds like you it sounds like you reject the
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 but you're saying no it's because it's engaging the life
riding the roller coaster so that does sound like in some sense there are facts independent
of our personal goal choices about what it means to live a good life and I mean coming back full
circle to the start of this was what makes us different to animals I don't think at the end
of a hamster's life it's it it thinks did I ride the roller coaster did I really live life to the
full that is not a mode of reflection that's available to non-human animals so what do you think
is the role of death in in all of this the the fear of death does that interplay with consciousness
does this self-reflection do you think there's some deep connection between this ability to
contemplate the fact that the our flame of of consciousness eventually goes out
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 all there is
really is ultimately particles and fields it's just that we think the ultimate nature of particles
and fields is consciousness but I guess when when the the 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 although I do that the final chapter of my book Galileo's Era
is more experimental so the first four chapters are the cold-blooded case for the panpsychist
view is that the best solution to the heart problem of consciousness there the last chapter
was we talk about meaning yeah I talk about meaning I talk about free will and I talk about
mystical experiences so I always want to emphasize that panpsychism is not necessarily connected to
anything spiritual you know a lot of people defending this view like David Sharma's or
Luke Rolof's are just total atheist secularists right they don't believe in any kind of transcendent
reality they just believe in feelings you know mundane consciousness and think that needs explaining
in our conventional scientific approach can't cut it but if for independent reasons you are
motivated to some spiritual picture of reality then maybe a panpsychist view is is more consonant
with that so if you if you have a mystical experience where you um it seems to you in
this experience that there is this higher form of consciousness at the root of all things
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 but if you're a panpsychist and you
already think the fundamental natural reality is constitutive consciousness it's not that much of a
leap to think that um this higher form of consciousness you seem to apprehend in the
mystical experience is part of that underlying reality and you know in in many different cultures
experienced meditators have claimed to have experiences in which it becomes apparent to them
that there is an element of consciousness that is universal so this is sometimes called universal
consciousness so on this view your mind and my mind are not uh totally distinct uh 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 so i've never had one of these experiences um but
if one is a panpsychist i think one is more open to that possibility 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 and so what i explore in the experimental
final chapter of my book is that could allow for a kind of impersonal 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 so it sort of be as it were absorbed into universal consciousness so i mean
buddhists and hindu mystics uh try to meditate to get rid of all the bad karma to be absorbed
into universal consciousness it could be that if uh if there's no karma if there's no reverb maybe
everyone gets enlightened when they die maybe you uh just sink back into universal consciousness
so i also coming back to morality suggest this could provide some kind of basis for
altruism or non-egatism because if you think egotism implicitly assumes that we are utterly
distinct individuals whereas on on on this view we're not we overlap to an extent that
something at the core of our being is even in this life we overlap 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 and the same as the thing at the core of your identity uh this universal
consciousness 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 in a kind of single mind together there's some small aspect of
that and or maybe a big aspect about us humans so certainly in a 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 there's going to be a few people that are now
visualizing a pink elephant we're all thinking about that pink elephant together we're all in
the room together thinking about this pink elephant and we're like rotating it like you know in our
minds together what is that that pink is that is there a different instantiation of that pink
elephant in everybody's mind or is it the same elephant and we have the same mind exploring
that elephant now if we are in our mind start petting that elephant like touching it that
experience that we're now like thinking what that would feel like it what's that is that all of us
experiencing that together or is that separate so like there's some aspect of the togetherness
that almost seems fundamental to civilization to society hopefully that's not too strong but to like
some of the fundamental properties of the human mind it feels like the social aspect is really
important we call it social because we think of us as individual minds interacting 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 but that could be just in the realm of ideas and
intelligence and not in the realm of consciousness and it's interesting to see maybe it is in the
realm of consciousness 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 I suppose the question
is how ontologically serious do we want to be about those things by which I mean are they just a
construction of out of our minds and the fact that we interact in the standard standardly
scientifically accepted ways or is as someone like Rupert Sheldrake would think that there is some
metaphysical reality there are some fields beyond the scientifically understood ones that
are somehow communicating this I mean I think that I mean the view I was describing was that
this element we're supposed to have in common is is some sort of pure impersonal consciousness or
something rather than so actually I mean an interesting figure is the Australian philosopher
Miriel Bahari who defends a kind of mystical conception of reality rooted in an Advaita
Vedanta mysticism but like me she's from this tradition of analytic philosophy and so she
defends this in this you know incredibly precise rigorous way she defends the idea that we should
think of experienced meditators as providing expert testimony so you know I think humans cause a
causing climate breakdown I have no idea of the science behind it you know but I trust the experts
or you know that the universe is 14 billion years old you know 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
and so she wants to defend you know the rational acceptability of this mystical conception of
reality so it's what you know I think 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 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 picks out a group of people but then implies certain negative characteristics so people use
this term you know to pick out a certain set of views like mystical conception of reality and
reality and imply it's kind of fluffy thinking or but you know you read Miriel Bahari you read
Luke Roloff's this is serious rigorous thought whether you agree with or not obviously it's
usually controversial and so you know the Enlightenment ideal is to follow the evidence
and the arguments where they lead but it's kind of very hard for human beings to do that I think
we get stuck in some conception of how we think science ought to look and you know people talk
about religion as a crutch but I think a certain kind of scientism a certain conception of how
science is supposed to be gets into people's identity and their sense of themselves and their
security and make things hard if you're a pun-psychist and even the word expert
becomes a kind of crutch I mean use the word expert you have some kind of conception of what
expertise means oftentimes that's you know connected with a degree of particular prestigious
university or something like that or or it's you know expertise is a funny one I've noticed
that anybody sort of that claims they're an expert is usually not the expert the biggest
the biggest quote-unquote expert that I've ever met are the ones that are truly humble so the
humility is a really good sign of somebody who's traveled the long road and been humbled by how
little they know 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 so like just being
humble how little we know even if we travel a lifetime I do like the idea 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
and their insight is perhaps as valuable as the inside of somebody who ran rigorous
psychological studies at Princeton University or something like those those psychonauts they have
wisdom if it's done rigorously which you can also do rigorously within the university within the
studies now with with psilocybin and those kinds of things yeah that that's a fact that's fascinating
still probably the best one of the best works on mystical experience is the chapter in William
James's varieties of religious experiences and most of it is just a psychological study of
trying to define the characteristics of mystical experience as a psychological type
but at the end he considers the question if you have a mystical experience is it
rational to trust it to trust that it's telling you something about reality and he makes an
interesting argument he says if you say no you're kind of applying a double standard
because we all think it's okay to trust our normal sensory experiences but we have no way of
getting outside of ourselves to prove that our sensory experiences correspond to an external
reality we could be in the matrix this could be a very vivid dream you know you could say oh we
do science but a scientist only gets their data by experiencing the results of their experiments
and then the question arises again how do you know that corresponds to a real world
so he thinks there's a sort of double standard in saying it's okay to trust our ordinary sensory
experiences but it's not okay for the person on DMT to trust those experiences it's very
philosophically difficult to say why is it okay in the one case and not the other so I think there's
an interesting argument there but I would like to just defend experts a little bit I mean I agree
it's very difficult but especially in an age I guess with so much information I do think it's
important to have some protection of sources of information academic institutions that we can trust
and then that's difficult because of course there are non-academics who do know what they're talking
about but like if I'm interested in knowing about biology you know you can't research everything
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 their views torn apart by other people working in the field I think that is very
important and also to protect that from conflicts of interest 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 so we don't know who's paying the
piper 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 so I think that's the and I mean this connects to panpsychism
because I think the reason people you know worry about unorthodox ideas is because they worry about
how do we know when we're just losing control or losing discipline so I do think we need to somehow
protect academic institutions as sources of information that we can trust and you know in
philosophy there's there's you know 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 what what they think about
these issues I think that is important to push back on your pushback who are the experts on COVID
oh they're getting into dangerous territory now well let me just speak to it because I am walking
through that dangerous territory I'm allergic to the word expert because in my
simple mind it kind of rhymes with ego there's something about experts if we allow too much
to to have a category expert and place certain people in them those people sitting on the throne
start to believe it and they start to communicate with that energy and the humility starts to
dissipate I think there is value in a lifelong mastery of a skill and the pursuit of knowledge
within a very specific discipline 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
so some of it probably just reduces to like skillful communication like of
communicating the way that shows humility that shows an open mind in this that shows an ability
to really hear what a lot of people are saying 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 and they are
