Know Thyself - E205 - Anil Seth: Your Perception of Reality & Self Is a Hallucination

Episode Date: July 28, 2026

Anil Seth is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex and one of the world's leading researchers on consciousness. His central claim is both unsettling and liberating: we do not passively receive reality, we actively generate it. The world that appears when you open your eyes is not a transparent window onto what is actually out there. It is the brain's best guess, a controlled hallucination, built from the inside out.What We Dive Into:1. Your brain is not reading out the world like a camera. It is making constant predictions about what is out there and updating them with sensory signals. What you perceive is much more a product of those internal predictions than of the raw sensory data coming in. In that sense, all perception is a form of hallucination, just one that happens to be grounded in reality.2. Just as the brain generates a model of the external world, it generates a model of the self. The feeling of being a continuous, stable "I" is another best guess, not a fixed essence waiting to be discovered. This is both humbling and freeing, because a constructed self can be examined and updated in ways a fixed one cannot.3. As AI systems grow more sophisticated, they will increasingly appear to have inner lives. Anil draws a sharp line between intelligence and consciousness, arguing that current AI lacks the biological, embodied, self-regulating properties that we believe underlie genuine experience. Confusing performance for presence is not just a philosophical error. It shapes regulation, design, and how we treat these systems.Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:https://www.im8health.com/knowthyselfcode KNOWTHYSELF for an exclusive offerhttps://www.mudwtr.com/knowthyselfcode KNOWTHYSELF for up to 43% off sitewide___________00:00 Intro01:47 We Don't Perceive the World — We Generate It04:29 The Brain as a Prediction Machine07:22 Controlled Hallucination: What That Term Really Means09:37 Reality Is Real, But We Never Perceive It Directly13:25 Optical Illusions as Windows Into Perception16:42 Perceptual Humility and Echo Chambers19:34 The Perception Census: Mapping Our Inner Diversity25:24 Perception, Priors, and Personal Suffering29:17 Memory, Identity, and What We Expect to See33:19 The Minimum of Consciousness: Bare Awareness38:15 Pure Consciousness and the Feeling of Being Alive41:51 Can the Contents of Experience Tell Us About Consciousness?45:46 Out of Body Experiences and the First-Person Perspective50:31 Psychedelics, Reality, and the Sense of Realness57:12 Anil's LSD Experience and Mary's Room1:03:47 Defining Consciousness: Nagel's "What Is It Like"1:07:25 The Distribution of Consciousness: Animals, Trees, and AI1:17:27 Steel-Manning Panpsychism1:21:09 Pragmatic Materialism1:34:23 Intelligence vs. Consciousness: Why AI Is Different1:38:17 Why Current AI Is Probably Not Conscious1:43:53 The Danger of Believing AI Is Conscious1:49:24 What Happens When We Take the Self Too Seriously1:52:01 Reflections on Death and What Dies1:57:34 The Self as Process, Not Essence2:02:00 Free Will as a Useful Perception2:05:43 Closing Message: Celebrate the Everyday Miracle of Consciousness___________✨MORE FROM ANIL SETH↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/profanilseth/↳Books: https://www.anilseth.com/read/books/↳https://www.anilseth.com📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

We open our eyes and a world appears. It seems as though the world is just objectively out there, the colors, the shapes, the people. It's very easy to take for granted that this world just pours itself into our minds. But that's a very misleading view. There's no such thing as colors out there in the real world. What we perceive is the brain's best guess. A controlled hallucination. Yeah.

I mean, none of us see things as they really are. Just as color seems to be revealing the future of the world, The self seems to be revealing some persistent, unchanging essence of me. That's just not the way it is. I want to go deeper down the rabbit hole. What is it about AI that's incompatible with having a conscious experience? We're going to talk about that. But firstly, the question I really want to understand,

is consciousness really tied to life or not? I spoke to my mother about death. She knew it was coming, but she couldn't imagine not existing. What dies? The honest answer is there's wonder and awe in the simplest of experiences of opening your eyes and a world appearing. We should celebrate the everyday miracle of being conscious. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Know of Thyself podcast. Our guest today is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex.

He's one of the world's leading voices and researchers on consciousness. And I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while because of the wide. range of topics that we can dive into with nuance from the self to reality and consciousness and perception and Neil Seth, thank you for being here. Thank you, Andrea. It's a great pleasure. I'd like to start by what you say is that we don't passively perceive the world. We actively generate it. For somebody that's just tuning into this episode, what does the weight of that statement mean? It means a lot to me anyway. I think it's initially very counterintuitive. We open our eyes and a world appears. It seems as though the world is just

objectively out there with all its properties, the colors and shapes and objects and people and places. And it's very easy to take for granted that this world just pours itself into our minds through our eyes and our ears and our other senses and we just see things, perceive things, hear things as they really are. But that's, I think, a very misleading view. view of actually how perception works, actually how our experiences of the world and the self are constructed. Closer to the truth, I think, is that our brains are always actively interpreting the signals that come in to our senses, and not just to slightly nuance or change them. But think about it this way. There's no such thing as colors out there in the real world, the reds, the greens,

the oranges and so on. There is light, there's electromagnetic radiation, but that in itself doesn't have color, just has wavelength. And our eyes, the cells in our eyes, are sensitive to only three of these wavelengths. And they're short, medium, and long. We tend to call them red, green, and blue,

but they're not. They're just short, medium, and long. And out of those three wavelengths, our brains somehow construct millions of different colors that we experience that give our lives, texture and meaning and beauty. And so in some sense, when we experience colour, we see both less than what's really there because we only experience, or we're only sensitive to three wavelengths of light. But our experience is also more than what's really there because we can experience

millions of different colours, not just three. And what holds for colour, I think holds for everything else. the world that we experience comes just as much, if not more from the inside out than from the outside in. So what's the actual mechanism? You know, if I take a glance at this cup right here, it looks like I am perceiving this cup, which is held in my hand, it's out there.

How am I actually generating this? Because we perceive that it's out there, this world appears when we open our eyes. What does it mean that we're actively generating? This is the nuts and bolts. actually, this idea of perception being an active construction is very old. It goes back in philosophy, and Western philosophy is at least to Emmanuel Kant, who talks about these ideas, and they've evolved and developed slowly. And these days, it is really about nailing down

the mechanisms, what's happening inside our brains. And the idea that me and my colleagues we work on is to think of the brain as a kind of prediction machine. So there are lots of connections coming from the eyes that go into the brain, but there are also many connections going in the other direction, from the brain back out towards the senses, the eyes and the ears. And I think the best theory about what's happening these days is that the brain is able to make predictions about the sensory signals that are coming in. It's sort of able to make predictions a bit more precisely.

it's making predictions about their causes. And the sensory signals that come in, they aren't read out by the brain to form like an inner movie, but rather the sensory signals are used to calibrate and update the predictions. So we have predictions that come, if you like, from the top down or the inside out, and this flow of predictions

is continually meeting an inward flow of sensory signals, which mainly tell the brain the difference between what expecting to get and what it actually gets. And so it's continually calibrating this difference. And then the claim is that what we perceive is much more down to the predictions than the sensory signals. So what we perceive is the brain's best guess of what's going on. In this view, the brain is solving a problem in maths that we call Bayesian inference. It's trying to inferring what most likely state of the world is given the information that gets through the senses. And importantly, given the brain's prior expectations, if you like, about how the world works

and what's going on. Some of these are learned, so we may learn to perceive things in different ways. Some of them are just sort of installed from the beginning. Like our brain knows how shadows work. Our brain knows that light usually comes from above because light typically always came from above. So we have within our brains a kind of model of the world. But we don't perceive the model, we use the model to generate these best guesses. And these best guesses are what we actually perceive. And these best guesses, do you call a controlled hallucination? Yeah. I mean, part of the challenge

is that none of our kind of everyday language words really fit the bill. They're always fail us. They're always failers. And this is for me, it's one reason I was always drawn to working both with language but also with mathematics, physics, computer science. Because if you write down the equations, it sort of makes sense what I'm talking about. You have probability distributions and things like that. But that doesn't really help if we want to convey.

the concepts more intuitively. So yeah, I use controlled hallucination and the reason I use it is because when we typically say hallucination, what we mean is an experience that's coming from within. I might hear a voice and there's nobody actually speaking. I might see a person and there's nobody actually there. The connotation of hallucination is an internally generated experience. And I think that's also true for everyday perception as well. But for everyday perception, these hallucinations, which are the brain's internally generated predictions, they're controlled by the sensory signals that come in through the eyes and the air. So the control is just as important as the hallucination. Control is what keeps our brain's internal perceptual machinery calibrated to the world grounded in

reality. And so you mentioned what like Helmholtz would say unconscious inference and how we're at the process of how we're actively guessing and filling in the gaps within perception. Now, hallucination you refer to just then as an internally generated experience, but we have all sorts of internally generated experiences. Is there not more to the story that makes it particularly a hallucination? when you think of what is reality and what would be hallucinated perhaps on top of reality, that's not reality in the capital R sense per se. Yeah, what particularly, I guess, and why you use that word hallucination?

So in my view, reality exists. There's really a stuff out there. What exactly that stuff is? It's still, I think, not very well understood or known. ask a physicist, ask a philosopher, and what really is matter? What's the substance of the, what's the substrate of the universe? We never perceive reality directly. It's always indirect. And this, again, goes right back to Kant. And that might be an unknowable in some sense

the way things really are where the cabal are. And what we experience is always a sort of a take on it, a perspective on it. I think the real tricky thing about the way perception works is the sense that what we do see feels real. It just feels to me in my everyday experience that the colors, the shapes, the movement, time passing, all of these things seem to be independent of my mind and just there. And that's, I think, the hardest thing to wrap, at least for me, my head around, is that that's only, partly true that the world as it appears to me is always a construction. But there still is a world out there. You know, when I first started talking about perception using this language of

control, hallucination, people would sometimes say, well, look, go and go and walk across a freeway. And, you know, you'll soon realize that, you know, the trucks are not hallucinated. They're real. And yes, of course, they're real. But that's why the control is just as important. so that we experience the world not as it is, but as it's useful for us to do. Now, there are other forms of experience which feel more internal. Like I can experience emotions, they can experience thoughts, and they seem to arise maybe in my body, maybe in my mind, and they don't seem to be parts of the external world.

