In Our Time - Panpsychism

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea that some kind of consciousness is present not just in our human brains but throughout the universe, right down to cells or even electrons. This is panpsychism and its proponents argue it offers a compelling alternative to those who say we are nothing but matter, like machines, and to those who say we are both matter and something else we might call soul. It is a third way. Critics argue panpsychism is implausible, an example of how not to approach this problem, yet interest has been growing widely in recent decades partly for the idea itself and partly in the broader context of understanding how consciousness arises.WithTim Crane Professor of Philosophy and Pro-Rector at the Central European University Director of Research, FWF Cluster of Excellence, Knowledge in CrisisJoanna Leidenhag, Associate Professor in Theology and Philosophy at the University of LeedsAnd Philip Goff Professor of Philosophy at Durham UniversityProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Anthony Freeman (ed.), Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? (Imprint Academic, 2006), especially 'Realistic Monism' by Galen StrawsonPhilip Goff, Galileo's Error: Foundations for A New Science of Consciousness (Pantheon, 2019)Philip Goff, Why? The Purpose of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 2023) David Ray Griffin, Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom and the Mind-Body Problem (Wipf & Stock, 2008)Joanna Leidenhag, Minding Creation: Theological Panpsychism and the Doctrine of Creation (Bloomsbury, 2021)Joanna Leidenhag, ‘Panpsychism and God’ (Philosophy Compass Vol 17, Is 12, e12889) Hedda Hassel Mørch, Non-physicalist Theories of Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 2024)Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge University Press, 2012), especially the chapter 'Panpsychism'David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West (MIT Press, 2007) James van Cleve, 'Mind-Dust or Magic? Panpsychism versus Emergence' (Philosophical Perspectives Vol. 4, Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind, Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1990)

BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, according to panpsychists,

some kind of consciousness is present, not just in our human brains, but throughout the universe, right down to cells or even electrons. This idea they argue of as a compelling alternative to those who say we're nothing but matter like machines and to those who say we're both matter and something else, we might call soul. It's a third way. Critics argue that panpsychism is implausible.

An example of how not to approach this problem. Yet interests been growing widely in recent decades, partly from the idea itself, and partly in the broader context of understanding how consciousness arises. with me to discuss panpsychism are Tim Crane, Professor of Philosophy and Prorector at the Central European University. Joanna Leidenhag, Associate Professor in Theology and Philosophy at the University of Leeds, and Philip Goff, Professor at Philosophy at Durham University. Philip Goff, how would you define panpsychism?

Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical universe. It doesn't necessarily mean everything is conscious. The basic commitment is that the fundamental building blocks of the physical universe, perhaps fundamental particles like electrons and quarks, have incredibly simple forms of conscious experience. And then that the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow built up from these simpler forms of consciousness at the level of fundamental physics.

A panpsychists need not think this table is conscious, but they may very well think the small particles making it up have some kind of very simple conscious experience. And what do you mean by conscious experience? Yeah, good question, because it is a bit of an ambiguous word. The standard definition of scientists and philosophers is that your consciousness is just what it's like to be you. So right now you're having an auditory experience of my voice speaking to you,

visual experience of the room around you, tactile sensations of the chair beneath your body this is all part of what it's like to be you right now and of course human consciousness is incredibly complex the result of millions of years of evolution but consciousness comes in all shapes and sizes the consciousness of a sheep is much simpler what it's like to be a snail

is maybe simpler still how do you know that well I guess the assumption that the conscious the structure of the conscious experience correlates in some way with the structure of the brain or central nervous system in ways scientists are continuing to uncover. So for the panpsychist, this keeps going down, right down to the fundamental building blocks of matter. It's infinite then, isn't it, consciousness? I mean, you started in this room with what

you can say, but there's what you can smell, what you can feel, what you can, does what you remember enter into it? Yes, so its conscious experience is a very general property which can come in many different forms, seeing colors, hearing sounds, remembering a childhood memory, and so on. Maybe like shape is a very general property that can come in, maybe an infinite variety of forms. Yeah, so for the panpsychist, this is something, in a way it's very Copernican because we're not taking the model of consciousness to be what it's like to be a human being. That's just one highly evolved form of what for the panpsychist exists.

throughout the universe. Well, in the way, before Copernicus, we thought we were in the center of the universe, and Copernicus taught us where we're just one planet going around one star among trillions and trillions. So for the panpsychist, we don't model consciousness on what it's like to be a human being. That's just one very idiosyncratic,

because highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe. What do you think motivates them? Well, when I studied philosophy, we were taught that there were only two options on consciousness. Either you thought it was immaterial, outside of the physical workings of the body in the brain. This is the dualist position. Or you thought consciousness was just electrochemical signaling in the brain.

This is the physicalist position. Now, both of these views have deep problems that philosophers have been wrestling with for centuries. Is it fair to say they haven't been solved? Well, that's seemingly without resolution, I would say they have been solved. Many others would too. So why does not leave us? So the promise of panpsychism is that, you know, it's a wacky sounding view,

but it promises to avoid the deep difficulties that plague these more traditional options. Thank you. Joanna, Joanna Leidenhag. How is this distinctive from animism and pantheism? Yes, so panpsychism overlaps in some ways with animism and pantheism, but obviously there are clear differences. So we can start off by looking at the words. So if we start with pantheism, that's like panpsychism. It starts with that telling pan that means everywhere, everything.

