Modern Wisdom - #272 - Philip Goff - What Is Consciousness?

Episode Date: January 21, 2021

Philip Goff is a Professor of Philosophy at Durham University and an author. Consciousness is the most evident of all phenomenons. It's the one thing we can actually be sure of, and yet we have a very limited understanding of what it is and why it's here. Expect to learn the main philosophical positions on consciousness, why Philip thinks the old proposals are insufficient to explain our awareness, what time racism means, why Deepak Chopra just won't me alone and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 3.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy Galileo's Error (UK) - https://amzn.to/3ixvxY7 Buy Galileo's Error (US) - https://amzn.to/3qyxCWu Check out Philip's Website - https://conscienceandconsciousness.com Check out Philip's Blog - https://www.philipgoffphilosophy.com Follow Philip on Twitter - https://twitter.com/Philip_Goff  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Philip Goff, professor of philosophy at Durham University and an author. We are talking about one of my favorite topics today, which is consciousness. Consciousness is the most evident of all phenomena. It's literally the one thing that we can be sure of that exists. And yet we have a very limited understanding of what it is and why it's here. So today, expect to learn the main philosophical positions on consciousness. Why Philip thinks the old proposals are insufficient? What time racism means? Why D-Pack Chopper just won't leave me alone?

And much more. Honestly, I feel like I could have a discussion on this for days. I love getting a philosopher on, like Philip, who's been in the literature and thinking about this topic for years and years, and then we just get to hear over the space of an hour everything that he's learned over decades of research, and then we're fully up to speed, we're mostly up to speed, about what it is that he's found out. If you enjoy this episode, please share it with a friend that is the best way to support the show, the only way it grows is people like you sharing it with people like you. But now please give it up

for the wise and wonderful Philip Goff. So, Shay, we're only a couple of miles away from each other and yet, I've had to use the internet to communicate. If you reached out of your window, I could probably just shout the podcast to you, I think, just stick a recorder in the middle of it. Ah, it's a crazy time to live in some future time, we'll have to get together. It is indeed. You're a philosopher. What you're doing talking about consciousness? Isn't

this the job of a neuroscientist or a biologist? Why are you here? Excellent question. Yeah. So I guess, yeah, I mean, it's broadly agreed that there's some big profound challenges surrounding consciousness. You know, we, despite our scientific understanding of the brain, we don't have even the beginnings of an explanation of how complicated electrochemical signaling could somehow produce this inner subjective world of colors and sounds and smells and taste. So, a lot of, most people are on board with that now, but in line with what you've just said, I mean, a very common reaction is to say, okay, there's a problem, but let's just plug away with our standard ways of investigating the brain and we'll crack it. So I don't think that's right.

I don't think this is just another scientific problem. I think there's a number of ways in which problem. I think there's a number of ways in which the problem of consciousness is radically different from any other scientific problem and that our current scientific approach is really not on its own at least fully equipped to deal with it. So should I say more about that? Why is it different? Okay, so here's the most straightforward point. Consciousness is not publicly observable. Why, you can't look inside my head and see my feelings and experiences. We know about consciousness not from observation experiment, but just from our immediate awareness of our feelings. If I'm in pain, I'm just directly aware of my pain. You can't get at it, but I'm directly aware of it. Now, science is used to dealing with unobservables, fundamental particles, for example, can't be directly observed. But

there's an important difference in all these other cases. We postulate unobservables in order to explain what we can observe. So fundamental particles are postulated part of the standard model of particle physics that explains a huge lot of publicly observable data. So the whole explanatory enterprise is explaining publicly observable data. In the case of consciousness, the thing we are trying to explain is not publicly observable, and that is just a totally different explanatory enterprise. And I think it really constrains our capacity to deal with it experimentally. Is consciousness the only thing that we have that's in that category, or is there anything

else? I think so. I'd be interested to know if you think there are any others. No, not that I can think of, but I wondered if there was an armchair philosophy experiment thought experiment that had come up that had created something similar. Well, well, I suppose there are other things that some philosophers think we need to make sense of that aren't straightforward scientific data. Maybe like the reality of free will or value, facts about value, a lot of philosophers think

we need to somehow make sense of facts about right and wrong and good and bad or abstract objects like mathematicians talk about numbers and sets and lots of philosophers think how do we fit them into the world? But what's unique about consciousness, I think, and makes it just so fascinating, is in all these other cases, it's always an option to say maybe the phenomenon doesn't exist. Maybe we're not really free in the way we think we are.

Maybe there aren't really facts about good and bad, maybe it's just the way we sort of project our feelings onto the world. Maybe abstract objects don't really exist, maybe it's just a useful fiction. But with consciousness, you know, the idea that nobody's ever really felt pain or seen red, that just seems absolutely insane. And some philosophers, do you take that line, my good friend Keith Frankish, takes the line, we can't explain consciousness in conventional scientific terms, so it doesn't exist. It's just like fairy dust or magic, you know, we don't, but you know, most philosophers think, you know, that really is beyond the pale. So there is this datum that we need our theory to account for, but it's not unlike any other scientific datum, it's not a datum of public observation experiment.

I mean, for a lot of the 20th century, consciousness was a sort of taboo topic. It wasn't sort of seen as good proper focus for proper science. That perhaps the high point was the behaviorists in the 1940s who thought, you know, the only proper science of the mind is what is behavior, you know, what you can observe and measure and quantify. And you can understand, I think, in a sense, they were right to think this isn't a normal scientific thing because it's, you know, it's this kind of invisible thing we can't get out for observation experiment. Now, since I think the 90s, people have thought, no, it is science, we've got to deal with it, but they've forgotten how radically different it is from any other scientific phenomenon.

So we're in a kind of, I think we're in a phase of history, we're in a weird middle phase where people do want to deal with it scientifically, but haven't quite got to the point where they realize to do that, we have to really rethink what science is. Yeah, I can't remember who it is, the quote I'm taking, but I remember reading something that said, if it wasn't for the fact that we experience it, the universe would give us no clues that consciousness exists. Exactly, exactly, wasn't for the fact that we experience it, the universe would give us no clues that consciousness exists. Exactly, that's very, I don't know who said that, that's a nice question. So like, a lot of people think the job of science is to account for the data of observation experiment. Right, once we've done that, if we can have our

grand unified theory that can account for all of observation experiments. That's it, job done. If you take that religiously, you wouldn't believe in consciousness because it's not known about in that way. Now, someone who's wonderfully consistent on that is Daniel Dennett, who, you know, says, science is about publicly observable stuff. Consciousness doesn't fit in, so it doesn't exist. And he's wonderfully consistent. I think most people, me and Denner, are at extremes. Most people, I think, are in a confused in the middle where they do think they don't want to say consciousness doesn't exist, but at the same time, they do want to say the only things we believe in and know about on the basis of experiment.