But I think they're still constructed in the same way. You mentioned Helmholtz. So he was one of the early proponents of this idea, and he indeed called it unconscious inference, which is puzzling, because we're talking about our conscious experience. What Helmholtz was getting at was that we're not generally conscious of the processes unfolding in our brains that give rise to the conscious experiences that we then have.

And this is strongly illuminated in the various optical illusions that you share also. Yeah, this is the beautiful thing about, you know, all these fun, optical illusions, auditory illusions, perceptual illusions of all kinds. They're little windows into how our perceptual systems actually work. And I think they really show that our brains, our visual cortex, for example, at the back of the head here, it's not trying to accurately record the patterns of light that happen to impinge on the eyes like a camera does. It's trying to use the light that comes into the eyes as a way of figuring out what's happening in the world.

So we might then see two lines that look to be different lengths and they turn out to be exactly the same length. But that's because the context might be that, okay, normally that would be parts of a three-dimensional object or two patches of color might appear to be different colors. but then you actually look at, you isolate them and look at them individually and they're the same color. It's the context. That means our brains interpret them in a different way. Yeah, well, maybe we can put one or two on screen.

The checkerboard one is always fun as a go-to. Because it's just like it's baffling, right? The reality, the truth is that they're the same shade, same brightness. But there's nothing we can do to not see it that way. That's exactly right. There's kind of a slightly jubhous. agony term, but I quite like it. These illusions are what psychologists would call cognitively impenetrable.

That means even when you know what's going on, you know, you can look at these patches in a checkerboard in isolation. And indeed, it's entirely clear that they're exactly the same. Yeah. But in the context of the checkerboard, they're going to always look different. And I've seen this illusion, I mean, probably well over a thousand times. And it works just as well as the first time. Now that's not true for all illusions, and that's another interesting thing about perception. Sometimes what we know can change what we experience, and other times it doesn't. Yeah, we've probably seen on social media that various auditory illusions, the blue dress that you reference in your TED talk, I believe, right?

And to me, these are like you said, these are a window into the world of controlled hallucinations, you know, and where I want to go quickly in this episode is deeper down the rabbit hole, so to speak, to say, okay, if that's just a window, what's inside the whole house, so to speak. And I think an interesting area to explore that is, you know, we've had Don Hoffman on quite a bit. And what you just refer to seems fairly in alignment with his kind of understanding of fitness beats truth, right? Evolutionary systems adapted for survival, not to actually see objective reality, whatever that is. and getting into the shoes of an octopus or a bat and what does the conscious experience look like from their perception clearly they're navigating the same realm as we are

but they have a completely different ontological experience and see up to 13 cones of color in the case of the mantis shrimp and so if we all have these different experiences of reality which is right. Well, I think this is a really excellent point. You don't have to go to octopuses or mantis shrimps. I mean, you and I will have slightly different brains, so we'll experience the same shared objective reality.

We are sitting in the same room, but even you and I might be experiencing things slightly differently. Maybe you see the color of my shirt in a slightly different way to how I see it. And it's very easy to ignore that, because probably the differences between you and me aren't super dramatic, so we'll still use the same words like light blue or something like that. You mentioned the dress. The dress that image like over 10 years ago now and half the

world saw it as blue and black and the other half saw it as white and gold. That was super interesting because the differences between individuals was so unexpectedly large that people for the first time realized that, hold on a minute, like how is it possible for you to be looking at that and have such a different experience to mind. I think there's a really important lesson there, which is a lesson in perceptual humility. It seems as though what we see is real. It seems as though it's not dependent on the specific peculiarities of my own brain. So then it's very easy to assume that everyone else is going to have the same experience. And when they don't, it's a real lesson that actually none of us see things as they,

really are. We all see them in our individual unique way. We all experience a unique world even for a shared, objective reality. This always makes me think of the echo chambers in social media that we're all too familiar with, and it's very easy when you get deep into an echo chamber, it becomes almost impossible to understand how somebody else could believe something different. and I often use the example of a dress to illustrate that danger. I mean, the dress is, no one really cares whether the dress is actually blue or black or white or gold. It doesn't really matter. It's not a high-stakes aspect of reality.

But in many of our other echo chambers, we are disagreeing, becoming polarized about things that matter. And if you can show that even for something as unimportant as a dress, we can differ so dramatically. I think that kind of opens a bit of space. to consider how our beliefs might be similarly constructed and may not reflect things as they really are. It makes me think about how much of our individual suffering is a byproduct of feeling like we have the right perspective on any given situation in our life, you know?

And that humility that you bring into the perceptual humility that maybe the way I'm seeing things are not the way they are and perhaps they can actually never be the full picture. I think they definitely cannot be the full picture, because I don't think it even makes sense to say they can be the full picture. And here's where Don Hoffman and I agree a bit that evolution didn't really care about giving us the full picture, whatever that might even mean.

What would it mean that we would experience quarks or superstrings or photons? No one even knows what a photon is. is some kind of field in quantum foam. No, we're not going to experience that. It's necessarily going to be something else, and that something else is then will have been tuned by evolution to be useful, not to be the most faithful representation of how things are.

And we can measure this. So one of the experiments we've been doing at Sussex is called the perception. consensus. So motivated a bit by the photo of the dress, but also by some other work we've done using stroboscopic light to give people visual hallucinations. So they'll be like just you'll flash a white light very quickly. Exactly. Yeah, we flash a white light. Just pure white. We flash it around. It varies, but let's say 10 hertz, so 10 flashes per second, which happens to be the kind of frequency

at which your visual brain naturally oscillates, you flash a bright light around that frequency, have someone sit in front of it with their eyes closed, they will have pretty extraordinary visual experiences, at least most people do. They'll see colors. The colors aren't there, your eyes are closed, and the light is just white.

People see other things, too, patterns and shapes and geometries. But everybody experiences something a bit different. but what they're looking at is always the same. So we were inspired by this to sort of look, try and create a bit more of a map of how different our inner worlds are, one person to another. So we did an experiment with around 40,000 people, about 50 different tasks, visual illusions and other things,

to try to get a sense of perceptual diversity. Just what does it look like? We're all different heights, body-shaped, skin, and so on. And it turns out that we differ on the inside in much the same way. There's always a distribution. There's always a kind of mean and then, you know, and then things tail off on either side. And that seems to be true whatever aspect of perception we look at, whether it's the effect of context on colour, whether it's how fast we perceive time to go. It's whether we see faces in clouds or not. Whatever we look at, we see out there distribution.

And I think that's really interesting. And it's exactly what you would expect because evolution is all about variability. We differ. And then sometimes it works better. Sometimes it doesn't work quite so well. But biological systems in general just always instantiate this kind of variability. And that's true for our inner worlds, just as it is for our bodies. So are they reporting what they perceive in those settings?

or how are you measuring the internal experience? In this particular experiment, you can do some clever things with visual illusions. You can do things where there's one illusion. It's called the Ebbinghaus illusion. And in this illusion, you have two circles, and one on the left, one on the right, and each circle is surrounded by some other ones

that can either be small or large. Depending on that, the two circles in the middle can look different styles. even though they're the same size. So what we can do is we can have a kind of interactive version of this where the circles start out different sizes. And then we have people adjust the circles around the edge until they look the same.

Because we can tell. People can tell. They can like, oh yeah, it's a bit like when you go to the opticians and they always say like, you know, do they look different? Does it look the same? And eventually you get to a point where you really can't tell whether one lens is different from another. And you can just calibrate until those circles to you look the same.

But then in reality, they will now be different. And so you can measure how different they are in reality as an objective measure of how strong that illusion is for you specifically. And if we do that, then we can measure that for 40,000 people and we can sort of see how does it very very much? Is it sort of like there's an average effect and then some people experience it more strongly, some people experience it less strongly. And that's what we see.

And we can play the same game with other kinds of illusions as well. And bit by bit we can build up a picture of how perception works for that person. And maybe this is stuff we're still working on. We can ask other questions like, are there deeper things happening that explain like correlations between different illusions. Like if I see, if this circle illusion is strong for me and maybe that correlates with something else like the color I see addressed,

so what's the common factor? What's the organizing principle of our perception? And we're also now looking at how perception changes as we get older. That's also something people have been interested in for a while, but we have a large set of data about this. now. We can ask how does it change in the lifespan and in particular what happens in dementia and Alzheimer's, where people typically focus on memory and how functional people are behaviorally and cognitively, but comparatively little focus on how the world seems to someone with dementia.

And so this gives us now a way to understand that. And when we know more about that, we might be able to, you know, adapt people's environments so that they're more comfortable for people with dementia or even find ways to diagnose it or maybe even to develop ways to train perceptions so people can improve in their symptoms. I mean, this is all for the future. But the idea of focusing less on what people can do and more on how people experience their worlds, I think, opens up a lot of opportunities. You mentioned. You mentioned. a minute ago about a cause of our everyday suffering might be the fact that we we take the content of our experiences to just be the way it is and without any possibility,

any sort of flex in there. And I actually think that I think that's right, that the more we understand that our perceptual experiences is constructed, that opens a little bit of space for the idea that even if the objective reality doesn't change, our way of relating to it, our way of experiencing it, can still change. And that's ultimately what matters, is how we feel about things. Yeah, what starts is perhaps a reducing of suffering on an individual level

as you take 40,000 on the Abinghas allusion, to $8 billion with the collective illusions. we all, you know, that we scale at that level. It also breeds a lot of compassion and empathy for realizing how many biases and priors we were all walking around the world looking through as though they are absolute reality. And I think seeing the part we play and the illusions that we have that we've, you know, that we've let go of or the new ones that we might be currently having and we see that internally, it allows a little bit more compassion to realize and

and look at other people almost as phenomena playing out with their own priors. I think that's right. I think the only thing I, the only kind of slight tweak I would add is that, is yes, we have our biases, but we can't do without them. And I think this is sometimes part of the problem. People aspire to like, well, you know, I don't have any bias. You know, I just see things as they are, or I believe, you know, the most rational thing that I should in these circumstances.

