The Joe Rogan Experience - #1739 - Philip Goff

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

Philip Goff is a philosopher and consciousness researcher at Durham University. His new book, "Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness," is available now.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Yep, yeah. Well, it started out as a plain, clean table. This is a new studio. And then along the line, people give you a bunch of shit, and then it just starts piling up. And you have to figure out when

like when do i empty this ashtray when do i throw out some of these objects when do i move them into storage and then when i move them into storage just always there always seems to be new ones that show up so these are things these are all things people have bought brought yes everything is something someone's given me oh i should I should have brought something. The deer head. Oh, please don't give me anything. We're good. Thank you. Just your pretty self. It's fine.

So thanks for doing this, man. Appreciate it. No worries. Thanks for having me. It's a very fascinating subject because I've always wondered. Let's just explain. Tell everybody what you do and who you are. My name is Philip Goff.

I'm a philosophy professor from Durham University in the north of England. And I spend most of my time thinking about consciousness. And specifically, I guess I defend this view, panpsychism, which is roughly the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. So it doesn't literally mean that everything is conscious necessarily. The basic commitment is that the fundamental building blocks of reality, maybe fundamental particles like electrons and quarks, have incredibly simple forms of experience. And then the very complex experience of the human or animal brain

is somehow rooted in or derived from this very simple experience at the level of fundamental physics. So sounds kind of wacky, but I think more and more philosophers and even some neuroscientists are thinking this might be our best hope for addressing the hard problem of consciousness and the scientific and philosophical challenges consciousness raises. Well, we are starting to challenge whether or not other things have something akin to consciousness like plants, right? There's real evidence that plants

both feel something when they're being eaten and react to it. The real evidence that they react to it, they actually change the profile, the chemical profile, to make themselves taste disgusting so that animals will not eat them. And that could actually be replicated with noises of the leaves being chewed on, which is really fascinating. They've played tape recordings of caterpillars eating leaves next to trees. And those trees have triggered that response, this chemical response of whatever it is inside of them that makes them taste disgusting. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the extent to which we've discovered how intelligent the kind of mental sophistication of plants

is incredible. So Monica Gagliano, for example, has done experiments subjecting pea plants to conditioned learning. So, you know, the old Pavlov's dog idea that, you know, you rang the bell every time the dog gets food and then eventually the dog starts salivating when the bell rings. But she's actually done this with pea plants. So she's taught them to associate the ultraviolet light with the hum of a computer fan. And eventually they started growing towards the hum of the computer fan. So there'd been some kind of conditioned association there.

And also other people, you know, the sophistication of trees and the life of trees to the extent that they're hooked up under the ground, what some people have called the wood wide web. And that even across species, there's kind of a sort of quid pro quo that the deciduous trees giving nutrients to the evergreen trees giving nutrients to the deciduous trees when they've lost their leaves and then this being reciprocated. And so there's much more sophistication in the plant kingdom than we previously realized. Now, but whether that's, I mean, whether that is consciousness is another question. I mean, there's a core difficulty at the heart of the science of consciousness, which is that consciousness is not publicly observable, right? I can't look inside your head and see your feelings and experiences. You know, we know about consciousness, not from observation experiment, but just from our immediate awareness of our own feelings and experiences. So, you know, and so, you know, science is used to dealing with unobservables,

fundamental particles, quantum wave functions, you know, maybe even other universes, none of these things are directly observable. But there's a really important difference in the case of consciousness. Because in all these other cases, we're postulating things that are unobservable, in order to explain what we can observe. That's ultimately what we're postulating things that are unobservable in order to explain what we can observe that's ultimately what we're in you know the standard model of particle physics it's all about explaining what is publicly observable but in the unique case of consciousness the thing we are trying to explain is not publicly observable and and that is utterly unique and really constrains our capacity to investigate it experimentally. So it is, I mean, in the case of human beings,

I can't directly observe your feelings, but I can ask you, right? And, you know, I can scan your brain at the same time, or maybe stimulate bits of your brain and ask you what you're feeling what you're experiencing and in this way neuroscientists try to match up what kinds of brain activity are correlated with what kind of experience and we can hopefully make some progress on that in the human case but the you know the further we get away from the human case. But the further we get away from the human case, the harder it is to establish what things are or are not conscious. I mean, some people are now starting to think there might just be real limits to our knowledge here because consciousness is not publicly observable. So there's a real challenge there, I think. It is a fascinating thing in that it's agreed upon, right? Like everybody knows that we have it, but then trying to figure out what else has it, we must rely on their reactions and motion.

Like that's one of the things about plants, right? Like the motion is so slow, like the motion of their growth or of the expanding of the petals of a flower. The motion is so small that we think of it as not being in motion at all. of a flower, the motion is so small that we think of it as not being in motion at all. Yeah. I mean, actually, if you watch things of the plants sped up, it starts to look a lot more like something you'd want to ascribe mentality, even consciousness to. So maybe there's just something going on in a different frame of reference here. But yeah, I mean, actually, so the neuroscientist, Christoph Koch, had a bet with the philosopher David Chalmers in the 1990s, that in 25 years, we would have completely established what is called the neural correlates of consciousness,

you know, exactly what kinds of physical activity go along with consciousness. He bet him a case of wine, a case of fine wine. Did he pay up? Well, I think he's probably about to lose that bet because, you know, it's pretty much 25 years later and there's just no consensus. There are different theories

and there's just no consensus. And actually, I mean, it's exactly what you said, right? Because we can't observe it, we have to establish to do the science. We're not even talking about the philosophy, the hard problem of consciousness yet, just this scientific project of trying to map up, map which kinds of brain activity go with experience.

To do that, we have to set up what we can call detection procedures, kind of rules for mapping behavior to experience. So one of these might be, if someone is having an experience, they can report it, right? That's some people, some neuroscientists adopt that rule. If someone's having an experience, you can report it. So if you adopt that rule, then you can start to test whether someone's having an experience you can report it so if you if you adopt that rule then you can start to test whether someone's having an experience but they're controversial so other people doubt those rules so some people who accept what's sometimes called the overflow thesis think that there's more experience than we can actually think or

attend to so if you think about your experience of your clothes on your body right now, so now I've said it, you might be attending to it and aware of it. But before I mentioned it, you weren't thinking about it, you weren't attending to it. It's an open, debated question whether you're actually experiencing that, whether you can have an experience that you're not aware of, that you're not attending to. And what stance you take on that philosophical question leads to different scientific predictions. So people who think there's a close connection between attention and consciousness tend to think consciousness is in the prefrontal cortex,

because that's where things like cognition, like working memory is. But people who think there can be more experience than we can attend to, they tend to think it's in the back of the brain. And it's just wildly different predictions. And then there's subconsciousness, the concept of your unconscious and subconscious thoughts, which are really just consciousness in different layers. It's not really unconscious or subconscious. Yeah, that's controversial. So, I mean, the extreme version of, so some people think if you're not aware of it, you're not really experiencing it. Right. If you're not aware of it, you're not really experiencing it. So, I mean, you know, to take, you know, all of your experience right now, you know, all of these beautiful, slightly odd objects and, you know, your experience of the clothes on your body and the sound of my voice.

So we know what we know experimentally is that you can't attend to all of that. Right. There are real limits to what you can attend to So the question is those things you're not attending to Are they part of your experience? That you're just not aware of Some people think that makes no sense if you're not aware of it. You're not experiencing it Or the case you know where you're kind of driving along and you're lost in thought, you're just on autopilot.

