Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Philip Goff: Consciousness and Galileo's Error (#230)

Episode Date: May 22, 2022

Philip Goff is a philosopher and consciousness researcher at Durham University, UK. His research focuses on how to integrate consciousness into a scientific worldview. Goff argues that the traditional approaches of materialism (consciousness explained in terms of physical processes in the brain) and dualism (consciousness is separate from the body and brain) face insuperable difficulties. He therefore defends a form of panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world, not confined to biological entities but is a fundamental feature of all physical matter—from subatomic particles to the human brain..  Goff’s new book, Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, traces the problem of consciousness back to the foundations of the scientific revolution, in Galileo's decision to set consciousness outside of the domain of science. He offers a provocative argument for panpsychism’s radically new picture of human consciousness.   Understanding how brains produce consciousness is one of the great scientific challenges of our age. Some philosophers argue that consciousness is something "extra," beyond the physical workings of the brain. Others think that if we persist in our standard scientific methods, our questions about consciousness will eventually be answered. And some even suggest that the mystery is so deep, it will never be solved. Decades have been spent trying to explain consciousness from within our current scientific paradigm, but little progress has been made. In Galileo’s Error, Goff offers an exciting alternative that could pave the way forward. Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness On Amazon www.philipgoffphilosophy.com/ https://twitter.com/Philip_Goff Please Visit our Sponsors: LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/impossible to post a job for FREE Athletic Greens, makers of AG1 which I take every day. Get an exclusive offer when you visit https://athleticgreens.com/impossible AG1 is made from the highest quality ingredients, in accordance with the strictest standards and obsessively improved based on the latest science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is consciousness? How do you know you have it? What was Galileo's error? Today we'll be covering these and many other topics, including a subject known by a strange, ominous-sounding term called panpsychism, which is not paranormal, but you may find it slightly abnormal after listening to my take on it. We talked today with Philip Goff, who's a professor and author of Galileo's error, a wonderful book, which I read and tried reaching out to him over a year ago, and it took me

and him both getting on Lex Freeman's podcast for us to come together and record this episode earlier this year. We've had a phenomenal growth in the podcast, and I know that this episode is going to keep the fires burning and stoked with passion for more guests like Philip and many more to come. Richard Powers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and I had a phenomenal interview. I know you're going to love it. It's coming up soon. And we have interviews with great thinkers like Professor Gerrit Lewis, who talks about questions that boggle the mind, including where did the universe come from. But today's mind-boggling conversation involves panpsychism and the notion of consciousness, the brain, and more.

So I hope you'll sit back, relax, and enjoy this deep dive into the impossible with a deep thinker. Professor Philip Goff, author of Galileo's Error. Let's Go. Any sufficiently advanced technology is, indistinguishable from magic. Open the pot-bay doors, please, hell. Well, ladies and gentlemen, philosophers of all ages, you're in for a treat today. We were talking with the really renowned thinker, philosopher, author, professor, Philip Goff, who I've been trying to get on unsuccessfully for over a year on the podcast,

and somehow after I made an appearance on Lex Friedman, and he made an appearance. on Lex Friedman, the magic of Lex connected us, right, Phil? Oh, it's great to be here, Brian. I had no idea you've been trying to contact me for a year. No, I mean, it wasn't Lex. I think the first, I saw you pop up on Twitter DM. Yeah. I had a idea.

You've been kind of trying to contact me for you. I'm sorry. Yeah, well, I was using your website, which has a picture of a brain. I thought, you know, selfishly, that's a Brian, or that's a plea. It's a sign that you should be a reception. to a missive for me, and I wrote you, and I think it was after you were on Michael Shermer's show over almost like two years ago. Yeah, but anyway, you're here now. We have an hour together.

We have a ton of stuff to cover, and you're talking about my favorite scientist in history, and you're claiming that he made an error, and that's Galileo Galilei. And I want to start off with, before we do my patented judging books by the cover, where you're going to explain how you got the title and the cover design for the book. I want to start with a quote, and I want to know if you recognize this, and if this was perhaps the impetus for your assertation, assertion, rather, that Galileo made an error, a blunder perhaps as big as could be offered. Here it goes. Is it payback for this statement made by Galileo? Okay.

What is observed by us in the third place is the nature of matter of the Milky Way itself, which, with the aid of the spyglass, may be observed so well that all the disputes that for so many generations have vexed philosophers are destroyed by visible certainty. And we are liberated from those pesky philosophers, wordy arguments. That was in a book, a little known book called Sidurias Nuncius. Tell me, my friend Phil, did you write this book to silly the reputation of a man who silly the reputation of all philosophers? No, I mean, I'm actually a huge fan of Galileo, and, you know, it's a provocative title, but actually I think he had things a lot more right about consciousness issues than we do now in certain ways.

And, you know, actually, I mean, one, he was obviously a great experimental philosopher using telescopes to look at the stars for the first time. But actually, I mean, you have him there appearing to have a go at philosophers. But actually, one of the things I talk about in the book, I think Galileo is one of the few people to come up with a philosophical argument that convinced absolutely everybody, namely his refutation of Aristotle's view that people had believed for thousands of years that heavier things fall faster. So, you know, you have this myth that Galileo went to the top of the leaning tower of Pisa and dropped two weights. I think historians think that probably didn't happen. But actually, Galileo, rather, refuted Aristotle, not with experiments, but with a purely logical argument. And so in a way, you might think not only is he an opponent of philosophers, he's perhaps the greatest philosopher that ever lived because of that argument,

but also because in many ways the philosophy that lies behind the scientific revolution. You know, we often forget there's a philosophy, a philosophical picture, a worldview behind science, and that was largely crafted by Galileo himself. Yeah. Yeah, what's so striking. And you go through that story in such amazing, wonderful detail in Galileo's error. We'll get into that. But what's always spoke loudest to me about Galileo is that he was a human being.