Those two things, though, fit together. So I think either, I, you know, more and more philosophers have come into this point. Either you say consciousness doesn't exist, it's an illusion, like, then it does or Keith Frankish, or you say, we need to rethink science. So the subtitle of my book is Foundations for a New Science of Conscious consciousness. So I'm not doing science, but I think we need to rethink our scientific approach before we can start making serious explanatory theoretical progress on consciousness. Going back to the why your philosophers here question I had earlier on. No matter how you create a theoretical framework around how we should view consciousness. That doesn't actually

change what consciousness is. So the phenomenological experience, the way that it manifests all of this stuff, it's still going to continue going on whatever way it does, which we currently don't have as satisfactory explanation for. But no matter what you guys come up with, no matter how weird and wonderful and plausible the theories are, nothing's actually going to change about the way that consciousness works. So, can we get a satisfying explanation of consciousness from a purely theoretical framework? Yeah, that's a good point.

So some people put the problem by saying it's a mystery what consciousness is. You often hear that, it's a mystery what consciousness is. You often hear that, it's nobody knows what consciousness is. I don't like that way of putting it, because I think nothing is more obvious and familiar than you know what pain is when you feel it. It's not a mystery what consciousness is. So what do we, I mean, let's come to the point, what are we trying to do here?

What is the, what is the, the task, the explanatory task? So I, I think, I mean, the way I've spoken so far is almost as though science doesn't have a role to play. I don't, I don't think that's true. We have a robust and well-developed experimental science of consciousness, and we have a interdisciplinary consciousness group here at Durham, and I, you know, I work when you're a scientist all the time. But what, so how does that work? Well, you can't directly observe someone's feelings, but you can ask them, right?

So you can ask them what they're feeling and what they're experiencing and you can scan their brains at the same time and with an FMRI scanner and you can start to establish correlations. Or sometimes you can stimulate a bit of the brain and ask someone what did you feel then. So we start to establish these correlations and we can try and get systematic about it in the early days and try to put together a general theory of what in general is necessary and sufficient for conscious experience. So that's the experimental task we're making progress on that consciousness is correlated with certain kinds of brain activity.

And that's really important data. But that's not the full story because what we then want is an explanation. Why is why a certain kind of brain activity go along with certain kinds of feelings and experience? Why should that be? And I don't think you can answer that question with an experiment because consciousness is not publicly observable. So all you can do with experiments is just get more correlations. So at that point, I think we have to turn over to philosophers and just look at the various proposals philosophers have offered for explaining why certain forms of brain activity go along with certain forms of experience. So that's what I see is the task-quirly explaining why is it that brain activity goes along with experience and there are various different proposals and we just have to try and assess them and try and work out which one works best

Give us the rundown then what's the I think you talk about three main approaches to answer the mystery of consciousness dualism Yeah, okay, so Yeah, when I study philosophy that we're just two and I got very disillusioned and left for a little bit and then I Discover this third approach, which is the one I like. So dualism is the idea that consciousness is non-physical outside of the physical workings of the body in the brain. And we tend to associate this with religion or some spiritual, but actually the most popular and the most well-known contemporary dualist, the Australian Australian philosopher David Charmers, calls himself a naturalistic

duelist because he thinks consciousness is not physical, but he wants to bring it into the domain of science and think of it as a normal law-governed phenomenon. So what he does is he thinks the aim of a science of consciousness, once we've got these correlations of neuroscience, we then postulate psychophysical laws of nature linking up physical brain activity to conscious experiences. Right, so neuroscience tells us, you know, a certain kind of activity in the hypothalamus leads to a feeling of hunger. Charmus would say, okay, so we postulate a law of nature saying whenever you get that kind of brain activity,

you get that kind of feeling. It's just a fundamental law of nature. So Charmus thinks if there was just the laws of physics, there wouldn't be consciousness. We'd all just be sort of mechanisms. But because there are these special psychophysical laws connecting up the physical to consciousness, that ends up in the result that certain forms of brain activity give rise to consciousness. So that's one proposal. I guess the more familiar proposal, just to get two on the table, the materialist proposes, and no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. There aren't two things here.

Feelings just are patterns of your own activity. So like water just is H2O. Right, so I've got a pane of water here. There aren't two things in here. The water and the H2O. Water just is H2O. So if you consider your feeling of pain and the corresponding pattern of neuronal activity, the materialist says, there aren't two things

there that your feeling just is a pattern of neuronal activity. So, see, see, see, they're two different, very different ways of accounting for the same scientific data. The scientific data is brain activity and experience goes together. Charmers says they're different things tied together by natural laws. The material says they're just the same thing. So they're the two, I guess, most popular options. What's the mechanism that Charmers proposes is happening because there must be some sort of signal

going, neurotransmitters, chemicals, et cetera. Is this where Deepak Chopra comes in and starts talking about quantum mechanics? I feel like this is where he begins going all woo-woo about the energies and the vibrations. Well, I mean, the first thing to say to us for I answer the question is David Charmer's is the most unwool person you can meet. I mean, he's absolutely total atheist secularist.