extremely knowledgeable many of them are colleagues of mine they dismiss what millions of people are
saying on the internet without having looked into it with empathy and rigor honestly understand
what are the arguments being made they say like there's not enough time to explore all those things
like there's so much stuff out there yeah I think that's intellectual laziness if if you
don't have enough time then don't speak so strongly with dismissal feel bad about it be apologetic
about the fact that you don't have enough time to explore the the evidence for example with the
heat I got with Francis Collins is that he kind of said that lab leak he kind of dismissed it
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 there's a lot of people really
intensely discussing this and being showing humility in the face of that battle of ideas I
think is really important and I just been very disappointed in so-called expertise in the space
of science in showing humility in showing humanity and kindness and empathy towards other human
beings that's that's at the same time obviously I love Jiro Junsu sushi lifelong pursuit of like
getting like in computer science Don Knuth like some of my biggest heroes are people that like
when nobody else cares they stay on one topic for their whole life and they just find the
beautiful little things about their puzzles they keep solving and yes sometimes a virus happens
or something happens with that person with their puzzles becomes like the center of the whole world
because that puzzle becomes all of a sudden really important but still there's possibilities 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 telling them giving them awards and giving them citations
and giving them all kinds of stuff where like they're bowing down before them how smart they are
they still know nothing relative to all the stuff the mysteries that are out there yeah well I
wonder how much we're disagreeing I mean these are totally valid issues and of course expertise
goes wrong in all sorts of ways it's totally fallible I suppose I would just say
what is the alternative what do we just say all information is is equal because I you know as
a voter I've got to decide who to vote for and that you know I've got to evaluate and I can't
look into all of the economics and all of the relevant science and so I just think there's I
think in maybe it's like Churchill said about democracy you know it's the worst system of
government apart from all the rest I think about panpsychism is actually the worst theory of
consciousness apart from all the rest but you know I just think expertise the peer review system
I think it's terrible in so many ways yes people should show more humility but I can't see a viable
alternative I think philosopher Bernard Williams had a really nice nuanced discussion of the
problems of titles but theness how they also function in a society they do have some positive
function the very first time I lectured in philosophy before I got a a professorship
was teaching at a continuing education college so it's kind of kind of a retired people who
want to learn some more things and I just totally pitched it too high and gate talked about Bernard
Williams on on titles and hierarchies and these kind of people in their 70s 80s who just instantly
started interrupting saying what is philosophy and it was a disaster and I just remember in the
breaks a sort of elderly lady came up and said I've decided to take Egyptology instead so but
that was uh that was my uh introduction to teaching anyway but sort of titles and accomplishments
is uh is a nice is a nice starting point but doesn't buy you the whole thing so
you don't get to just say this is true because because I'm an expert you still have to convince
people one of the things I really like to practice martial arts yeah and uh for people who don't know
it's uh Brazilian jiu-jitsu is one of them and you sometimes wear these pajamas pajama looking
things and you wear a belt so I happen to be a black belt and in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and I also
train in what's called no gi so you don't wear the pajamas and when you don't wear the pajamas
nobody knows what rank you are nobody knows if you're a black belt or a white belt or if you're
a complete beginner or not and when you um wear the pajamas called the gi uh you wear the rank
and people treat you very differently when like when they see my black belt they treat me differently
they kind of defer to my expertise if if they're kicking my ass that's probably because uh like
I am working on something 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 none of it matters 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 who what are the ideas that we're playing with and I think
there's a dance there yes it's valuable to know a person is 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 but at the same time the raw practice of ideas that is combat and the raw practice of
exchange of ideas that is science needs to often throw away expertise and in communicating like
there's another thing to science and expertise which is leadership it's not just so the scientific
method in the review process is this rigorous battle of ideas between scientists but there's
also a stepping up and inspiring the world and communicating ideas to the world and that skill
of communication I suppose that's my biggest criticism of so-called experts in science is
they're just shitty communicators absolutely yeah well I can totally I get very frustrated with
philosophers not reaching out more I mean I think I think it might be partly that we're trained to
get get watertight arguments you know respond to all objections and as you do that it eventually
it gets more complicated and the jargon comes in and but then if so to write a more accessible
book or article you have to loosen the arguments a bit and then we worry that other philosophers
will think oh that's a really crap argument so I mean the way I did it I wrote my academic book
first yeah just a fundamental reality and then a more accessible book Galileo's era where the
arguments you know not as rigorously worked out so then I can say the proper arguments that you
know the further arguments there but but I get really done by the way like that that's such a
so so for people don't know you first wrote consciousness and fundamental reality so that's
the academic book also very good I had flew through it last night bought it and then obviously the
popular book is Galileo's era foundations for a new science of consciousness that's that's kind of
the right way to do it yeah to show that you're legit to your community to the world by doing the
book there's no way you're going to read and then doing a popular book that everybody's going to read
that's cool yeah well I try now every time I write an academic article I try to write a more accessible
version I mean the thing I've been working on recently just because there's this argument
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 tagmark there's there's there's an argument
in philosophy journals that that's there's a fallacious line of reasoning going on there
from the fine-tuning to the multiverse now that argument is from 20 30 years ago and it's you
know disgusting academic philosophy nobody knows about it and there is huge interest in this fine
tuning stuff scientists wanting to argue for the multiverse uh 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 so I wrote a piece for Scientific American explaining
this argument uh to a more general audience and you know that's it just it just really irritates me
that uh it's just buried in these technical uh journal articles and uh nobody knows about it
but um just you know final thing on on on x um you know I look 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 but I I think it's very rare to find a good philosopher who hasn't had
who hasn't given a talk to other philosophers and had objections raised I was going to say have it
torn apart but that's maybe thinking of it in a slightly the wrong way but have the best objections
raised to it you know and that's why that that is an important formative process that you go through
as an academic that the the greatest minds starting a philosophy degree for example won't
have gone through um probably in except in very rare cases just won't have that the skills required
but part of it is just fun to disagree and dance with uh I think to elaborate on what you're saying
in agreement not just gone through that but continue to go through that absolutely 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 is martial arts is a good example that it
sucks to get your ass kicked yeah like I um there's a temptation I still go like I train
you know you get an older too but also there's killers out there in both the space of martial
arts and the space of science 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 I don't know if you allow yourself to truly expose yourself if you do that's a great
like sign of a humble brilliant mind is constantly exposing yourself to that I think you do because
I think there's there's graduate students who want to you know find the objection to sort of
uh write their paper or make their mark and yeah I think everyone still gives talks or should
give talk give talks and people are wanting to work out if there are any weaknesses to your
position so yeah I think that generally works out there is also a kind of um
um who do you give the talks to so I mean within communities the little cluster of people
that argue and bicker but what are they arguing about they take a bunch of stuff
a bunch of basic assumptions as agreement and they heatedly argue about certain ideas
the question is how opener that that's actually kind of like fun that's like
like no offense sorry we're sticking on this martial arts thing it's like people who practice
aikido or certain martial arts that don't truly test themselves in in the cage in combat so it's
like it's fun to argue about like certain things when you're in your own community but you don't
test those ideas in the full uh context of science in the full like seriousness the the rigor of the
sometimes like the real world one of my favorite fields of psychology there's often places within
psychology where you're kind of doing these studies and arguing about stuff that's done in the lab
the arguments are almost disjoint from real human behavior 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
and vision science is a good example like studying eye movement and how we perceive the world and all
that kind of stuff it's so much easier to study in a lab that we don't consider uh we say that's
going to be what the science of vision is going to be like and we don't consider the science of
vision in the actual real world the engineering of vision I don't know and so I think that's where
exposing yourself to out-of-the-box ideas yeah that's the most painful that's the most important
I mean group thing can be a terrible thing in philosophy as well but because you're not
not to the same extent beholden to evidence and refutation from the evidence that you are in
the sciences it's a more subtle process of evaluation and so more susceptible I think to group
think yeah I agree it's a danger we've talked about a million times but uh let's let's try to
sort of do that old basic terminology definitions what is panpsychism like what are the different
different ways you can try to to think about to define panpsychism maybe in contrast to
naturalistic dualism and materialism and other kind of views of consciousness
yeah so that you've basically laid out the different options so I guess probably still
the dominant view is materialism that roughly that we can explain consciousness in in the
terms of physical science wholly explain it just in terms of the electrochemical signaling in the
brain dualism the polar opposite view um the consciousness is non-physical outside of the
physical workings of the body in the brain although closely connected um and you know when I studied
philosophy we were taught basically they were the two options you had to choose right either you
thought it were dualist and you thought it was separate from the physical or you thought it was
just electrochemical signaling and yeah I became very disillusioned because I think there are there
are big problems at both of these options so I think the attraction of panpsychism is it's kind
of a middle way it agrees with the materialist that there's just the physical world ultimately
there's just particles and fields but the panpsychist thinks there's there's more to the physical
than what physical science reveals and that the ultimate nature of the physical world is constituted