And when you think about, like, he destroyed the confirmation bias of Aristotle, as you just pointed out. But then later in the dialogue, which I've just translated or not translated, but we record the first ever audiobook. By the time this interview with Phil comes out, I record an audio book with Carlo Rovelli and Frank Wilcheck and Fabiola Giannati and many others. And that's coming out. It's the first ever audiobook by Galileo. But in that book, he makes the case for the heliocentric model of the universe. And he uses as a proof the sloshing of water as the earth rotates around and revolves. on its axis, and that's totally wrong, and yet that the underlying theory is right, and I want

to ask you, in other words, he was right about geocentrism being wrong, or heliocentrism being right, but he used a confirmation bias error. He made an error. How is it possible that we can get things right philosophically by thinking purely philosophically, and yet be wrong at the same time? Doesn't that kind of call into question the ability of the human brain to be trusted on many levels. Yeah, it's funny how these things work out, how great leaps forward can sometimes end up being mistaken in the way they reached it, even though perhaps there was some underlying intuition or some, I mean, Galileo's principle of relativity, perhaps some deep intuition Galileo had that you'll know the physics better than me, so I shouldn't talk about things above my pay grade,

but maybe even if you didn't get the details right, there was something right about it, is fundamental vision, you know, the Copernican vision underlying this, and the mathematical picture of physics, which is mainly what I focus on in my book. But, you know, I think we all need to remember that we always think we're at the end of history, you know, human beings always think we're at the end of history. And, you know, before Galileo, people thought, you know, Aristotle had basically wrapped everything up, you know, including that the Earth was in the century. of the universe. And then, you know, as things don't start to fit with the data, people try to

plaster, rather than looking to, rather than challenging those fundamental assumptions, people try to plaster over the cracks, you know, postulating epicycles of the planets in addition to their basic orbits, and then epicycles upon epicycles. And then, you know, eventually, this is just swept away by Copernicus's idea and then Galileo following him. And, you know, So, I mean, I sometimes think we're in a little bit of that situation ourselves now with consciousness, for example. You know, we're just so convinced we're at the end of history and our basic worldview is correct. And when things like consciousness don't quite fit in, we try to postulate the epicycles where maybe it's time to do what Galileo did, which is, you know, think a little bit further. Think to a kind of new paradigm, a new worldview.

Right. And, you know, this book is just such a fascinating exploration of both how we came to know what we know about consciousness, about what we're going to get into panpsychism, and also where we go in the future. But before we get into all the luscious topics of this wonderful book, I want to first play with you, the game I play with all my authors who write books. And it's called Judging Books by Their Covers. It's peak pollination season, and my business is. scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay.

Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google FiWireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Yeah, you're never supposed to, uh, you know, judge a book by its cover, but, uh, I learned, if I've learned nothing from you and my other philosopher, guests like Peter Bogassian and Craig Callender here at UCSD, it's that you have to reason to the proper inference. It's the only way that you can judge a book if you don't know anything is by its cover. How did you come up with the title, first of all, and the cover design as well?

I have to confess that both of the books I've written, I didn't come up with the title for either. The title of my, so I first wrote an academic book, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality, and David Chalmers came up with the title for that. And then actually, Nigel Warburton came up with the title for my book, Galileo's Era, which is it's kind of a similar themes, but aimed at a general audience, trying not to assume any background understanding. So Nigel Warburton's kind of a popular philosopher in the UK. one of the few philosophers who earns his money just from writing philosophy,

but not needing an academic post, very lucky for some. And he has the wonderful podcast, the philosophy bites, very short philosophy, you know, 15-minute bites of philosophy, which I would wholly recommend. But anyway, he was someone who, when I was first starting to try and think about, how can I communicate this to a broader audience? Because there's this huge idea that's taken hold in academic philosophy. And everyone's talking about it. Everyone's publishing about it. But nobody outside of academic philosophy knows what the hell it's all about. And, you know, people care about consciousness and, you know, neuroscience and all sorts of areas. How can I get this

idea out there? And he's someone who, a couple of people who really help me understand how to write more excessively and I remember, you know, I, I said him a chapter and, you know, he said, but this is just, this is just an academic book without jargon, you know, you need stories, you need anecdotes, you need, and, you know, I was sort of talking about the Galileo stuff, and he said, Galileo's error. And I guess it might have been maybe in the back of his mind, there's a book, Descartes error. Yeah. Maybe there's some connection there. But I guess in a way, It's, in a way, maybe the title is, is, in a way, I think probably what Galileo did was the right decision, because it sort of put consciousness on one side for a few centuries so that we could focus on building mathematical physics.

So in a way, maybe it was, it was the right decision. But what I mean by it being Galileo's error is that he designed physical science, I believe, in such a way that it essentially and necessarily excluded consciousness from the domain of science. And I think we're now at a time in history where we need to maybe rethink that, maybe find a way of bringing consciousness

back into the story of science. So that's the title. The cover, I think the first few covers the publisher's sentence, I really thought were terrible. And it was someone, you know, the design.

I looked at them. I really liked their other stuff, but I just, and I talked to my editor and, um, uh, my editor for the, for the book. And I think he just put it together himself, actually. So we, we know, we'd have the, the publisher had the designer make some covers and, um, and neither of us were happy with them. I think he said, oh, I'm glad you didn't like it. Um, but, um, maybe I'm giving away some secrets here, but this is a wonderful designer. I think maybe, maybe it was just not quite what we're looking for. And so I think the not a professional designer, it just worked it out himself. And I think the idea was, you know, it's kind of an eye representing consciousness. I think it's made up of fibers, maybe representing particles in some sense. Yeah, it looked like a fiber, like a particle track. Yeah. Somebody asked if it's on my YouTube channel where I solicit questions, and folks should subscribe over there, Dr. Brian Keating.

I solicit questions from the audience for all my guests. And one of them was, why is the picture you have here a grid circle? That was one of the questions. So I guess we've answered that now. But let's go on to what I also don't like to do, but I feel like we have to do because people won't really understand what is the meaning of the title without a little bit of spoilage, although it is the first chapter. So they'll have to get through the preface and buy the book to understand.

I listen to the book. I love the audiobook. book, the reader evokes your wonderful, delightful, mercurial persona, fellow, you'll be glad to know. What is it, Galileo's error? What does that even mean? Yeah, the narrator actually, I think, is the star of Greece too, incidentally. Oh, wow. So Carla Ravelli, who's no stranger to Galais, one of his books was narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch. And I just love saying Benedict Cumberbatch.

But that's pretty cool. You have a Greece too, narrate. That's amazing. But yeah, he did a really good job. Yeah, so that's, I mean, as a bit of background, I suppose, a key moment in the scientific revolution is this decision of Galileo to make mathematics the language of science. And this is something like we take for granted now. I think it's kind of obvious, almost inevitable.

But actually, this was a very conscious and radical decision of Galileo to do this. and, you know, although this is much discussed, we actually maybe ignore the philosophical work that Galileo had to do to get there. As I say, he was not just a great experimental scientist, he was also a great philosopher. This was a time when these things weren't necessarily so sharply divided.