I once asked him, I think I said this in my book, do you have any spiritual or religious feelings? He said, only that the universe is cool, right? So he's Not a G. Another contemporary dualist, Martina Nida Rumelon, who's passionately anti-religious and hates it being connected. So these guys, they don't believe in any transcendent spritory. They just believe in feelings, pain, pleasure, and they think, you know, we need to

account for this and we can't do it in the normal way. Anyway, but... So what's the connection? So yeah, again, when I was an undergraduate, we were told the big problem with dualism was what's the connection, how to make intelligible. That's being how the mind, right? This was actually what Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia challenged Decarton. You know, the most famous dualist historically was Decarton and she said, oh, I'll I said, oh I'll mess up the quote if I try to remember it, but she was just mystified by how something utterly non-physical could

impact on the brain. And for a long time people took that seriously. I don't think people take that worry seriously anymore for this reason that, well, about 100 years later, the great Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out that actually when it comes to fundamental causal interactions or laws of nature, no one has any explanation. So take the laws of physics. I mean, to take a simple example, Newton's law of gravity. Newton came up with this law of gravity that tells us that objects are attracted to each other with a force that's dependent on the distance between them and the mass and gave us a nice bit of mass. And then people said to him, okay, why does that

happen though? And he famously said, hypothesis, non-fingo, showing off in Latin, I don't frame hypotheses. It's not the job of a physicist to say why things happen. We just give mathematical laws that describe that. It happens. Later Einstein gives a deeper explanation of gravity in terms of matter-curving space time and then matter follows the geodesics through space-time. But he didn't explain why that happens. He gave the equations, took him a long time, ten years, but he just explained why matter-curve

space-time. When it gets down to the fundamental laws of physics, you just have to say, that's just the way it works. So the naturalist of Jules says, well, if you can do that, I can do that. I just think this is a basic law about our universe. If you're saying that's not fair, that you're applying David Charms would say, a kind of double standard. You don't ask the physicists to explain why laws of physics hold.

So why should I have to explain why? And you know, why the psychophysical laws are they just basic fundamental facts about our universe okay what are the main criticisms or what are the reasons why you find dualism and materialism unsatisfying yeah what you want to on first you go for dualism first. Let's go for dualism first Yeah, so a lot of people think there are just straightforward Scientific empirical worries with dualism and the thought is something like if there was

You know non-physical consciousness impacting on the brain Every second of waking life. That would really show up in on neuroscience. You know, there'd be all sorts of things happening in the brain that had no physical explanation. It'd be like a culture geist was playing with the brain and we just don't seem to find that. And so that builds a kind of disconfamation of dualism. I think the more I talk to neuroscientists, the less I think we're actually in a position to assess that, because the more I find out we really don't know that much about the

brain works, and people get very excited about brain scans. But what you have to remember brain scans is every pixel, the tiny pixel corresponds to 5.5 million neurons. So I think what we've got, here's how I think the current state of our scientific knowledge is that, I think we understand the basic chemistry of how neurons fire and various kinds of neurotransmitter, and we understand a fair bit about, so that's the bottom stuff, and a fair bit about the top stuff, like what large scale bits of the brain do, their functions. What we all know almost nothing about, very little about, is how those large scale functions

are realized at the cellular level, how it works basically. And I think until we, you know, to make to put it in perspective, we're about 70% through putting together a connect home for the maggot brain, which is, you know, smaller than the dot on an eye, you know, we're just so far from, you know, really understanding that the workings of the 85 billion neurons in the brain. So I'm not, I don't know, the more I touch in neuroscientists, this is the objection I've always made to journalism, but I'm maybe less sure that I think we'd have to know

a lot more about the physical workings of the brain before we could really be in a position to assess whether there's non-physical influences or not. But anyway, so I'm kind of more agnostic about that the more I go on, but the most straightforward worry is a scientist's self- philosophers, you want a simple and unified, a theory as possible. In dualism, you've got this radical division

in nature between the physical things and the non-physical things. And it's very ugly and disunified. That's what we end up with. That's what we end up with. But all things being equal, it's nicer to go for a more simple and unified theory of reality, and I think there are alternatives. But you materialism, why are you not happy with that?

No, you materialism. Yeah, so I mean, I guess, you know, being a sciencey kind of guy I initially wanted to be a materialist, then just eventually came to the conclusion that this is a non-starler really, and was a bit lost for a long time. That was like me when I tried to enjoy take that music when I was about 11. I was like, everyone else seems to think that this is cool, but I just can't get into it, man. I had a thought when I was a little bit younger with teenage mutant Ninja Turtles.

When they first came on and I thought, this is just absolutely ridiculous. Did you get Biker Maas from Mars? Was it, was that your thing? Biker Maas from Mars. That was, I think that was a bit later. But then it ended up all my friends were into the teenage minigur turtles and I was really left out,

afraid, and then I sort of pretended. I don't conform, I did. I'm afraid I pretended I'd like them all along. And anyway, that was a long time ago. What we talk about, materialism. Yeah, so I think it's a big debate, but the core of the issue is that physical science works with a purely quantitative vocabulary, whereas consciousness is an essentially quality-involving phenomenon.

If you think about the redness of a red experience, the smell of coffee, the taste of mint, you just can't even describe those qualities in the purely quantitative vocabulary of physical science. And so as long as your description of the brain is framed in the purely quantitative vocabulary of neuroscience, you're essentially just leaving out those qualities and it's really just leaving out consciousness itself. And so what I've tried to press, the reason for the title of my book, Galileo's Era, is that we shouldn't be surprised that our standard scientific approach can't account for consciousness

because our standard scientific approach was designed explicitly to exclude consciousness. So in 1623, key moment in the scientific revolution, Galileo, the father of modern science says, right, if we're going to make progress here, we need a purely mathematical science, right, purely quantitative. Thumball is kind of fuzzy, unclear, and precise stuff. We just want it all to be in maths. But he understood quite well from the start that you can't capture the qualities of experience in these terms. You can't capture an equation, the redness of a sunset that experience, the quality in your experience. So he said, right, well, if we want a quantitative science, we need to take consciousness outside of the domain

of science. So Galileo set up this worldview, in which there's this radical division between the quantitative domain of science and the qualitative domain of consciousness, consciousness with its colors and sounds and smells and tastes. And that was the start of mathematical physics. It was only once consciousness with its qualities was out of the way that mathematical physics is possible. So I think just to just finally, I think this is so important because I think what really motivates people to materialism, I think, is this sense that a lot of physical science is great.

Look, it's done such amazing things. Of course, it'll one day explain consciousness. I think that's rooted in a misunderstanding of history of science. Physical science is amazing, but it's been amazing precisely since Galileo designed it to exclude consciousness, right? And the fact that it's done well, since it put consciousness on one side, doesn't mean it's going to do well when we bring consciousness back in.