But it ends with theism, so the Greek for theos meaning God. So for pantheism, it means that everything is God or God is identical to the universe or the divine is fundamental in some sense. So if you think that consciousness is the same thing as divinity, then those two views are going to be pretty much the same view. But I think that's a big jump. So we get this a little bit in the history of panpsychism, someone like Thales and the pre-Socratic period famously said,

all things are full of gods, which Aristotle took to be a form of panpsychism or psyche everywhere. And so in there you get a really key, really early, in a sense, confusion between those two views. But most people today would want to say that my consciousness isn't divine. Like I'm not a god, but I am a conscious human being. And so I think we should probably keep consciousness and divinity quite separate.

As for animism, if we start again by looking at the word, it comes from the Greek for animus and life. So in this view, it's that life is everywhere. Life is fundamental. Animism is more often associated with indigenous forms of philosophy and spirituality. But again, the key question is, in what sense is life the same thing as consciousness? So if you think life and consciousness are pretty much the same, we're referring to the same thing when we use those two words.

If what it means to be alive, you have to also be conscious, then panpsychism and animism are going to have lots of overlaps. But if you think, as most modern biologists do, that things can be alive but not necessarily conscious because they've got a very functional definition of what... So I think the standard view, as I understand it, in biology is that plants are alive, they're living things. I mean, some biologists might think plants are conscious,

but I think the standard view would be that plants aren't conscious. And that would mean that life is defined in a very functional way, as the kind of input and output of nutrients, growth, reproduction, without any sort of internal life, any sort of experience, as Philip we're saying. So if you think consciousness and life are different, then panpsychism and animism are different. It said that ancient philosophers touched on panpsychism. Can you give us an example of that?

Yeah, so I've already mentioned, and Thales. Ch-H-A-L-E. Yes, I'm never 100% sure about the pronunciation. Another pre-Socratic example is Heraclytus. So Heraclitus thought that the underlying principle of the universe was an ever-living fire. And he thought that that ever-living fire had psychic and spiritual properties. So that sounds a bit like a fundamental and ubiquitous psyche kind of thing.

Now, again, we can point to Plato as well. So that's a bit different. Plato didn't say anywhere very clearly that Psyche was this universal underlying thing. Like it seems like Heraclitus did. But Plato did, in particular in the Tameas, talk about psyche in humans, in animals, in plants, the earth as a whole, and in stars. So that starts to look like something close to panpsychism as well. I think one of the key things when we're looking at the history of panpsychism is to be. aware that often it's not going to be the exact precise definition that we work with today. So as Thilip was saying, the definition of consciousness that philosophers and scientists typically work with today is that there's something it's like to be me or a plant or an animal. Most historically, that's a very new definition.

Nagelism. Yeah, exactly, with Thomas Nagel in about the 1980s and 1970s. So the vast history of panpsychism that goes all the way back to presocratic Greece as well as to ancient India and China and Japan doesn't have anything like that precise definition of consciousness, but we can see analogous ideas about psyche, about soul and about living things in other historical positions. Thank you. Tim Crane, what do we know about Descartes in this respect? I think Descartes was the person who created the mind-body problem as we have it now. He thought that reality consisted of two fundamentally different kinds of things.

there were souls or minds and then there was matter and these he called different substances by a substance he meant here something that was capable of existing independently of all other things so the fundamental beings were substances now what he brought to this conception of the world was a radically different conception of matter and a radically new conception of mind

matter he thought of in purely geometric terms he called it extension in effect just size and shape. So matter is just what fills space. So he didn't include within matter what someone like Philip would call the qualities of things, the colours, the feel, the texture of matter. Matter was a purely geometrical concept.

You could say everything you needed to say about matter by saying the space that it occupied. I see. So matter and space were actually identical. The soul was something very different for Descartes. The soul was what was characterized by what he called thought. by thought he included not just what we mean today by thought but also things like sensation the sensations of the body and perception so he had this new concept of matter this geometrical

concept of matter which he shared with galileo actually broadly speaking galileo had said that god has written the book of the world in squares and circles and Descartes had the same view that matter could be characterized purely mathematically geometrically and when it came to the mind he combined sensation and thinking and reason and all the higher mental capacities into one category. He had a new concept of matter and a new concept of mind. And then, as Philip said earlier on, it looks like there are two options. Either mind and matter are fundamentally different things,

which is Descartes' dualist view, or in some way you can explain mind or reduce mind to matter. Now, panpsychism looks for a third option because the choice between dualism and materialism looks unacceptable. Why is it unacceptable? It's a sort of dilemma. On the one hand, if you think that the mind is not material, then it seems impossible to understand how your minds can make your bodies move.

We think that the things that we ordinarily think and feel affect us, they move us, they move us to act. So they bring about changes in the physical world. But this is very hard to understand if the mind is not. a physical thing. So if the mind is not a physical thing, it's hard to understand mental, physical interaction.

On the other hand, if mind is a physical thing, it's very hard to understand consciousness. And that's so we have this dilemma. If it's non-physical, you can't understand interaction. And if it's physical, then you can't understand consciousness.