And that the trouble was, before Galileo, again, following Aristotle, or people thought quite naturally the world is kind of filled with qualities. If you think about my Batman cup here, there's the blueness and the yellowness out there on the surface of the object, or the heat, the quality of heat as I touch it, smells, tastes, sounds, all these things. And I think of Galileo, the problem is it's hard to see how you can capture these qualities

in a purely quantitative language like mathematics. You know, an equation can't pin down that blueness, that quality of blueness. If there's someone who's blind from birth, you can't give them some equations and tell them about the blue. There's lots of things you can't pin down about the mathematical structure of colour experience, but I think there's always going to be the qualities that fill out that structure. Maybe we could argue about that. So Galileo's way of getting round this, was to say, well, those qualities,

they're not really out there in the physical world on the surfaces of cups. They're in the consciousness of the observer. So for Galileo, you know, the blueness isn't really there on the surface of the cup. It's in your consciousness as you look at it, or the age-old thing. When the tree falls in the forest and there's nobody there to hear it,

does it make a sound? For Galileo, no observer, no consciousness, no sound. So Galileo sort of strips the physical world of these colors, sounds, smells, tastes. What's left when you do that? Just things like size, shape, location, motion. Property is quite conveniently, you can capture mathematics. So in this way, he allows us to mathematicize nature, but he does that by taking consciousness and its qualities out of the domain of science.

and he saw them as not part of corporeal matter, part of the soul or the animated body. He thought that the body has a special kind of animation. This was an element actually of Aristotle. He retained Aristotle had this idea of the soul as a sort of the form of the body. So the proper domain of mathematical physics or what he called natural philosophy is what we can capture in mathematics, size, shape, location, motion. And we can do that because we've taken out.

consciousness and its qualities, that's in the soul. That enables us to do that. So the way Galileo designs science makes it inevitable that consciousness will be excluded from the domain of science. Cut forward 400 years, Galileo's conception of science has gone so well. And people are like, oh my God, this is, this is really working. This is the complete truth. I think the irony is, it's gone so well precisely because it was designed to exclude consciousness. It seemed to me, reading the book with a physicist's hat on that it was not unlike the situation with Newton, you know, constructing an absolute version of time and in which, you know, events play out as time progresses, but time is somehow absolute, universal, and so forth.

Was that kind of, you know, influence of Newton, on Newton, rather, did that come from Galileo's perception of thoughts on consciousness or exclusion of it, as you say, to the, you know, to being sort of the independent variable upon which nothing can be more primary than? Yeah, that's really interesting. And I mean, someone, there is, people might be interested, there's this collection of 19 essays from scientists as well as philosophers, including Carla Rovelli, you mentioned, but responding to my book, Galileo's era. And one of the contributors is Lee Smolin, who argues that it kind of agrees with me that sort of Galileo took consciousness out,

but thinks that the mathematical physics that's resulted also leaves time out real time. Obviously, you have this, you know, physicists have this mathematical, four-dimensional notion of time. But Smoland thinks they leave out the real dynamic passage of time. So I don't know, it's an interesting historical question. I mean, how Newton, his conviction about absolute time and its relationship to Galileo, my guess, my uneducated guess would, well, non-expert guess would be that absolute time is perhaps the common sense assumption. You know, it's more something radically new that came along with Einstein relative time, but maybe absolute time is more the common sense assumptions.

So maybe it was something Newton kind of. focused on and made explicit, but maybe it was just something that people would naturally, would naturally assume. So, I mean, I'm not sure how much whether I agree with Smol and I would say, you know, I would say the reality of real, quote unquote, dynamic time, I would say we have to be much more agnostic about, about that, you know, I mean, I'm, why maybe we're just, maybe our ordinary conception time is just wrong, right? Maybe we should, like I guess many people think physics has dispensed with that

I think matters are different when it comes to consciousness though I think that this is why consciousness is so fascinating not only is it hard to fit into our standard scientific picture of things it's also so hard to deny it exists you know so this contrast to say free will you know a lot of people get the idea that

it's hard to get fit free will into our standard scientific story and this is a big debate, but it's at least an option to say, maybe it doesn't exist. Maybe we're not really free in the way we think we are. But when it comes to consciousness, the idea that, well, nobody's ever felt pain, nobody's ever seen red or that just seems intolerable. So that's why it's such a fascinating issue. We can't deny its existence, and yet it's so hard to fit into our standard scientific story of the universe. Yeah, you very tenderly and interestingly point out, you know, these concepts of emergence within physics.

And I wonder, you know, to what extent we could talk about consciousness without really understanding emergence. And I think the emergence here that I'm most interested in is how do we unify, you know, kind of this concept of time or can you decouple the concept of time from the concept of consciousness? Are they fundamentally intertwined? And then there are many who say time is emergent and gravitation. properties emerge, everything is emerging. And so I guess my question, you know, which will now devolve into a discussion about panpsychism after you hopefully can give us your favorite definition of that, you know, will be, well, can we really understand, as I think Philip Morrison said, you know, more is different. More is, you know, more, in other words, when you have a collection

of individual things, they behave differently than end times those number of things. So the concrete question after this blathering on is can we understand consciousness, time, gravity, whatever, without a real understanding of how these things emerge and what their fundamental quality is? In other words, are we, as I often accuse my colleagues who are obsessed with theories of everything, I say, why don't you work on a grand unified theory first, you know, before you tackle all four forces, just unify the first three. And, you know, don't put the toe before the gut, I always say. So are we kind of doomed on a fool's errand because we don't understand how emergence really fundamentally works? Can we understand consciousness with before we understand emergence?

That's a great question. And you know, on everything other than consciousness, I'd be tempted to agree with you. You know, we have a kind of pre-theoretical understanding of what time is, of what freedom is, of what a person is, what value is and then you might think well why should we think those pre-theoretical

ordinary everyday person conception of those are correct you know our ordinary concept of solidity maybe is like everything's filled in but why I think that's correct maybe it doesn't correspond to the reality I just think I think in the unique case of consciousness things are a little bit different

And that's because I think, at least to some extent, we know what consciousness is before we do any science. You know, so a lot of people say, oh, it's a mystery. We don't know what consciousness is. I mean, I don't like that way of putting it. I think, you know, in a way, nothing is more familiar than our feelings and experiences. That's all we're talking about with consciousness. You know, pain, pain, what is pain? It's pain is just a feeling and a feeling is essentially defined by how it feels and you know how it feels when you feel it or think about a red experience.