So yeah, so physical science alone just wasn't designed. It's all part of that thing that it's, it wasn't designed for this explanatory task. It was designed for dealing with publicly observable phenomena with mathematics. It was designed for this thing that's, this thing that's not publicly observable

that involves qualities and trying to explain these unobservable qualities of consciousness. It's a totally different explanatory task. I'm trying to think about since reading the book I was trying to sort of consider my position. I think I probably came into this as what would be class as a materialist and presuming that an emergent quality of a bunch of different neurons firing can be the phenomenon of experiencing something more than just the neurons firing in the same way as when you get a color wheel You know you got all the colors of a rainbow and you look at them and you're like, okay, this is a bunch of things but then if I spin it

Something inherent changes. It's no longer individual colors, it turns white. Does it turn white? I haven't done this experiment since I was about seven. I'm gonna be abused on the internet for not knowing something a seven-year-old knows. Yeah, it turns white. So perhaps individually, if you were to look at the makeup of the brain, this is what it is, but when things combine together, there is an emergent property, something that is a phenomenon of being that particular connection of things. Is that insufficient? That's a very nice analogy. Yeah, yeah, so that sounds like the materialist position.

But, I don't know, so the word emergences is a bit slippery. So I like to distinguish. Feeling like Deepak Chopper again. Deep packs he is a burning tonight. Well, yeah, you got it. You got to precisely define these things. So there's strong emergence and weak emergence. So strong emergencies for David Sharma's view that, yeah, he thinks consciousness emerges in the physical, but only because of these extra laws of nature that bridge the gap. Whereas weak emergencies, you don't need extra laws of nature that bridge the gap. Whereas weak emergencies, you don't need extra laws of nature, you just, you know, it's just like water, the liquidity of water, you know.

So I think if you're going for that weak emergent, just materialist position, what's the problem? So I think what we need is an explanation We need an explanation of the qualities of consciousness in terms of the purely quantitative story of electrochemical signaling of the kind to take an analogy The kind of explanation we have about the boiling point of water, right? If you study the chemistry of water, you have a totally satisfactory explanation of why water boils when it does. We want that kind of explanation, right? Now, but I think to do that, if you were to come up with that kind of explanation, you'd have to be able to describe the qualities of experience in your theory. So, so you give me your theory explaining the redness of red experience in elective terms of electrochemical signal. Your theory would have to describe in the language of physical science the redness of the

red experience and then account for it more for the metal terms. And I just don't think you could do that. I don't eat it's that. It's the wrong kind of concept. Do we even have a language at the moment that you could do that in? Well, yeah, it's famously kind of ineffable, isn't it, meaning you can't... You have to have the experience to be able to do it. So yeah, if we could do that, you could convey to a blind-sense birth and neuroscience just the character of a red experience and you can't do that, you have to a blind-since-birth neuroscientist, the character of a red experience, and you can't do that, you have to actually have the experience.

So, it's a kind of two-stage thing, I think there's an expressive or descriptive limitation to physical science that it can't even describe these qualities, and I think that entails an explanatory limitation, because I think if we were to explain the qualities we'd have to be able to describe them first in the theory and we can't even do that. So it's not just, oh, we haven't worked it out yet. It's, it's, in principle, this couldn't be done because there's just totally different kinds of concept and more, and just to make the point one more time that this was never what physical science was in the business of. It's never been the point of it. So I think we're going

for a phase of history where we're so blown away by how well it's gone. Look, we're winning, we're just continuing to win every single match that we enter. It's 10-0, 10-0, 10-0, and then you come up against an opponent, you can't even hit the goal against. Yeah, we want to say it could do everything. You know, it's, it's, oh, this is it. And it gets into people's identity this sense. Oh, we've found the way we found the true.

But, you know, I think it's gone so well because Galileo essentially gave it a limited focus task that isn't applicable to, you know, to absolutely everything. Yeah. Anyway, that's, that's the thought. I think my view of the human brain and consciousness was informed quite heavily by getting into a lot of evolutionary psychology last year. And I realized upon reading your book that I've been asking myself the wrong questions, or I've been giving myself an explanation of consciousness, which is satisfactory for how it feels phenomenologically, but insufficient to explain why it is the way it is. So for instance, learning a lot about pair bonding and the reason that we have reciprocal

altruism or the reason that pain feels like pain or the reason that we have abstract thought. Like one of the explanations, which I'm sure you're familiar, or the reason that we have abstract thought. Like one of the explanations which I'm sure you're familiar with, the reason that we have abstract thought is so that we can plan doing a thing and see the potential outcomes without having to do it. It also means that we're able to predict what us saying a thing to another person, which would have been, well, highly social species, I can predict what Phillips response to me saying this thing will be, and then I'm able to gauge this theory of mind, right?

I'm able to gauge how I should this sort of metacognosant game, I can play this persona, and I can cultivate myself toward it. But it seems like that can all be fine. And also based on evolutionary psychology, it doesn't seem to massively be debated about why we have those particular,

like it makes sense. It's a fairly satisfactory explanation that by having those particular abilities for abstraction, we're able to do these things and everybody knows what it's like to make a plan and to think about how it might go or how it might fail and et cetera, et cetera. But that doesn't

actually seem to be the same question that we're talking about here. And that kind of was uncomfortable and interesting for me to see at the same time. I was like, I've answered the wrong question correctly. That, I wouldn't say it's the wrong question. I think these are just different questions. It depends what you're interested in and what you're trying to do. That stuff you can tell about is all great and important. My colleague, Kiarabraza, is interested in, you know, how the brain, you know, constructs a theory of mind that is to say an understanding of the mental states of others and the role

of mirror neurons and what mirror neurons tell us about. It's quite good we teach together. So she does the more grounded science and stuff and the more abstract philosophical, so you know cater to both preferences among the students. But I mean, it's not either. It depends what you... So depends on what we're trying to do. So, one way of explaining consciousness is a sort of historical explanation as, you know, why the kinds of consciousness, the kinds of mental state we have are adaptive and good for survival and that's why they've evolved. So, that's a different kind of explanation to that sort of historical explanation is different to what Thomas Nagel calls a constitutive explanation, which is just, you know, right now, what is it that makes

the stuff in my brain that right now produce feelings and experiences? So that's not a historical question about how we got here. It's just, you know, what's going on when I wake up in the morning that, how do we bridge that explanatory gap between the purely quantitative story of the brain and the qualities we immediately apprehend in our experience? It's just the different task. And, you know, talking about evolution, I think early on after Darwin, many philosophers and psychologists actually saw the connection to, well, the view we haven't got onto, that I defend panpsikers and people like William