Do you think this solves the dilemma? Panpsychism, yeah. No. That's a short answer. It's a very good short answer. Phippes in our track. Philippe, there's a question. what is something like or qualia?

How does this relate to the issues at hand? Yeah, this very much follows on from what Tim was saying really. Qualia is a bit of a slippery word, but I guess it most often refers to the qualities we encounter in our experience, the smell of coffee, the taste of mint, the redness of a sunset, these very qualities that Descartes stripped from matter, as Tim said, in order to get this purely deep. geometrical conception, which is the start of mathematical physics.

Now, these qualities are thought to be a big problem for the physicalist account of consciousness because it's hard to see how you can account for these qualities in the purely quantitative language of physical science or neurocides. You know, an equation can't capture that deep red you experience as you watch the setting sun. So the panpsychist hopes to solve this problem by turning this explanatory project on its head. So rather than starting with matter and trying to get consciousness out of that, they instead start with consciousness and try to get matter out of that. Do it the other way around.

This is really where we get to the influence of Bertrand Russell. I think the contemporary panpsychist program is very much rooted in certain pioneering work of Russell from the 1920s. I think of Russell, sort of the Darwin of consciousness. I think he solved all the mysteries. But anyway, so in the 1920s, Russell was thinking very hard about the fact that our fundamental science, physics, is purely mathematical, something we take for granted. But as Tim says, this is quite a revolutionary decision of Galileo and Descartes,

that science was going to be purely mathematical at the fundamental level. Now, that's very useful if you're a practicing scientist, but what does it mean as a philosopher interested in the fundamental nature of reality that our most basic science is just mathematics? And what Russell decided it meant is that physics isn't really telling us that much about fundamental reality. It's merely describing its mathematical structure. It's a heap of equations. Exactly. This might be what Stephen Hawking was getting at

on the final page of a brief history of time when he said that, Even final physics will be just a bunch of rules and equations. It won't tell us what breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe. So as far as physics is concerned, fundamental reality could turn out to be anything. As long as it has the right mathematical structure, that's all physics cares about. So the contemporary Bertrand Russell inspired panpsychist, who we get to the core of it, exploits this in the following way.

Their view is at the fundamental level, what we have are these networks of very simple conscious entities, interacting in simple, predictable ways through their interactions forming certain patterns, certain mathematical structures. And then the idea is those mathematical structures just are what we call physics. So we get physics out of underlying facts about consciousness. It's consciousness that breathes fire into the equation. So we can't get consciousness out of physics. People on my side of the debate would argue at least. But we can get physics out of consciousness. Russell showed us how to do that.

Joanna, there's a thought experiment known as the philosophical zombie, not a particularly tempting title, but still there you go. The philosophical zombie, what is that? And why do people seek to highlight it? The philosophical zombie argument invented by a guy called David Chalmers really tries to push one of the... the horns of the dilemma, as Tim put it earlier, that faces the jurists and in the sense the physicalist. So the horn of the dilemma that the physicalist sit on is the idea that they can explain consciousness in purely physical ways.

And the philosophical zombie experiment is trying to show that that's not right, that that avenue of explanation actually is not going to be fruitful or successful. And it does it like this. It says, imagine that there's another world that's physically, identical to this one. You're exactly the same in this other world. You've got the same body, the same hair, colour, the same weight. You have all the same behaviour, the same relationships in a sense. You're the same mother and the same children. But there's a key difference in this world, and that's that you're a zombie. And that doesn't mean that you like to eat brains, or that you walk very slowly with your arms in front of you. It means that you don't have consciousness. So you're

physically the same, but there's nothing going on behind your eyes. You're not really, really experiencing anything or just maybe answering programming or going through motion. So if that world that we imagine is conceivable or possible, there's complex philosophical arguments about those two worlds. But if that world is conceivable and possible, Chalmers argues, then it shows us that consciousness has to be something more than your physicality. It has to be something more than what can be explained by appealing to your body, your relationships, your behaviours, your functions,

because your identical zombie partner can have all those things the same but not be conscious. So there's got to be something added. That's how the thought experiment, the argument about philosophical zombies works. And what's the next stage? There are a few ways you can go from this. So this argument only tries to block the physicalists.

So anyone who thinks that there's something to consciousness that's more than just the behaviour and structure of matter, of physical matter, avoids this problem. So a substance dualist avoids this problem. It says, yep, you're right, it's not just the body. You need something separate. It's the soul.

A panpsychist avoids this problem by saying that the matter needs to contain consciousness itself. There is no physical version of you that's without consciousness, because the consciousness is found in the very stuff you're made out of. And the emergentist is also going to have another answer by saying you might start off, purely physical, but then something more does have to happen in order to get you to be a conscious being. Thank you. Tim, Tim Crane, it seems a terrific problem I have is understanding where the evidence base is. So could you tell us? Well, one question is what's the evidence that anything is conscious?

The other question is, you know, what's the evidence for one theory of consciousness rather than another? Exactly. And the first question, I mean, I think as philosophers, we have to start with what we know. And we start with what we really know and be serious about what we know. And we know that all of us are conscious around this table. We know that everyone in this building is conscious. We know that the human beings we see on the street are conscious. We don't doubt that in any serious sense.