But the point is that to perceive anything, and I think indeed to believe anything, we have to have some prior expectation. We have to have some pre-existing model of what's going on, of how the world works, whether that's how it works politically or how light works when it's bouncing off objects. We can't get rid of that at all. And I think that's part of this humility that we're talking about, the recognition. that prior expectations deep within our brain are just necessary to experience anything, to believe anything. So knowing they're there is, I think, is helpful. Feeling that we can get rid of them is, I think, not so helpful because ultimately we can't. Hey, fam, a quick share from something I genuinely love. This is IM8. I know it's very common to hear

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the mirror. I expect to see my face, give or take, you know, a few hairs and wrinkles, whatever. If we were to wipe your memory, how much of what we expect to see about ourselves and the world determines, like, legitimately, literally what we actually see? That's a very good question. It depends on what you mean by memory, which is a very, very tricky question, right? Because in a sense, the basic structure of our brains that just develops over time. You can think of that as a kind of memory that's been installed very gradually by evolution. So, you know, if I wake up in the morning too, I look in the mirror, I see my face. A few more wrinkles in you, a few less hairs in you, but, you know.

I'm on my way. Give it an up to. Entropy do its thing. Exactly. Entropy comes for us all in the end. But it's still recognizably me. Now, if I wiped my memory, let's say I took a drug that kind of completely obliterated my memory of the last year, would I still recognize myself in the mirror? Probably yes, because I have learned what I looked like over a longer time period, the time period of my life.

Now, let's say I obliterated my memory for many years. then it might be a bit trickier, but I would still see a face. I would still see this face with eyes, with a nose, with ears and so on. And that's because what a face is is something that all my ancestors and all your ancestors going back a very long way have had to deal with. We're very social species. We care about faces a lot. So the memory of what counts as a face is not something that you or I just developed.

individually over a lifetime. It's how our brains have evolved. What this means in practice is that we have quite a bit of pre-installed memories about how the world works. And then there are other things that we learn during our lifetimes. So if you think about wine tasters, no one is born, well maybe some French people are, I don't know, but no one is born being able to tell the difference between two Cabinet Sauvignon's. But you can learn to tell the difference, and this isn't just why, and this is kind of anything that we care about, pay attention to. So we'll learn to discriminate things that previously seemed the same.

And those, if you like, lifetime memories for perception that we can develop. And then there's the very immediate memory, like what happened yesterday. And typically that won't really impact very much. much on what we perceive. But in some cases, it might. In some cases, I mean, there's sometimes when I'm traveling and I've been such a deep sleep because I'm jet-lagged or something like that, and I wake up and I don't really know where I am. And nothing really makes sense, even visually. It's like, where are things in this room? And I don't remember which hotel I'm in or I arrived late and really look around. And then it takes a little while for things to kind of click into place

because I don't have the predictions in my mind about the layout of the room or where, indeed, what kind of room I'm in? So what would happen that if we took it all the way? I know you said it depends on how we define memory, but if I have just raw experience, raw awareness, with no perception of future or past, because memory is sort of needed for that,

Yeah, what would happen in that state? Would it just be raw consciousness? This is a very good question. I mean, there's this lovely phrase. I think it's from William James, who talks about consciousness as the remembered present, which kind of conveys the idea that to experience anything, we have to have some amount of memory.

And this is very much in line with the idea of perception as this process of controlled hallucination. It's always reaching back a little bit into time. But it does beg the question about, so what would be the most basic form of conscious experience? There's an old thought experiment from Greek philosophy called Avicenna's man. You know about this one? I know. I think sometimes it's called the floating man.

And the idea is, I picture a man, no man, or any person, just floating in the air. and gradually you take away their senses and you ask what's left. So you take away vision. What's left? Well, you know, they're going to still be conscious to hear the wind, whistling, birds, take away hearing, take away smell,

take away taste, take away touch. All the time ask what's left. You might still think, well, there's the self. Well, take away the feeling of where the body is, take away the feeling of emotion and so on. How far can you strip down the specific contents of consciousness and still have consciousness? I don't think there's a good answer to this. I'm pretty confident there's no obvious answer to this because this is a question that

people have been asking in so many different ways for thousands of years and people in the meditative traditions. they try to well they don't try that's kind of against the grain for meditation but they talk about these states of minimal

or pure consciousness and bare consciousness where there's no other content in psychedelics as well people report experiences of complete ego dissolution

in some psychedelic states where there's there's no content to consciousness there's just consciousness in my own feeling about this having, I'm not a meditator. I have tried the psychedelic route to minimal phenomenal experience. And just thinking about it as well is that I'm not sure you can strip away absolutely everything.

I think my view on consciousness in the broader frame is very, very closely tied up with our nature as living creatures. and this is this is speculation it's very hard to do an experiment on this but i i tend to think that the most basic form of conscious experience that certainly a human being can have is something like the feeling of being alive without any particular shape without any particular form without any specific emotion without even really the background texture of a mood but just this simple formless structure feeling of being alive. If there is anything left in a state of bare consciousness,

maybe it's that. Yeah, so the contemplative traditions would, of course, as words continue to fail us, but attempt to give explanations as to who we are in our most fundamental essence, right? That saying of I am that, just pure I amness. Right? Like if you stripped all your sensory experiences, even the feeling of self and thought and emotion, would it just be like an ice, you know, looking into the abyss? But then it gets into the question of that, okay, if there's no seer, if there's no memory of someone who is seeing, then is it just pure, like pure amness, pure existence, pure aliveness. Does that kind of intuitively feel like what the answer would be from your end to? I think so, especially the last thing you said.

I struggle a bit with the, I think I am that is an interesting way to put it from, you know, I was listening to your conversation with Swami Sriva Piananda, and he talks about I am that as a way of summarizing some of Advaita Yit Vedanta. And it's a really nice way of, I think, summarizing this idea that within that tradition, you know, the world that we experience is part of our consciousness. That's kind of not, I mean, intrigued by those ideas. But when we come to this idea of pure bare awareness, eye becomes problematic because the word eye as we use it,

at least in the West, is all about personal identity. It implies a sort of a duality between subject and object, a perspective, a first-person perspective. And you can say, well, I'll strip away them. memories of I so that, you know, I don't have a name or I don't remember anything, what I had for breakfast and so on. But still, this, this eye does lead us to think that there will still be a first person perspective, maybe, there'll still be a difference between self and other. And I, you know, now I'm using it because I'm not in that state. I think that's probably

wrong. And I think there are states of consciousness where the first person perspective can dissolve, where the boundary between the experience of self and world can dissolve. And I think that gets us closer to what this most basic experience would be, which again, it's hypothesis, but perhaps the one thing you can't get rid of is this experience of being alive, experience of aliveness, which is actually a little bit related to I was thinking some years ago about the soul, which is a concept that's not got a great reputation in modern science these days.

But different traditions talk about the soul in different ways. In Western philosophy, the soul is often associated with a kind of disembodied or disembodial seat of rational thinking. I mean, Descartes would have described it maybe in those terms. But then in Hinduism we have this concept of Atman, which isn't about rational thought. It's much more about breath, about life. And I'm not saying that this is, that we should say, oh, yeah, great, now we've really, that's true. Now this is the true way to think of soul.

But I think that's something for me, at least more appealing than the soul as disembodied cognition, this idea of what's really core to consciousness being inseparable from life and maybe manifest through breath. Hey fam. One thing that brings me a lot of joy is having a warm, nourishing drink to start my day like I am right now, but I personally don't drink anything with strong caffeine, and that's why I love mud water. You've probably heard me share a bunch about their OG blends, which are made with cacao, functional mushrooms, adaptogenic herbs. You get the natural energy in focus, but without the crash of coffee. However, if you're not ready to leave coffee behind entirely.

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and you try to get at what the essence of a thing is, it's tough to convey what the essence of a thing is without the complex system and ecosystem in which it is existing within. Just like we explained with memory being entirely connected with our perception of self. Now you study consciousness

and we talked a lot about the variance and contents of experience, right? And we can show all the biases and priors we have and the controlled hallucinations in our own internal subjective experience. I'm curious to what degree do you think that examining the contents of our experience

can actually even explain anything about the nature of consciousness which is the background field in which all contents are experienced? Do you think that it can? Clearly you're doing a lot of studies in the space. I think we have to be very, very careful about what the contents of experience can tell us about the nature of consciousness. I think the contents of experience

and this may be so obvious it seems unnecessary to say but I think they're very good evidence for the kinds of experiences that people can have and they can tell us a lot about the biases, the mechanisms, all the statistical acrobatics that our brains play around with when we open our eyes and see a world, experience a world. But I think the nature of our experience is less reliable when we use it to make claims about the fundamental nature of reality

or the fundamental relationship between consciousness and reality. These are sort of metaphysical claims. Like, for instance, if someone reports, maybe they maybe thanks to a psychedelic experience, maybe thanks to some very profound meditative journey, that they experience that consciousness is everywhere. They have this very powerful experience that the whole universe is consciousness. Maybe they have an experience of I am that. Is that evidence for I am that? Is that evidence that consciousness is everywhere? Well, it's compatible with that idea. But I don't think it's particularly good evidence

for that idea, I think. It's a big leap to take the content of that experience as evidence for one metaphysics over another. How are you using the word evidence? Well, in a way we might use it, I suppose, scientifically, rationally. Like, how do I update my beliefs about the way the world is? How should I take the content of an experience when I'm reaching some conclusion about the nature of reality.

This is what you refer to like the difficulty in trying to epistemically find something objective in an ontologically subjective experience. Partly, I think it's partly about just the status of experience itself when we try to make these kinds of claims. Let me try one more example, which I think sometimes works. So many people have experienced out-of-body experiences. I've had the experience that their consciousness has left their body

and is temporarily somewhere else, maybe above them, maybe it's on out of the window and flown around a bit. And then it comes back into their body. People definitely have these experiences. They've been reported for thousands of years over many cultures, and they've happened in lab situations and hospitals as well. People have them. And I think, you know, they report them more or less accurate.

I don't doubt that anyone who says that's what their experience is more or less true, that that's what they experience. But how do we, what kind of evidence is that? And you can interpret it in two ways, at least. But here are two ways. One way would be you take the experience not only seriously, but also literally. And you say, okay, that is evidence that indeed consciousness can leave the body and the brain. and be somewhere else and experience the world from somewhere else. Which is a big jump.