James saw it fitted very well with the Darwinian framework. So if you know if you're not a panpsikers, you have to think, and this might be a good way to sort of enter the view, you just have to think there's just utterly non-conscious stuff getting more and more complicated and then suddenly a miracle happens. Poof, consciousness appears. Whereas if you're a fan-psych, it's the idea of be what there was before life would unimaginably simple forms of experience and then natural selection molds them into more complicated forms of experience. So, you know, these aren't competing stories at all. Before we get on to. Yeah, well, I guess I guess I came up with that actually teaching philosophy of time and trying to sort of get it across in a vivid jockey

way for the students. So yeah, I mean, there's, well, this is kind of a tangent, but in philosophy of time, I guess they're broadly speaking two views, one is which, one of which is only the present moment exists. The past is cease to be, the future is not yet here, it's sort of common sense view. So on that view, there's something really special about, I was going to say, 2021, it's the only year that actually exists. Whereas the other sometimes called for-dimensionalist view is that all moments of time exist equally. People fighting the Badlahaistings of 1066, people setting up colonies on Mars in 4000. They're

all the bodies are equally solid, the experience is really real. And then the thought will be on that view, if you think there's something special about 6th of January 2021, your kind of time racist, this is chronological show, and if you think there's something special about your time. I love those terms. So much, man. I love those terms.

It's not an actual thing in the sense that, you know, people are kicking up a fuss about this and demanding their right people in the past are demanding I guess it was just a jockey way I sort of thought. I love it. And if you are listening, Carla Revelli, please reply to my emails because I want to get you on to talk about the philosophy of time from your perspective. Oh, he's he's writing and he's contributing to I've got a special issue Oh, he's writing and he's contributing to, I've got a special issue of academics, scientists, I've got a special issue, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, responses to my book and he's one of the consciences.

Oh, hey, that's cool. That guy's an animal. I think he'll be slightly critical. No, he'll be very good. OK, so we've sort of skirted around it. We've laid the landscape. We have two popular, but as far as you're concerned, insufficient theories are just incorrect theories.

What do you propose? Yeah, so the Panpsychus VI proposed is it's a very specific form of panpsychism. So there's been a resurgence of interest in this view. I guess for a lot of the 20th century, it was kind of laughed at in so far as it was thought of at all. But in academic philosophy, there's been a real resurgence of interest in the last five or 10 years. Largely due to the rediscovery of certain important work by, from the 1920s, by philosopher, Bertrand Russell, and the

scientist Arthur Eddington, who was incidentally the first scientist to experimentally confirm Einstein's theory of general relativity after the First World War. So yes, as I often say, I'm inclined to think these guys did for the science of consciousness in the 1920s what Darwin did for the science of life in the 19th century. I've heard you say before, it was lost and people didn't like what, what do you mean it was lost? Well, it just, it just was almost totally forgotten about for, I guess, I mean, look,

you got, it was 1927, 1928 and then you've got, you know, this was a real hate, I think of really interesting philosophy connecting up science and philosophy. And then we have what the Great Depression, Second World War, people have a lot on their minds. So it's not as if it was like physically lost. Oh, not lost. Books that were then recently. It was just something which didn't land

with the academic community, didn't get absorbed, didn't get developed. After the war, Second World War, I think you've got a real kind of anti-philosophies, Igeist. People like the logical positivist who thought, who tried to have this idea, were that any question that can't be unsubbed by an experiment is meaningless gibberish. So this dominates for a long time and a very kind of hard materialist viewpoint. And then, as I said, consciousness was not really seen as a serious scientific stuff. So I think it's only once people dealt with consciousness by pretending it didn't exist. And then I think

from the end of the 20th century people started to think, hold on, it does exist. I feel pain, you know, and so we start to get a research and people have eventually found their way. I think because of finding deep difficulties with these conventional options of dualism and materialism, and there's been a lot of excitement that this is a middle-way that sounds a bit wacky, but that avoids the difficulties of these two traditional options. Okay, should I describe? So the starting point of Russell Neddington was that physical science doesn't really tell us what matter is, and I thought that was just the most absurd thing I'd ever heard when I first heard it, because you

know, you read a physics textbook, you seem to learn all these incredible things about the nature of space and time and matter. But actually on reflection, it turns out that for all its richness, physics is confined to telling us about the behavior of matter. What it does, you know, physics tells us, for example, the particles have mass and charge. And these properties are completely defined in terms of what they do, things like attraction, repulsion, resistance, and acceleration. It's all about behavior. What stuff does? So so what's wrong with that? So that intuitively at least there's there's more to what something is

than what it does so I like to give a kind of chess piece analogy, right? If you're playing chess You're interested in what the pieces do. You're interested in the moves you can make, the pieces you can take. But if you're supposed to be someone who collects high-end luxury chess pieces, then you're interested in the substance of the pieces themselves. Your pieces made of gold or silver rather than plastic or cheap metal. So this is what Fluss was called the intrinsic nature of a thing. What it is, what it is considered independently of what it does. So now think about fundamental particles. Like an electron, you know, you might very well be interested in what physics

tells us about the behavior of an electron, what it does, but you might also be interested in the intrinsic nature of an electron. What an electron is considered independently of what it does. And about this, physics just has nothing to say. So the thought is, there's actually this huge hole in our standard scientific theory of the universe. Physics gives us this rich information about what stuff does, but tells us nothing about its intrinsic nature. So, what's this got to do with consciousness? So I think the genius of Russell and Eddington was to bring together two problems. The problem

we've just been discussing, the problem of intrinsic natures, the physics doesn't tell us the intrinsic nature and the problem problem of consciousness to bring them together and to see that they can be given a unified solution. So problem number one, physical science tells us a purely quantitative story of the brain and leaves out the qualities we know in experience. Problem number two, physical science just describes the behavior of matter and doesn't tell us anything about its intrinsic nature. So the unified solution is given by the hypothesis that maybe the qualities of experience are the intrinsic nature of matter. So we answer, we solve both problems at once, so we find a place

for consciousness for those qualities that physical science leaves out, and we have an answer to the question, what is the intrinsic nature of matter? So it's a beautifully, so the idea, it's a beautifully simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific story. It's not dualism, right? There's just matter, just particles or fields, but matter can be described from two perspectives. Physics describes it as it were from the outside in terms of what it does, but matter from the inside in terms of its intrinsic nature is constituted of the qualities of consciousness.