There is a way of thinking, which is known as philosophical skepticism, which challenges us to explain how we know that. So how do we know that you're thinking or conscious? And that's a good question. But for the moment, I'm taking it for granted that we do know these things. So I don't think that there really is a serious question about whether people are conscious or whether animals, whether certain animals are conscious. Where consciousness begins in the universe, both in time and also among the hierarchy of animals, is an interesting question. And I think it's probably one that doesn't have a sharp answer.

I don't think there was a moment when consciousness came into existence, but rather something very gradual happened that where you had sort of what Pansakis might call a sort of proto. consciousness which evolved into consciousness as we have it today. Where that begins, as I say in the natural world, I wouldn't want to draw a sharp line. I don't think oysters are conscious, for example. And this is a matter, as Philip says, it's partly a matter of what we know about their biology, and partly a matter of how they behave. But I think, you know, mice are conscious. But why should mice be conscious and not oysters?

We know that consciousness is a function of complexity, and they lack the adequate neural complexity. Philip, you've been putting your hand up. Philip Goff. Well, yeah, I argue about panpsychism a lot on social media. And the question I get asked most often is, how'd you test it? To see what you're getting at there, Milford. And my answer to that is that all of these philosophical options on consciousness, physicalism, dualism, panpsychism, at least in certain forms, are empirically equivalent, which means you can't distinguish between them with an experiment. For any scientific data, each theory just interprets that data on its own terms. So this is not a question we're going to answer with an expert.

I think people often think physicalism or materialism is the scientific option, but I think that's just wrong. The scientific data is just neutral on all these options. This is a philosophical dispute. So how can we resolve it? Well, I would say we could look at two things. We can look at simplicity or parsimony in science and philosophy quite general. we try to respect Occam's razor,

we try to have the simplest theory of reality. Why believe in two kinds of things, as the Jewelist does, consciousness stuff and physical stuff, if you can just believe in one kind of stuff as both the physicalist and the panpsychist do. The physicalist just believes in physical stuff at the bottom.

The panpsychist just believes in consciousness stuff at the fundamental level. So that's one consideration. We could also look at explanatory success. How well do these theories meet their explanatory obligations? The physicalist aspires, or I think at least ought to aspire to explain consciousness in terms of physical processes in the brain. We can ask, how well has that gone? Is that a coherent project? The panpsychist aspires to explain matter in terms of consciousness. We can ask, how well has that gone? So we can compare the

views. We can't distinguish them with an experiment, but we can compare them in terms of simplicity and how well they meet their explanatory aspirations. How do we know that the simplest things are the simplest things? How do we know when they turn into the mind? It's a scientific question what the simplest things are. I've been talking as though the simplest things are particles. Actually, many theoretical physicists are inclined to think our universe is made up of universe-wide fields and particles are just local excitations in fields. So it's a question for physics, what the fundamental things are. Why does the panpsychist propose that those fundamental things, whatever they are, are conscious? Well, it's part of their solution to the mind-body problem,

this ancient challenge of how consciousness and the physical world fit together. The physicalist says, well, it's physical stuff at the bottom and consciousness pops out. I don't think anyone's ever managed to make sense of that, and there are compelling philosophical arguments, such as we've touched on that seem to show that it's not even a coherent project. The panpsychist tries to do it the other way around, start with consciousness, and explain the emergence of physical. reality in terms of consciousness. The due list takes both as fundamental.

So this is not a scientific question we can settle with an experiment. We just have to take these philosophical options and try to evaluate them on their own terms. John, you wanted to come in. I wanted to come back to what Tim was saying about oysters because I think, as far as I understand it,

Tim's not a signed-up panpsychist. Absolutely not. Yeah, Philip and I are. And I think we would say that oysters could well be conscious. I wouldn't doubt. that in strong terms. I think that we I would give them the benefit of the doubt rather until proven otherwise type thing. And I would think that consciousness in our panpsychists is

found in as Dilip was saying the fundamental, whatever we think of the fundamental physical entities of the universal particles, fields, quarks, electrons. And the reason to posit them down there where it seems bizarre is so that we can explain them in organisms as we encounter organism is so that we can explain consciousness in humans, in sheep, and even in oysters, in octopi, you know, who are fascinating creatures in terms of their neurobiology and clearly conscious. So it's a hypothetical or a theoretical posit of consciousness in the fundamental because the panpsychist thinks there's no other plausible explanation for how you get consciousness further up the scale of being and complexity. So the panpsychists,

like me and like Philip thinks, as far as I understand Philip's position, that it's much more plausible to imagine that consciousness exists in the universe, from the moment the universe is created or the big bang happens and then alongside and within matter and the mathematical structures and complexity of matter, it becomes more complex and it unifies in an interesting ways

and that's how we get all the different types of consciousness that we see in different organisms. But if you don't posit, it down at the beginning, down at the most fundamental level, then you're never going to get it up at the higher level where it clearly exists in humans and other animals. Tim, you want to come in. Yeah, I'd like to come back to this point

about mathematical conception of reality because Philip mentioned this remark from Stephen Hawking when Hawking said, what breathes fire into the equations? This is an image or a metaphor or something, but it's not actually very, very clear. An equation is a way of describing something. What we're describing here is the material world. Just because we use mathematics in describing the material world,

it doesn't mean the material world is, so to speak, a purely mathematical object or something like this. The material world is what it is. It's matter. And modern physics has these mathematical methods of describing the material world, but that doesn't mean the material world is mathematical. So that doesn't mean, in effect, that there needs to be any fire breathed into the material world. It's just that mathematical physics is one way. of describing the material world and there may be other ways of describing it.