Were you actually experiencing the road or were you just on total unconscious autopilot? So there's a real debate just there. But I suppose for those people who think awareness and consciousness can come apart, some people think there could be all kinds of really vivid experiences that we're just totally unaware of. And then, you know, so I mean, I think we're just in a way, we're not at first base with it. We're not even at the kind of hard problem of consciousness yet, just in these scientific questions. We're really not in a first base in how to think about them properly. Well, what the way we interface with the world as a as a life form is uh based essentially on instincts and uh on genetics that have all been

hammered into our system in order to keep us alive right i mean that's you could only concentrate on so many things it's only like you have to have a certain amount of concentration on your environment and the world around you. If you didn't have it, you didn't survive. That passed on to where we are today. The concept of unconscious thoughts and of memories, this is all supposed to be things you could rely upon for certain instincts that you have to avoid certain areas because this is problematic. This could cause you to lose your life. This could keep you from passing on your genes

Like there's a reason for all this stuff, right? When you get down to objects though like a thing having consciousness or some kind of consciousness. That's where We we have to like do we do have to parse what it means to be a human being and why do we have all these hammered in instincts and thoughts and there's there's certain instincts that animals have like i have a golden retriever uh he has not been around a lot of dogs to learn certain behavior but there's certain things that he does that are baked into his dna like one of them unfortunately he likes to roll around in fox shit. Nice. I've got a friend who does that as well.

Sorry, go on. A human? Yeah. No, I was just joking. If you talk to anybody that has a dog, they'll tell you that their dog, if they find wild animal shit, sometimes in the woods, they will roll around in it for whatever reason. I don't know what that is, but it's clearly baked into what it means to be a dog. Yeah.

Right? There's certain things that are baked into what it means to be a person. Yeah. Now, are those, what are those? Is that your DNA? Is that a part of your memories? Is that your consciousness? And is that the only thing that encompasses consciousness?

Like, does this table have a certain amount of consciousness? I've always felt like these tables, there's one of them that I have in LA that's like this. And I redid this one. And while we're doing a new studio, it's like we need to get some memories into this table. Because the old table was rich with memories. And it was kind of a joke, but kind of not. Like there's certain places, like the Comedy Store, for example. The Comedy Store in Los Angeles is a very old building that used to be cero's nightclub so used to be owned by bugsy

siegel and dean martin and jerry lewis used to play there and is a classic old mob run nightclub that apparently a lot of people got murdered in it was a mob owned place and the people that worked there would all i'm not all but a good number of them an unusual number would have stories about like seeing an apparition or hearing someone talk who wasn't there these ghost stories like what what is that is that nonsense or is there a certain amount of memory in that building that echoes sometimes? The certain amount of the right moment with the right frequency, you tune into it and you catch a glimpse, you catch a whisper of the memories that are baked into a building.

I mean, no one wants to have a house where someone was murdered in. In fact, in many states, they have laws. So they have to let you know if someone was murdered in that house or if someone committed suicide in that house, because we have this feeling they're like, oh, whatever that is, is still in there. What is that? Yeah. Look, I mean, I know what you're talking about. I mean, I think these are difficult questions. Is this just associations we have or is this something we can't explain here? And I mean, these are ultimately kind of empirical questions that it's hard to settle. I mean, I suppose, fortunate for me in a way, I think the case for panpsychism is based on much, you know, in a sense, much more solid data, just the reality of consciousness, the reality of feelings and experiences, you know, this inner world of colors and smells and tastes that, you know, each of us enjoy every second of waking life. And that's real. That is real. I'm not

sure. We're detecting those with senses, right? So if you have something that you say has consciousness like this coffee pot, let's imagine this coffee pot has some sort of a consciousness. What is it based on? So I think, yeah, there's a tendency to, so whenever people hear about panpsychism, there's a tendency to think, oh, it's the kind of consciousness a human being has. So we're thinking like particles are feeling existential angst or wondering if it's good to get clear on what we mean by consciousness because it is a bit of an ambiguous word. And often people use it to mean something quite sophisticated like awareness of one's own existence or something. That's something I'm not sure a sheep has, never mind a particle. Is consciousness and sentient thoughts, are they linked? I think I would just say consciousness is the way it's standardly used in the science and philosophy of consciousness is just subjective experience, pleasure, pain, seeing color, hearing sound.

Consciousness is what it's like to be you. Right. And, you know, this comes in all shapes and sizes. You know, in human beings, it's incredibly rich and complex. A sheep's consciousness is a bit simpler. Consciousness of a mouse, simpler again. And as we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of experience. So for the panpsychist, this just continues right down to the basic building blocks of matter, which have incredibly simple forms of experience

to reflect their incredibly simple nature. So that's, I mean, that's one clarification that we're talking about just very simple kinds of experience. But also, I mean, you say is the coffee pot conscious. I think most panpsychists would not think the coffee pot is conscious. The idea is that the fundamental particles, perhaps, are conscious, but maybe not every random aggregation of them is conscious in its own right. Although some panpsychists do think literally everything is conscious.

Luke Roloff is a very good, very rigorous panpsychist philosopher, and he does think literally everything, including the coffee pot, is conscious. But even then, you know, it's not going to be like sitting there wanting us to drink it. You know, that's the kind of consciousness you get after millions of years of evolution.

Its consciousness is going to be just some kind of meaningless mess. Like the difference between the consciousness of a dog and a human, even though a dog is clearly a conscious animal, it's not having in-depth conversations about its past and talking about what it wants for the future. Yeah. So the panpsychosis is kind of like a Copernican revolution where you stop thinking about consciousness

rooted in the idea of human consciousness. Sorry, when did this start? Where did this line of thinking, when did this become a serious point of discussion? I mean, panpsychism goes back to the start of philosophy and, you know, both East and West and major enlightenment thinkers were panpsychists like Leibniz, Spinoza. And in the 19th century, it was kind of a heyday for panpsychism. But I suppose... How was it proposed?

I mean, I suppose for the latter half of the 20th century, this view fell out of favor. And it's, you know, up until 10 years ago, it's sort of hardly anybody took it seriously, at least in Western science and philosophy. It's really just, I'd say the last five or 10 years, it's really come back on the table as people are taking it as a serious option. And one reason for this is in academic philosophy is the rediscovery of a really

interesting approach to consciousness by Bertrand Russell in the 1920s, which was also developed by Arthur Eddington, who was incidentally the first scientist to experimentally confirm Einstein's general theory of relativity, which made Einstein an overnight celebrity. So I sometimes... Sorry, go on. So what was Bertrand Russell's take on it? Sorry, go on. So what was Bertrand Russell's take on it? So Russell's starting point was to focus on the mathematical nature of physics,

that the story, the description of reality we're getting from physics is just pure math, right? And this was the choice of Galileo, right? Back in the 1620s, he made the express choice, right? From now on, the language of science is going to be mathematics, right? And the maths has changed a lot. We have now imaginary numbers and non-Euclidean geometry, but still, right? Physics trades in equations. So, I mean, what Russell realized, right, so there's a couple of ways a philosopher can respond

to the fact that physics is just purely mathematical. One approach is to follow someone like the physicist Max Tegmark and say, well, maybe at base, reality just is pure math, right? Maybe we live in a mathematical universe. The other approach, and this is close to Russell's approach, was to think, well, maybe there's something underlying those mathematical structures. Maybe there's something that those mathematical structures are the mathematical structure of. Right. that those mathematical structures are the mathematical structure of. So for the panpsychist in this kind of Bertrand Russell style panpsychism,

at the fundamental level of reality, what we have are networks of very simple conscious entities. And these very simple conscious entities behave because they have incredibly simple kinds of experience. They behave in very simple ways, simple predictable ways. And through their interactions, they realize certain mathematical structures. And then the idea is those mathematical structures are the mathematical structures identified by physicists.