When we think about our red experiences, I always give that, I need to think of different examples. But anyway, think of that, you know, that deep red you experience as you watch the setting sun. There's a quality, a quality to that experience that fills it out. and I think we have some kind of rich understanding of what that is, just in the sense that we understand its qualitative character. So we know something about what consciousness is

from the inside, as it were. Now, I don't get me wrong, you know, I think we make all sorts of mistakes about our consciousness. The philosopheric Schwarzschweigschweig, has done some wonderful work pointing out the errors we make about our consciousness. But I want to say, there are things we know about it before we do science, and they can't be entirely wrong, I want to say,

maybe you disagree. Like, the way pain feels, I don't think science could ever say, oh, actually, no one's ever felt hurting, that hurting quality, that's a mistake. Or, you know, the way redness looks, the way chocolate tastes. Right.

It may be relative. It may be relative. I may see and call red something, you know, that you call red, but I may perceive it in something that if I were in your brain, you would see as green. And that's the whole Nagel thing. By the way, my dream someday maybe you can help me, Phil, to write a book called, What Does It Like to be Thomas Nagel written by A Bat, Anton Bat? Anyway, maybe you can help me. But that's that whole kind of perception as almost a different form of relativity. But of course, I agree with you.

And I wonder if you, you know, consider this. have you ever met somebody who truly acts as if they don't believe they have free will? I know our friend Sabina Hasenfelder, many people believe in determinism, super determinism, and she's going to be coming back on the show for her new book coming out later this year. But I want to ask you, have you ever met someone who acts like they don't have free will? I've never met someone. I may have acted like it. What does it mean that people say that they believe that there's no free will,

and then they act purely in concert with the opposite of that, of that condition? texture. Yeah, that's a good, I mean, that's a really good point. I say it's an option to deny the reality of free will in a way that doesn't seem like an option with, but can you really have no choice but to deny that option? Can you really live that out? I was actually talking to neuroscientist Michael Ferguson from Harvard who visited me here in Durham recently with trying to make pansearchist connections. And he was talking about empirical work actually where people who do adopt to determine this position and at least on an intellectual level reject the reality free will have worse well-being so even if you can't totally live it out just on an intellectual level

believing it lowers your well-being i don't know whether that's true but i mean even in the consciousness case well by co-hosts of my podcast mind chat if i could just quickly plug that is um someone who says intellectually he does not believe in consciousness at least in the way I've just been characterizing it. So, you know, the gimmick is, I think it's everywhere. He thinks it's nowhere. But so, I mean, even on the consciousness case, there are people, Daniel Dennett in certain moods,

who say, you know, it just does not exist. But, you know, to my mind, that's a position really is that, at least the position of least resort. I think we want to try and find ways that preserve. both the data of empirical science, of course, but also the felt reality of our own experience, which I'm inclined to think actually is the only thing, the thing we are most certain of, you know?

Right. I believe in an external world, but, you know, maybe I'm in the matrix, maybe I'm just dreaming, but the idea that my feelings and experiences, I'm not really feeling anything. I don't, you know, so I think, what I want to say is the reality of, consciousness as we experience it is a fundamental scientific data in its own right.

And I don't believe as a scientific community we really treat it as such, actually. No, I don't think we do. And then there's all these canards, you know, will typically, someone thinks they're really sophisticated, you know, professionals talk about, you know, inference and reasoning, and amateurs talk about Carl Popper, right? So the canard, you know, people say, well, how do you know that this, we live in a matrix? had on David Chalmers last month for his new book, Reality Plus, which is not sponsored by Apple Plus, unfortunately, for him. But it should be. It's a great book. And, you know, and he goes through and he comes with some probability, and we came up with an equation, which I

named after him, the Chalmers equation, which is like the Drake equation, but for the probability of the number of different sentient consciousnesses in the universe. At any rate, you know, he actually believes, you know, with some degree of high degree of confidence that we are likely simulated, but he's not so dogmatic, you know, David, he's not going to beat it down your throat. He's a star in your book, right? On the other hand, you have people that are quite confident and even in possession of some data. So now I'm thinking about Stuart Hammeroff and past guest, Roger Penrose, and thinking about their contributions, you know, to this study where they have actual data from, you know, their study of microtubules. I wonder if you could comment

on these, you know, relatively controversial figures. I know they're, you know, probably your friends and colleagues in some sense, but what do you think about Chalmers, you know, simulation? If you had to give it a grade, first of all, would you, do, is Popper really relevant? I always say even he didn't believe in falsification as absolute, but is Popper truly that relevant to the study of consciousness? We only have one mind of our own, at least. So is Popper play a role at all in the assessing the likelihood in some Bayesian sense of veracity of claims that you make or your colleagues make. You mean Popper's idea of falsification? Yeah, the fact that we can't falsify that we're not in the matrix, you know,

yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, I think, as you say, often I think we get crude caricatures of Popper, you know, crude simplifications of the idea. But I think I prefer to think more in, as you say, Bayesian terms, rather. other than it's impossible to totally, it's very hard to totally falsify anything. But I would rather think in Bayesian terms, like, which hypotheses fit best with the evidence? It's a very difficult judgment call to make. But it's also a different question.

What are the starting points for theorizing? You know, if you're going to be a Bayesian, you've got to have your evidence, what is our evidence? I think a lot of people assume, well, it's, it's, it's, our evidence is the empirical observation experiments. And that's definitely part of it. But as I say, I think that's not the full story because this is this other source of evidence we have just from our immediate awareness of our own feelings and experiences. So I think what this calls for is a radical reassessment

of what we mean by what the task of science is. I think people think the task of science is accounting for the data of public observation experiments. Once you've done that, job done. We can go home. well, of course, you know, will we ever do? But if he religiously followed that, you wouldn't postulate consciousness,

because consciousness is not something we discovered in a particle collider. It's not something we know from experiments. It's something we know from our immediate awareness of it. So this is why, you know, Daniel Dennett is very consistent. He says, you know, my consciousness, consciousness in the sense that philosophers talk about it is, is not a postulation of third-person empirical science, so it doesn't exist.

Whereas I'd rather than, go the other way and say, no, look, there's this other fundamental datum we need to account for in addition to the data of public observation experiment. So that's why, you know, we need to think of the reality of consciousness as hard data. You know, we talk about pun-psychism or wacky theories. You say, you know, what's the data in support of it? Well, the reality of consciousness is a data point in its own right. On the simulation hypothesis, yeah, I, Charmer said to me a 25% probability, on our podcast. Exactly. That's what he said on the show too, yeah.

Well, it's a very interesting argument, and it should be thought about, I don't think, I don't go for it because I don't think a simulation would be conscious. I mean, that's a huge debate. It depends on what's called substrate independence, whether consciousness is dependent just on kind of computational organization

or it's dependent on stuff. As a puns like it. Right, and the bit from it. Yeah, good point. That is, yeah. And I often think, you know, in terms of, like, extrapolating artificial intelligence, and you and Lex Friedman talked about this, and you and Joe Rogan talked about this. We'll have links to all those appearances in the show notes.