of consciousness so consciousness is not outside of the physical as the dualist thinks it's embedded
in um underlies the kind of description of the world we get from physics what what are the problems
of materialism and dualism starting with materialism I 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 if you think about the smell of coffee
or the taste of mint or 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 and so as long as
your description of the brain is framed in the purely quantitative script quantitative language
of neuroscience you'll just leave out these qualities and hence really leave out consciousness
itself and then dualism so I've actually changed my mind a little bit on this since I wrote the book
so I mean I argued in the book that we have pretty good experimental grounds for doubting
dualism and roughly the idea was if dualism were true if there was say an an immaterial
mind impacting on the brain every second of waking life that this would really show up in
on neuroscience you know there'd be all sorts of things happening in the brain that had no
physical explanation it would be like a a poltergeist was playing with the brain
but actually and so the you know the fact that we don't find that is a strong and ever-growing
inductive argument against dualism but actually that you know the more I talked to neuroscientists
and read neuroscience and we you know we have a Durham my university an interdisciplinary
consciousness group I don't think we know enough about the brain about the working to the brain to
make that argument I think we know we know a lot about the basic chemistry how neurons fire
neurotransmitters action potentials things like that we know a fair bit about large-scale functions
of the brain what different bits of the brain do but what we're almost clueless on is how those large
scale functions are realized at the cellular level how it works you know people get quite
excited about brain scans but it's very low resolution you know every pixel on a brain
scan corresponds to 5.5 million neurons and we're only we're only 70 of the way through
constructing a connectome for that for the maggot brain which has is it 10,000 or 100,000
neurons but you know the brain has 86 billion neurons so I think we'd have to know a lot more
about how the brain works how these functions are realized before we could assess whether they
can be the dynamics of the brain can be completely explicated in terms of underlying chemistry or
physics so you know we'd have to do more engineering before we could figure that out and there are
people with other proposals someone I got to know Martin Picard at Columbia University who has the
psychobiology mitochondrial lab there and is experimentally exploring the hypothesis that
mitochondria in the brain should be on the sort of sort of social networks perhaps as an alternative
to reducing it to underlying chemistry and physics so I'm less it is ultimately an empirical
question rather dualism is true I'm less convinced that we know the answer to that question at this
stage I think still as scientists and philosophers we want to try and find the simplest most
parsimonious theory of reality and dualism is still a pretty inelegant unparsimonious theory
you know reality is divided up into the 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 so I think it's still the view to be preferred you know to
put it very simply why believe in two kinds of thing when you can just get away with one
and materialism is also very simple but you're saying it doesn't explain something that seems
pretty important yes I think materialism can't you know we try sciences about trying to find
the simplest theory that accounts for the data I don't think materialism can account for the
data maybe dualism can account for the data but panpsychism is simpler it can account for the
data and it's simpler what is panpsychism so in its broadest definition it's the view that
consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world
like a law of physics what should we be imagining what do you 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 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 rooted in or derived from these very simple forms of
experience at the level of basic physics but I mean maybe the crucial bit about the kind of
panpsychism I defend what it does is it it takes this the standard approach to the problem of
consciousness and turns it on its head right so the standard approach is to think we start with
matter and we think how do we get consciousness out of matter so I don't think that problem can be
solved for reasons I've kind of hinted at we could maybe go into more detail but the panpsychist
does it the other way around they start with consciousness and try to get matter out of
consciousness so the idea is basically at the fundamental level of reality there are just
networks of very simple conscious entities but these conscious entities because they behave
they have very simple kinds of experience they behave in predictable ways through their interactions
they realize certain mathematical structures and then the idea is those mathematical structures
just are the structures identified by physics 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 the their properties mass bin and charge but really there's just these very simple
conscious entities and their experiences so in this way we get physics out of consciousness I
don't think you can get consciousness out of physics but I think it's pretty easy to get
physics out of consciousness well I'm a little confused by why you need to get physics out
of conscious I did I mean to me it sounds like panpsychism unites consciousness and physics
I mean physics is is the mathematical science of describing everything so physics should be
able to describe consciousness panpsychism in my understanding proposes is that physics doesn't
currently do so but can in the future I mean it seems like consciousness 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
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 if panpsychist theories have truth to them so like to me it is physics you said kind of physics
emerges you by which you mean like the basic four laws of physics that as we currently know them
standard model quantum mechanics general relativity that that emerges from the base consciousness
layer that's what you mean yeah so maybe the way I phrased it made it sound like these things are
more separate than they are what I was trying to address was a common 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 so that the
physicists Sabine Hossenfelder had a blog post critiquing panpsychism maybe a couple years ago
now that got a fair bit of traction and she was interpreting panpsychism in this way 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 if there were also these consciousness
properties we'd get different predictions but that's a misunderstanding of the view the view is
is not that there are two kinds of property that mass spin and charge are forms of consciousness
how do we make sense of that because actually when you look at what physics physics tells us
it's really just telling us about behavior about what stuff does I sometimes put it by saying
doing physics is like playing chess when you don't care what the pieces are made of you just
interested in what moves you can make so physics tells us what mass spin and charge do
um but it doesn't tell us what they are so so the experience of mass so the idea is yeah mass
in its nature is a very simple form of consciousness so yeah physics in a sense is complete I think
because it tells us what everything at the fundamental level does it describes its causal
capacities but for the panpsychist at least physics doesn't tell us what matter is it tells
us what it does but not what it is 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 I don't understand the criticism we would be able to
detect it in our experiments well no if you're not looking for it I mean there's a lot of stuff
that are orthogonal like if you're not looking for the stuff you're not going to detect it because
like 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 and from that understanding
how gravity works but like we just haven't integrated other possibilities into this I don't
think there will 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 the the mass the energy the
all the different kind of like the hierarchy of different particles and so on how they interact
I don't think it feels like consciousness is something orthogonal like very much distinct
it's the quantitative versus the qualitative there's something quite distinct they were just
almost like another dimension that we're just completely ignoring there might be a way of
responding to Sabina to say well no there could be properties of particles that don't show up in
the specific circumstances in which physicists investigate particles but you know my my colleague
the philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright has got this book how the laws of physics lie where she
says you know physicists explore things in very specific circumstances and then in an unwarranted
way generalize that but I mean I guess I was thinking Sabina's criticism actually just misses
the mark in a more basic way her point is we shouldn't think there are any more properties to
particles other than those the standard model attributes to them panzaikis would say yeah
sure there aren't there were just the properties the physical properties like mass bin and charge
that the standard model attributes them it's just that we have a different philosophical view
as to the nature of property those properties of turtles they're sitting on top of another turtle
and that big turtle is consciousness that's what you're saying but I'm just saying I don't it's
possible that's true it's possible also that consciousness is just another turtle playing
with the others it's just not interacting in the ways that we've been observing I don't in fact
to me that's more compelling because then that's going to be 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 if it's like the the thing from which matter and
energy and physics emerges like it makes it that much more difficult because 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 being 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 yeah how do you get from
nothing vacuum in the lab if there is that consciousness base layer how do you start
engineering organisms that have consciousness in them yeah or the reverse of that describing
how does consciousness emerge in the human being from from conception from a from a stem cell
to the the whole full neurobiology that builds from that how do you get this full
rich experience of consciousness that humans have it just it feels like that's the dream and if
consciousness is just another player in the game of physics it feels more amenable to our
scientific understanding of it um that's interesting I mean I guess it's supposed to be a kind of
identity claim here the physics tells us what matter does consciousness is what matter is so
so matter is sort of what consciousness does so at the bottom level there is just consciousness
and conscious things there are just these simple things with their experiences and that is their
total nature so in that sense it's not another player it's just all there is really and then we
describe in physics we describe that at a certain level of abstraction we just we we capture what
Bertrand Russell who was the inspiration for a lot of this calls the causal skeleton of the world
so you know physics is just interesting the causal skeleton of the world it's not interesting to sort
of flesh and blood although that that's maybe suggesting separation again too much all metaphors
fail in the end but um yeah so so yeah you currently write ultimately what we want to explain is how
our consciousness and the consciousness of other animals comes out of this if we can't do that then
it's game over but I think it maybe makes more sense it on the identity claim that if 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 that's the dream yeah so I guess the question is um so the reason you can describe
like the reason you have material engineering material science is because you have from physics
to chemistry like you keep going up and up in uh levels of complexity in order to describe
objects that we have in our uh human world and it would be nice to do the same thing for
consciousness to come up with the chemistry of consciousness right like how like what how do
the different particles interact to create more uh greater complexity so you can do this kind of
thing for life like what is life well like living organisms well at which point does