So when we think about these conscious entities in terms of the mathematical structures they realize, we call them particles, we call them fields, we call their properties mass, spin, and charge. But all there is there really are these conscious entities. So essentially what Russell realized is we can take the traditional hard problem of consciousness and turn it on its head, right? So the typical way people think about the problem of consciousness is you think, you start with matter and you think, how do we get consciousness out of matter? I think that problem is unsolvable when we could talk about why, but what Russell did is turn it on its head, right? Instead, start with consciousness and get matter out of consciousness in the way I've just described. Because physics is purely mathematical,

if we can have facts about these conscious entities that realize those mathematical structures, then we can essentially get physics out of consciousness. And that's much easier than getting consciousness out of physics. That's the basic idea. So, I mean, that sounds kind of weird because you think it means that when you're studying physics, you're learning about fundamental consciousness. And you know, that doesn't feel like what you're doing, but that's just because as a physicist, you're just interested in the mathematical structures. You're not interested in what, if anything, underlies that. That's more of a philosophical question. And then the concept of the mathematical structures below the mathematical structures, the mathematical structures of the mathematical structures, and that would be consciousness. Kind of. I mean, I would say, actually, I would say

that the mathematical structures identified by physics are the bottom level, right? In terms of mathematical structures. But there's something that fills out those mathematical structures. So I disagree with Max Tegmark that it's just pure math. It's there's something. So I mean, the final page of the brief history of time, Stephen Hawking famously said, even the final complete theory of physics will be just a set of equations. It won't tell us what breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe. So for the panpsychist, it's consciousness that breathes fire into the equations.

So the concept of the consciousness, if you go back to the beginning of life, we basically had a bunch of amino acids and chemicals, and eventually somehow, some way, through some process, it became a single-celled organism. When did consciousness emerge? Does it emerge then when you have this organism that's single-celled? Did it emerge when there's multi-celled organisms where it started to split? Did it emerge when it started to move?

And did it emerge when it started to change environments? Like if you really stopped and thought about what consciousness is, just from a traditional perspective, like if a light bulb went off when it existed, like bing, there's one, there it is, now we have one. Like there conceivably was a point in time where there was none, and then all of a sudden it came out of these chemical processes.

Did it come out of it just because there's predators and prey and it had the need to survive, it had to recognize its environment and view its threats and then form communities in order to have more protection because of numbers? I mean, what is it, right? Yeah, I mean, actually, I mean, the consciousness, there are difficulties, apart from the hard problem of consciousness, giving an evolutionary explanation of why consciousness emerged. Because it seems like what's important for survival is just behavior, right? So if you could have this notion of a philosophical zombie, right, which David Chalmers popularized, that's, you know, a behavioral duplicate of a human being that has no inner experience. So there's nothing that it's like to be a zombie.

So we need to distinguish these kind of philosophical zombies from Hollywood zombies, right? We need to distinguish these kind of philosophical zombies from Hollywood zombies, right? These are creatures that behave just like us in every way. You know, you stick a knife in it, it screams and runs away. You know, it's navigating the world in all the ways we do. But there's no visual or auditory experience. There's no feeling of pain. And there are a couple of different reasons we might think about these creatures. But one of them is when we're thinking about the evolutionary emergence of consciousness, a zombie would survive just as well as us, right? Because all that's important

for survival is behavior. So if a creature without consciousness, a complicated mechanism that behaves just like us, but doesn't have consciousness, would survive just as well, why did consciousness evolve at all? So that is a deep mystery. But for the panpsychist, consciousness was always there at the fundamental level of reality. The question is, when did it arrive higher up? I mean so I said panpsychism had something of a heyday in the 19th century. Pretty early after Darwin

many philosophers and scientists saw the connection between Darwinism and panpsychism so William James for example thought you know on a panpsychist view, what natural selection does is take very simple forms of consciousness and molds them into more complex forms of consciousness, right? Whereas if you're not a panpsychist, you've got to have this story of, you know,

you're getting more and more complex matter. And then suddenly at some point a miracle happens and consciousness emerges and you've got this mystery of, you know, why is that emerging? If behavior is all that's important to survival, we could do without it. So I think the panpsychist has a better story to tell on the hard problem of consciousness, but also on the evolution of consciousness. There's an also, there's a very interesting kind of consciousness amongst animals, There's a very interesting kind of consciousness amongst animals, amongst living creatures, and that's insect consciousness. Insects have very bizarre and complex worlds, like leafcutter ants. Have you ever seen when they've done those cement composures of leaf?

They fill a leafcutter ant colony up with cement, and then they dig it out to try to find how it's constructed. Have you ever seen that? I don't think I have actually. Oh my God, you gotta see it. I'll have Jamie pull something up. It's insanely complex to the point where they have parts in their colonies in this village that they've established that are there to ferment leaves.

So they have vents that go up through the ceiling, and then below that they have this compost pile of leaves. This is good, but I'd like to see it. There's some images of ones that they've taken. That's it. So that is amazing. Look at that. Subterranean portion of a giant leafcutter ant nest in Brazil.

Oh, my God. So what they did is they took this leafcutter ant nest, and we're looking at something that's enormous. It's like a small house in terms of the amount of coverage that this colony has. And the scientists filled it with cement. So I don't know how they did it. I don't know how long it took. filled it with cement. So I don't know how they did it.

I don't know how long it took. But essentially when they dig it out slowly and excavate the site, you get to see the actual structure of the leafcutter ant colony and where they lived. And it is unbelievably complex and amazing. And somehow or another they know how to do this. And it's not just that they know how to do this, but that all leafcutter ants know how to do this. This is not unique to this one individual colony that's figured something out that other ones haven't. And there's a series of complex little pods and holes and tunnels.

And again, they actually have vents. and tunnels, and again, they actually have vents. They have like an area where the leaves they bring in are fermenting, and they go through this process. And when you're looking at this, and for the folks that are just listening, these folks are, you know, 8, 9, 10 feet down in the ground, digging out these incredibly complex, it looks like, tunnels that lead into these large pods and it's just wild it's wild to see like what causes this incredibly complex construction like what is it what how are

they communicating if they're just communicating through pheromones and odd signals that they're giving off like how do they know how to do this like what what is this right what is what causes bees to make beehives all over the world why are they doing that like what why is it such an immense structure why do they have why have they figured out the correct way of making these geometric patterns that form the the hive itself? It's wild. Yeah. I mean, so, look, these are really difficult scientific questions. So, I mean, I mean, I guess this is the orthodox view would be in some sense.

This is just reducible to underlying chemistry, underlying physics. But, I mean, there are experimental scientists who deviate from that norm. I'm friends with Daniel Picard at Columbia University, who's got the psychobiology mitochondria lab at Columbia University. And he's experimentally exploring the hypothesis that mitochondria in the brain, their activity should be understood as irreducible social networks, rather than reducible to underlying chemistry, underlying physics. So I think, I mean, I think there's, this is an ongoing argument I'm having with the physicist, Sean Carroll at the moment. I think, um, he was on my podcast, uh,

last week we had a three hour debate on what does he think he's just so confident that, uh, you know, we, we know so much, we know enough about physics to think that, um, everything in the brain, everything in the biological world is ultimately reducible to underlying physics. I used to hold that myself, and I don't necessarily deny it now. I'm just more agnostic. I used to hold that myself because a panpsychist can totally accept that, right? A panpsychist can just hold, yeah, everything's reducible. You know, the causal dynamics of, everything's reducible, but you know,

the causal dynamics of the world are reducible to physics. All that the panpsychist adds is that the causal dynamics of physics are sort of filled out with consciousness, but they can agree with Sean Carroll that in terms of like the causal dynamics of what those ants are doing or mitochondria in the brain, a panpsychist can accept that the causal dynamics are all bottom out at physics. For many people, that's an attraction of panpsychism that you don't need to deny that. But actually, the more so, you know, my first academic book, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality, and actually in my popular book, Galileo's Era, I supported that view. But actually, the more I talk to neuroscientists and, you know, we've got an interdisciplinary consciousness group at my university in Durham, and I just don't think we know enough about the brain to know whether that's true or not.