So I think we shouldn't confuse the description of something with the thing itself, which I think is the problem with the argument from Russell that Philip L. was talking about. You want to come in? Yeah, I think that's a very interesting objection. I suppose I would say we have to say something about what the nature of matter is. Descartes gave us, as you said to him, a clear answer. It's pure extension, pure geometry.

Okay, if it's not that, What is it? We look to physics to tell us what it is, but physics basically just gives us mathematics. So I think that's the point that Russell was trying to get at, that there's this gap. And another way of putting it that panpsychists often give is physics is in the business of telling us what matter does. And that's why it's very useful. If you know what matter does, you can manipulate it, you can create incredible technology. But it doesn't really tell us what matter is. It tells us what an electron does, but not really what.

an electron is and that leaves space for that we know we're looking for this place for consciousness physics doesn't really tell us what matter is it's the sort of hole there maybe we can put consciousness in the hole well maybe we could put it in the hole maybe we could put something else in the hole I mean why consciousness well I mean I don't like the whole idea it may well be that there's nothing more to things than what they do and that what something is is just what it does And so in order to make your point, you have to rule out that idea first. So, I mean, I'm not saying, I mean, there's a big debate about this. So what I mean is, is an object just the totality of its dispositions to behave in certain ways?

Or is there something more to it? If there is something more to it, then this tends to be something ineffable, something indescribable, something that you can't actually theorise about, because theorizing about it is talking about what it does, which is how you end up with your proto-consciousness stuff as the basis of the physical world. Do you know there's something more to you and to me, right, as you said earlier, Tim. So when we're thinking about, well, there's something more to matter, we don't really know what to put on that whole consciousness is one contender. Maybe there are other contenders.

But when I think about what I am, I can be described mathematically, I can be described biologically. But if someone asks me, you know, who are you? What are you in a kind of more fundamental sense? I'm going to think about my mind, my consciousness, my personality, what, you know, what past eras have called my soul. And if I'm going to do that in my case for myself, I'm probably going to do that for other humans and animals and organisms, and thus we get a plausible reason to at least start off

by saying, what should we fill that hole with, we should fill it with consciousness. If you ask me what I am, and I'll say I'm an organism, I'm an animal, I'm a person, I'm a human being, those are perfectly good categories. And we don't need to ask, What am I really underneath?

I don't think I'm a soul or a mind. I think I have a mind. I can tell you what I mean by that, which is that I mean I have certain mental capacities. I have the capacity to think and to reason, to imagine, remember, to feel pain, to see, all these things. These are mental capacities. And anything that has a mind has some or all of these capacities.

Now, I don't have to say, having said that what those capacities are and that they're capacities of me, the organism that I am, what's left? What's the bit that now I have to fill by saying, but underneath fundamentally, I must be something that fills all the gaps in the equations. No, I don't think you were disagreeing with me there. I think because I don't think there's anything underneath that, but I don't think you could fully explain who and what you are without reference to those mental capacities.

That's true. And likewise, the panpsychist says you cannot fully explain matter without reference to psyche or mind in some way. it be more basic than in the case of the human, but the same analogy is being played out. And again, it's just a plausible reason why when we look at matter and we say there's something more to it than the equations that mathematics and physics give us, why should we assume that that might be consciousness that we should fill the whole with? The argument is, well, that's what we do with ourselves. If I could just respond to that point about matter,

because I think in a way this is the fundamental point, that Descartes had the notion of substance and he thought that this was his fundamental category. And then he asked, you know, what is substance? What substances are there? And actually he really thought that God was in effect the only substance because God was the only independent thing. But ignoring that, he thought among created things, there was matter and there was mine. Now, if we don't have that question, what is substance or what is the fundamental nature of all material reality, then we're not led into this position of asking what matter fundamentally is. There may be nothing that matter fundamentally is. There's this kind of matter. There's that kind of matter.

of matter. There's the periodic table of the elements that tells you what all the elements are, how they fit together. The mistake as I see it is asking the question, what is the fundamental nature of matter? This is a question that they asked in the 17th century. Descartes asked it because he believed in the concept of substance. We don't believe in the concept of substance now. Maybe you do. Maybe Philip does, but I don't, and I don't think we should believe in it. I don't think it's actually a very workable concept. If we don't have the concept of substance, then we shouldn't be asking the question, what is matter as such? We can understand. We can understand. We can ask what is lead, what is gold, what is an organism, what is a tree. We can ask those things

and the totality of that knowledge is the totality of science. But there's no further question, what is matter? Philip, Philip. I think Tim's been unduly pessimistic. I mean, I just think we have to look at these different options on their own terms. You know, if physicalism could be made to work, if we could just start with physics and get everything out, including the qualities of our subjective experience, that would be great. I'd love that, a really nice, simple theory. But no one's ever made the slightest progress in the attempt to do that. And there are good arguments that it's not a coherent project.