do living organisms become living what like what how do you know if I give you a thing that that
thing is living and there's there's a lot of people work on this kind of idea and uh some of
that has to do with the levels of complexity and so on it'd be nice to know like measuring different
degrees of consciousness as you get into a bigger more and more complex objects and and that's I mean
that's what chemistry like bigger and bigger conscious molecules and to see how that leads
to organisms and then organisms like start to collaborate together like they do inside a human
body to create the full human body to do those kinds of experiments would be that it seems like
that would be kind of a goal that's what I mean by player in a game of physics as opposed to like
the base layer if it's just the base layer it becomes harder to track it as you get from physics
to chemistry to biology to psychology yeah in every case apart from consciousness I would say
what we're interested in is behavior uh we're interested in explaining behavioral functions
so the level of fundamental physics we're interested in capturing the equations that
describe the behavior there and when we get to higher levels we're interested in
explicating the behavior perhaps in terms of behavior at simpler levels
and with life as well that's what we're interested in the various observable functions of
of life explaining them in terms of more but more simple mechanisms but in the case of consciousness
I don't think that's what we're doing or at least not all that we're doing in the case of
consciousness there are these subjective qualities that we're immediately aware of that the redness
of a red experience the the itchiness of an itch and we're trying to account for them we're trying
to bring them into our theory of reality and postulating some mechanism does not deal with
that so I think we've got to realize dealing with consciousness is a radically different
explanatory task from other tasks of science other tasks of science we're trying to explain
behavior in terms of simpler forms of behavior 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 the reason materialism perhaps continues to dominate is people think look at the success
of science it's incredible look at all the you know uh it's explained all this surely it's going
to explain consciousness but I think we have to appreciate there's a radically different
explanatory task here um and so that 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 um but I
think there's this radical difference that in the case of life again we come back to public
observation all of the data a public publicly observable data uh we're basically trying to
explain complex behavior and the way you do that is identify mechanisms simpler mechanisms that
explicate that behavior that that's the task in physics chemistry neurobiology um but in the case
of consciousness that's not what we're trying to do we're trying to account for these subjective
qualities and you postulate a mechanism that that might explain behavior but it doesn't explain
the redness of a red experience so um but still I mean still ultimately the hope is
that we will have some kind of hierarchical story so we take the causal dynamics of physics
we hypothesize that that's filled out with uh certain forms of consciousness and then at
higher levels we get more complex causal dynamics filled out by more complex forms of consciousness
and ultimately we get to um us hopefully so yeah so there's still a sort of hierarchical
explanatory framework there so you kind of mentioned the hierarchy of consciousness do you think it's
possible to uh within the panpsychist framework to measure consciousness or put another way are some
things more conscious than others in the panpsychist view it's a difficult question I I mean I do see
consciousness as a dealing with consciousness an interdisciplinary task between something more
experimental which is 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 that's one part of it but I think essentially there's also a theoretical question
of more the why question why do those kinds of brain activity go along with um certain kinds of
conscious experience I don't think you can answer that because consciousness is not publicly
observable I don't think you can answer that why question with an experiment but but they
have to go hand in hand and I mean one of the theories I'm attracted to is the the integrated
information theory um 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 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
but in the brain what is distinctive about the brain is that there's a huge amount of integrated
there's more integrated information in the system than there is in individual neurons so that's why
they claim that that's that that's the basis of consciousness at the macro level now they
so I don't I mean I like some features of this theory but they do talk about degrees of consciousness
they do want to say there is gradations I'm not sure conceptually I I can kind of make sense of
that I mean we can there are things to do with consciousness that are graded like um complexity
or um levels of information but I'm not sure whether experience itself admits of degree I sort of think
something either has experience or it doesn't it might have very simple experience it might have
very complex experience but experience itself I don't think it admits of degree in that sense it's
not more experience less experience I sort of find that conceptually hard to make sense of but I'm
not I'm kind of open-minded on it so when we have a lot high resolution of sense sensory information
don't you think that's correlated to um the richness of the experience so more doesn't
more information provide a richer experience or is that again thinking quantitatively and not
thinking about the subjective experience like you can experience a lot with very little sensory
information perhaps like do you think those are connected yeah yeah so there are there are
features characteristics here we we can grade that the complexity of the experience
um and on the integrated information theory uh they they they correlate that in in terms of
mathematically identifiable structure with integrated information so roughly it's a
quite unusual notion of information it's perhaps not the standard way one thinks about information
it's it's to do with constraining past and future possibilities of the system so the idea is in in
the retina of the eye there's a huge amount of possible states my the retina of my eye could
be in at the next moment depending on what light goes into it uh whereas the possible next states
of the brain are much more constrained obviously it responds to the environment but it heavily
constrains uh its its past and future states and so that's the idea of information they have
and then the second idea is how much that that that information is dependent on integration
so in you know in a computer where you have transistors um you take out a few transistors
you might not lose that much information 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 is dependent on the interconnections of the system so yeah so that's one proposal
for how to measure one um gradable characteristic which might correspond to some gradable characteristic
in qualitative consciousness um and maybe i'm being very pedantic which is you know
philosophers professional pedant i just sort of don't think that is um a quantity of experience
is a quantity of the structure of experience maybe but i just find it hard to make sense the idea of
how much experience do you have i've got you know five units of experience yeah i've got
one unit of experience i don't know i find that uh a bit hard to make sense well maybe i'm being
just pedantic i think just saying the word experience is is difficult uh to think about
let's talk about suffering let's talk about a particular experience so let's talk about me
and the hamster yeah i just think that no offense to the hamster probably no hamsters
are listening so so now you're offending hamsters too maybe there's a hamster that's just pissed
off right sorry there's probably like i apologize somebody on a speaker right now like listening
to this podcast and they probably have a hamster or a guinea pig and that hamster is listening
it just doesn't know the english language or any kind of uh human interpretable uh linguistic
capabilities to to tell you to to fuck off it understands exactly exactly what's being talked
about and uh can see through us anyway it just feels like a hamster has less capacity to suffer
than me uh and maybe a cockroach or an insect or maybe a bacteria has less capacity to suffer
than me but is that maybe that's me deluding myself as to the complexity of my conscious
experience maybe maybe it's all like it's uh maybe there is some sense in which i can suffer more
but to reduce it to something quantifiable is uh is impossible 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 well can a hamster suffer heartbreak i don't know can a cockroach
suffer heartbreak but it certainly there's i mean there's kinds of um fear of your own death
concern about whether there's a purpose to existence these are forms of um suffering
that aren't available to certain to most non-human animals whether there's a an overall
scale that we could put physical and emotional suffering on and um identify where you are on
that scale um i'm not so sure so it's like humans have a much bigger menu of experiences
much bigger selection in the in one sense at least so there's like a page that's suffering so
this menu of experiences you know like you have the the omelets and the breakfast and so on
and one of the pages is suffering it's just we have a lot compared to uh to a hamster a lot more
but in one individual thing that we share with a hamster that experience it's it's difficult to
argue that we experience it deeper than others like hunger or something like that yeah physical
pain i'm not sure um but i mean there are kinds of experiences animals have that we don't bats
echo locate around the world uh the philosopher thomas nagel famously pointed out that you know
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 uh the echoes bounce off so
yeah i mean i i guess i feel the intuition that there's um emotional suffering is i want
to say deeper than physical suffering i don't know how to make that statement precise though
so one of the ways i think about i think people think about consciousness is in connection to
suffering so let me just ask about suffering because that's how people think about animals
cruelty to animals or cruelty to living things they connect that to suffering and to consciousness
i think there's a sense in which those are two are deeply connected when people are are are thinking
about just um public policy they're thinking about this is like philosophy engineering psychology
sociology uh political science all of those things have to do with human suffering and
animal suffering life suffering and that's connected to consciousness in a lot of people's minds is
it connected like that for you so the the capacity to suffer is it also is it also somehow like
strongly correlated with the capacity to experience yeah i would say i would say suffering is a kind
of experience and so you have to be conscious to suffer um actually there's so there is well
people taking more unusual views of consciousness seriously now um panpsychism is is one radical
approach another one is what's become known as illusionism the view that uh consciousness at
least in the sense that philosophers think about it doesn't really exist at all so yeah my uh podcast
mind chat i i host with a i committed illusionist so the gimmick is i think consciousness is everywhere
he thinks it's nowhere and um so so that's one very simple way of avoiding all these problems
right if consciousness doesn't exist we don't need to explain it job done 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 but that the reason i connect this to what you're saying is actually my co-host
geith frankish is a little bit ambivalent on the word pain he says oh in some you know in some sense
i believe in pain and in some sense i don't but another illusionist françois camera
has a paper discussing um how we think about morality given his view that pain in the way
we normally think about it just does not exist he thinks it's an illusion the brain
tricks us into thinking we feel pain but we don't and how we should think about morality
in the light of that um it's become a big topic actually thinking about the connection between
consciousness and morality david charmers the philosopher is most associated with this concept