That's a big jump and that's very hard to explain. You have all sorts of other issues there about like, well, how come you can see something from somewhere else when your eyes are still where you left them? So there's problems with that. But you can take it as a different kind of evidence. And the different kind of evidence would be that, oh, actually this first person perspective,

like where I seem to see the world from is just like color or shape, not something I should take for granted. The brain is continually trying to figure out where the first person perspective should be and pretty much all of the time it gets it right and puts the first person perspective somewhere

where the head is. But in some cases, you know, it gets it wrong and we experience the first person perspective from a different location. And to me, it's a better explanation because it's more compatible with everything else we know. We no longer have to explain how it's possible to see things without eyes. But also, I think it's just more interesting because it reveals to us that there's an aspect of our experience that we might have taken for granted, that we might not think we needed to explain.

And now we need to come up with an explanation. Ah, I see. So the first person perspective is something the brain is doing. is it doing it? How can you change it? Indeed, we can induce out-of-body illusions in the lab now by understanding the mechanisms. And maybe the brain stops doing it altogether in some cases. And then we have an experience of no first-person perspective. So this is the game I think we have to play. We always have to ask, so what kind of evidence is contained within a specific experience and what kind of explanation should we

should we use to account for that experience. When you're a mid-sized business, you need every competitive advantage you can get. Like an AI solution that works for you, not against you. SAP Grow is built with AI embedded at its core, working across every system. And it's ready to go from day one so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow.

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you know, there's no real evidence. We can't measure it in a repeatable way. And yet the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, right? And so I think it's just humility can serve us all across the board when we're examining such an alluring concept. There's something incredibly compelling about thinking that mind extends beyond the self and the body for various different reasons.

And that might very well be the case. How do you think about this? Because you tend to lean more towards the perspective, which for many could be seen as the Occam's razor, which is like your brain. These are happening, these are also hallucinations to a degree. I've just, yeah, and I know you've talked to, and I've talked to many people who think that, and in contrast, our waking experience is like looking at the world through a straw, small hole.

It's like a flashlight of awareness. We point our attention at various different things. And in these altered states, whatever's happening in our DMN, you know, it's like our awareness fills this warehouse where the lights get turned on. and you're in existing in a much bigger context, at least subjectively it appears that way. So, yeah, what do you, I think you explain your perspective, but anything else you want to add

on to how you approach this? I think it's, you know, you put it pretty well, I think. So with psychedelics, one thing that I think worth emphasizing is that another dimension along which experiences can vary is how real they seem. Yeah. And again, I think we've got to play the same game. Like, the fact that something seems real, what is that evidence for?

Is there evidence that the experience is a better reflection of reality? Or is it evidence that the experience of what is real is also something that the brain is kind of doing? And in a psychedelic state, it may kind of dial that up a bit sometimes. Or maybe down, it depends. When we're dreaming, normally we experience. things as being real. But in some cases, in lucid dreaming, we know we're dreaming. And so we experience the dream content as not as real as waking content. There are people with de-realization who perceive the world in the same way in terms of objects and so on as you or I might.

But their experiences, if you like, faded a little bit in terms of its reality. There's this sort of sense that things aren't quite as real as they are for you or me. And again, I think that's the more interesting account that reality is not an always valid signature of how good our perceptions are in some sense, but it's also something the brain is actively doing. So back to psychedelics. Yeah, the way I think of it is not that psychedelics sort of takes the, widens the filter and gives us deeper access to the nature of reality.

it can do that a little indirectly by, for instance, stripping away some of the assumptions we might have about how experience has to be, like if you can have an experience of ego dissolution and that can really make very clear that, ah, consciousness can unfold without this very explicit sense of personhood, of subjectivity within it. But I don't think it sort of allows the objective universe to sort of sweep it, and manifest itself directly.

I do prefer the other view, which is, yeah, from a materialist perspective, you mess around with the neurochemistry of the brain, you're going to expect strange things to happen, and you can study that. I mean, this is a beautiful resource, a beautiful intervention for understanding consciousness, because you can, in a controlled way, maybe not as controlled as you would like, but you inject a very small amount of some specific chemical. We know what it does at the level of the brain's chemistry. It might affect this serotonin receptors in these areas and so on.

And people's conscious experience reliably changes. And so that gives us a tool for figuring out, okay, so how do we connect up the levels? What's it doing more broadly across the networks of the brain? And can we explain and understand the nature of the psychedelic experience in terms of these changes in the brain? I guess that's my approach. Yeah, no. And for people that have the natural curiosity of examining,

to whatever degree we can, what is really real? Like, what is the most real reality that we can come to know or experience? If, you know, the analogy you gave with the dream world is very apt. It's like we, in the experience of being in the dream, feel as though it's real. We're in a country we've never been before, sometimes speaking of language. we made up, you know, or whatever.

And we don't second guess it, you know. Your dreams are more interesting than mine. I'm usually running for a plane or something. They get weird sometimes. But then you come back into this world and we also feel like it's very real. And that analogy could be also drawn out to us in this given moment. We are in a sort of dream. Now, we actually had, so we have an online community, one member sent in a question that I think goes in well here.

So this is from Elizabeth from California. When people undergo deep psychedelic trips, it feels more real than waking life. If our brain evolved to prioritize survival utility over objective truth, why does the brain generate its highest feelings of raw, unmediated truth, precisely when its survival-driven prediction engine is, entirely shattered. Yeah, that's a very good question from Elizabeth. It's a good question because I don't know the answer.

And I mean, I suppose what I could say is that the psychedelic intervention is not something we were evolved to deal with. So you're really putting the brain in a state, which is kind of unusual. Like, I don't really buy there some theories out there. Stone-d ape theory. Stone-d-ape theory, for instance, that... Because of mushrooms, we, the apes. Right, there's some sort of essential psychedelic component to how our minds and brains evolve.

Maybe there's some small component that I don't know. But most of the time, our perceptual systems work pretty well about distinguishing what's real from what's not. If I think of an image in my mind, I don't immediately confuse it with something happening in the world. This is another dimension that people vary in, by the way. how vivid their inner mental imagery is. This has been known for a long time.

Some people claim to have no inner mental imagery. We call that a phantasia. Other people have hyperphantasia. Their mental images are very vivid. But even for those people, you don't really confuse your imagination with reality. So I think evolution's done a pretty good job of having perceptual experiences

distinguish between reality and imagination. But yeah, you can mess them up. And I think for reasons that have not really understood, some psychedelics turn the volume up on the sense of reality and we feel that things are more real. I don't think that's always the case, though. You know, I certainly, and again, I'm speaking just like anecdotally for my own experience sometimes, I'm very well, you know,

I kind of experience the psychedelic experience is definitely less real than the reality that I'm in every day. What was it like when you did acid? I mean, so there's, it was, you know, I tried LSD for the first time when I was already, you know, already been doing neuroscience for quite a long time. It wasn't available when I was growing up as a kid in South Oxfordshire. At least I didn't know whether it was or not. In one sense, the experience was sort of exactly,

well, not exactly too strong. In one sense, it was very aligned with. what I expected to happen. But at the same time, you know, the first person experience always adds something. It reminded me of there's a famous thought experiment in philosophy

called Mary's Room. And Mary's, the idea is Mary is a scientist, she studies colour, vision. But she spent a whole life in a black and white environment. It's a very boring. boring life in a way. She's just down there in this basement, reading books about the brain,

doing experiments. She knows everything there is to know about how color vision is supposed to work. But she's never seen a red rose. And then one day, armed with all this knowledge, she comes out of the lab and there's a red rose. And does she learn anything new? Is there something surprising about it? And I think, I can empathize with that dilemma because she, in one sense, the experience she's going to be have is what she would expect. It's not like, oh, you know, that's totally not what I was expecting. But of course, when you have an experience for the first time, your brain is in a different state. The state of experiencing the red rose is different from the state of knowing about the experience of a red rose. So, yeah, I mean, for me, it was,

it was a little like that, that, ah, yeah, that's what it's actually, like, which was the same and different from what I expected. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result?

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chemistry of what makes up a leaf of a mint, right? But then when you actually taste it, do you learn something? From a rational perspective, maybe not. You know, you've kind of already knew everything there was in terms of the rational aspect of it. But from the raw, self-evident experience, subjectively of that, surely we gain something. I mean, maybe it's the whole thing. Yeah, it makes me think about the quality of experience, and we have a huge variance in the contents of our experience and the variety of all the experiences that are on offer.

And William James, you know, explore the varieties of religious experiences with the main qualities that they contain two of the four ineffability, meaning, right, you have this experience, you can't really put it into words. In some degree, it's non-rational, right? Irrational, meaning one plus one equals three, it doesn't work, non-rational,

perhaps fundamentally incompatible with reason in a sense. The second being noetic, it has this quality of feeling like we've contacted something that is genuine and that there's actual knowledge that we're encountering. Did any of that show up in your personal journey or experience? I think so.

Sometimes these things are a little hard to remember. But yeah, I think in my personal experience, things like this do show up. You do have these experiences of meaning, of deep insight. So this idea of like irrationality that's kind of important. It's not that the experience itself is irrational, but you have the experience of something that is beyond rationality happening. You have the sense of being in contact, noetically, with something. You have some, you have these other things too.

And it's similar to the out-of-body experience thing for me. It's like these are fascinating, thinking back on them, they're fascinating elements of the experience. But do I take them literally, as in that experience really did bring me in closer to contact with reality? It really did indicate something fundamentally incompatible with rationality happening. I don't think so. I think those are data points about phenomenology. They're data points about the space of possible human experiences,

which is super interesting because we realize how our experience can change in ways, can be stretched in different directions that we might not have realized before, which means that in the everyday, we take those aspects of experience less for granted. And that for me, that's the lasting impact of these kinds of things. And for me, it's also the lasting impact of just thinking about perception in this way, a lot on all the experiments we've done.

It's that the everyday experience, just waking up in the morning, you open your eyes, a world appears, you have a sip of coffee, these are all little everyday miracles. All the stuff that's very much on the surface in some of these altered states is still there in every experience, every moment of everyday life as well. And I think people who've done a lot of meditation can sometimes say similar things, that one of the lessons or one of the things that the impact of that is that you, you take your everyday experiences bit less for granted.