Whereas we have this other view, starts with consciousness, can account for the emergence of physical reality in terms of underlying facts about consciousness. A very simple, elegant theory. Accounts for all the data. Feels a bit weird. But what's not to like? I am a pessimist about this because I'm a pessimist.

is because I see that these broad, ambitious, metaphysical claims about the nature of matter, which people used to make in a philosophy of some hundreds of years ago, that these lead you to very strange places. And I think, you know, if you get on a bus by mistake and you end up somewhere that really isn't very nice, the question you should be asking yourself is, why did I get on this bus in the first place? How did we get to thinking that fundamental particles may have some kind of consciousness? This is an extremely peculiar view.

And it's not something that I think we should consider as a theory, just like a theory of anything else, like the periodic table of the elements. I think it's an extremely peculiar view. So we have to ask ourselves, how do we get to this position? We need a diagnosis of why we're getting there. And that's what I would like to give, a diagnosis of how you get into mistaken views like physicalism and panpsychism. I don't think there are any non-peculia views on option, really, on the table. And I think what you count as a peculiar, where does this sense of peculiarness come from?

is very subjective. So lots of people throughout history have believed in panpsychism, as well as a bunch of a whole other series of peculiar views. Panpsychism has been found in just about every culture around the world. It's not been terribly popular in 20th century Western Anglo-American philosophy, but it's been very popular in other places pretty consistently for thousands of years, such as in India and in Japan. So I think the sense to which we find it peculiar can't be taken for granted.

That can't be taken as just, well, for that reason and that reason alone, I'm getting off this bus, and I'm rewinding the cycle of Western history and figuring out where we all went wrong, Tim thinks somewhere in the 17th century. I think that's a lot of work to be doing on the basis that you find it odd, when lots of other people don't find it that odd. That's not the only reason. It's not because I find it odd. I mean, I think it isn't a peculiar place to end up.

But I think when you start looking at the reasons and the arguments for the view, then they have serious shortcomings. And I think it's not obvious that we need such a conception, that we need a philosophical conception of matter, as opposed to an understanding of how the different, the varieties of things in nature hang together. Joanna, what makes panpsychism of interest to theologians? Yes, so I'm a theologian and a philosopher,

and I think that panpsychism, even though I've said earlier that it's not the same as pantheism, I think it should be of real interest to people of a variety of kinds of religious perspectives. So panpsychism, I think, is a very flexible philosophy about the mind and about consciousness in terms of how it fits with belief in God, or atheism, belief in no God, pantheism, belief that the universe is in some sense divine, and in other forms of spirituality as well. So I think it's very flexible. And the reason I think a lot of these views will be interested or should be interested in panpsychism

is because it gives a view of the world, of the natural world or of the universe, that fits very nicely with a lot of things that theists in particular want to say. So theists typically want to say that the universe has a purpose and is filled with meaning. That fits very nicely with panpsychism. Theists typically want to have what's called an interest. chanted view of the universe. Theists typically want a sense to which the universe has value, perhaps because it's created and loved by God. And all of these things, I think, become much more plausible with the metaphysics of panpsychism to aid them. So it's not that theists have to be

panpsychists, but I think they should want to be. I think it fits really nicely with all the other things they're committed to. And I even think that there are kind of scriptural reasons. from the Judeo-Christian tradition that one should be interested in panpsychism. So in the Christian Bible, we get lots of passages, particularly in prophetic texts, where nature, trees, mountains, rivers,

and things like that are depicted as praising God or lamenting the evil in the world and the horrible things that humans do. And I think although that is clearly poetic and metaphorical, I think it's metaphorical with a kind of realist aspect too, that there's something that trees are doing to praise their creator. It's not speaking, they don't have mouths,

they're not waving their hands, but as they blow in the breeze, but still the sense to which creation could praise its creator and respond to a God, and that God could be present in the consciousness of the world, whilst not being identical to it, should at least be really inviting and compelling from a Judeo-Christian or perhaps other theistic perspectives.

Tim, do you like to go here? Yes, I can see that there are all those connections. I mean, I suppose the point of view I'm trying to put across is that the world is not enchanted. I think some people are enchanting. The world itself is not enchanted. The world is just there. And it's there in its infinite variety. And part of the variety is that it contains people with minds and mental capacities and animals with minds and mental capacities.

And that's just a fact. I think there's an interesting. interesting split in the contemporary panpsychist research community, perhaps a little reminiscent of the split in the early psychoanalytic community where you had followers of young who were into spiritual things like archetypes, collective unconscious, and then followers of Freud who thought, oh, it's all superstitious nonsense, we want to be doing serious science. In contemporary panpsychism, there are some panpsychists like Angela Andalevici or Luke Rolofts who are very atheistic, reductionist, secular.