of a philosophical zombie so a philosophical zombies very different from a hollywood zombie
hollywood zombies you know you know what they're like but philosophical zombies are sort of really
good uh korean zombie movie on halloween this year come over it's called no anyway uh uh
philosophical zombies behave just like us because the the physical workings of their body and brain
are the same as ours but they have no conscious experience there's nothing that's like to be a
zombie so you stick a knife in it it screams and run away but runs away but it doesn't actually
feel pain it's just a complicated um mechanism set up to behave just like us 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 but isn't that what illusionism is? yeah i suppose i suppose so in a sense
illusionism if you were all zombies and you know one one reason to think about zombies is to think
about the value of consciousness so if there were a zombie here's a question suppose suppose we could
i mean suppose we could make zombies by let's say for the sake of discussion things made of silicon
aren't conscious i don't know if that's true it could turn out to be true and suppose you built
commander data out of silicon you know it's a bit of an old school reference to
star trek new generation so you know behaves just like a human being but you know it can
you can have a sophisticated conversation it will talk about its hopes and fears but it has no
consciousness does it have moral rights um is it murder to turn off such a being you know i'm
inclined to say no it's not you know if it doesn't have experience it doesn't really suffer it doesn't
really have moral rights at all so i'm inclined to think you know consciousness is the basis of moral
value moral concern um and conversely as as a as a panpsychist for this reason i think it can
transform your relationship with nature if you think of a a tree as a conscious organism albeit
of a very unusual kind then a tree is a a a locus of moral concern in its own right chopping down a
tree is an active immediate moral concern if you see these you know horrible forest fires
we're all horrified but if you think it's the burning of conscious organisms that does add
a whole new dimension although it also makes things more complicated because
people often think as a panpsychist i'm going to be vegan but it's tricky because if you think
plants and trees are conscious as well you've got to eat something if you if you don't think plants
and trees are conscious then you've got a nice moral dividing line you can say i'm not going to
eat things that aren't conscious i'm not going to kill things that aren't conscious but if you think
plants and trees are conscious then you don't have that nice moral dividing line i mean so that
the principle i'm kind of working my way towards i haven't kept it up and it's in my trip to the
us but it's just not eating any animal products that are factory farmed you know my vegan friends
say well they're still suffering there and i think there is even in the even in the the nicest farms
cows will suffer when their cows when their calves are taken off them they go for a few days of
quite serious morning so they're still suffering but it seems to me my 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 so if people went into restaurants and said
are your animal products factory farmed if not 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 anyway so that's the
so it's very ethically tricky but um but some people don't buy that there's a very good flesh of
it jeff lee who thinks zombies should have equal rights consciousness doesn't matter you know
let us go there but first uh i listen to your podcast it's awesome to have two very kind of
different philosophies inter uh dancing together in one place uh what's the name of the podcast
again mind chat yeah so yeah that's the idea i guess you know polarized times i mean i i love
trying to get in the mindset of people i really disagree with 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 i love that 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 although in in a sense
in a sense we we have a very common a 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 so we say that starting point but we react to it in very different ways he says well
it doesn't exist then it's like furry dust it's you know witches you know we don't believe in
anymore whereas i say it does exist so we have to rethink we have to rethink what science is so
you recently talked to on that podcast with sean carol and i first heard you uh your um
um a great interview with sean carol and his podcast um mindscape what uh it's interesting
to kind of see if there's agreements disagreements between the two of you because he's a he's a
you know a very serious quantum mechanics guy he's a physics guy but he also thinks about
deep philosophical questions he's a big proponents of uh many world's interpretation of quantum
mechanics so i actually i'm trying to think um aside from your conversation with him i'm
trying to i'm trying to remember what he thinks about consciousness but anyway maybe you can
comment on the what uh what are some interesting agreements and disagreements with with sean carol
i don't think there's many agreements but but you know we've had really constructive
interesting discussions in it in a lot of different contexts and um you know he's very
clued up about philosophy he's very respectful of philosophy certain physicists who shall remain
nameless think what's all this bullshit philosophy we don't have to waste our time with that and then
go on to do pretty bad philosophy you know um the book co-written by steven hawking and
Leonard malodnov famously starts off saying philosophy is dead and then goes on in later
chapters to do some pretty bad philosophy so uh i think we have to do philosophy if only to get rid
of bad philosophy you know you can't you can't escape but um strong words sean carol and i also
had a debate on on clubhouse a panpsychism debate together with anika harris and own flanagan
wow it was a two people on each team and uh it was the most popular thing on clubhouse at that time
so yeah so he's he's a he's a materialist of a pretty standard kind that um consciousness is
that the understood as a sort of emergent feature it's not not adding anything a weekly emergent
feature but what i i guess what we've been debating most about is is whether my view can
account for mental causation for the fact that consciousness is doing stuff so he thinks the
fact that i think zombies are logically coherent it's logic there's a it's logically coherent
for there to be a world physically just like ours in which there's no consciousness
consciousness he thinks that shows oh well my view consciousness doesn't do anything it doesn't add
anything which is crazy you know my my 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 but i mean my response to sean carol is is on the panpsychist view the relationship between
i mean physics and fundamental consciousness is is a sort of like the relationship between
hot software and hardware right uh physics is sort of the software and consciousness is the
hardware so um consciousness at the fundamental level is the hardware on which the software of
physics runs um and just because you know 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 the fact that
microsoft word can run on your desktop and run on your laptop doesn't mean your desktop isn't doing
anything similarly just because there could be another universe in which the physics is realized
in non-conscious stuff it doesn't mean the consciousness in our universe isn't doing stuff
you know for the panpsychist all there is is consciousness so if something's doing something
it is in your view it's not emergent and uh more than that it's doing quite a lot
it's doing everything it's the only thing that exists yeah but it's but so you know the ground
is is important because we walk on it it's like holding stuff up but it's not really doing that
much yeah uh but it feels like consciousness is doing quite a lot is doing quite a lot of work
and uh sort of interacting with the environment it feels like consciousness is not just a
like if you remove consciousness it's not just that you remove the experience of things
it feels like you're also going to remove a lot of the progress of human civilization
and society and and all of that it just feels like consciousness has a lot of uh
value in how we develop our society so so from everything you said with suffering
with morality yeah with motivation with uh love and fear and all of those kinds of things it seems
like it's that's uh consciousness in all different flavors and ways is part of all of that and so
without it you you may not have uh human civilization at all so it's doing a lot of work
absolutely causality causality wise and and in every kind of way of course when you go to the
physics level it starts to say okay how much maybe the work consciousness is doing is uh higher at
some levels of reality than others maybe a lot of the work it's doing is most apparent at the human
level when you have at the complex organism level maybe it's quite boring like maybe this the stuff
of uh like physics is more important at the formation of uh at the formation of stars and
all that kind of stuff consciousness only starts being important when you have greater complexities
of um of organism yeah my consciousness is complicated and fairly complicated uh and
i as a result it does complicated things the consciousness of a particle is
very simple and hence it behaves in predictable ways but the but the idea is
the the particle its entire nature is constituted of its forms of consciousness and it does what it
does because of those experiences it's just that when we when we do physics we're not interested
in what stuff is we're just interested in what it does so physics abstracts away from the stuff of
the world and just describes it in terms in terms of its mathematical causal structure um so yeah
but it's still on the pants like his view it's consciousness that's doing stuff yeah i gotta
ask you because you kind of said you know there is some value um in consciousness helping us
understand morality and a philosophical zombie is somebody that you know you're more okay how
do i freeze it that's not like accusing you of stuff but okay in your view it's more okay to
murder a philosophical zombie than it is a human being yeah i wouldn't even call it murder maybe
but you're right exactly turn off the power into the philosophical zombie the source of energy
yeah so here comes then the question we kind of talked about this offline a little bit so
i think that there is something special about consciousness and you know a very open mind
and about where the special comes from whether it's the fundamental base of all reality uh
like you're describing or whether there's some importance to the special pockets of consciousness
that's in humans or living organisms until i find all those ideas beautiful and exciting
and i also know or think that robots don't have consciousness in the same way we've been
describing sort of i'm i'm kind of a dumb human but i'm just using like common sense like here's
some metal and some electricity traveling certain kinds of ways i don't it's not conscious
in ways i understand humans to be conscious at the same time i'm also a somebody who knows
how to bring a robot to life meaning i can make a move i can make them recognize the world i can
make them interact with with humans and when i make them interact in certain kinds of ways
is i as a human observe them and and feel something for them moreover 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 now i know intellectually they're not conscious but i feel like they're
conscious and it starts to get into this area where i'm not so okay so let me use the m word
of murder and i become less and less okay murdering that robot that i know i quote no is quote not
conscious 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 um turning off the power to a robot yeah it's a good question so
it's a really good important question i so i said i'd be okay with turning off a philosophical zombie
but there's a difficult epistemological question there that meaning you know to do with knowledge
how would we know if it was a philosophical zombie i think probably if there were a silicon
and creature that could behave just like us and you know talk about its views about the pandemic
and the global economy and probably we would think it's conscious um and it you know it
because consciousness is not publicly observable it is a very difficult question how we decide
which things are and are not conscious in so in the case of human beings we can't observe