I think, you know, I think we know a fair bit about the basic chemistry in the brain, like, you know, how neurons fire, calcium chambers, neurotransmitters and so on. We know a fair bit about large scale functions in the brain, you know, what large bits of the brain do. So we know kind of the top and the bottom. But what we're almost totally ignorant about is the middle bit is how large scale brain functions are realized at the cellular level, how the brain works, right? We are, you know, people get very excited with brain scans, but they're very low resolution. You know, every pixel on a brain scan corresponds to, I think,

5.5 million neurons. You know, we're only 70% of the way getting way through getting a connectome of the maggot brain with its, is it 10,000 or 100,000 neurons? Whereas the human brain has 86 billion neurons. So I think we'd have to know a lot more about how the functions of the brain are realized before we can say, oh, yeah, it's all explicable in terms of underlying chemistry and physics. So maybe, you know, maybe Daniel Picard is right that it's not, that there are these irreducible social networks at the level of mitochondria. I think that's just an open question. And I think physicists, I think I saw Brian Green making a similar comment on your podcast.

I think physicists are too quick to have the assumption that, I think an assumption that goes beyond physics itself, which is that all causal dynamics ultimately bottom out at physics. I don't think that's a claim of physics. I think that's a philosophical claim that goes beyond physics. And we just don't know yet. I mean, this has implications for free will as well, I think. But anyway, I'm talking. We know for a fact that the human mind, at has reactions to chemicals like so there's some sort of a chemical

composition that's making it react certain ways and when the chemical composition is imbalanced it causes consciousness to go awry we absolutely we know there's so much going on, but to reduce it down to just those chemicals seems silly as well. Yeah. So the way I think about consciousness is there's a division of labor here. There's an experimental aspect to the science of consciousness and there's a philosophical aspect. Right. I'm going to come back to back to your point in a roundabout way. So the, I mean, the experimental task is to try and work out what kinds of electrochemical activity go along with what kinds of experience. And you do that by asking people how they're feeling while you're scanning the brain. That's a really important project, although there are challenges,

as we've discussed already. But that's important data, but that's not going to get you a full theory of consciousness. Because what we ultimately want from a theory of consciousness is an explanation of why. Why do certain kinds of brain activity go along with experience? And because consciousness is not publicly observable, that's not a question you can answer with an experiment. At that point, you have to turn to philosophy and you just have to look at the various proposals philosophers have offered for explaining why brain activity goes along with conscious experience. So, I mean, or at least it's philosophy at the moment, you know, philosophy is what you get when the rules of the game are not set. I mean,

the subtitle of my book is Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. I hope that this will, what is now philosophy will one day be established science. You know, once the rules of the game are set, it becomes science. But coming back to your point, you know, I guess many people have the intuition if it's just chemicals, that's not quite feelings. Feelings and electrochemical activity are somehow not the same thing. The panpsychist has a nice way of accommodating that intuition whilst also disagreeing a bit. So the panpsychist will say, look, all there is in the brain is physical activity. Nothing spooky, nothing supernatural, just physical activity. But there's more to the physical than what physical science tells you about.

Physical science just tells you what matter does, right? You know, physics talks about mass and charge, and these properties are completely defined in terms of behavior, you know, attraction, repulsion, resistance to acceleration. It's all about what stuff does. It's all about mathematically capturing the causal dynamics of the physical world, what Russell called the causal skeleton of the world. The idea of the panpsychist is, so physics doesn't tell you what matter is, it just tells you what

it does. And so there's a kind of hole in our standard scientific story of the universe. And the idea is, well, maybe we can put consciousness in that hole so we can we can sort of accommodate your intuition because you're thinking when you say or if you have the intuition consciousness is more than just chemicals that's because you're thinking physical science tells us what chemicals are but the panpsychic says no physical science tells us what chemicals are. But the panpsychist says, no. Physical science tells you what chemicals do. The question what chemicals are is ultimately answered by the panpsychist. What's fascinating, though, is that consciousness is manipulated by chemicals. And chemicals are a gigantic part of consciousness.

And you can change how consciousness interfaces with the world. So if we think about what you are, we think about what it means to be a person, like who are you, Philip? If you think of who you are, you are very different if you change your chemical makeup. The way you interact with people would be different. Your path in life will be different. Maybe even your desires and needs will be different if we radically shift the way the chemical composition of your brain is set up. if we radically shift the way the chemical composition of your brain is set up. Yeah, but on panpsychism, that's not a mystery because matter is, its nature is consciousness. So when people hear about panpsychism, they always interpret it dualistically. Like we're saying particles have physical properties and then they have consciousness.

But that's not the idea. The idea is that physical properties like mass, spin and charge are forms of consciousness. All there is, is consciousness. So that you're saying, well, you know, your brain activity changes your consciousness. For the panpsychist, the brain activity just is consciousness. Consciousness is all there is. So it's not surprising that changing your brain activity just is consciousness consciousness is all there is so so it's not surprising that changing your brain activity changes your consciousness because brain activity just is consciousness matter is what consciousness does and when sean carroll's pushing back against this what is he saying what well so does it and he's a very smart guy does any of what he's saying make you oh? Yeah, I mean, I've got...

Imagine if this is all a giant waste of time. I've got a huge respect for Sean Carroll, and I think it's reciprocated, because, I mean, a lot of physicists, I'm not going to mention any names, don't have a lot of time for philosophy and think, oh, this is all a lot of bullshit. Why are we wasting our time with this?

But he's really clued up philosophically and takes the time to look at the arguments. And so, yeah, I've got a lot out of our discussions. But I suppose, I mean, one issue is, so he wants to say, I'm saying consciousness is not just what matter does. Physics just tells us what matter does. Consciousness is something more than that.

Consciousness is what underlies what matter does, what fills out the mathematical structure. So the way he hears that is he thinks, oh, so consciousness doesn't do anything. Because if you took it out and you still had the mathematical structures everything would behave the same so that just sounds like consciousness doesn't do anything but i think that's he's just making a philosophical mistake there you know because for the for the panpsychist you know the relationship between physics and consciousness is like the relationship between software and hardware. So physics is like the software and consciousness is the hardware on which physics runs. So maybe,

you know, in another possible universe, you could have physics run on different hardware and then you wouldn't have consciousness. But that doesn't mean consciousness is not doing anything. You know, just because Microsoft Word can run on different computers, that doesn't mean consciousness is not doing anything you know just because microsoft word can run on different computers it doesn't mean the computer's not doing anything anyway that's the that's the debate we've been having for about three months now but um and so you when you and sean carroll have this debate um these these last for hours and you i'm assuming you're essentially doing the same shit you're doing right now in your head. Right? For a lot of people, this is like, God, it seems almost pointless or impossible to solve. And then the idea is like, well, why do you think consciousness isn't everything?

Like, why even assume that? Yeah. Yeah. So, look, this is, I mean, why the hell should we take this seriously? Yeah. Yeah, so look, this is, I mean, why the hell should we take this seriously? Yeah. So, I mean, the starting point is I don't think we can explain consciousness in terms of matter.