They don't believe in some transcendent spiritual reality. They just think we need a new paradigm of explanation for mundane consciousness, see a grad, hearing sound and so on. Whereas others, like, for example, Itaishani or Hedhaas or Merck, see a certain consonants between panpsychism and certain spiritual convictions. I guess I'm probably somewhat more in the latter camp. In my recent work, I've explored whether panpsychism in a similar way to the way it's offered a middle way between physicalism and dualism,

maybe it can offer an attractive middle way between traditional belief in God and secular atheism. Tim. I don't think panpsychism offers a middle way between physicalism and dualism. I think it's much more like a form of physicalism in the sense that it has the view that everything is essentially of the same kind and underneath it is something which explains all the varied phenomena of the world.

So I think panpsychism is very much in the same basket as physicalism. I think that they're both very ambitious views. They want to explain the entire world through one simple metaphysical vision. And I think that that's part of what I think is debatable about the whole thing, having such a single metaphysical vision that explains the whole world. Joanna? I actually think there are panpsychism is again flexible in this way. So I think there can be panpsychism that's close to physicalism, as Tim just said.

but I also think that one could be a panpsychist in a more dualistic kind of way and say that panpsychism is basically dualism everywhere. Now that's not going to be very attractive if you think that dualism is already in trouble and we need something simpler and we need to cut down the number of things that we believe in. But I think that's a possible position. And I also think there's been a real absence of the word idealism in this conversation because in a way what Philip was discussing in terms of consciousness at the bottom and then matter comes in later,

that sounds more like a form of idealism to me than it does a form of physicalism. But both would be monosom, they both believe in one thing, of which one substance, even though you don't like that word, that can explain everything else. But I think we're probably closer to idealism

than we are to physicalism in this conversation. Can I go around the tale briskly? What do you think is the future of Pampsychism? I think as a society, are thinking on the consciousness issue has changed quite rapidly in recent history. For much of the 20th century, people dealt with consciousness by pretending it didn't exist. End of the 20th century, people start taking it as a serious scientific issue, but then just thinking, oh, we just need to do a bit more neuroscience and we'll crack it.

Now I think what's starting to happen is people are seeing the philosophical underpinnings of the problem, how this is something baked into the way we designed science in the 17th century, him outlined, and hence that properly dealing with consciousness, we're going to need a pretty radical paradigm shift. And the more people appreciate this, I think the more and more panpsychism is going to continue to be a mainstream issue. I think panpsychism is a useful idea to stimulate theorists and philosophers and scientists to think about what the right view of the mind-body problem is, since it cannot be panpsychism. And finally, Joanna? I agree with Philip that I think people are increasingly warming up to panpsychism, even though intuitively it might seem a bit bizarre at first.

And I think, therefore, there's going to be increasing amounts of research and interest in panpsychism, at least in the short-term future. And I think a lot of that is also going to be funded by the way that panpsychism links onto and overlaps with other pressing concerns we have in our contemporary society, concerns about how we value the environment, concerns about how we reverse the harms of colonialism and listen to indigenous cultures and their wisdoms. I think as well as the scientific research program that it offers and the philosophical solutions that it at least promises,

panpsychism is going to have a lot of attention because it's touching on a lot of really key important issues of our time. Well, thank you all very much indeed. Thanks to Joanna Leidenhauer, Tim Crane and Philip Goff, and to our studio engineer Steve Greenwood next week, the Hansa or Hansiatic League, how medieval German merchants changed the world around the Baltic and the North Sea and beyond.

Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I always kick off by saying, would you like to have said you didn't have time to say, Philip, you want to kick off. Yeah, I think we didn't cover the combination problem, which is standardly seen as the biggest challenge to panpsychism

and where the energies of the contemporary panpsychist research program are very much focused. So there are variety of ways of trying to make the combination problem precise, but the basic core of it is a demand to explain mental combination, that is to say the panpsychist view, that little conscious things combine together to make the complex consciousness of the human or animal brain and the basic demand is,

well, how does that happen? You know, we know how parts of a car engine come together to make a functioning car engine, but how do little conscious things make a big conscious thing? It's hard to make sense of, maybe even unintelligible. So that's the core problem I could say a bit about the solutions, but I think this problem, this combination problem, shows why panpsychism is very much in the same boat as physicalism,

because just as physicalism has the problem of explaining how matter when it achieves a certain complexity, then can become conscious. So panpsychism has the same problem, which is how matter, which they think is conscious in this kind of primitive way, achieves real consciousness when you combine it in a brain. So I think it seems to me, I know Philip doesn't think this, but it seems to me that it's just reproducing the same problem of consciousness that the physicalists have. John? Yeah, I don't think it's exactly the same problem, though there is that clear parallel. But I think the panpsychist is in a slightly better position because I think it's easier to see how holes are made out of parts if you start with the right parts. So if you start with subjects or mental capacities as you prefer, I think it's much easier to imagine how adding those together unifying them so that they can overlap and share information between one another so your experience. of red and your experience of blue can combine to form an experience of purple, right?

So use a colour analogy. So if we start with the right parts, you can get more complex things. But if you don't start with the right parts, if you start with red and the feeling of wool, you don't get the colour purple. Right. So it's about mixing the right things. And I think mixing purely physical things together isn't going to produce the complex conscious experience, but mixing simple conscious experience is much more likely to get complex conscious experience. You're talking about mixing colours. You're talking about mixing colours.