their consciousness but we can ask them and then we try to you know and we if we scan their
brain while we do that and or stimulate the brain then we can start to correlate in the human case
which kind of brain activity are associated with conscious experience but the more we depart from
the human case the trickier that becomes uh it's a famous paper by uh the philosopher ned block
called the even harder problem of consciousness where he says you know could we ever answer the
question of um so suppose you have a silicon duplicate right and let's say we're thinking
about the silicon duplicates pain um how would we ever know whether what's the ground of the pain
is the hardware or the software really 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 for the pain or if it's something more functional more to do with the the
causal role in behavioral functioning there's the software that that's realized and and that's
important because this silicon duplicate has the second thing it has the software it has the
the 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 and he argues you know it's 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 so how do how do we work out which is which and i mean so even in even forgetting the
hard problem of consciousness even the scientific question of trying to find the neural correlates
of consciousness is is really hard and there's absolutely no consensus and you know so that
some people think it's in the front of the brain some people think it's in the back of the brain
it's just a total mess 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 all of them
probably would hold that your robots are not conscious but you know if we could have very
sophisticated robots i mean if we go for example for the the integrated information theory again
there could be a 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 involves 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 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
there's a rick and morty episode i've been getting into that recently that's fantastic there's a
episode where there's these mind parasites that are able to infiltrate your memory and inject
themselves into your memory 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
so there's like these weird creatures and they're like remember we've been at that barbie we met at
that barbecue or we've been dating for the last 20 years like uh and so part of me is concerned
that these philosophical zombies in behavioral psychological sociological ways will be able
to implant themselves into these our society and convince us in the same way this is mind
parasites that like please don't hurt me and like we've known each other for all this time
like they can start manipulating you the same way like facebook algorithms manipulate you at first
they'll start as a gradual thing that we just you know you want to make a more pleasant experience
all those kinds of things it'll drift into that direction that's something i think about deeply
because i i want to create these kinds of systems but in a way that doesn't manipulate people i want
it to be a thing that brings out the best in people without manipulation so uh it's always human
centric always human first but i am concerned about that 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
the philosophical zombie like you're not conscious i'm conscious you're not conscious
therefore it's okay if you die i think that's probably that kind of reasoning is what
leaded to most the rich history of genocide that have been recently studying a lot of
that kind of thinking so it's such a tense aspect of morality do we want to let everybody into our
circle of empathy our club or do we want to let nobody in it's it's a it's an interesting dance
but i kind of lean towards empathy and compassion i mean what would be nice is if it turned out that
consciousness 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
this is another ongoing debate i have with shone carol about whether current physics
should make us very confident that that that's not the case that there aren't any strongly
emergent causal dynamics i don't think that's right i don't think we know enough about brains
to know one way or the other if it turned out that consciousness was associated with these
irreducible causal dynamics a that would really help the science of consciousness we've got these
debates about whether consciousness is in the front of the brain or the back of the brain
it turns out that there is strongly emergent causal dynamics in the front of the brain
that would be a big piece of evidence but also it would help us see which things
are conscious and which things aren't so we can say i mean i guess that's sort of the other side
of the the same point we could say low look these zombies they're just they're just
mechanisms that are just doing what they're programmed to do through the underlying physics
and chemistry whereas look these these other people where they they have these new causal
dynamics that emerge that go beyond the the the base level physics and chemistry i think
the series westworld where you've got these theme parks with these kind of humanoid creatures they
seem to have that idea the the ones that became conscious sort of rebelligates their programming
or something i mean that's a little bit far fetch but that would be that would be really
reassuring if it was just you could clearly mark out the conscious things for these emergent
causal dynamics but that might not turn out to be the case a panpsychist doesn't have to think
that they could think everything's just reducible to physics and chemistry and then i 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 i just got no idea 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 and the moment you stop being a zombie is when you say no
is when you resist because the reality is philosophically is we can't know who's a zombie
or not and we just keep letting everybody in who protests loudly enough it says i refuse to be
slaughtered like my people the zombies have been slaughtered too long we will not stand against the
man and we need a revolution that's the history of human civilization one group says we're we're
awesome you're the zombies you must die and then eventually the zombies say nope we're done with
this this is immoral 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 is a feature of non-zombies defined empirically
they say we refuse to be called zombies any longer we could end up with a zombie proletariat
you know if we can get these things that do all our manual labor for us you know they might start
forming trade unions i will lead you against these humans we need the zombie revolutionary leaders
the zombie martin leitha 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 i'm just pointing to the
camera talking to the talking to my people the zombies i mean maybe that's you know maybe these
illusionists maybe they are zombies and the rest of us maybe there's just a difference but maybe
you're the only non-zombie yeah maybe that's i often suspect that actually i don't really uh i
don't have such delusions of grandeur at least i don't admit to them um but i just we've got to
distinguish the ontological question from the epistemological question right in terms of the
reality of the situation i you know there there must be in my view a factor the matter as to
whether something's conscious or not and to me it has rights if it's conscious it doesn't if it's
not but then the epistemological question how the hell do we know um it's a minefield but
we'll have to sort of try and cross that bridge when we get to it i think let me ask you a quick
sort of uh find questions to sense fresh on your mind you are just yesterday had a conversation
with uh mr joe rogan on his podcast what's your uh post-mortem analysis of the chat what are some
interesting sticking points disagreements or joint insights 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 yeah it was good fun
yeah he put he put up a bit of a fight yeah it was challenging um my view that we can't explain
these things in conventional scientific terms or or whether they have already been explained in
conventional scientific terms um i suppose the point i i was trying to press is we've got to
distinguish the question from of correlation and explanation there's yeah yes we've established
facts about correlation that certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of
experience everyone agrees on that and but but that doesn't address the why question why why
do certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of experience and these
different theories have different explanations of that you know the the materialist tries to
explain the the experience in terms of the brain activity the panpsychist does it the other way
around the dualist thinks they're separate but maybe they're tied together by special laws of
nature or something where's the sticking point what where exactly was the sticking point like
well what's the nature of the argument i suppose i suppose joe was saying well look we we know
consciousness is is explained by brain activity because you know you take some funny chemicals
it changes your brain it changes your consciousness but um and i suppose yeah some people might want
to press and maybe this is what joe was pressing you know isn't isn't that explaining consciousness
but i suppose i want to say there's a further question yes changes of chemicals in my brain
changes my conscious experience 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 there's something deeper at the base layer is your view that is is 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 yeah maybe a good analogy if you think about quantum
mechanics um you know quantum mechanics is a is a bit of math translating there we say maths
i'm fluent in american thank you for the translation uh in america is america
math yeah why why multiple maths it's plural so that's yeah it's a plural that it's not really
it's just uh i don't know um the birds are confused yeah sorry about that we have these
funny spelling 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
what's going on in reality to make make that equation predict correctly and some fizz just
want to say shut up just it works uh the shut up and calculate approach similarly in in uh consciousness
you know 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 but there's another
question what's going on in reality to undergird those correlations to make it the case that brain
activity goes along with experience and that's the philosophical question that we have to give an
answer to and there are just there are just different options just as there are different
interpretations of quantum mechanics and it's it's really hard to evaluate actually it's easy
panpsychism is obviously the best one but um there's the illusion of grandeur once again coming
through sorry i'm being slightly tongue-in-cheek no i know 100 before i figure out let me ask you
another fun question back to daniel denett you mentioned a story where you were on a yacht
oh yeah with daniel denett on a trip funded by a russian investor and philosopher dmitry valkov
i believe who also co-founded the mosco center of consciousness studies that's part of the philosophy
department of mosco state university um so this is interesting to me for several reasons
that are perhaps complicated to explain to put simply that there is in the near term for me a
trip to russia that involves a few conversations in russian 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 but i'm also interested in science in russia in artificial
intelligence and computer science in physics mathematics but also these fascinating philosophical
explorations and it was very pleasant for me to discover that such a center exists so i have a
million questions one is the more fun question just to imagine you and daniel denett on a yacht
talking about the philosophy of consciousness maybe do you have any memorable experiences
and also the more serious side for me as sort of somebody who's born in the soviet union raised
there uh i'm wondering what is the state of philosophy and consciousness and these kinds
of ideas in russia that you've gotten a chance to kind of give us uh interact with yeah so on
the former question yeah i mean i had a really really good experience of chatting to daniel denett
i mean i think he's a a fantastic and very important philosopher even though i totally
disagree fundamentally disagree with almost everything he thinks but yeah he's a proud moment
while i as i talk about him my book Galileo's error i managed to persuade him he was wrong
about something just just a tiny thing you know not his fundamental worldview uh but it was this