But the, you know, I wonder often, and I've said this, I have my Einstein finger puppet. I can't find my Galileo finger puppets in the shop, I guess I brought up to it. But do you know what Einstein called his happiest thought of his life, Phil? His happiest thought. Remember his greatest blund. I'm not sure the happiest thought, no. Yes, happiest thought was that someone in Freefall would experience no gravitational force.

I did know that. Yes, I'm sure you do. Yeah, I shouldn't have put you on this. Relativity. Exactly, which led to the equivalence principle. Very good. So, but I often think, well, like, let's examine an artificial Einstein instead of A-E-A-I, right? Okay, so how could such an object or entity or being have a sensation,

of happiness, A, and then B, how could such a sensation of falling weightlessness, how could that, you know, in other words, we kind of impute to the, and I talked a little bit with Lex about that in my chat with him, but the point is, you know, how do you imbue these things? In other words, would we recognize it if these things were conscious, you know, if we could create artificial consciousness, or maybe they, or if there are other conscious, you know, mess things, Is it possible that there's sort of like, as Paul Davies says, you know, a shadow biosphere, could there be a shadow consciousness that we just cannot access because we don't have those proteins or we don't have language or is that a possibility? That's kind of the answer to the Fermi paradox about consciousness, so to speak, of why we don't see other consciousnesses. Yeah, well, the thing I am most passionate about conveying, I hope people who probably get sick to death and be saying this is that the reason consciousness is can't.

be totally treated in the normal scientific way is that it's not publicly observable. Now, scientists are used to postulating things we can't observe. In this case, the thing we are trying to account for can't be observed and can't be publicly observed. I think that is totally unique. And that's why I don't think you can pin down a lot experimentally about consciousness, but I don't think you can totally pin down the theory of consciousness with experiments, because it's not a publicly observable phenomenon,

there's always going to need to be some kind of inference to the best explanation. Yes. And I mean, the core, I mean, what is so excited academic philosophy about this Bertrand Russell-inspired panpsychism that's got to have been rediscovered? You talked about emergence a while ago

is, you know, the standard way of thinking about things is how do we make sense of consciousness emerging from matter and we get the hard problem of consciousness no one's ever

despite our scientific understanding of the brain no one's ever sort of come up with a good explanation of that a good way of accounting for how consciousness

emerges from matter that what the panpsychist does is turn the explanation on its head right instead of thinking how consciousness

emerges from matter let's think about how matter emerges from consciousness. And Russell's insight, the reason we can do that, coming back again to Galileo, is because physics is purely mathematical. So because physics is purely mathematical,

physics just identifies these fundamental mathematical structures, so long as there's stuff that through its interactions realizes those mathematical structures, then you can get physics. So the panpsychist idea is, well, it could be consciousness stuff. We could have these networks of simple conscious entities behaving in simple predictable ways because they've got very simple experiences. Through their interactions, they realize these mathematical structures.

And that is what physics is studying. You don't know that when you're a physicist because you're just interested in the mathematical structure. But that is what you're studying. So in this way, physics emerges from facts about consciousness. us. So what we've got to do is thinking in terms of inference the best explanation, you know, we know consciousness goes along with brain activity. What's the best explanation? I think the kind of materialist explanations are getting kind of trying to make sense of consciousness emerging from matter. It's a big argument. I don't think they work out. I don't think

they've ever shown any fruit. There's this alternative explanation. Maybe physics and matter emerges from underlying facts about consciousness. And I think actually that's a much more straightforward explanation. So in a sense of inference, the best explanation, I think this looks to be the best solution to the hard problem of consciousness. That's the basic problem. Let's get into psychism in just a second.

But first of around the audience, we're speaking to Professor Philip Goff of, is it Durham University or University of Durham? I'm not sure, actually. I think you can say either. Okay, either way. And the author of The Phenomenalaya's Err featured on Lex Friedman's podcast, Joe Rogan's podcast. And after you go on those two kind of, you know, up-and-coming stars, then you come on to the end of the impossible podcast. But he is also a podcast, a host of his own. And your podcast is called Mind Chat. And you can find that wherever podcasts are sold, even on YouTube. And so I want to turn back to lastly to the, to the, before I turn. and over to my audience questions that they've submitted via Twitter to Dr. Brian Keating and to Philip underscore Goff. And on YouTube at Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube. And that's another call back to

our friend Galileo who said the following. He said, the sun with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do. And I don't know if you've ever been to Galileo's prison. in Florence, but we hosted a conference on relativity there in 2015, and it's a pretty nice prison. You know, I think, I think Delane Maxwell and others would love to be there instead of where they are right now. But it has these, you know, grape vines and olive trees and so forth, and it's a lovely,

lovely place, but he often thought amused about wine, and he said wine is sunlight held together by water. And I want to ask you, can we learn about consciousness from the unlawful, you? unconscious state, thinking about the anti-consciousness. Is there something that we can learn from sort of the counterfactual, as Stuart Hammeroff has claimed, he has special, you know, kind of privileges because he's an anesthesiologist, and so he can knock people out.

And I say, I knock people out all the time, just come to one of my lectures. I'll put in a drum roll right there. But can we learn about it from its opposite, unconsciousness? Absolutely, yeah. So, I mean, the way I think about consciousness, science consciousness research is that it's there's a theoretical aspect and a and a and an experimental aspect so the experimental task is to try and pin down what's called the neural correlates of consciousness

which kinds of brain activity go along with which kinds of experience and more generally which kinds of brain activity are necessary and sufficient for consciousness in general that's really important data, but I think that always leaves open the more theoretical question. Why? Why do these two things go together? And now I think we're back to the inference to the best explanation thing.

It's the first time I put it in terms of inference the best explanation. When I was on Joe Rogan, I don't think I managed to convey to what the heart problem consciousness was. I was thinking of it. It's the host fault, you know. If you can't bring out the best in your guest,

you should think of another profession. Maybe like, you know, epidemiology is what Joe should be. Just kidding, Joe. I love what you do. I was thinking afterwards, maybe I should have talked about inference the best explanation. That's a better way to do. But yeah, in terms of the experimental task, yeah, it's about thinking of trying to pin down as best we can, and it's very difficult, where consciousness is and where consciousness isn't. You might think it's a panpsychist isn't it everywhere?