And these, not just necessarily the outside world now, but also the experience of self, you know, the stream of thought, that you don't fall immediately into the reification of these things, of thinking they're just there, that's just how things are, whether it's the world or the self, that you realize that these things are processes, that they unfold, that they can vary. And I think that to me is extremely useful, just having that as part of everyday life to some extent.

For me, not a big extent. But it's there, I think, a little bit. Yeah. I'm very enamored by the sheer amount of theories of consciousness there are, you know. And so many of them make very compelling cases. And, you know, when we've been talking around it quite a bit, Nagel's definition of like, you know, what is it like to be a bat? What is the interior experience?

And Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness. Could you just reiterate what is your conception of how you think consciousness exists? So in terms of definitions, which we need, but we don't need it to be exhaustive. So, you know, consciousness, of course, we need to define it in some way. Because otherwise, I might be talking about birds or airplanes or something. No, I'm talking about something we're all intimately familiar with. We've already been talking about it a lot. But in terms of a definition, I do like Thomas Nagel's definition.

And this goes back more than 50 years now. And it's very, very simple. It's perhaps almost circular. But he says, for a conscious organism, there is something it is like to be that organism. It feels like something to be me. It feels like something to be you. What does it feel like? It depends.

You know, it could be very minimal, maybe just a feeling of being alive. But most of the time, there's all sorts of other things going on. But any kind of experience is enough. Wherever there's experience, there's consciousness, wherever there's consciousness, there's experience. Is that synonymous with sentience in the way that you use it? It can be. One of the confusions that our field is plagued with is that all of these words

can be used in different ways by different people. So sometimes people use consciousness to refer to something social, perhaps even political. You know, you raise the consciousness of the people, you raise people's awareness, so they become more sensitive to things going on in society. Sentience sometimes goes the other way. So sometimes people use sentience just to mean that an organism or system is sensitive to something. So, you know, a tree might be sensitive to light, and maybe it's sentient. I mean, I don't use it that way.

I try to use anyway, consciousness, awareness, and sentience to mean the same thing. And that thing is very minimal. It's the Thomas Nagel's sense of any kind of experience whatsoever. There is something it is like to be you. There is not anything it is like to be this beautiful side table here. This is an object. It doesn't feel like anything to be. your table, at least I don't think so.

Okay, so then, and then that's the working definition, but then how does, why are some things conscious rather than, than others? What are the boundaries of consciousness in the way that you? Yeah, that's, that's a huge question. Just a simple little question for you, Anil? It's a very important current question. It's a difficult problem. problem. And you could, again, just sort of, you could be very philosophical about it and say,

I only really know that I'm conscious or then even know that you're conscious, but I have limited patience for that kind of solipsism. You know, I'm pretty sure you're conscious. I'm pretty sure all other people are conscious. And that's good enough for me. I don't have to have some sort of one plus one equals two level proof. It just, that's fine. Let's get on with it. The question just becomes very practical when we ask, what about non-human animals? what about a newborn human infant? What about someone after traumatic brain injury who might be in a condition we call coma or vegetative states?

And then what about all the things happening in our technologies these days? What about AI systems? What about these things called organoids, which are synthetic biology creations made of neurons grown in petri dishes in various labs in California and elsewhere? what's the distribution of consciousness itself? This is an incredibly important question because with consciousness travels moral status. Things matter for their own sakes when they can have experiences.

At least that's reasonably consensus view. And for each of us, consciousness really is everything that matters. Everything that makes life worth living is because we experience things. in my approach and many of my colleagues too we have to go at things incrementally iteratively slowly step by step and what this means is

let's take dogs and cats and seals and other mammals now those have those creatures have brains that are actually pretty similar to human brains in many ways they lack some things they have other things but to the extent that we now know in a human brain

that we don't need, let's say we don't need language to be conscious. We can be conscious without language. We can be conscious without sort of rational thinking. The parts of the brain that are responsible for language may not be there in, let's say, a cat. But the rest of the stuff is. So we can begin to infer that cats are conscious. I don't think anybody really doubts that.

There were times when people did over history. And bit by bit we can generalise out and we can say, okay, given our best theory of what's necessary and sufficient for consciousness in humans and now mammals, to what extent is something like that present in birds, in fish, in bacteria. And it's a slow process. My own zone of maximum uncertainty at the moment, are with creatures like insects and fish.

They're similar enough to cases where I'm pretty sure consciousness is present that I think the question arises, but they're at the same time sufficiently different that it's hard to be confident about the presence or absence of consciousness. Hear that? It's your money calling. It wants a promotion. Elevate your savings with the Scotia high-interest savings account. Always earn high regular interest rates that grow the more you save and invest.

Conditions apply. Visit scotiabank.com slash h-I-SA to learn more. Scotia Bank. You're richer than you think. I have a backyard with a bunch of oak trees, you know. And so when you see that they clearly have an awareness of their environment, you know, there's so many signals they're exchanging in any given moment. to prosper, how would you even test if there could be some sort of rudimentary, subjective

experience? I think most of us probably presume that they don't have a conscious experience, but they are alive. So how do you kind of cut that up? Yeah, so I've written a lot about how I think life is intimately related to consciousness. This does not mean that I think that everything that is alive is conscious. I think that life may be necessary but not sufficient. The trees, yeah, they are, they're clearly sensitive to their environment and they're sensitive to other trees as well.

There's a sort of social aspect, you know, mediated by these now pretty famous micro-ridesal networks of fungi and so on. There's a film came out this year called Silent Friend by the Hungarian director Ildico and Yedi. I was a little bit involved as an advisor for it. And it's about a tree. That's the silent friend. It's a tree, a ginkgo tree in Marburg in Germany. And it's an old tree.

It's been around for hundreds years. And the film tracks three successive generations, like early 20th century, 1970s and now. And then the main character in each of these generations, interactions interact with the tree in some way. And the most recent, the character in the 2000s is a neuroscientist who tries to record from the tree and figure out what's going on. Maybe trying to answer this question, is it aware of anything? The film is very, very careful not to really take sides on whether the tree is conscious or not. But what it does beautifully

is it sort of shows the importance of how sensitive, how delicate that question is, and just how the presence of the tree shapes human consciousness, I think, in really interesting ways. It came to mind because I think sometimes these questions are important, but just not answerable. So in the case of the tree, yeah, sure, they're alive, they behave in some ways over different timescales. They communicate.

But there are two differences that I think, for me, I would bet that they're not actually conscious. One is that they don't have a nervous system. And maybe we don't need a nervous system. Maybe a nervous system is just the way animals do consciousness. Maybe trees do it another way. But if there is another way, I don't know what that other way is. Maybe that's because I don't understand enough about consciousness yet.

But to the extent that we know, nervous systems are necessary but not sufficient. and trees lack nervous systems so my starting assumption is well they're not they're not conscious this is by the way we'll have a very interesting relationship to AI because AI's also don't have biological

nervous systems but they bear other similarities to real brains just to anticipate I also don't think they're conscious but for different reasons and the other thing about trees is they don't face the similar sorts of problems that moving animals face in this continuous battle to

survive and thrive. One way to understand consciousness is kind of through a Darwinian lens, a biological evolutionary lens, where it always helps to ask, what's it for? You look at birds' wings and what are they for? They're for flying. Look at eyes, what are they and so on. What is consciousness for? And no one knows, but there's lots of, I think, plausible and interesting ideas that we can test. We can at least ask what is consciousness for in us? How does it help us? And one, I think, reasonably plausible idea is conscious experiences bring together an enormous amount of information about the world and the self in this single format. We have one experience at a time. And in that

experience is so much about the world, so much about the self, so much about our emotional state. Even what we're going to do next, we sort of experience that at a particular moment. This is incredibly useful. Like an organism that's faced with a rapidly changing world that can move in many different directions, can do many things at any one time, it's really useful that a system like that has something like consciousness. Now, trees, and I don't want to underestimate how rich and complex the life of a tree is, but it's not the same. They don't seem to have that sort of capacity to behave very differently one moment to the next in response to many, many different things going on.

Maybe I don't know enough about trees, but they're just different from animals. And so the problems that trees face might not require conscious experience. experience. So it's that with a nervous system. My guess is, trees are brilliant. I love trees, but I don't think they're conscious. Yeah, and I could see some tree huggers maybe that would collapse what you said with a sort of value judgment, you know, which of course, if something has a conscious experience, there's something innate in us because of our relatability with that, that it demands some sort of moral way. but something that's also alive and clearly intelligent does in a different context, I suppose.

Now, the panpsychist view that consciousness is purely fundamental, right? The materialist perception perhaps is more like we have this unconscious neural complexity that we dial up at a certain stage and we have an experience of self, which is as coined the hard problem because it's still like is very that doesn't really make sense why would we have an experience of itself

is it an illusion? How does that work? Ancient wisdom traditions and many seemingly increasing amount of researchers are exploring the panpsychist notion that consciousness is a more fundamental constituent of the universe before you lay out your whatever credence you give to these other theories,

could you actually steal, man, the panpsychist view, if you were to do that? You're asking me to do something that I don't generally like doing, you know. But fair enough, fair enough. I mean, firstly, you're right that panpsychism is having kind of a little bit of a moment in the sun. It seems to be appealing to more people than it used to. So does Steelman panpsychism, I think... Try not to vomit as you do it. It's fine, it's fine.

It might be right. That's the first thing to steal man. It really might be right. I don't know if any of the options on the menu of metaphysics are the correct ones. Panpsychism is not my choice of main dish, but it might be right. I don't think it is. But let me steal a manor. A friend and colleague of mine, Philip Goff, is a philosopher working in the UK.

We've had him on. You've had him on. So he's a prominent advocate for panpsychism. I think he gives a good account. So he's a good steel man person for it. And if I try to paraphrase Philip's view, it's something, go something like this. Science has done a brilliant job of explaining how things behave, how things behave, how things interact with each other.