I don't think we can explain consciousness in terms of physical science, right? How do I know that? It's a huge debate, but I think that the core of it is that physical science works with a purely quantitative vocabulary. Whereas consciousness essentially involves qualities. If you think about the smell of coffee, the taste of mint, that deep red you experience as you watch a sunset. These kinds of qualities can't be captured in the purely quantitative vocabulary of physical science. And so as long as your description of the brain is framed in the purely quantitative language of neuroscience, you're essentially just leaving out these qualities and really leaving out consciousness itself. And, you know, I think we shouldn't be surprised that physical science has this difficulty of consciousness because the scientific paradigm

we've been operating in for the last 500 years was designed by Galileo to exclude consciousness. Should I talk a bit about that? Yes. So, yeah, so this is why I defend in my book Galileo to exclude consciousness. Should I talk a bit about that? So, yeah, so this is why I defend in my book Galileo's error. So really the most important, well, I shouldn't say that, a key moment in the scientific revolution, right, is 1623, Galileo's decision that mathematics was going to be the language of science, right? This was the start of mathematical physics.

What is not discussed much is the philosophical work Galileo had to do to get there, right? Because the problem was, before Galileo, people thought the world, the physical world, was filled with qualities, right? So you have colours on the surfaces of objects, smells floating through the air, tastes inside food.

And this was a problem for Galileo because you can't capture these qualities in the purely quantitative language of mathematics. You know, an equation can't capture the redness of a red experience. So Galileo got around this. So Galileo, you know, he wanted to describe it all in math. So Galileo got around this problem by proposing a radically new philosophical theory of reality. So we think of Galileo as a great experimental scientist, which he was,

but he was also a great philosopher. So he proposed this new philosophical theory of reality. And according to this theory, the qualities aren't really out there in the physical world, right? They're in the consciousness of the observer, right? So if you're looking at this, is that black? You're looking at that, you know, the blackness isn't really on the surface of the pen. It's in the consciousness of the person looking at it. Or if you're eating a spicy curry, the spiciness isn't really in the curry. It's in the consciousness of the person eating it. So Galileo strips the physical world of its qualities. And after he's done that, all that's left are the purely quantitative properties, size, shape,

location, motion, properties that you can capture in mathematical geometry. So in Galileo's world view, there's this radical division in nature between two domains. The quantitative domain of science, you know, the physical world with its mathematical quantitative properties, and the qualitative domain of consciousness, you know, consciousness with its colors, sounds, smells, tastes, which he took to be outside of the domain of science. So this is the start of mathematical physics which has gone incredibly well but I think what we've forgotten is that it's gone so well because Galileo gave science this narrow specific focus. Galileo essentially said you know just put consciousness on one side just focus on what you can capture in mathematics.

So this is so important. So I think people, we're now living in a strange period of history where people like Sean Carroll, for example, think, oh, materialism has to be true because, you know, look how well physical science has done. You know, it's explained so much. Surely it's going to explain consciousness. The irony is it's done so well precisely because it was designed to exclude consciousness. So I think if we want to bring consciousness fully into science, we need a new worldview. We need to find a way to bring together what Galileo separated, to bring together the quantitative domain of science and the qualitative domain of human consciousness and that's what panpsychism does it gives us a way of bringing this together i'm not getting how galileo excluded

consciousness that doesn't it doesn't make any sense i do understand that mathematics are what he felt was the underlying building blocks of all things but even if you're talking about how like spicy curry for for example, spicy curry doesn't exist in the curry. It exists in the consciousness of someone who eats the curry. But it's not really true because there's a chemical reaction. We know what the ingredients are in the curry that causes it to have a spicy reaction to the human being that's taking it in it's a very distinct very definable chemical reaction that we know that these plants have uh excreted these chemicals to discourage predation that's why they're so spicy in the first place we know we know all these things like this is in a way

mathematics it's mathematics engaging with consciousness yeah Yeah. So look, there's definitely a lot we can do mathematically with the tools of mathematical science. Yeah. You can capture the chemical composition of the curry. You can capture the changes it makes in your brain. Right. But then at some point, the resulting brain activity goes along with the sensation of spiciness. Well, you recognize it. That's where the miracle happens. But you're recognizing it because your pain sensors in your tongue, the sensations of taste, they're all, this is mathematics, right? Like there's certain compounds that cause certain reactions.

We even attribute genes to those compounds, like the genes for, with some people, cilantro tastes like soap, and some people it tastes delicious. There's a genetic, we know for sure that there's a genetic component to that. We can actually isolate the very specific genes that cause people to have that reaction. So I think that the chemical story, the physical story can explain how people react to the taste, how people store information about it, how that impacts on their later behavior.

But all of that story could in principle go on in in what we call a zombie in without any kind of inner life any kind of experience of spiciness you you know it's conceivable that you could have a mechanism that had all those reactions um and all those responses but there was no feeling of spiciness. I mean, it's sometimes a bit more vivid with color, if you think about it. So, I mean, here's another way of putting it, right? Suppose I wanted to explain in a neuroscientific theory the redness of a red experience, right? Why red experiences have that red quality. So the first issue is, I don't think you can, and this is essentially Galileo's insight, you can't capture the redness of a red experience in the language of neuroscience. And the way to see that, you know, you couldn't convey to a blind

neuroscientist what it's like to see red by, you know, getting him to read your theory in braille, right? You couldn't convey that to him. So that's a descriptive limitation, right? That the language of neuroscience, this purely quantitative language can't express the redness of a red experience. So that's just a descriptive limitation. But I think it entails an explanatory limitation. Because if I wanted to present my brilliant neuroscientific theory that explained the redness of a red experience, my theory would first have to describe that quality and then explain it in terms of underlying physical processes. But if the theory can't even describe it, then it can't explain it. So I think in principle, a neuroscientific theory cannot explain the qualities of our experience. Galileo 500 years

ago realized that. And he said, if we want science to be mathematical, we have to take consciousness out of the story. And that was a good move, but we've sort of forgotten that that's what we did. So now we're in a weird period of history where people think,

oh, it's gone so well. But yeah, it's gone so well because we took consciousness out of the story because you can't capture those qualities in a purely quantitative language but what if it's both what if what if it's both conscious and chemical that seems more likely right yeah but that i mean that's essentially the panpsychist view right but

look the question is what comes first so both both the panpsychists like myself and the materialists like Sean Carroll, for example, you know, many, many people are materialists. We both think, you know, we don't do it the other way around. It's very easy to explain. But why do you, I still don't understand why you think that. Because I think, so we've got a choice. Well, there's three options really, right? Here are the three options on consciousness. Either matter is, consciousness is explained in terms of matter. That's the materialist view.

Or matter is explained in terms of consciousness. That's the panpsychist view. Or we've got a third option. Hold on. Break that down again. Either

either consciousness can be explained in terms of the brain. Okay. That's the that's the materialist view of, say, Sean Carroll. Second option, no, the brain is explained in terms of consciousness.

That's my view. Right. That's the panpsychist view. Third option is, they're just, they're two separate things. That's the dualist view. But it's also, like the soul is separate from the brain.

Everything has some sort of component of consciousness. Yeah,'s what i don't understand how do you make that leap because i don't you've got a you've got these three choices i don't think i i think look i basically think the materialist view is incoherent you you just you can't you can't account for the qualities of experience in in the in the purely quantitative language of physical science. That's Galileo's insight. Aren't the qualities of experience quantitative in and of itself? So you, I mean, yeah. So you can, to an extent,

capture the structure in quantitative terms. So like color experience has a mathematical structure. We can analyze it. Bright red versus a dull red. Yeah, we can analyze it in terms of hue, saturation, lightness. And we can map out a color space in terms of those three dimensions. So that's, yeah. It's not that they obviously have that quantitative structure.