Well, yes and no. A panpsychist thinks at the fundamental level of reality. maybe particles or fields, there's consciousness, but they don't necessarily think at the macro level it's everywhere. They would tend to think that the circumstances in which simple conscious entities combine to form complex conscious entities are maybe quite rare, maybe natural selection as it were discovered this and exploited it. So, you know, pinning this down, you need to be guided by the earth.

by the science. So science and philosophy really needs to be work hand in hand here. And yeah, a lot of it is, because it's not publicly observable, we have to do the best we can. You can ask people, you can, the so-called no report paradigm, you can look for sort of external markers. And make people unconscious. You can look where it's absent. Although it's even then it's tricky, you know, do people really have dreamless sleep? Or is it just experience that you don't remember? you know, waking experience is connected up by memory second to second. Often when you're dreaming, it's not so much, you can be suddenly somewhere else and you don't notice. So maybe so-called dreamless sleep is just where the chains of memory collapse and you're just having streams of experience.

Well, not knowing from one moment to the next. So it's very, very hard, even just with the experimental science. I don't know if it's true or not, but a friend of the show, Kim Stanley Robinson, he wrote a wonderful book, which if you haven't read, it's called Galileo's Dream. You would love it because in the book, Galileo suffers from these, what they're called syncopes, which I think he did in real life, kind of fainting spells. And Kim uses that, or Stan uses that as a vehicle that really engages the concept of time travel and space travel. I won't ruin it, although it occurs very early in the book.

where Galileo, during those moments of epileptic seizure, apparent to the outside observer, Galileo is actually being teleported to the future on the moon Europa that he, of course, discovered. And it goes back and forth using this vehicle of these syncopies or epileptic seizures, perhaps, and of unconscious to the external observer. But I wonder, it would be really fun to have you and Stan kind of gather around and talk about these issues. because that's obviously fictional, but I think there is something that we could say as this problem of external observation and how that may preclude you as sort of a barrier that we have to tunnel through to gain greater clarity. I'd be remiss. So like when David Chalmers on the show, I asked him, you have to define the hard problem of consciousness because it would be like you go to see someone in your beloved country by the name of ACDC and they don't play back in black or they don't play, you know, you shook me all night long.

feel kind of ripped off. So my audience will feel ripped off, Phil, if you don't explain panpsychism. Panpsychism, well, I mean, in our simple way of, in our standard way of thinking about things, you know, consciousness exists only in the brains of highly evolved organisms and so only exists, you know, in a tiny part of the universe and only in very recent history, at least in terms of the history of the universe. But for the panpsychist, consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it. So it sounds kind of wacky. I mean, I suppose the thought is, you can think of it as an alternative research program, right? We've been trying, banging our head against the brick wall for many decades now of trying to explain consciousness in terms of

utterly non-conscious processes in the brain. I would argue that's, I mean, we've done a lot that's good understanding the brain and consciousness, but in terms of explaining consciousness, in terms of patterns and neural firings, I think, you know, how the brain produces a kind of inner world of colours, sounds, smells, tastes, I think we've got nowhere with that.

The panpsychist tries an alternative research program, rather than explain consciousness in terms of the non-conscious, we try to explain very complicated forms of consciousness in terms of simpler. forms of consciousness, simpler forms of consciousness, which are then postulated to exist as just fundamental constituents of matter. So that's the start of it. And the Russell stuff I talked about earlier is it is an important part of spelling that out in a little bit more detail. Now, if we have a concept in physics related to emergence, but really it's mostly like

linearity, I think about, you know, let's say there is, because you know the, and I hope it's okay to criticize you with love or credit, not you, but the theory is, oh, panpsychism is everything's conscious, is rock is conscious, my mouse is conscious, this mouse, not the one running around in the background, everything's conscious, yeah, but that's not really what it is, right? I mean, that is not a full accurate description of panpsych. I think, by the way, it suffers from a, from a PR problem. When you hear panpsychism, you ask someone at the checkout count here at the Whole Foods, they're going to say, oh, it's about psychics. So I think it gets a bad rap, because of its moniker.

But it's not really true that everything has consciousness, is that everything, as I understand it, participates in the conscious observer, or the process of what we deem as consciousness. Is that right? Or is it true that electrons are conscious? No, right. Yeah, and I think there is, yeah, I agree.

Anna Kahers, who's somewhat sympathetic to panpsychism, among the other views, you know, thinks something problematic about the name. I kind of think maybe we're stuck with it now. I mean, literally it does mean, everything mind, pan, everything, psyche. But yeah, pan-psychies these days, as I say, the standard view would be that the fundamental level

has things have consciousness. So for the sake of simplicity, you know, we could think about fundamental particles like electrons and quarks. So the view would be that they have incredibly simple forms of experience. So we're not talking about, you know, the kind of experience a human being has.

You know, by consciousness, to be clear, we're just talking about any kind of subjective experience. Our consciousness is very complicated, the result of millions of years of evolution. You know, a horse's consciousness is simpler, a mouse simpler again, a bedbug. If bedbugs have consciousness,

it's going to be much, much simpler. For the panpsychis, this keeps going right down to the fundamental building blocks of matter, which on the pansegis view have, incredibly simple forms of experience to reflect their incredibly simple nature. And then the thought would be the ultimate aim of the expansementary program is to make sense of those little forms of consciousness combining together to make more complicated forms of consciousness

and we thereby ultimately get an explanation of the consciousness of humans and other animals that we're pre-theoretically committed to. I mean, I'm just over, as I'm talking to a physicist, I'm oversimplifying by talking about particles, but there are also, you know, field-based versions of panpsychism and maybe even, you know, conscious wave functions. So often it's put in terms of conscious particles, but that's just sort of the ease of exposition, I think.

Great. Just, Chad, so it doesn't literally mean every combination of particles is conscious in its own right. So this cup might not have its own consciousness. It's just made up of living. things that are conscious in some very, very simple way. Right. Yeah, and again, you know, just because something has the name, you know, consciousness. I mean, again, physicists used to be called natural philosophers,

you know, used to have, you know, physicians and so forth, used to be physicists. So, yeah, just the name shouldn't be, you know, construed as a Shibboleth or some anchor around the field. But, yeah, I agree. It would be great to sort of modify it at some point. But we've got so many questions from the audience. I feel and I hope that we can do a part two someday, but I do want to get to a couple of them just while I have you here and who knows what the future will bring. Hopefully it'll bring you to America at some point and me, the UK, and we can do this in person. But the first question comes from a fellow, well, he's a member of Great Britain, at least I think you guys are still unified in Scotland. And that's a man by the name of Lee Cronin, also guest on Lexington. Friedman's show, also past guest on my show. And Cronin criticized panpsychism today on Twitter by saying panpsychism appears to not be a real thing. It has no conceptual or philosophical or cultural meaning. It just reflects the void in our understanding, which should be filled by

more sensible discourse. I'm happy to be wrong, but tell me why. And he sends you his love and affection, by the way. Thanks, that's great. Yeah. Oh, I saw that on Twitter this morning. I didn't realize it was connected to this. That's great. Yeah, so again, it's, I guess it's, um, a couple of things. I suppose in some ways I'm repeating what I've already said, but part of this is, I think, you know, we have, in contrast to other cases, we have some grip of the phenomenon of consciousness before we do the science. So we've got an explanandum, something that needs explaining. But you know, contrast with, like, with anything else, you know, usually we don't know what the hell the thing is

before science tells us. You know, what is this stuff? Maybe it's a fundamental element, as the Greeks thought. Science comes along and tells us it's H-2-0 or, you know, when you see lightning in the skies, maybe it's the anger of the gods. Science comes along and tells it's electric discharge.