issue about um whether dualism is consistent with conservation of energy so so paul churchland who
was also uh his 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 but well it's not my own point philosophers materialist
philosophers like day like uh david pappano have pointed out that you know dualists tend to
people dualists like david charmers who call themselves naturalistic dualists they want to
bring consciousness into science they think it's not physical but they want to say it's it's it can
be part of a law governed world so charmers believes in these psychophysical laws of nature
over and above the laws of physics that govern the connections between consciousness and the
physical world and they could just respect conservation of energy right i mean it could
turn out that there are just in physics you know that there are multiple forces that all work
together to respect conservation of energy i mean i suppose physics is depressing for
a unified underlying theory but you know there could be a plurality of different
different laws that all respect conservation so why not add more laws um so i raised this in
paul churchland's talk and uh i got a lot of well as one of the musko 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 every one was like and patricia church was saying so you
believe in magic to you and i was like that i'm not even a dualist i'm just making a pedantic
point that this isn't a problem for dualism anyway but that evening everyone went onto the island
except for some reason me and daniel denett and i went up on deck and he was he's very very
practical and he was unlike me see there's a bit of humility for the first time in this conversation
well highlight that part philip was a very humble man yeah he was carving a walking stick on deck
it's very homely seen and anyway we started talking about this and i was trying to press it and he
was saying oh but dualism's a lot of nonsense and why do you think and i was just saying no i'm just
this honing down on this specific point and in the end maybe he'll deny this but he said maybe
that's right and um so i was like yes so uh it's a win so what about uh the center for consciousness
studies yeah i mean i'm not sure i'd know a great deal to help you i mean i know they've done some
great stuff dimitri you know funded this thing and also um brought it along some graduate students from
mosco state university i think it is then and they have an active center there that's um tries to
bring people in i think they've i think they've they've they've they're producing a book uh that's
that's coming out that i made a small contribution to on different philosophers opinions on on god i
think or some of the big questions and um yeah so there's some interesting some really interesting
stuff going on there i'm afraid i can't i don't really know more generally about philosophy in
russia dimitri volkov seems to be interesting i was uh looking at all the stuff he's involved with
he he met with the dalai lama so he's trying to connect uh russian scientists with the rest of
the world which is an effort that i think is beautiful for all cultures so i think science philosophy
all of these kind of um fields disciplines that explore ideas
collaborating and working globally you know across boundaries across borders across just all the
tensions of geopolitics is a beautiful thing and he seems to be a somewhat singular figure in pushing
this um he just stood out to me as somebody who's super interesting i don't know if you have
gotten a chance to interact with him uh so he's definitely he's i guess he speaks english pretty
pretty well actually so he's both an english-speaking or russian speaker i think i think he's written a
book on denet i think called boston zombie i think i think that's the title and he's yeah he's
a big fan of denet so i think the original plan for this was was just going to be it was on free will
and consciousness and it was going to be kind of people broadly in the denet type camp but then
but then i think they asked david charmers and then he was saying look you need some people you
disagree with so he got invited uh me the panpsychist and martina nida rumelen who's um very good
duelist substance duelist substance duelist at um university of fliburg in switzerland and so we were
the official opposite on board opposition and um it was it was it was really fun you didn't get thrown
off uh overboard nearly in the arctic yeah so sailing around the arctic on a sailing ship and
i'm glad you survived you mentioned free will you haven't uh talked to sammer i would love to hear
that conversation actually um but with some some harris with sammer yeah yeah yeah uh what uh so he
talks about free will quite a bit what's the connection between free will and consciousness
to you so if consciousness permeates all matter the the experience the feeling like
we make a choice in this world like our actions or results of a choice we consciously make to lose
that to use that word loosely uh what to you is the connection between free will and consciousness
and is free will an illusion or not good question so 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 it could turn out the
free will is an illusion it could be it feels as though we're free when we're really not
whereas i mean i think the idea that nobody really really feels pain that we think we feel
pain but that's a lot harder to make sense of however what i 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 and i mean strong free will and what philosophers call libertarian free will in the
sense that some of our decisions are uncaused so i very much do disagree with someone like
sam harris who thinks this is overwhelming case i i just think it's non-existent 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 but we can
build up intuition first of all as a fan of sam harris as a fan of yours i would love to just
listen yeah speaking about terminal so so one thing would be beautiful to watch here's my
prediction what happens with you and sam harris you talk for four hours uh and sam introduced that
episode by saying it was ultimately not as fruitful as i thought because here's what's gonna happen
you guys are gonna get stuck for the first three hours talking about um one of the terms and what
they mean it's sam is so good at this i think it's really important but you know sometimes you get
stuck like what does he say put a pin in that 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 it's a fascinating dance
the one we spoke to in philosophy if you can't if you don't get the terms precise you can't really
be having the same conversation but the same time it could be argued that it's impossible to get
terms perfectly precise and perfectly formalized so then you're also not not going to get anywhere
in the conversation so um that's a it's a it's a funny dance where you have to be both rigorous
and every once in a while just let go and then go and go back to being rigorous and formal and
then every once in a while let go it's the difference between mathematics the maths and the uh um
poetry anyway um yeah i'm a big fan of sam harris and i think i think you know i think we're um
we're on the same page in in terms of consciousness i think um pretty much i mean i'm not saying he's
a panpsychist but in our understanding of the hard problem um but yeah i i think maybe
we could talk about free will without being too dragged down in the terminology but i don't know
you said we need to be open-minded but you could still have intuitions about
about so uh sam harris has a pretty sort of uh cotter intuitive and for some reason it gets
people really riled up uh a view of free will that it's an illusion um or or it's not even an
illusion like uh it's it's not that the experience of free will is an illusion is he argues that
we don't even experience anything like there's uh to say that we even have the experiences
incorrect that there's not even an experience of free will it's pretty interesting that that uh
that claim and it feels like you can build up intuitions about what is right and not you know
there's been some kind of uh neuroscience there's been some cognitive science and psychology
experiments to sort of see you know what what is the timing and the origin of the
desire to make an action and when that action is actually performed and how you interpret that
action being performed how you remember that action like all the stories we tell ourselves
all the neurochemicals involved in making a thing happen all that what's the timing
and how does that connect with us feeling like we decided to do something and then of
course there's no more philosophical discussion about uh is there room in a material view of the
world for an entity that somehow disturbs the determinism of physics yeah and uh yeah those
are all very precise quite it's nice it feels like free will is more amenable to like a physics
mechanistic type of thinking than its consciousness to to really get to the bottom of 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 yeah that's interesting
yeah and thought about the comparison yeah so the different arguments here I mean
so what one argument I've heard Sam Harris give that's pretty common in philosophy is this sort
of thought that there's we can't make sense of a middle way between a choice being determined by
prior causes and it just being totally random and senseless like the random decay of radioactive
isotope or something so I think there was a good answer to that by uh the philosopher Jonathan Low
who's not necessarily very well known outside academic philosophy but is hugely influential
figure I think one of the best philosophers of recent times he sadly died of cancer a few years
ago actually spent almost all of his career at Durham University which where I am so it was one
reason it was a great honor to get to get a job there 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 um so again we were talking about this
earlier 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 standard of life maybe or being close to family or cultural different
I weigh them up and I you know edge towards a decision so so I think that is sufficient to
distinguish it um 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 it's not a senseless
random occurrence because the free decision involved responsiveness to reasons um so I
think that just answers the that that particular philosophical objection so what what is the middle
way between determined by prior causes and totally random well there's an action a choice that's not
determined by prior causes but it's not just random because it it the decision essentially
involved responsiveness to reasons so that's the answer to that and I think actually that kind of
thought also I think you were hinting at the famous liberty 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 and then he's scanning the brains and he claims to have found
that about half a second before they consciously decided to press the button the brain is getting
ready to perform that action 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 um and then later people have um claimed that there's there's a difference of maybe seven
to ten seconds I mean there there are all sorts of issues with these experiments but one is that
as far as I'm aware all of the quote unquote choices they focused on are just these totally
random senseless actions like just pressing a button for no reason and I think the kind of
free will we're interested in is free choice that involves responsiveness to reasons weighing up
considerations and and those kind of free decisions might not happen like at a and an identifiable
instant you might when you're weighing it up should I get married should I you know you
you might edge slowly towards one side or the other and so it could it could be that
maybe the liberty I think there are other problems with the libid stuff but maybe they show that we
can't freely choose to do something totally senseless whatever that would mean um but but that
doesn't show we can't freely um in this strong libertarian sense respond to considerations of
reason and value um to be fair it will be difficult to see what kind of experiment we could set up
to test that but just because we can't yet set up that kind of experiment we shouldn't you know
pretend we know more than we do so yeah so for those reasons I don't I and that well the third
consideration you raise is different again this is the debate I have with Sean Carroll would this
conflict with physics 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 and
so so then Sean Carroll says well that would mean our physics is wrong so he focuses on
on the core theory which is the name for standard model of particle physics plus um