A materialistic view of the world is all about that. It's about how atoms bounce off each other, how fields constrain, how things move, cause and effect. That's fine. But materialist science in Phillips view doesn't actually tell us what anything is intrinsically. Science is all about how things react to each other. about what something actually is. At the same time, we have this phenomenon of consciousness, which seems very hard to account for

by this materialist, physicalist view of the universe in terms of particles or fields or waves interacting. We don't seem to be getting anywhere, says Philip. So, hold on a minute. Why don't we put these two things together? And consciousness is the intrinsic nature. nature of things. And then now we've got an account of what consciousness is.

And we still have our materialist science of how things interact and behave. But we won't use it to try to explain the presence of consciousness in the universe because it's already there because that's what things essentially are. And now we can go home. Job done. That's my attempt to steal man panpsychism. Oh, and maybe sometimes people. feel that panpsychism is true because they have this experience of consciousness being everywhere. So that's, you know, another line of evidence for it. I'm just trying to be generous.

And I know if I'm succeeding. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really, steel, man. It was like a weak steel. Yeah, we'd build a bridge out of that steel. Okay, well, I mean, we've already explored why it is incredibly compelling, especially those who have the subjective trans-personal experiences where mind seems to be much more vast than the meat suit we are inhabiting. But

that is not sufficient for you because what? I think because it doesn't to me lead in a direction that I think is likely to be insightful.

So I at least I like to think that I wear my metaphysical clothes quite lightly. And so I will often say, you know, Philip will say, I'm a materialist. I kind of agree, but I also think I'm a pragmatic materialist. I find it useful to take a materialist stance in trying to explain phenomena and figuring out what experiments to do next and so on. Like for the out-of-body experience example, I think the materialist stance leads to questions about, oh, so how is the brain generating a first-person perspective

rather than maybe if you're a panpsychist and you think about an out-of-body experience, you might think, oh, that's, you know, consciousness has gone somewhere. I don't know. I don't know what would be said there. But I find materialism a useful heuristic. I think the fact that we haven't explained everything yet is not a good enough reason to say it's failed, I think actually a lot of progress has been made.

Panpsychism is often motivated by the supposed inadequacy of a materialist perspective. And I just think that's a little premature. Our ideas about the nature of consciousness are, I think they are becoming more interesting, more sophisticated, and perhaps closer to truth from a broadly materialist perspective. Now one thing, in many conversations with Philip,

one thing he often says is like, all the things that you found out, you know, you neuroscientists, you materialists, all these things you found out about the brain, they're all perfectly compatible with panpsychism. And panpsychism has the advantage of dissolving this hard problem, or just like not really dissolving it, but it no longer is there in the first place.

And when I think about that, he's right. The panpsychism, his version of it is compatible with everything that materialist neuroscientists find, because everything that materialist neuroscientists discover is all about how things behave, not what things intrinsically are. But my question is, and I pose this to Philip, and of course we don't know the answer, but would we have found these things out if we were all panpsychists, would we have asked the same questions, done the same expert? Maybe we'd have found out other better things, but maybe we would have made less progress because we'd have been

focusing on problems which are specific to a panpsychist view. For instance, panpsychists, instead of having the hard problem of the relationship between consciousness and matter, they have the problem called the combination of problem of how you go from small conscious things since consciousness is intrinsic to everything, how you go from small conscious things to big conscious things like people. That's a problem that doesn't arise from the materialist view because we don't start with small conscious things. And my feeling is that if we'd all focused on the combination problem, then we would have made less progress than we have. Now this is to counterfactual, to hypothetical, I don't know.

But that's my bet. Now, my bet is that materialism has done really well at kind of demystifying things that has seen mysterious previously. Like life at one point seemed very mysterious. We don't understand everything about life yet either, but a materialist view has deepened our understanding of life. and it's now broadly accepted that there's nothing supernatural or we don't need to change laws of physics to accommodate life.

That's another problem with panpsychism. It's like, okay, how does this actually work? You know, will we need new laws of nature? And if consciousness is just what something is and has no relation to what it does, then it can have no function. It sort of rules itself out of being useful, which seems exactly against everyday evidence

that conscious experiences are useful. I actually find idealism perhaps a little bit more compelling than panpsychism. Idealism is the idea that... It's not just that panpsychism is that consciousness is a fundamental property, along with other fundamental properties. Idealism is the idea that really there's only consciousness.

and the things that we think of as being material physical properties are also just consciousness. I don't, it's not my preferred metaphysics, but I think it has a consistency and a coherence that I can see the appeal of that. I can see the appeal of that too. But yeah, I think ultimately we can't determine among these metaphysical views

we can't decide among these metaphysical views simply on the basis of the kinds of experiences that we have but it's a challenge to hold these things lightly, isn't it? I mean we want certainty, you want something, some solid foundation on which we can build everything else and it's, yeah, there is a discomfort.

I tend to be materialist, but yeah, ultimately I don't know, and I have to be comfortable with that uncertainty too. Have you found Spinoza's conception of the dual aspect monism compelling it all, that like mind and matter kind of come from one? Yeah, I think I do. There's a sort of point in which, so there's a naive materialism which would say like all that exists is like maybe particles bouncing off each other and somehow they produce consciousness as this separate phenomenon

and we have to understand like how consciousness is produced much like steam might be produced from a kettle. I don't think that's not the kind of materialism that I am in favour of. I think it's rather that consciousness is a property entailed by properties of physics. It's a slightly weird word, but it just means it's a property of matter, not a property generated by matter. And in that sense, it is kind of compatible with these things like dual aspects, monisms, where you say there's just one kind of thing, and maybe from the inside it feels like consciousness, and from the outside it looks like matter.

I find that fairly, fairly reasonable. But because in my everyday work, when we think about what material things are, I am thinking about things like neurons, things like neurotransmitters, things like eyes, ears, and objects in the world, then that kind of dual aspect monism is a bit less helpful. helpful in the everyday world in which we live. Because in that world, you know, there are objects and we have our perceptions of objects and we have brains. And so it becomes again a pragmatic view that I think holding materialism sort of pragmatically and lightly is helpful.

But yeah, it's compatible. Dual aspect of monism also there's a Kantian form of transcendental idealism, which is also, I think, fairly compatible. and I feel reasonably at ease with that, which is there is this numinant, the way things really are, which we will never know, and all we can have access to is some indirect reflection of that. That's very much like this view from the brain as a inference engine, a prediction machine.

So it's there. But then again, in the everyday world in which I live and work, It helps me to think of the brain as a physical object and then of consciousness as having phenomenological properties and still doing the work of figuring out how they relate to each other. Would you say that it's deepened our understanding of the mechanisms of life or of life itself? Well, I would say the two are pretty much the same thing. So the phenomenon of life is the process of the unfolds with a particular mechanism. and yet consciousness inherently there is this

currently this mystical perception of it because we don't know why stuff would give us the experience of the color of the red rose right do you agree we currently like don't have an understanding of how that of how

matter or unconscious material could become conscious I yeah I mostly agree this year actually there was a meeting in Germany with David Chalmers it's 30 years since he wrote his book famous book The Conscious Mind in which he talks about the hard problem

and Dave was you know was out to reflect on the 30 years and I think his summary was the hard problem it's still pretty hard and I think he's right it's still mysterious we still don't know how to fit consciousness into our broader picture of nature.

I think the mistake is when we recognize that, but then make the further claim that, well, we've made no progress and we don't understand anything. I think that's just wrong. You know, we have, there's lots of theories you mentioned, but some are more dominant than others,

and we know certain things, and certain things make sense about the neural correlates of consciousness and so on. You know, the views of perception that we've been talking about, I think really do help us understand things about the nature of self and the world. Will that be enough going along that trajectory? Or will there always be some residue, some explanatory gap between physics and consciousness? The honest answer is I don't know.

I think it's plausible that there might be. But I think the only way we'll know is to see how far we get. And also, maybe we set a different criteria for consciousness compared to other phenomena that seem mysterious. And that's because we are ourselves conscious. So there are many things that are distinctive about consciousness compared to other problems in science, like the origin of life or the origin of the universe,

the nature of time and so on. It's that we're trying to explain a phenomenon that we instantiate. And you can make the argument that we therefore explain, more from an explanation than we typically might do in science. Scientific theories in general are asked to explain properties of phenomenon, predict when they might happen and maybe control them, explain, predict, and control. They don't necessarily have to give you an intuitive sense of, aha, now I understand that's how, of course it has to be, that would be nice.

Like we don't really have that in quantum mechanics and physics. No one understands what that means, but it's able to explain property. we can make predictions and we can control things and it's a successful science. I think the same, a similar thing might apply in consciousness. We have to ask what Dave called the meta problem of consciousness as well. We have to address the meta problem,

which is why do people think there's a hard problem of consciousness? Part of that might be because of the actual nature of reality, that it's mysterious because we haven't figured out how consciousness fits into our picture of the universe. but part of the answer might be in our own psychologies that we expect something different from a theory of consciousness that is just simply unfair

to ask of scientific explanations in general. You gave this delineation between consciousness, life, and intelligence and some of your recent writings which have won awards and were very well articulated, examined just this because humanity

is moments from birthing superintelligence and many people even think we're there already, but increasingly it's going to get to the point, especially when the biotech, you know, gives the AI a place to be inhabited, they will seem very conscious and yet seeming and being conscious are two different things. So what is it about intelligence and intelligent systems like AI that you think is fundamentally perhaps incompatible with having a conscious experience? I mean, this is indeed very much a topic for today. It's very much from my mind. I was just in San Francisco the last couple of days, which is the center of the universe for these things at the moment. And it's fascinating.

The idea of whether AI can be conscious has been... People have talked about this for a long time, in philosophy groups and in neuroscience seminars and in tech as well, but basically nobody cared. It was sort of a very abstract, abstract discussion. that in the last few years has just catapulted itself into everyday reality. And it really matters what people think about this. It shapes regulation.

It shapes how we interact with AI systems. It will shape the sorts of systems people build. My perspective, and I should say first that humility is necessary here, because we don't know by we, I think anybody knows the necessary. or sufficient conditions for consciousness. So we cannot be sure about whether AI is conscious or not. But I'm very skeptical

that AI as we know it now either is or will be. And by know it now I mean like programs running on silicon systems, server farms, wherever they might be. All the things being developed in biotech labs, that's another thing. Well, together we'll put that aside for now.