But with like pain, I think we already have a somewhat of a grip on what it essentially is. You know, we're talking about things that are defined by how they feel and we know how they feel or defined by the character of the experience and we know the character of the experience at least to a rough approximation. So that's an important part of why I think this is a very very different to other scientific cases.

And then, I mean, I suppose that there's just there's no explanation. I mean, I think there are now detailed explanatory, you know, detailed explanatory claims about how exactly, if you could mind want to look at my paper on my website, how exactly does panpsychism explain consciousness where I, you know, try and lay out a detailed explanation of how, you know, an empirically credible explanation of how human consciousness emerges from consciousness and more fundamental levels. And it's, it's going to work, as I say, hand in hand with the experimental science, you know, like another, I'm really good panpsychist's head of hassle, Merck, spent a year with Giulio Ternoni, spelling out in her panpsychist terms, the integrated information theory.

So the two are going to work together. But I think there are detailed explanatory views here. So I suppose I'd want to say, well, tell me what's in the details, what's going wrong there. Maybe what puts people off is because, as I say, because consciousness is not publicly observable, there's always going to be, it's not going to be totally pinned down by the data. You can't look in a quark and see if it's conscious, just as I can't look in your head and see if you're conscious. It's always going to be a role for inference to the best explanation, even once all the data's in.

I'm going to talk about, but I mean, I think it's, in a way, it's easy because I think the materialist doesn't have an explanation. It doesn't have a solution. I mean, they often admit that. I have a lot of friendly arguments strong, but friendly arguments with the neuroscientist Anil Seth, who says, yeah, look, we don't have an explanation. space into the heart,

Sush, to the Harpanma consciousness, but his view is, just ignore it and it'll eventually go away. I call this ostrich materialism. Yes. In the sand. So materialism doesn't have an explanation.

Panpsychists have all these now pretty detailed explanations. What's not to like? And that's where I think you get, Ponpsychism spend a lot of time just justifying its existence. But what's happening now is people just getting on, with the research program, scientists and philosophers coming together to see what fruit is yielded

from this. And that's what's really exciting, I think. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day gives you. with low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details.

Amazing. Okay, well, one last question because I can't resist. This is from Eugene Bird on my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating. Professor Goff is fascinating. His ideas about cosmology, but his accent and his manner of dress give him movie star potential. I would like to know whether or not a theory in the possible origin of the universe has shifted or not.

not. So if you could briefly address that. I'm actually not familiar with your theory on the possible origin of the universe. I thought he was going to say but his accent address is ridiculous. I didn't get the movies. You've got a fan here. I'm a bit of rushing now.

I didn't know what maybe what he has in mind that. I mean, maybe I've sort of I've had some speculative ideas about explaining the fine tuning. You know, the surprising discovery that, I mean, you know,

that it seems that, for example, the cosmological constant has an unexpected value and that it's so very small but non-zero, but it also seems kind of like a number of constants of physics seem kind of just, there's just the right values for life, or is in a narrow ring. Some people postulate God to explain this. Some people postulate the multiverse. I used to think, oh, it's probably the multiverse, but actually it's a big, big story. but I've actually come to think that the inference from the whole anthropic reasoning that justifies the move from fine-tuning to multiverse, I think is a bit fallacious. So I was messing around this idea, well, look, if we've already got a conscious universe, maybe it's sort of fine-tuned itself.

Maybe we can make sense of some kind of goal-directed activity at the level of fundamental physics. And actually, I'll be talking about this. I'm currently writing a book where I might sort of explore this a little bit more. So, yeah, I mean, I feel very silly talking about it. And culturally, it seems preposterous to me. But I don't like the God option. I don't like the multiverse option. That does seem to be this fine-tuning problem.

So maybe a conscious universe that designed itself is the one to go for, even though I feel very silly saying it. Well, that's lovely. And appreciate the compliments there, Eugene. Okay, we'll have to come back to part two. We've got about 50 other questions, Phil. So if someday you're willing to come back on, I would be most delighted to host you and answer remaining questions. And maybe we'll do a friendly debate with David and Stuart Hammeroff or folks like that.

But for now, I'm wondering if you are willing to go and play the game that we call the thrilling three. Okay, these are my existential questions designed to elicit from my guest, the stuff that matters most in life, which is your wisdom, not just your knowledge. I think you've impressed the universe and my fans, especially with your knowledge. But let's talk now about wisdom and start with the very first one of all, which has to do with your departure from this mortal coil, as the Bard once said. And that has to do with when you depart at age 120 or later, perhaps, and you get uploaded to the great cloud, perhaps. What wisdom or knowledge is, what wisdom or knowledge would you want to impart in your so-called ethical will?

What is in your ethical will? I think one thing I'd say that I've already touched on is never assume you're at the end of history. I think this is a perennial problem with humans. We always think, oh, we've got it all sorted now. Something always comes along and starts to show cracks, you know, consciousness, maybe this fine-tuning stuff. and we try to plaster over the cracks,

but always be open to the possibility that your fundamental assumptions are just wrong. And, you know, thinking more kind of the meaning of life and so on, I've come to think, you know, it's hard to be happy if you approach things saying, what's going to make me happy? You know, what do I want out of life? I kind of think you have to find something bigger than yourself

that you're going to live for, you know, whether it's gone, or socialism or the advancement of science or curing cancer or something. I think, in my experience, real happiness comes from finding something bigger than yourself that you can live for the sake of. And I think that's very important. Indeed it is. And the next question has to do also with the future, but not your immediate future,

but rather the future of our species, the universe, perhaps. and that has to do with sort of the knowledge or wisdom you would put in or in on your monolith. And you might know in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001, a Space Odyssey featuring a conscious artificial intelligence by the name of Hal. I'd love to get your opinion on how someday. But these are monoliths that appear throughout the show beginning in the African Savannah and progressing to the moon. And we don't know what they are. There could be time capsules. They could be warnings.