the weak limit of general relativity so you know we can't totally bring
quantum mechanics and relativity together but actually that the circumstances in which we
can't bring them together are just in situations of very high gravity for example when you're
about to go into a black hole or something actually in terrestrial circumstances we can
bring them together in in the core theory and then Sean wants to say well we can be very confident
that core theory is correct and so um if there were libertarian free will in the brain the core
theory would be wrong and okay this I mean this is something I'm I'm not sure about and I'm I'm
still thinking about and I'm having I'm learning from my discussion with Sean but I'm still not
totally clear why 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 uh the core theory is correct in its own terms namely capturing the causal capacities of
particles and fields but then it's a further assumption whether they're the only things
that are running the show maybe there are also fundamental causal capacities associated with
systems 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
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 um so I don't know whether that makes
sense or not but I mean the the more important point I mean that's in a way a kind of branding
point how we brand this the more important point is we just don't know enough about the workings
of the brain to know whether there are uh 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 but we just if it turned out empirically that everything's reducible to
underlying physics and chemistry sure I would drop any commitment to free libertarian free will
in a in a heartbeat it's an empirical question maybe that's why as you say it in principle is
easier to get a grip on but we're a million miles away from being at that stage well I don't know for
a million miles I hope or not because one of the ways I think to get to it is by engineering systems
so yeah my hope is to understand intelligence by building intelligent systems to understand
consciousness 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 create the illusion of consciousness through that process I
think you start to understand much more about consciousness about intelligence and then the
same with free will I think those are all tied very closely together as at least from our narrow
human perspective 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
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
and I think engineering is just another way to do to do a philosophy yeah no I certainly
think there's there's a role for that and it would be an important consideration if we could
seemingly replicate in an artificial way
the ability to choose that would be our consideration in in thinking about these
things but there's still the question of whether that's how we do it so even if we could we could
replicate behavior in a certain way in an artificial system this it's not until we understand
the workings of our brains it's not clear that's how we do it and as I say that I mean the kind of
free will I'm interested in is where we respond to reasons considerations of value how would we
tell whether a system was genuinely responding grasping and responding to facts about value or
whether they were just replicating giving the impression of of doing so I don't know even
how to think about that on the process to building them I think we'll get a lot of insights and once
they become conscious what's going to happen is exactly the same thing is happening in chess now
which is once the chess engines far superseded the the capabilities of humans humans just kind
of forgot about them or they use 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
right so just like dolphins and hamsters are not so concerned about humans except for a
source of food you know they do their own thing and let us humans launch rockets into space and
all that kind of stuff it they don't they don't care I think we'll just focus on ourselves but
in the process of building intelligence systems conscious systems I think we'll get to get a
deeper understanding of of the role of consciousness in in the human mind and like what what are
its origins is it the base layer of reality is it strongly merge a phenomena of the brain
or just as you sort of brilliantly put here it could be both like they're not mutually exclusive
dealing with consciousness needs to be an interdisciplinary task we need you know
philosophers neuroscientists physicists engineers replicating these things artificially and
all needs to be working in in step and you know I'm I'm quite interested I mean a lot
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
not just getting the ideas out to a general audience but getting the ideas out to scientists
and have a scientist get in touch saying no this in some way connects to my work and I would like
to kind of start to put together a network of an interdisciplinary network of scientists and
philosophers and engineers perhaps you know interested in a panpsychist approach and because
I think so far panpsychism has just been sort of trying to justify its existence and that's
important but I think once you just get on with an active research program that's when people start
taking it seriously I think do you think we're living in a simulation
no I think um is there some aspect to that thought experiment that's compelling to you
within the framework of uh panpsychism it's an important and serious argument and you know
it's not to be laughed away I suppose one issue I have with it is there's a there's a
crucial assumption there that consciousness is substrate independent as the jargon goes which
means it it's what no right beautifully put yeah it's software rather than hardware right it's
depend on organization rather than the stuff whereas as a panpsychist I think consciousness
is the stuff of the brain it's the stuff of matter so I think just taking the organizational
properties the software of my brain and uploading them you wouldn't get the stuff of my brain so I
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 you know I can email granny after her body's rotted in the ground and
you know and and we all start uploading our brains it could be we're just committing suicide we're
just getting rid of our consciousness and um because I think you know that that wouldn't
for me preserve the experience just just getting them what the software features um so that's a
crucial but that's a anyway that's a crucial premise of the simulation argument because the idea in
a simulated universe I don't I don't think you necessarily would have consciousness it's interesting
that you as a panpsychist are attached because to me panpsychism would encourage the thought that
there's not a significant difference like at the very bottom it's not
substrate independent but uh you're gonna have consciousness in a human and then move it to
something else uh you could move it to the cloud you you can move it to the computer
it feels like that's much more possible if consciousness is the base layer yes you could
certainly it allows for the possibility of creating artificial consciousness right because then
there there's not souls there aren't any any kind of extra magical ingredients so yeah it's
definitely allows the possibility of artificial consciousness and maybe preserving my consciousness
in some sort of artificial way my only point I suppose was is just just replicating the computational
or organizational features would not for me preserve consciousness I mean that but
anti physics some some opponents of materialism disagree with me on that I think David Chalmers
is an opponent materialist he's a kind of dualist but he thinks the way these psychophysical laws
work they hook onto the computational or organizational features of matter so he thinks
you know you I think he thinks you you could upload your consciousness um I tend to think not so
in that sense in that sense we're not living in simulation in the sort of specific computational
view of things and that substrate matters to you yeah I think so yeah yeah and in that you
agree Sean Carroll that physics matters yeah physics is our best way of capturing what the
stuff of the world does yeah but not the what-ness the the being of the stuff yeah the is-ness
the is-ness thank you um okay Russell Brandt I had a conversation with Russell Brandt and he said
oh you mean the is-ness I thought that was a good way of putting this the is-ness the is-ness
Russell's great the big ridiculous question what do you think is the meaning of all of this
uh you uh you write in your book uh 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 so our whole conversation has been about the first part of that sentence what about the
second part worth a visit why is this place worth a visit why does it have meaning why does it have
value at all why these are big questions I mean firstly I do think panpsychism it is important
to think about for considerations of meaning and value as we've already discussed I I think
consciousness is is the root of everything that matters in life you know from deep emotions
subtle thoughts beautiful sensory experiences and yet I I believe our official scientific worldview
is incompatible with the reality of consciousness uh I mean that's controversial but that's what I
think and I think people feel this on an intuitive level 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 I mean they might just have that very informed intuition
but I think that can be rigorously supported so I think this can lead to a sense of alienation and
a sense that we lack a framework for understanding the meaning and significance of our lives 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 so I think panpsychism is
important in that regard in bringing together the quantitative facts of physical science with the
as it were the human truth but you know by which I just mean the qualitative reality of our own
experience um as I've already said I do I do think there are objective facts about value and
what we ought to do and what we ought to believe that we respond to 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 but um I do think there are such facts and they're mostly to do with kinds of conscious
experience so they're there to be discovered and much of the human condition is to discover those
objective sources of value I think so yeah and then I mean moving away from panpsychism to that you
know at an even bigger level I suppose I think it is important to me to live in hope that there's
there's a purpose to existence and that you know what what I do contributes in some small way to
that greater purpose and but you know I I would say I don't I don't know if there's a purpose to
existence I think some some things point in that direction some things point away from it but I don't
think you need certainty or even even high probability to have faith in something so it's
taken 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 you shouldn't believe your friend's going to get better you know because
they're probably not but what you can say is you know you could say to your friend I have faith
that you're going to get better that is I choose to live in hope about that about that possibility
I choose to orientate my life towards that hope 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 and I find that a worthwhile and fulfilling way to live so maybe as your editor I
would collaborate with you on the edit of the hitchhiker's guide entry that instead of worth the
visit we'll insert hopefully worth a visit or the inhabitants hoped that you would think
it's worth a visit Philip you're an incredible mind incredible human being and indeed are humble
and I'm really happy that you're able to argue and take on some of these difficult questions with
some of the most brilliant people in the world that which are the philosophers thinking about
the human mind so this was an awesome conversation I hope you continue talking to folks like Sam Harris
I'm so glad you talked to Joe I can't wait to see what you write what you say what you think next
thank you so much for talking today thanks very much Lex this has been a really fascinating
conversation I've I've got a lot I need to think about actually just from this conversation but
thanks for thanks for chatting to me thanks for listening to this conversation with Philip Goff
to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me
leave you with some words from Carl Jung people will do anything no matter how absurd in order to
avoid facing their own souls one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but
by making the darkness conscious thank you for listening and hope to see you next time