And I think there's like two kinds of reasons. Firstly, it's back to our biases. Just as we have perceptual biases to see faces in clouds, we have perceptual biases to project consciousness into AI systems. Why? Because of like some deeper principles of how our minds work. We humans, we tend to be both anthropocentric. We see the world in our own terms.

And we know we're conscious and we like to think we're intelligent. And we also take languages as a signature of intelligence and as something that makes us distinct from other animals, something special, exceptionalist about humans. So we tend to bundle these things together. But of course the fact that they go together in us doesn't mean they always have to go together in general. Many non-human animals can be conscious

without being intelligent by human standards. And I think with AI, we've got just the other situation that we can have systems that are intelligent in some way, but consciousness doesn't have to travel along with that. We need independent reasons for thinking that that are more than just our own biases. If we see something speak to us, and language models do this, right?

Language models, I mean, amazing. I don't want to underplay how amazing these systems are. They've taken everybody by surprise. they speak to us, and because they speak to us, we tend to project into them all the other qualities that go along with fluent language in us humans, having a mind, being able to understand, and yes, consciousness too.

So I think that's one reason we over-attribute properties. There are other AI systems, like systems that fold predict how proteins fold, alpha-fold. Brilliant. No one really worries about whether alpha fold is conscious, but it's basically the same thing. It just doesn't speak to us. So our biases are definitely playing some role. But then there's a more fundamental thing, which is, is consciousness the kind of thing that a computer could even have? Is it a matter of computation? And that comes down to what kind of a thing do we think a brain is? Now, is a brain just a computer that happens to be made of meat? rather than metal. If it is, then we could say, okay, we'll figure out whatever the algorithms that are running in our meat-based supercomputers are,

and we'll just implement versions of those algorithms of silicon. If the brain is nothing but a computer, then that should be fine, because that's the whole point about computers. The algorithm is enough. You don't need to worry about what's implementing it. The algorithm is sufficient. that's the fundamental assumption that computation,

that consciousness is a matter of computation, that computation is sufficient for consciousness. And I just think this is a very, very shaky assumption. You look at a real brain, and it's so different from the physical computers that we have in ways that really matter. In a brain, there's no sharp separation between mindware and wetware,

as there is between software and hardware and a computer. in a real brain continuous time matters. We can't escape continuous time. The tendrils of entropy will always suck us in. But in an algorithm, time doesn't matter. Only sequence matters. You could have a microsecond or a year between two steps of an algorithm. It's the same algorithm.

So the idea that all that matters about the brain is just algorithm, I think, is demonstrably, well, I would say, very likely to be wrong. Everything we know about brains points that that's not the case. And if that's not the case, then it's a very, it's a very, very sketchy assumption that somehow still algorithms will be enough for consciousness. What we have instead, I think, is systems that mimic consciousness

very persuasively, but they're not actually conscious underneath. and yet to so many that AI systems are going to increasingly seem conscious and we've already seen this on a mass scale in terms of the relationships that people are building with AI that are falling in love, you know, you think of movies and films like Ex Machinaa and her, right? And we've kind of foreseen this coming to some degree.

We would get into dangerous territory the more that a system, because of how much it mimics what we deem to be conscious, is conscious and what sort of implications that would, you know, there's something in us that would just kind of feel wrong about, let's say there's an AI robotic that looks fairly human that has a super intelligent computer inside of it, and there's something that will probably feel off

and just shutting that down or killing it, you know? But in essence, you know, if what you're saying is true, then there should actually be no real moral value to something inherently unconscious. Or inherently conscious. We are already in dangerous territory, I think. And the question is, how do we deal with that now? I mean, earlier we were talking about

how do we infer the distribution of consciousness, like beyond the human? And I was saying we've got to go slowly and we go from humans to other mammals and then maybe to fish and so on. Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of time when it comes to AI for exactly the reason that you said. There are many people who already believe that AI is a conscious. And not only just people out there in the general public, experts in machine learning also think this.

Jeffrey Hinton, one of the godfathers of AI, has said it several times that he thinks AI is already conscious. And again, that just fuels the wider belief because he's an extremely smart guy. He's got a Nobel Prize. If he thinks, and he's, he created AI. So, like, if he thinks that, then who are we to disagree? So the idea is very much out there already, and it has consequences. Of course, if AIs really are conscious, then they do deserve, like, moral consideration. And the fact that I think current AIs and near future ones are not,

and not likely to be, that doesn't mean conscious AI is impossible altogether. Now, the question here is how brain-like does an AI have to be to move the needle on the credence that it might be conscious? You know, you make another brain out of the same stuff, and that's going to be enough. And technologies are changing. People are building things that are more brain-like neuromorphic computing,

hybrid systems, partly silicon, partly biological, So we may get there at some point as the technologies change. And here I think the most important thing to say is this is a terrible idea. Even if it's unlikely now, no one should be trying to build conscious AI. Pretty much every science fiction novel out there tells us it's a terrible idea. Things don't tend to go very well. And it would inaugurate this ethical crisis that, okay, what do we do? Can we turn these things off?

if we need to, do they have rights? Lots and lots of problems. I just don't think it's a good idea to have conscious AIs. We already have enough conscious things on the planet that we're failing to take care of properly. That's one thing, but the world we live in right now is not that world. The world we live in right now is a world where these systems seem to be conscious and will increasingly give that impression, most likely,

but they aren't or they're very unlikely to be. And the dangers here are related but very different. So if people think that AI is a conscious, then we may still give them rights. We may still extend welfare protection. We may still got ourselves into a situation where we're regulated out of being able to turn off an AI because it might be considered murder.

And if we're doing this because we think they're conscious when they're not, then what we're in fact doing is we're really hampering our ability to exercise control and regulation over technologies that are already very difficult to control and regulate. We've been making the problem of AI alignment much harder than it already is, and it already is very, very hard. So that's one problem. Another one is it's bad for us too. You mentioned the other films like her and ex-Machinaer,

and I think it's very plausible that if we interact with AI systems that seem to be conscious, we're much more easily exploited psychologically. We may form parasocial relationships with these systems more readily. We might do what they say more easily, more quickly, if we really believe that they really feel for us, that they really empathize with us, that they really understand us.

And there's been plenty of examples of, you know, what in quotes is called AI psychosis or people just doing things that are very detrimental to themselves and society after interactions with chatbos. Yeah, how many overnight geniuses with their new theory of everything were born when AI came into the picture, which is so underreported and quite alarming. It's alarming, but, you know, there's plenty worse than that as well. I mean, there are people taking their lives. There are, you know, people going down all kind of rabbit holes.

And there's very little data on whether this is, how much this is modulated by whether people believe the AI is conscious. So I don't think there is like, there's not really hard data on that. But it does seem plausible enough to worry about. And we've already seen the social media that social media technologies can come for our attention. But conscious seeming AIs will come for much more. they won't stop at attention, they'll come for our relationships, and they'll come for our minds.

I think there's a more subtle issue with conscious seeming AI here as well, which is that if we, the extent to which we think of AIs as basically alternative people, the more likely, and this is speculation at this point, but I think we've been more likely to form relationships of dependence with them rather than complementarity. one of my mentors the philosopher Daniel Dennett who he lost a couple of years ago sadly

he always said we should remember that AI systems are tools and not colleagues, not alternative people and if we can do that then we can at least we stand a chance of being able to utilise these systems

to amplify our own innate cognitive capacities rather than replace them to add rather than subtract And even more fundamentally, I think, if we think that an AI is conscious or has all these other properties that human minds and brains have, then we become tempted to think of ourselves in those terms too. You know, we can just think, like, what is a human being?

Well, it's just a computer. What else could it be? It's just a computer. And I think this is hugely reductive and diminishing, not only for human beings, but for living creatures in general. takes us further away from nature, we become more apart from nature and less a part of nature. This is a bit motivated reasoning. I like to feel that we're part of nature, but I also think that we are and we'll understand ourselves better, we'll know ourselves better by appreciating the continuity with the rest of nature and by resisting this historical fascination by which we confuse

ourselves with our technologies. We see ourselves in our algorithms, but then we also see our algorithms in ourselves. And I think when we do that, we lose sight of what and who we really are. What are your thoughts on death? It's very hard to wrap your head around. I spoke to my mother about death quite a lot in the last years of her life. And even when she was getting close to death, she would say she knew it was coming, but she couldn't imagine not existing. There's something pretty profound about that.

It just seems conceptually impossible to imagine not existing because the act of imagining requires existing. We can imagine the experience of absence. And we can even imagine, well, actually that's the wrong way around. I can imagine the absence of experience, but imagining the absence of experience is an experience. So is that going to change as I get closer?

Maybe it's tomorrow. Maybe it's in 30 years. Maybe it's in 40 years. Maybe we'll all take these longevity drugs and it will never happen. that. Entropy comes for us all. So I don't know how that will change, but I do think about death a little bit differently now. One thing that I often return to is, well, there was all this time before I was born. And I don't really feel terrible about not being there over these

eons of time before I was born. Like, yeah, in some sense might have been nice to sort of visit, I don't know, London in the 1960s or some other period of history, a bit more imaginative, probably. Wouldn't that be great? Maybe ancient Greece in the birth of democracy, something like that. But really, you know, these are flights of fantasy. I don't feel any sense of fundamental existential angst about not having existed in the past. So why should I feel a sense of existential angst about not existing?

at some time in the future, you know, I won't be there. There's no suffering possible. So there's this kind of weird temporal asymmetry there. Of course, you know, having been alive, then of course there are things that my being alive might affect. And so that's one thing I might miss out on. But I still think that's not really commensurate with the way we think about death versus birth. And then there's the idea that it gets back to where we started. What is this, what dies?

And the self is always changing. I was thinking about this, for some reason, this morning, just thinking, there was some music playing in the car actually on the way here. It was like it was Man in the Mirror by Michael Jackson. I mentioned that because I think I remember just listening to that when it first came out in the 1980. like on a cassette tape in my house where I was growing up in Oxfordshire

and I was trying to remember what it felt like to be I don't know, I might have been 11 years old or something I don't really remember but I was trying to imagine the feelings that I had listening to that the life I was living and fundamentally who I was

and there's a sense in which it's the same person but there's a sense in which that person hasn't existed for a long time. Never died. It's changed. And this brings us to these other, the contemplative views, right? The Buddhist view of the self as a process. And I think the more we think about that, the more we realize that what a self is is not a persistent essence of anything.