They could be just whatever giveaways left or, you know, the future. equivalent of a CD-ROM, who knows? What would you put in it to express what scientists in your field have discovered that would be most impressive to an alien civilization? I think I'm going to have to say the thing I'm most passionate about, which is that the reality of consciousness is a fundamental scientific data in its own right over and above the data of public observation and experiments. I think this is something we... we still haven't totally got on board with as a scientific and philosophical community. I believe we will do at some point,

and I think it's going to totally revolutionize how we think about the world, how we think about science and its relation to human knowledge. So if the aliens see that, they'll say, all right, they've moved on from that materialist phase. They're doing okay. All right, fellow. The last question involves the past, not the future. and this has to do with what is known as Sir Arthur C. Clark's third law, which states the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them into the impossible. That's the origin of the name of this podcast. I want to ask you, Phil, what mysterious aspect of life might have perplexed you or given you some concern or trouble as a 20-year-old? But now makes sense and give yourself kind of the advice to your former self that would give you the courage to do as you've done to go into the

possible. I think I would say to my younger self, the long dark night of the soul doesn't last forever. I think I've had a lot of, you know, I just, oh, the theory doesn't work. You discover this just doesn't work at all. And you think this is, I'm going to have to, or writing, writing my popular book for the, trying to write for a general audience for the first time and getting these responses saying, this is not a, this is not a popular, this is not a book for a general audience or you know when i was david charmer's postdoc i'd be i'd work a couple of months on a theory and he'd come up with an objection that destroyed the whole paper and so you know those things feel devastating at the time but often they're you know the things that are most important for

bringing you to a better place so i like the phrase um from uh samuel becket try again fail again fail better i think that's the other thing that's been important realization for me I think is also try to get in the mindset of people you disagree with. I think at one stage, as a young man, I was trying to win the argument, you know, oh, you're an idiot, but then really getting curious about, you know, trying to look out of the eyes of the person you're arguing about, well, why are they thinking these crazy things, you know, trying to get inside their head? And sometimes you can change your mind.

But even if you don't, I think it inevitably leads you to a, a deeper understanding of your own view. And so, yeah, that's so important to try and understand the people you disagree with. Wow. It has been a great pleasure coming to understand you a little bit more. Plug yourself for just a second. Where do people find you on Twitter and your podcast and elsewhere? Yeah, I've always argued with people on Twitter.

Philip underscore Goff, Philip with 1L, G-G-G-O-F-F-F. Philip got Philosophy.com website. I got lots of things there, academic, and otherwise. Mind chat, it's my podcast, where we interview scientists and philosophers. We had a great one about free will today

with a very good philosopher who believes in free will. And there's a blog on my website, I'll link to my book, Galileo's error, I guess. Yes, of course. Wonderful.

Well, Philana, thank you so much. I've been such a delight, and I hope that you'll agree someday to do a part two. And hopefully you'll be in the chat room when we actually air this live, or air the recording of it in real time. You'll be in the live chat interacting and hopefully passing the Turing test. Absolutely. Thanks, so much. I can't believe I didn't realize at all.

You tried to contact me a year ago, and I'm so glad we finally connected up by it. It was meant to be. It was meant to be, my friend. Thank you. Thank you. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Well, that's a wrap. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Philip Goff.

He and I had a great, great chemistry and rapport, and I do hope he'll be back on the podcast whenever we talk about things like the simulation hypothesis, consciousness, the brain, and the origin of one of the most important topics in all of science, as he evidenced coming from way back when in the 1600s with Galileo Galilei himself. friend. And don't forget, I have a new project with my friend Carlo Rovelli, Frank Wilczek, James Gates, Fabiola Gianati, and others, which is the Galayan Dialogue, the project that we took over a year to put together the narration of this wonderful contribution to human history.

And I know that you'll love to listen to it, and you can get it wherever books or audio, books are sold. But in particular, go to my website. Go to Brian Keating.com slash dialogue. And you'll find some free links there. You'll even find an NFT. which you may want to procure for yourself. And while you're there, I hope you'll check out the other podcast that I do run, which is called Think Like a Nobel Prize winner, and I hope you'll leave a rating and a review on this podcast. And I want to read one.

I read every single one, even the ones that don't really agree with me so much. For example, we have a statement from the 80s villager via Apple podcast just today, who called me and Eric Weinstein a cowardly, cowardly lions. He only gave us, or she only gave us three stars, that's okay sometimes that happens can't please everybody but they say I'm lacking the courage and Eric and I lack the courage to take a stand or even discuss the compromise of Roe versus Wade and the point of viability okay well that is that is your prerogative and I've had deeper criticisms with fewer stars for less but I do hope that if you enjoy it or if you just want to give me

feedback and advice or recommend guests that you'll leave a review it's really one of the best ways and the only way that Apple allows me to communicate with you guys directly is by you leaving a rating and a review. You can leave actual a voice message for me on my website at the briankeating.com slash podcast. And there you can also sign up for my twice monthly newsletter where I share the most fascinating tidbits from around the world of science, including astronomy, space, engineering, and just incredible discoveries that colleagues and people I respect are making. And sometimes they give you cool tips and tricks and hacks that I use and I find to be quite genius. So that's called my Monday Magic message, where Magic stands for members.

appearance, genius, image, and conversation, which is the interview that I do. And I always link to my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keaton. We're over 61,000 beloved subscribers on YouTube, and I have short form explainer videos about all sorts of things ranging from dark matter to black holes to wormholes and other kinds of holes, magnetic monopoles, many other things. I do hope you'll enjoy coming there, but please, if you want to give a little bit of feedback to me, please do leave a review. We have over 500 reviews around the world is amazing.

Most podcasts don't even get to 50 reviews. I'm more than 10 times that. I have such gratitude for you guys all the way out there. And I want to learn. I want to get better. I'm trying my best to get better like those I look up to. And I hope that you will give me some constructive feedback and also encouragement to keep going. Because, you know, I don't really do it.

I have some advertisers. I appreciate those. But really doing it because I want to share the wisdom of these great phenomenal minds that I have gotten to know over the years. And I want to share them with you and in a way to make the world a more interesting, curious place. So for now, yours truly, Brian Keating, long-winded outro, thanking you so much for being a part of this product and wishing you the best of experiences as you go into the impossible. For now, signing off. Until next time, take care.

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