But you can't fully pin down, I would argue, maybe you disagree, Yeah, it's not that they obviously have that quantitative structure, but you can't fully pin down, I would argue, maybe you disagree, the redness of a red experience in that language. I mean, I talk in my book about the color scientist, Nort Norby, who's a color scientist who's got some cones missing from his eyes. And so he's only ever seen black and white and shades of gray, but he's a color expert. And he talks about this and he says, when he tries to think about color, he compares it to sound. So he thinks of brightness, maybe like loudness. And he says he can get some grip on the structure.

But he says, you know, I'll never fully understand, you know, the redness that underlies that structure. Because he's colorblind. Because he's colorblind. So I'm saying the qualities of experience can't be totally pinned down in that language. can't be totally pinned down in that language. But right there in that example, the qualities of his experience can be pinned down to a problem in the structure of his eyes.

It's chemicals. Yeah, we all agree. So look, we all agree that the kind of experience you have is dependent on the structure of your brain, right? We all agree on that. That's, but then there's a question is what explains that? Is that because the experience is explained in terms of the brain

or is it the other way around? That's the philosophical question. The materialist says the experience is explained in terms of the brain activity. I think that doesn't work out. I do it the other way around. I think it's much more straightforward, at least, to explain the brain activity in terms of the consciousness. But the quality of the experience can be explained based on the way the brain works so i don't think so if you add things to the brain it changes the quality of the experience if you add certain chemicals certain dopamine serotonin you add things to the experience it literally changes the way you view

an interface so so yeah i agree with what you've just said, which is basically a claim about correlation, that certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of experience, right? Yes, and certain kinds of chemicals are responsible for certain types of experiences being different. Well, I would just say that they go together i would put

it more neutrally they always go together and that's a scientific question concert said if you go to a concert and you take acid you're going to have a very different experience and if you didn't take that acid absolutely absolutely so so definitely certain kinds of chemical activity go along with certain kinds of and that's the scientific question the hard problem of consciousness is why why do certain kinds of experience go together with certain kinds of um sorry certain kinds of brain activity go together with certain kinds of experience and there's two just two ways of explaining that you explain the experience in terms of the activity the brain activity or you explain the brain activity in terms of the experience or both How would that go?

well if you're experiencing something and you're explaining the experience based on the brain activity or You're experiencing or explaining the brain activity based on the experience aren't they both mutually? They're they're both. They're happening at the same time. Like both things, they're interacting. It's not as simple as one versus the other. Well, I mean, let me put it another way. What is there at the fundamental level of reality, right?

For the materialist, what there is at the fundamental level of reality is just the mathematical structures we find in physics. That's what there is. I think if that was what our world was like, there would be no consciousness. There would be complicated mechanisms. But what if consciousness is an essential aspect of the fundamental structure? Yeah, but that's the panpsychist view. You're a panpsychist.

But what if it's like mathematics? Like the reason why this structure exists is because it enhances the ability for these creatures to procreate and innovate and move things forward. That it's an element of life because life propagates better when it has this consciousness. So just like sight is an element of life because you can pick out your prey and your food and what the dangers are, just like sounds are an element and the ability to receive those sounds enhances this being's ability to survive. Consciousness is a more complex version of all these senses,

that it's an all-encompassing thing that allows this creature to innovate, to create structures like the leafcutter ants have built this insanely complex colony, like bees create beehives, like humans create computers. But why couldn't you have all of that without experience? Why couldn't we just have, as long as you have complicated enough physical structure to behave in the right ways, like those ants are doing, you'd survive as well. Why do you need inner experience? Where does experience come into the mix? I think if you started with just physics, there'd be no need for experience. Experience wouldn't pop up. Experience. I don't understand. Why would there be no need for experience?

Can you make sense of the idea of, you know, that, I mean, I don't mean, I mean, does this make sense to you? Commander Data, you know, Commander Data from the next generation, you know Commander Data from the next generation? Let's say he's made of silicon, and let's say for the sake of discussion, silicon things aren't conscious, right? There's no inner life. There's nothing that it's like to be Commander Data. But if he's complicated enough, he could behave just like us, right?

So if silicon creatures somehow evolved then they would survive just as well as us they would behave in all the same ways even though there was no inner experience does that make sense yes but the curiosity of the human being and the thought process of the human being is what causes it to try to invent things and innovate and survive and do calculations based on past experiences. So the past experiences are all correlated. They're all added up and this animal goes based on its experience and tries to figure out what to do with the current moment, what decisions to make. So you could think of it as being a form of mathematics, that consciousness itself is a complex way to ensure that these

very sophisticated life forms continue to innovate and procreate. Yeah, I wonder whether, I mean, I wonder whether there's a kind of ambiguity in the word experience. I mean, I think sometimes we do use experience in a sort of mechanistic or functional way to mean responding to the environment or storing information, using that information, in some sense, planning for the future. We just use it in a kind of, the kind of thing a computer could in principle do,

just a kind of totally mechanistic way, mechanistic thing. But I think we also use experience in a different way to mean having an inner life, having there being something that it's like to be this physical system. And in principle, it seems you could have all the mechanistic responding to the environment, processing information, all that good stuff for survival without any kind of inner experience. Or maybe you think that just doesn't make sense. I mean, I guess some people think that just doesn't make sense.

The animal needs motivation, right? Without that inner experience, what gives an animal a cause to action? I think all the things are connected, whether it's the desire to breathe, the desire for acceptance among the social group and social hierarchies. All these things motivate action and innovation. They motivate this human creature to continue to do what it does, which is make things. Like the human animal, if you looked at it objectively, if you were standing outside of our life form, if you were visiting from somewhere else, you say, what does this human thing do? Well, it makes things.

It makes better things constantly. It's never quite satisfied, except on maybe an individual basis. It's never quite satisfied with whatever it's got, whether it's a cell phone or an automobile or a television set or a computer. It's always making a newer and better thing. Well, what motivates it to do this? Well, there's a series of complex interactions that go on in this thing's mind. It has to do with sexuality. It has to do with sociality. It has to do with the way it interfaces with its neighbors and its peers and how it wants to be judged by strangers.

And all these things move this animal in this very certain and specific direction, which fuels the innovation, which fuels the construction of these new things. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think if aliens came and very different kind of aliens came and looked at us, they might make all the kinds of observations you're saying, and it's a really interesting take on it, that they're doing these things, they're making this technology, they're constructing it. They might describe the mechanisms in our brains that are making us do that. But then you

can imagine a conversation, another alien says, so are they conscious? Do they have inner experience? I think they'd say, they might say, I don't know. I can tell you what they do. I can tell you the mechanisms that give rise to it. But that, you know, in principle, you could have all of that stuff in a complicated enough mechanism. But no, there's evidence of the consciousness. Like if someone that you love dies, you weep. Like there's, if you get excited about something, you jump up. If your football team scores, you throw your arms in the air and you cheer. Like there's evidence of this consciousness.

Very easily discernible evidence of it. I mean, look, in a sense, I agree with you, right? Obviously, I think it's, I do think it is in a sense obvious that other people are conscious. But I mean, there is a deep mystery how we know that. I mean, we're evolved to... Can I have some coffee, by the way? Is that all right? Yeah.