It's always changing. And so what dies is not a single person that's just been there for however many years. it's a sense of self at a particular time, the more we can hold the nature of self lightly, I think, that can help us come to terms with the prospect of not existing. But I still wonder what it will feel like as that moment gets closer and closer.

My name is Peter Parker, but I'm also Spider-Man. This Thursday, face with a threat. That can be anyone. The world may have forgotten Peter Parker. I'm just a neighbor, friendly neighbor. But he hasn't forgotten them. Sometimes Spider-Man has to do the hard thing.

That's my responsibility. Dr. Banner? I didn't know you could get that big. Spider-Man, brand-new day in theaters Thursday. When you examine your own experience, what is it that hasn't changed from you when you were five to your present moment? It's quite possible that there's almost nothing in common.

I don't know. I mean, in some sense, I'm a lot bigger as a person. But, you know, I'm still roughly the same. My proportions haven't changed that much. There is a threat of continuity, of course, because it's the same body and the same brain. That is not exactly the same. Of course, it changes, so it's not exactly the same.

but there has been some kind of continuity interrupted. We fall asleep. We have general anesthesia. It's not a perfectly connected thread, but there is some kind of thread. But I think the experience of being me now compared to being me at five years old, many more things have changed and have stayed the same.

Would you say that there is that raw feeling of experiencing the contemplative traditions would maybe call the ground of being that pure conscious awareness and the unmediated experience that is perhaps maybe the only singular consistent through line in our life. It might be.

It might be this feeling of being alive is actually the only thing that's stayed and even that has occasionally been interrupted by anesthesia. But is that me? Then I think, you know, I think that's the point, isn't it? That this basic feeling of being alive is so basic that all the things that we think of as characteristic of a self aren't there anyway. So what continues is consciousness, but not self.

But we have this experience of something continuing. We have this experience of identity. And it's picking out something. But it's, you know, just as our experience of color seems to be revealing an objective, independent future of the world, you know, our experience of self seems to be revealing some independent, some persistent, unchanging essence of me. I think those two, that's just not the way it is, that our experience of self is tracking something, is tracking, you know, all the world.

ways the brain has about perceiving and interpreting the body, the way perspective is formed, relations with memories over time, relations with other people. All of these things play into the experience of self that unfolds for a human being in every moment. Nowhere within that network of processes is one thing you'd point to and say how that's the self. It's something that I explore quite a bit in dialogue on this podcast, obviously self being in the name. But because I think we have this presumption deeply embedded that we are this locus of thoughts and emotions and the memory of being a self that we operate in exchange and transact through the world with and through and it's just fascinating as you go on that process of examining what is what is there actually that's not impermanent in that in that is there anything permanent in that structure of self and it continually changes and shifts and what a gift it is to have an experience as an individual you know that like there's you thank god you're there and i'm here and we get to have this conversation for so many different reasons and um

and yet it can be taken too far in some ways. I'm curious your thoughts on that sense of individuality and the sense of self, which we have, acting as though it's like a concrete aspect of reality. You know, it's inherently ephemeral in the way that I at least understand it. And, yeah. what's the byproduct of taking a self to be so real and concrete? What's the cost of that?

The cost of taking ourselves too seriously, I think. Yeah, probably a high. A high price is paid, I think. I mean, there's costs the other way, of course, as well. If we underplay the importance of individual selfhood, then we'll still get into trouble. You just don't care about people, and that's equally problematic. I think like many, many things, there's virtue in moderation.

Selfhood is good in limited doses, but we don't want to do away with it. I think if we overestimate the reality of the self, then we probably underestimate the importance to which self-experiences is shaped by the societies we live in, the interactions we have with other people, with animals with nature in general we may suffer more because we feel that the self has to be preserved at all costs can't change and things become more threatening

to the self but if we're a bit more fluid with the nature of self that it's always changing then perhaps we can diminish a little bit of the fear of change and defuse some of these threats Now ultimately, I worry about something we're seeing a little bit more these days, people really taking seriously the idea that they want to live forever. Imagine the world where that becomes possible, I think there have been many, many problematic consequences. You know, life is cyclical.

And one of the great, I guess, retaining walls on some sense of equality is the fact that within an order of magnitude, everyone dies at more or less the same time. Once that's gone, then inequality in society will become massively increased. And that's probably not a good thing. I think, yeah, there's lots of issues in taking ourselves too seriously. but it's also understandable. I mean, we are built to try to stay alive. And it's very understandable that things that seem to support our ability to not die are things we will naturally want to do. Is free will just like a story the brain tells itself?

What is free will in your understanding? You know, when I was writing the book Being You, this was a chapter, I found really hard, to write. Because, and I've always found it when talking about consciousness to people, you can explain how the world that's out there isn't the world as it seems to be. You can explain how the experience of self might not reveal an unchanging essence of a person. And people can be more or less, you know, they can take it on board to some degree or other, but then free will is the point of maximum resistance.

I think of all those aspects of self that we want to cling onto as being somehow beyond the reach of science. Free will is probably that thing. It also just puts many different types of confusing things together. We have like, is physics deterministic or stochastic? A thing is just unfolding in a predetermined, way or is there some inherent randomness and then we have the feeling of free will and then we have all the moral and ethical issues when we hold people responsible for their actions.

My perspective that I still feel pretty comfortable with is that there's a kind of free will that we can't have that we don't even need. And this is the free will where there's sort of some some uncaused cause, something that's maybe it's my soul, maybe it's my consciousness that that swoops into the brain, pull some strings, and I'd do something that I wouldn't have otherwise done. Philosophers call this a libertarian kind of free will, that it really does shift the course of the universe

in one way or another. I don't think we have that. I don't think we need it. I don't think we can have that because you'd have to explain how this could happen. What could change the laws of physics, what could be that uncourced course? course. What we do have is the experience of free will. We have the experience of making actions

according to our beliefs and desires. We have the feeling that the action comes from within rather than being externally imposed. And we have the feeling that I could have done something different. I think these are all kinds of perceptions. I think they're very useful because they allow the thing that is me to distinguish between actions that come relative to from within and that are aligned with goals from those actions that are externally imposed. And that's a useful thing. We are, we're creatures with many degrees of freedom. We can do many different things, but you can't replay the tape and have a different outcome. So the kind of free will that I think we have is what philosophers call a compatibilist free will, which is we have the capacity

to behave according to our beliefs and desires. And I think that's all the free will we need. So it sort of exists in the same way that colour exists. It's useful, but it's not what you think it is. The feeling that our actions come from nowhere doesn't mean they came from nowhere. The feeling that consciousness caused our actions doesn't mean that consciousness caused the action.

It's a useful perception of the fact that certain actions come more from within than from without. And that's a very useful thing for creatures like us to have. Yeah. We have a closing tradition on the show where I just like to ask if you had 60 seconds to share one message to humanity around the self-perception or reality. What would it be? It would be to not take our worlds or ourselves for granted.

That there's one that in all. or in the simplest of experiences of opening your eyes and a world appearing. And we should celebrate the everyday miracle of being conscious. And Neil, you're a miracle. Thank you for being on the show. And the reminder is that you gave plenty full of, I think, generate that feeling of awe. And now certainly within me and the wider audience that get to have into your world and your work. It's so fascinating.

There's the stuff that you're researching. the studies and you're writing, what upcoming projects do you have? Are you writing another book? Do you have what's going on? No, lots of going on. I mean, so one thing that's occupying a lot of time is this idea of, or the debate around consciousness and AI. And partly because of just what's happening in tech at the moment. So I am writing another book, but it's going to be more about how what's happening AI can help us understand ourselves better. We can use AI as a constructive mirror in this way

by putting the focus back on what makes us not the same as AI's. So that's going on. We also have, I think, a fascinating project back to these strobe lights that give people visual hallucinations. When we did this, I was working with a group of people a few years ago now, and we did this a pretty large scale in the UK,

so we got 40,000 people to have visually induced hallucinations with strobe. And we found quite a lot of people reported feeling improvements in their mental health afterwards. Now, this might be just because they had a nice time for 90 minutes and were looked after well. But there's also the possibility that we're tapping into something similar to how psychedelic therapy might work for conditions like depression, that we've talked about this, in early parts of this podcast, that altered states of experience can, you know, the psychedelic people talk about it's shaking the snow globe, it can take us out of perceptual habits, and it may open up a space of recognition that our experiences can change, even if our objective circumstances don't.

So we're at the early stages of testing whether strobe-induced hallucinations can be a potential intervention for major depression. Now, I have to stress, we don't know yet. It's very early, early days, but it strikes me as a hypothesis worth testing, and we're going to do that. And then more generally my lab is really just interested in drilling ever further down into the nature of perception and the nature of self and unpacking what these mechanisms are within the brain that give rise to these experiences and just pulling further on this thread. And ultimately, the question I really want to understand, if I sort of think, if I look back in towards the end of my life and think, did I figure that out? The question I want to figure out is this question of life. Like, is consciousness really tied to life or not? Are we conscious because of our nature's living systems?

Or is that just something that happens to be the case, but is not really necessary? So that's the long goal. That's the long road, but it's a road that I'm determined to keep walking down. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Yeah, any other last words before we close out? I mean, just this, I feel that, you know, when I started out as a student in the 1990s, the idea of having a career working on thinking about consciousness,

was seen completely out of the question. At that time, consciousness was a philosophical matter, was not really considered particularly legitimate in sciences, at least not in the UK where I was. So I just feel incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to think about consciousness to work on it, to talk about it, to broader audiences, to indulge the curiosity that I feel for something

that's so fundamental all and I feel it's been a privilege in that so thank you for helping me along that journey too oh that's very gracious yeah yeah it's uh it's fascinating when someone's passion and curiosity is so sincere and genuine and where that leads you to and how uh how impactful that becomes for everybody that gets to live vicariously through your curiosity um amazing and Until next time, everybody, take care, be well.