So that's the basic idea. How does that manifest? How does the internal state manifest? these are consciousness. So that's the basic idea. How does that manifest? How does the internal state manifest? It can't be any more than can be described in a materialistic world view, no? So let's start with, so thinking about fundamental particles, so the view is that fundamental particles

have some kind of very, very, very simple experience. Now when people hear that, they always interpret it dualistically. So they always think of the electron as its physical properties that science studies like mass, spin and charge, and then these weird, consciousness properties. The physicist Sabine Hassenfelter had a recent blog

about, it's about a year ago now, probably, a blog post criticizing panpsychism, but she was interpreting it in this dualistic way and she was saying, physics doesn't show any sign of these weird non-physical properties, but that's not the view. The view is the mass, the physical properties, mass spin and charge, forms of consciousness, mass, spin and charge, are forms of consciousness. Because, how do we make sense of that? Because physics doesn't tell us what these properties are, it just tells us what they do. And so that leaves open the theoretical possibility

that they are forms of consciousness. So coming up to take your pain at the level of the brain, your pain and the pattern of neuronal firings that corresponds to it. The idea is that in a sense they're just the same thing. When the neuroscientist studies your brain, it's just, it's, she's not really studying what it is, she's just studying what it does and what it's parts do. When you attend to the qualities of your experience, that is the intrinsic nature of your brain, the intrinsic nature of the brain states. So they're just two sides of the same coin.

So let me come back to your question, how does it manifest itself? Well, it manifests itself as the behavior that physics studies. Matter is what consciousness does, right? There's just consciousness that there's nothing but consciousness. But physics describes what consciousness does. That's the view. So there aren't two things. What is the bottom wrong for consciousness in your opinion, then, do does the soil have consciousness, do plants have consciousness? What about a rock? What about a tree that's now being chopped down?

What about a tree that's about to die? Yeah, so I mean, one common misunderstanding, it doesn't literally mean that everything is conscious, despite the etistemology of the word, you know, pan means everything, psyche means mind, everything has mind. But the basic commitment of pan psychism is that the fundamental building blocks of reality have incredibly simple forms of experience. So it could be fundamental particles, that's the way I guess it's conventionally standard he talked about it. But actually many physicists, many theoretical physicists tend to think that actually the fundamental entities are not little particles, but universe-wide fields.

And then particles are understood as sort of local excitations of fields. So if you interpret that kind of view in a pan-psychist way, then the fundamental forms of consciousness would be the intrinsic nature of those universe-wide fields. So that's the basic commitment of the view, and the idea would be that the consciousness of the human or animal brain is somehow derived from those more fundamental forms of consciousness. But your question you asked was, which other things are consciousness? So, the fundamental things are conscious, whether they're particles or a universe wide fields or whatever, humans and animals are conscious, what are the things are conscious? I think that's an open scientific question that we're in the very early days, and I don't think it's a question for

philosophers like me to answer, I think it's a question for scientists to answer, and how do they do that by studying the correlations between brain activity and consciousness and trying to get systematic, there are a couple of proposals, the integrated information theory or the global workspace theory that we could perhaps talk about. But, I mean, to be honest, I think it's such early days that we're really, you know, in the dark at the moment. So it's an open, empirical question. So I guess I'm inclined to think, you know, like anybody else, the tables and rocks probably aren't conscious, but just that they're made up of little things that probably

are conscious. What are the strongest criticisms that you see of panpsychism? Yeah, good question. So, I guess the, what's generally seen as, there are a lot of different things, but what's generally seen as the biggest problem, the so-called combination problem, which I mean, there's a couple of different ways of making this precise, but the basic idea is you know the pan-psychist wants to account for my consciousness in terms of the consciousness of the particles ultimately making up my brain How how does that work? You know we feel like we understand how you put together Part of a car engine and you get a functioning car engine We have a grip on that but how do you put together lots of little minds and make a big mind?

That seems hard to make sense of, it seems almost unintelligible. You can't build a mind in the way you can build a house. So there are various, you know, I'd say that the energies of the contemporary Ponceigus research program are focused on, you know, I could run you through some options and my own favourite view. But I mean, I would say, I guess I say like, nobody's got a total complete theory of consciousness. It's such early days, but it seems to me that the problems facing the panpsychist are more tractable than the problems facing these other views.

If you're a materialist, you've got to bridge the gap between the purely quantitative properties of physical science and the qualities, the subjective qualities of experience. If you're a panpsychist, do I say panpsychists at first? If you're a panpsychist, you've just got to bridge the gap between simple forms of experience and more complex forms of experience. I could talk about some of my favorite solutions and the different approaches people take, but I think it's a problem we can potentially make progress on and are in the business of making progress on.

In the process, are we making progress on? Is your view of pan-psychism compatible with consciousness emerging from artificial general intelligence, if and when we manage to create it? It's certainly compatible with artificial consciousness. What's that mean? Well, just man-made, human-made things becoming conscious. So, as I say, I think it's an empirical question we're trying to work out what kinds of physical activity bring about emergent. So, I think it's an empirical question, we're trying to work out what kinds of physical activity bring about emergent. So I think there's always consciousness

at the fundamental level, but I don't think there's always consciousness at the emergent level. So it's an empirical question. If we can work out, I think we're a long way from doing so, but if we can work out what is necessary and sufficient for consciousness, then we can maybe build a thing that has that. Now this is why the panpsychic is maybe much closer to, you know, we don't believe in souls

or something, you know, extra like that. But I mean, the way you phrase it, you said, artist, visual, general intelligence. So, I mean, I guess I would want to sharply distinguish consciousness from intelligence, at least the way that's standardly understood in AI, is something functionally defined in terms of certain kinds of sophisticated behavioral response. So I think that's not necessarily anything to do with consciousness. You could have a computer with very high levels of intelligence, in that sense, without having any kind of inner conscious experience at all. So there's two different questions, you know, what is required for something to be intelligent, and what is required for something to be sentient or

conscious. But yeah, I mean, I certainly, I think, I think, Pantsikers would probably say all the same things as a materialist, or probably even a dualist about artificial consciousness, the possibility of. Yeah, I mean, that question of whether or not consciousness comes along for the ride, so to speak, and it's just there is some sort of point that you get to where there's enough intelligence or enough processing going on for it to happen. That's the switch that you were talking about before, right? It's like, either, is it a gradation of levels of slightly less conscious, to slightly more conscious,

or is there a point, something that you hit? Are we going to get a point where the internet is so big that it becomes conscious? There's simply so much information processing around. And these questions from Nick Bostrom and the other guys at the Future of Humanities Institute have been something I've really enjoyed thinking about ever since I read superintelligence. I'm just trying to, I'm making a pig zero of it, but I'm trying to work out how this maps on to what you do. I said, good, okay, I get what you'd say. So, yeah, I mean, well, just in terms of the internet being conscious as a slight digrush, I mean, the integrated information theory, one of the dominant neuroscientific models that connects, I mean, a basic idea is that consciousness corresponds to the level at which you have most integrated information.