Oh, thanks. That was a heavy conversation. Slightly jet-lagged. But, so, you know, we've evolved... Thanks for coming here across the pond, by the way. Oh, thanks for having me. No, it's good. We've been planning this for a couple of years.

It was going to come just at the start of the pandemic. And the shit hit the fan. I thought, oh, we'll do it in a month or so. So we've evolved to what's what cognitive scientists sometimes call theory of mind to make these intuitive judgments about other people's experience right um you know a baby sees its its parents smile it naturally attributes happiness to the mother you know you see someone crying you naturally actually an argument i've i'm having another long argument also with donald hoffman right who kind of has a similar view to me in some ways,

different in other ways, that there's consciousness at the fundamental level. But he has this argument. He calls the, what does he call it? Fitness beats truth argument. He has this argument that we should expect that our senses are radically deceiving us about reality. Why?

Because our senses have evolved for truth. Sorry, the opposite. Our senses have evolved for survival, not for truth, right? So our senses will make us think what is good for survival, not what is true. So my argument against him is, I worry this overgeneralizes because coming back to theory of mind

or instinctive judgments about the mental states of others, if we've evolved to survive, then if this kind of argument can make us doubt our senses, then it should make us doubt our instinctive attributions of conscious experience to other people as well you know pause you there what does he mean what does he mean by the senses have evolved to uh for survival and not for truth and what what examples um well he just thinks you know if if i mean i guess he thinks he thinks in sensory experience is kind of like an interface between

the world and if like i mean like when you're playing a computer game sensory experience is kind of like an interface between the world and if like i mean like when you're playing a computer game you get a kind of i'm trying to remember his his details as you know you kind of get an icon but that's not what's going on in the in the physical mechanism the machine but that allows you to interface with the computer so he thinks the physical world out there is there right and? And it's real, but it's very different to how we experience it. What we've evolved to experience is a useful way of representing it, but one that doesn't necessarily correspond to the actual reality. It doesn't mirror the reality.

Well, if we take things down to the quantum level, that has to be accurate. Yeah, I suppose. I mean, that's another way of defending this view is that the fundamental structure of reality looks wildly esoteric according to contemporary physics. You've got like,

what are the fundamental level? It's just a kind of vector in high dimensional Hilbert space. And it's like, where are the tables and chairs? It's anyway, but, um, yeah. Okay. So that's, that's another, that's another approach. But I mean, the point I was trying to make is there is, I look, I agree with you that I know you're conscious, but there's a deep philosophical mystery about how I know that. And, and, um, how I can trust my trust my – how and why it's rational for me to trust my instinctive sense that you're conscious when all I have really access to is just your behavior. That is a deep mystery.

And we're looking at consciousness as a thing that assumes that it is conscious. I mean we all are under the agreement that we're conscious. We are all conscious. We're all debating and discussing consciousness. But what if that is just a fundamental aspect of what it means to be this creature that needs to innovate and create things? Like what if that's all it is? Yeah.

What if it really is just sort of a mathematical component of the biological systems of these animals that have this this imperative and this this biological imperative is to innovate and create new things like the same way again that a beehive is created by these bees with this imperative to create this thing well i mean it has in recent times in philosophy as people are taking panpsychism much more seriously but people are also taking a view that's become known as illusionism quite seriously which is basically the idea that consciousness is an illusion right you know the brain tricks us into thinking we have conscious experience but we don't really so what is what's the replacement if we don't have

conscious experiences what what is happening so i i mean so i i um sorry i run a podcast with a guy who has this view right so the gimmick is you, I think consciousness is everywhere and he thinks it's nowhere. Oh, no, you're the odd couple. Yeah, exactly. So we're, mind chat, we're sort of, you know, in the age of polarization, you know, we're trying to bridge divides. But I guess we start from a common starting point, which is that we both think that the conventional scientific approach can't deal with consciousness, at least consciousness as philosophers normally conceive of it. And I think that's because Galileo designed science to ignore it. But we both agree with that. So then Keith Frankish, this illusionist guy, his response to it is to say, well, it doesn't really exist you know it's like

magic fairy dust you know it's and then you know it's it's a nice elegant solution because you don't have to explain something that's not there so he thinks i mean he compares it to like telekinesis he thinks you know when there seems to be telekinesis there's there's two there's two responses you can make you can either say it's there and radically rethink your science to accommodate it, or you can say it's not there. And then a challenge remains, which is to explain why it seems to be there, you know, explain away apparent cases of telekinesis.

And he wants to apply that to consciousness as well. You know, that what we should say is it's not there. And then the problem that remains is not the hard problem, but the illusion problem. Why is it so hard to deny the reality of consciousness? Because, I mean, there are a lot of these troubling philosophical phenomena that philosophers worry about, like free will, you know, just free will. How does free will fit into a conventional scientific story or morality, you know, does free will, how does free will fit into our conventional scientific story or morality, you know, facts about right and wrong. But in all these other

cases, it always seems like an option to deny the datum. You know, maybe we're not really free in the way we think we are. Maybe there aren't really facts about good and bad, right and wrong. Maybe that's just our kind of projecting our feelings onto the world. But with consciousness, it's, you know, it's so hard to deny, you know, that nobody's ever really felt pain. Nobody's ever really seen color.

You just think you feel pain. Actually, so, I mean, Keith is, who would do this podcast, he's slightly ambiguous. He wants to say, in a sense, I believe in pain. In a sense, I don't. But there's another illusionist, Francois Camus, who says, he just says, no one's ever felt pain. And he's got a really interesting article exploring how we should think about morality.

What does that mean, no one's ever felt pain? Yeah, I don't know. What if somebody kicks his ass? What if someone holds that guy down and punches him in the nose until he screams to stop? Do you think he's in pain? When I was a first year. This is an intellectual masturbation exercise.

Do you understand that? When I was a first year philosopher, I wrote, when I was 18, I wrote an essay expressing these sentiments saying, you know, if I kind of stuck a rusty blade in one of these people and I got a really bad mark i got really they said it was like violent oh because you're explaining something that would be physically painful well like this i got a bad mark for that kind of thinking yeah i think my tutor didn't like i think he thought i was a bit of an obnoxious but i probably was when i was 18 well you're probably challenging ideas you know like you should encourage all young minds to I

Think your teachers a piece of shit about that. I showed him I Took pictures of my but I don't know what my band we took our group photos of us Pretending on the toilet we took photos anyway. Yeah, it was a he got mad at you he got really us I mean it wasn't pornographic, you know, it was from an angle, but it was kind of so we thought it was artistic Yeah, and a bit silly and he wrote a letter to, you know, it was from an angle, but we thought it was artistic and a bit silly. And he wrote a letter to me saying how inappropriate it was. He sounds boring. That guy sounds like I don't want to listen to him about anything. Anyway, but look, no, look, I want to disagree.

My fellow panpsychists get annoyed at me taking this illusionist view seriously. But, you know, consciousness is difficult and so this guy thinks yeah you know if you punched him repeatedly in the face he'd he wouldn't like it and he'd feel like he was in pain but he wouldn't really be in pain i mean it's a coherent position that's nonsense it's nonsense no no light his feet on fire hold him down light his feet on fire he's gonna scream in pain and he'll be like tell me it hurts and i'll stop and i'll go it hurts okay well you have to get an illusionist in to defend their view but yeah i mean look it's perspective water is wet but in a way i tell you like i've got i in a way i've got more respect because i think it's coherent i think the conventional materialist position which is that consciousness exists, but we can totally explain

it in terms of electrochemical signaling. I think that's just incoherent. The idea that we really believe in these qualities, the colors, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, but at the same time, that's nothing more than the purely quantitative story of electrochemical signaling. I think that's just incoherent. Whereas at least these guys are coherent. They say, look, all there is in your head is the purely quantitative story of electrochemical signaling. And so these qualities you seem to experience, the colors, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, they don't really exist. So at least they're coherent. But they do exist, but they are also a part of this interaction that we have with the electrical chemical environment that we live in.