We don't mix experiences. You get purple by mixing blue and red, not by mixing two experiences of blue, an experience of blue and an experience of red that. No, I agree. It was an analogy. But I think you can mix experiences. I think you can mix.

We have different sensory inputs. That's mixing experiences. experiences of warmth with experiences of seeing something and smelling something, right? If you think of a good meal, it's got all sorts of experiences in it, that we mix together and to form a unified experience of what the good meal is like to taste and to eat. But each of these individual experiences is conscious in the manifestation of consciousness in the full sense, the proper sense, that is to say, you know, the sense in which, you know, seeing something is a conscious experience, hearing something.

And there is this question which then, you know, neuropsychologist is called the binding problem of how these things are bound into one experience, one single experience. And I agree that that's a good question. But that seems to be nothing like the idea of combining the proto-consciousness of fundamental matter in order to get something like a human mind. May I say just one more thing about the relationship between those two things? Because I think one thing that's so hard to understand about panpsychism, and I'm not mocking it or making fun of it,

but the thing that's hard to understand is what this proto-consciousness is actually supposed to be. The notion of consciousness that we have is connected to notions like the experiencing subject, the point of view of the subject, the emotional life of the subject, the intellectual life of the subject, thinking, consciously, reasoning, perceiving, feeling things,

all these things that are associated with a whole person or a whole organism. Philip says in one of his books that it's easy enough to imagine a slim down or thin down notion of consciousness, which doesn't involve all those other connections. Well, that's what I do find actually very hard to believe, very hard to understand. I don't know what this, how can you extract consciousness from its place in the full mental life of something like a human being or an animal?

Well, I think subjective experience is a very flexible notion. I think we, as I say, snails have much simpler forms of experience, presumably, than human beings. Do bedbugs have experience? the jury's out on that one, but if they do, it's presumably extremely simple, and there doesn't seem to be any conceptual limit to how simple it could become. But just to say something about the combination problem more generally,

I think Tim raises a very important objection, and there are lots of things to be said. But one thing, to my mind, the central explanatory virtue of panpsychism is its ability, as Russell showed us, to explain physical reality in terms of consciousness, and thereby to bottom out in one kind of stuff to get us this very simple, elegant theory.

If it can explain mental combination as well, that's a bonus, but even if it can't, even if we just have to take it as a brute, primitive fact that conscious particles combine into complex conscious systems in certain circumstances, I still think it's a very attractive, elegant, unifying theory, and that's got a look going for it. Do you think there's a development? One of you mentioned, or it was mentioned it,

Do you think conscious and the idea of consciousness and your notion of the idea of consciousness is itself developing? I think there's been certainly a return of interest to more radical options. I would put that down to the fact that we've been trying to solve the so-called hard problem of consciousness to explain consciousness in terms of neural activity for many decades now, and it's got precisely nowhere. It's not just that we don't have the full story, but we haven't managed to explain a single experience in terms of underlying neural activity. Now that's different to the science of consciousness. The science of consciousness,

the scientific attempt to work out which kinds of brain activity go along with which kinds of experience. That's made great progress, although it's still not much consensus. But that's different to the philosophical question of how we solve the mind-body problem. It's very important to distinguish those two things. Tim, Jim, Brian.

I think there has been development in the idea of consciousness and a slightly different one from the one that Philip mentions. I think in the post-war period in philosophy, people distinguish very sharply between mental states that were to do with thought and reason, like believing and wanting and thinking. It distinguished between those and conscious mental states. And this is where the word qualia came in.

Qualia was supposed to be the thing that distinguishes the conscious mental states. This distinction, I think, is now being broken down in many parts of philosophy and psychology in the way that people are thinking about this because they realise that actually there's no clear division between the purely conscious bits, the ineffable pure consciousness

and things like conscious thinking or understanding the world. In fact, Philip makes this point in his recent book. I think we're probably on the same page on that, actually, and that's why I don't really like the word qualia because it's an artificial separation. I was just thinking this reminds me of how there's this other hot-button issue, I think, that panpsychism is right on time that's going to help it be popular for a little bit longer.

And that's the question of, you know, AI and artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness. I think panpsychism should say that in principle, there's no reason that we might not one day make a conscious machine, but in practice we are a hell of a long way off that. That would be my view. And I kind of hope we never get there. But I think that's another kind of area in which we'd have to solve the combination problem

to do it. So that's a big hurdle really, philosophically and practically. But in principle, if everything is conscious and we're all made out of the same stuff, I'm made out of the same stuff, it's just organized in a much more complex way than my computer is. But in principle, that could be possible, which I find slightly terrifying, but interesting at the same time. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you. Terrific.

I loved it. Does anyone want tea to your coffee? I love a cup of tea, please. It's a normal biscuit. So one cup of tea. Unless you've got non-caffeinated tea or minty or something. Yes. Oh, what are they mint tea?

Thank you very much. Are you having a mint tea? What did you enjoy? Brilliant, yeah. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Cobalt. A thriller from BBC Radio 4. Hey, Dad.

The person you're trying to reach is not available. 603 pounds to Rwand Air. That's the price of a one-way ticket. to Zimbabwe. Good afternoon, ma'am. We're looking for Mr. Manfred Zabanda. Is there a problem? Not yet.

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