So in this view, this cup of tea isn't conscious probably because there's more integrated information in the individual molecules than there is in the liquid as a whole. In the brain, there's consciousness because there's much more integrated information in parts of the brain than in the individual neurons. So I really like that distinction. I think that's really useful. So if you could one day have, if they become so much integrated information

in the internet that there's more in the internet than the human brain, this theory predicts, we don't know if it's true or not, but it predicts, it has some empirical confirmation that the internet, we'd be absorbed into sort of an internet mind and we'd cease to be conscious in our own right. But how does it connect to boss?

I guess boss trim is very much a materialist. So as an I don't think consciousness arises from just in intelligence and information processing and because I think that's the materialist story, that it's the purely quantitative story of information processing. I don't think you can get consciousness out of that because I think consciousness is something qualitative. It's to do with the underlying intrinsic nature of matter.

But it could be just as a matter of empirical fact that the two could end up going together. It could end up, it's just a sign to open scientific question that it could be that certain types of sophisticated information processing do give rise to emergent consciousness but my view that wouldn't be because of the information processing per se but because of the intrinsic nature of matter underlying that information processing if that makes sense. It goes up to the point. No, it does.

It does. Yeah, it's whether you think consciousness is, I think consciousness is the stuff of matter. It's the kind of intrinsic, it's real concrete. If you, if you, for example, if you smell a really bad smell, that horrible smell is the stuff of your brain at that moment. So it's a real concrete, it's not just some kind of more abstract notion of information processing. It's the stuff of the world. I should say that more often.

Do that at the same time. People are starting to think I'm profound. You need a skull or a bust, need a bust in your hand. So, wrapping all of this up, why does this really matter? How does consciousness relate to the meaning of life for us? Okay, nice simple mean that the final chapter of rock the first four chapters are sort of building the Cold-blooded scientific philosophical case for this view the final chapter explores the kind of meaning of life implications for human existence and I Mean you know, but the first reason this matter the most straightforward reason is matters I think it's intrinsically important to try and work out the ultimate nature of reality. Not for everyone, but I think it's important that some people are doing that trying to have

our best guess at what reality is like. I guess most people think that's a purely scientific question. I disagree with that slightly. I think there's a real role for philosophy, especially in the case of consciousness. So that's just important. But I do think this isn't, it's more than that with consciousness. It's not just an abstract puzzle, because consciousness is at the root of human identity, I think, fundamentally we relate to each other as creatures with feelings and experiences.

Consciousness is sort of the basis of everything I think that's important and of value in human existence. And yet, I believe I would argue our official scientific world view doesn't have a place for it. So, and to see that, just if you just consider for a moment what it's like to be you right now, the colors, the sounds, the smells, the taste, those qualities, our official scientific world view tells you, tells us that all that's really going on in your head

is the purely quantitative story of electrochemical signaling. I think that's just equivalent to saying those qualities you encounter in your experience don't really exist. And that's just kind of crazy. I think there's nothing more evident than the qualities of experience, the pleasure, the pain. And so I think we're in a crazy period of history where our official story of reality denies the existence of the one thing that's most evident and the one thing that gives value to human life. And I think, you know, it's some kind of subconscious level that I think that does lead to it and profound sort of alienation and

Sense that we don't belong to the world. We don't fit in Part of what Max Weber called a disenchantment of nature. I mean, you know, there's a lot of crazy stuff going on at the moment And there's lots of different reasons for that, but I think this is a small part of it. And so, you know, I think the attraction of pan-psychism is that, you know, it accommodates both what we know about the world scientifically through public observation experiment and what we know about ourselves through our immediate awareness of our feelings experiences, it brings both together in a single elegant picture of reality. So I think it's a worldview that's, it's both healthier and more true conception of reality. Yeah. I've got a theory that I've been working on for the last year or so about why we're seeing

the sort of increase of, I would go as far as to say, sort of pettiness and existential angst, so all of the abstract problems that people make for themselves. And given the fact that for the first couple of million years of our revolution, all of the bottom things of Mazel's hierarchy of needs were super, super important and yet unfulfilled, meant that we didn't have like oddly, an existential crisis is a very luxurious bourgeois position to be in. Like, you can only afford to have an existential crisis if all of the bottom levels of that hierarchy of needs are already met. And now we've got, you, Amazon Prime, the TV to watch the world's best shows on Netflix while you deliver Rua Mitchell in Star State to your house. Like we have so much luxury and abundance that actually afforded the opportunity to,

the bliss to have an existential crisis and wonder why am I here, what am I doing, what is my purpose? Why do I feel the things I feel, why do I think the things I think. If you've been chased down by a tiger or a lion, you don't really have the opportunity to do that. Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm sure that that is a part of it. I think there's lots of different reasons. What I do feel comfortable about the Historians of the future looking back one thing that will be obvious to them is There was this huge crash in 2008 but brought the world to its knees and then the longest period of waste grease since Napoleonic war

And then all sorts of crazy politics, you know, no shitshell, you know What's fucking obvious? Sorry as we're doing this. I need to say as we're doing this Trump is leading a No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, piss off. I don't want you here. But yeah, I've just got this image of him with the mega hat on and a like a flag over his shoulder marching, marching down like Melania and So yeah, you're right. There's a lot of crazy things going on. But yeah, I mean, it's it's since the crash and you know, I mean if you just go back a bit further, after the war, we had 30 years where we had very control capitalism, we put high taxes on the wealthy and we had 30 years where society got more prosperous, got more equal, we had the 60s, and then the 80s onwards we had Wild West capitalism, cut all the taxes on the wealthy and gross inequality, the bottom 50% in developed countries, their percentage of national incomes gone from 25% to 12% in the US. When the Senate left parties, I'm responding to that. I think to an extent that they're a straightforward economic causes, but there are all sorts of different things going on here. You know,

we don't know the loss of religion, we don't know what the hell would do and what it's all about. I think that's a huge part that in some circles feels tried to say and then in other circles feels novel, like depends on who I'm speaking to. But that's in a compulsion that people have to be connected to something greater than them to give themselves a sense of scale and wonder, you know, it's why you're seeing a resurgence of minimalism, I think, you know, that diogenesis, the cynic 2,000 years ago was living out of a pot with a robe to wear. And 2020, one of the most popular YouTube channels on the internet is the Minimilists,

the guys from the Minimilists. Like, what is that if it's not like a modern day reincarnation of what Diojenis was doing, or people that decide to go and live out in the woods, or people who decide to go and have transcendent experiences with psychedelics in the middle of the Amazon jungle, people who go and lie on a darkened night and look at the sky.

What are we doing? We're trying to give ourselves a sense a dark and night and look at the sky. What are we doing? We're trying to give ourselves a sense of scale and connection and reminding ourselves that we are insignificant, but also somehow connected. Is that simply just the physical processes? Is that just us looking at the night sky in a way that our ancestors would have done? Therefore, it makes us feel good. Or is there something more going on like All of this stuff is what I like spending time thinking about, and it's so satisfying, even though you always come away with

more questions and you do answers, it feels very satisfying to think about somehow. And there's the questions, Birjati, but also that the social structures religion used to provide to bring communities together, mark the rights of passage, mark the seasons, you know, bring together people, you know, not just because you live near each other, not, you know, so I'm actually, well, this is something I'd like to write on, totally different, right more on, I just grab as a non-believing Christian. So you like the tradition and you like the ritual and... Yeah, I attend church.

And I mean, like so many Jewish people, I might attend synagogue, even though they're not believers in the traditional sense. And people think that's not an option question. I think it's Christians, it's supposed to be, it's just this radic, do I believe these propositions? Do I, so I, the tradition and the community and the marking of the rights of passage and the connecting to some kind of higher reality.

And, you know, I think in some ways it's a modern corruption. I think the total focus on belief,in Armstrong's written about this that it's The change of the the meaning of the word belief so that the Greek word pistis that we translate as faith or belief Didn't mean belief in the modern sense it meant something like commitment engagement having your heart and something and when the Bible was first translated Is it 16th, 10th century, I'll come up in a, the word belief meant something kind of similar. She quotes Shakespeare play where the character says, believe not by disdain, which means I don't have your heart in your disdain. It was closer to

the German word believe and meant sort of, you know, engagement having your heart in something and then with the scientific revolution, the word beliefs change, meaning, and it now sort of means a kind of cold blooded hypothesis about reality. It's what I absolutely is, right? Yeah, so now you read the Bible, and you think Jesus really cared about

what theory, the reality you have, and that salvation depends on it, whereas actually, it's good textual analysis, looking at, you know, the way G is actually uses the word, faith is much to do, much more to do with commitment and engagement. It's always when people have gone the extra mile. So it's not really belief in the modern sense.

It's more about sort of a commitment to a possibility. But I went to last year for my birthday. I went to Rome and I did the Colosseum and the Roman Forum day one and I did the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican day two. And, man, like, I've, I've not been many, I've traveled a lot and I've not been to many places that gave me the same sense of grandeur and perspective and wonder and beauty and awe and like all of the things that make the phenomenological experience of being human and being conscious like beautiful. And I was like, if this is the front end

of the funnel for Christianity, like, sign me up, like, it's so nice. And you just think like this is how could this not have inspired someone's belief commitment you know in the more traditional sense of the word because it was just so it was so gorgeous like it was a beautiful experience to be in there every time I got a Durham Cathedral you know that's the closest one to me. And go with my mum regularly, and these high ceilings and the pillars, and that kind of like the echoes and the sound of everyone the shuffling feet on flagstones. It's just beautiful.

And it is a shame that you have to kind of take it wholesale rather than piecemeal. And wrapping up your life in something of that grungy. You know what, both always think of the secular world as adopted Christmas and that's fantastic. A beautiful celebration of light and joy in the middle of winter. But what it has in the taken on is Easter. I think there's something one of the more Easter that it's a sort of a festival of misery followed by a spring festival of hope, that period of dwelling on the horror of the world and then turning to hope.

And those kind of marking of the seasons, and I think it's something about the human condition that that's really important. But when I first returned to religion, I went to Liverpool Cathedral around Christmas, and it's absolutely beautiful music, and wonderful choir, and speaking to the Vicar afterwards, and, you know, saying, I just know, literally, I take these things, and he said, well, I'm a pretty traditional believer, you know, I think Jesus rose physically from the dead, but there are other ways of understanding it. He gave me books by liberal Christians like Marcus Borg and Karen Armstrong who believe in some kind of reality, higher reality, but take everything else non-literally.

That just blew me away because I always raised Catholic and I thought, first thing is do I believe these things? He just said, different ways of doing it. So yeah, I think, yeah, maybe some do with the Church of England. It's like, we've got wildly a topic of, but maybe because it was set up because the King wanted a divorce, maybe it doesn't have that heavy ideology.

So such a broad, there's some very conservative wings and there's some incredibly liberal wings. And yeah, anyway, I didn't mean to get on to Jesus. No, it's good, man. It's something I think about an awful lot. Look, Philip, today's been like really, really fun. Galileo's error. Now in paperback.

The US paperbacks just come out, but the UK has always been paperback, actually. Amazing. That will be linked in the show notes below. Go and pick your copy up from Amazon. If you do use the link below, you will be supporting the podcast at Nox Recost to yourself, because they have to pay me a little kick back. Where else do you want to send people? Any other stuff you want to plug? I'm on Twitter, Philip, under slash, underscore goff, Philip with one L G O F F spend a lot of time arguing on Twitter too much my website Philip goph philosophy.com I've also got a blog with the

horrible title conscience and consciousness which is but anyway linked to my website and yeah that's about it probably awesome man look today's been really really fun I'm gonna ask you for some book suggestions when I get off and I'll post those on my Instagram or probably in an upcoming newsletter at some point. So make sure that you've signed up to that. Philip, I really, really enjoyed this. It's fried some brain cells, but kind of built some as well at the same time. So thank you. Thanks a lot Chris, it's been a great discussion. Get over, get over