Yeah, yeah. That could be it too. You don't have to persuade me that the consciousness exists. That colors exist or that sounds exist. But I don't... You're interfacing with these things. I don't think you can explain. I don't think you can reductively,

fully account for the taste of coffee or the blueness of a blue experience in terms of a purely quantitative story of electrochemical signaling. Because you just can't convey those qualities in that language. Well, you can't using a language, but you could recognize the concept of these things, these components, these compounds interacting with each other

in a way that's going to cause a reaction. We know that certain chemicals have various reactions in the human mind. As we said dopamine and serotonin and adrenaline and all these different things that do different things to the way people perceive reality around them different colors different sounds different feelings different reactions from the very nerves of your body themselves the hormones that you have fight or flight all the different things that are going themselves, the hormones that you have, fight or flight, all the different things that are going on inside the body, that these chemicals interact

and that ultimately the end goal of all these experiences is to encourage survival, to encourage reproduction, to encourage advancement in the social structure of these tribes and groups that we're in, and that this will also encourage survival of your genes? Yeah, I mean, I think I can agree with pretty much everything you've just said there. But I mean, well, it depends. I think there's a bit of an ambiguity. It depends if we're just, it's a question of correlation or explanation. Yeah, I totally agree.

It's just a fact that certain kinds of chemical structures in the brain correlated with certain kinds of experience. But why? That's the big mystery. That's the hard problem of consciousness. Why should they go together why should um you know the the chemical structures go along with an inner world of of these subjective qualities rather than just a mechanism doing all the same stuff and um well it's maybe perhaps that's what has led us to where we are today and that all these interactions have proven to be successful in this quest for innovation and breeding and social structure. That this all these chemicals and this has led us into this point now where it allows you to be successful with what it means to be a person today in 2021. successful with what it means to be a person today in 2021 and that all these hundreds of thousands if not millions of years of evolution have led us into these chemical pathways that

will allow this thing that the human animal does so well which is innovate breed procreate form social structures try to climb the social hierarchy there's clearly a lot of motivation to do those things. There's clearly a lot of motivation to innovate, climb the social structure, make friends, form communities, be loved. Well, why is that? Well, clearly all those things help you procreate and establish your genes and allow them to carry on. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, what is so attractive about panpsych is, you know, when I studied philosophy, we were taught that, you know, you had two choices on consciousness, right? Either you say it's something magical and mysterious, something supernatural, something that it's hard to fit into the kind of scientific evolutionary story you've just described, or you think it's just totally reducible to electrochemical signaling

in the brain, right? What if it's everything? What if it's all those things? Yeah, well, so I think the attraction to pod psychism is you get the best of both, right? You get to say there's nothing supernatural. There's nothing. There's just, you know, in a sense, in a sense, there's just particles and fields at the fundamental level, right? There's nothing. I mean, the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, you know, wrote a blog post criticizing panpsychism that got a little bit of traction saying, you know, you know, wrote a blog post criticizing panpsychism that got a little bit of traction saying, you know, well, look, this panpsychism stuff must be bullshit because if particles had these funny consciousness properties, it would have showed up in our physics, right? You know, because the

standard model of particle physics predicts the behavior of particles just on the basis of, you know, their physical properties, mass, spin, charge. If there were these extra consciousness properties, that would presumably have different predictions. They would behave differently, right? But that's not the view. That's dualism. That's the view that consciousness is separate from the physical.

The panpsychist says, no, no, there's just particles and fields, just mass, spin, and charge. But mass, spin, and charge are forms of consciousness. All of that mathematical structure you get from physics is realized by consciousness. So in a sense, you don't change anything. And this is why some people say, well, what's the point of the view? But in a sense, if we're just thinking about observable,

physical science, the evolutionary story, what stuff does, you know, basically, I think what physical science is all about is what stuff does. And that's really useful information. If you know what stuff does, you can manipulate the natural world and you can create technology and, you know, and i think that's why we're going for a period of history where people think oh my god that's it's so exciting it's working we've got something that works because you look at technology and you know people talk about religion as a crutch but i think a certain kind of scientism can really get into people's identity you think oh no we've got something that works. But it works because from Galileo onwards,

it's just focused on this narrow task of what stuff does. I sometimes say like doing physics is like playing chess when you don't care what the pieces are made of. You're just interested in the moves you can make, right? And the panpsychist can just say, yeah, that's all right. That's all, that's fine. But there's this other thing we know to be real, not from observation experiments.

Consciousness isn't something we discovered in a particle collider. It's something we know about just from our immediate awareness. If you're in pain, you're just directly aware of your pain. And that needs to be fitted into reality. So, I mean, like what I'm most passionate about and much more than panpsychism is just getting people to see that the reality of consciousness is a hard scientific datum in its own right. I think most people have this conception of science, you know, what's the task of science? To account for the data of observation and experiments. Once you've done that, that's job

done, you can go home. I want to say no, no, no, no, no. That's important. But there's this other thing not known about in that way, the reality of conscious experience. So the task of, we need to expand the task of science. It's not about saying science can't explain consciousness. It's about saying we need a more expansive conception of science. We need a theory that can accommodate both the quantitative data of physical science, what stuff does, but also the reality of conscious experience. We need a theory that can accommodate both of those that can bring together what galileo separated and i think that's that's what panpsychism does that no other theory can really do is there also a problem just with the term consciousness i mean

is that that term not complicated enough for what it means to be conscious it's because it seems like it has so many other meanings to like consciousness is connected to being unconscious or being like knocked unconscious like being awake being not awake but it's more than that it's the the interaction that this sentient this aware thing this life form has with everything around it and then this idea that all these other things around it have some, whatever the quality is, however you can measure it, some quality of their own that allows them to experience their surroundings. And that everything is experiencing itself subjectively and constantly. All things are moving together. So to call this the word consciousness, it's almost like it's too narrow a box for this thought.

Yeah, I kind of think, I know where you're coming from there. I think I have a problem with students. I think I've explained, I think people always associated it with something different. Some people think of it as self-consciousness. Or as you say, in a medical context, someone's conscious if they're awake, right? Whereas that's not consciousness in the way philosophers or scientists of consciousness use it because you can have experiences when you're asleep. I guess it's something we're stuck with. But I mean, I would like to swap it for just experience, although that's a bit ambiguous as well, because sometimes by experience, you mean your perceptual relationship with the environment around you rather than just something kind of inner.

So I don't know what to do. I think we're just kind of stuck with the word now. One of the things that I love about science and the study of quantum mechanics and quantum physics is that we find things out that defy all understanding, like spooky action at a distance, like particles being in superposition, where they moving and and and still at the same time like there's certain things that happen under observation that throw all of our assumptions of what reality is out the window and then you have to wonder like how much of what we're experiencing is because this is the easiest way for you to interface with the environment and stay alive how much of what our senses are are just limited to what do we need in order to be effective as a human being and procreate and keep ourselves going and then innovate and then keep

this this whole process that we're involved in moving in the same general direction. And how much of it is out there that we're not tuned into? Like you could wave your hand above an ant colony and they have no idea that you're there. Why? Because it's not really that important for them. They're busy. They have a limited amount of senses, right? We have more senses, but we don't have all of them. There's clearly some things that we can't detect,

whether it's because they're too small or in the sense of the universe because they're too big. We don't have the senses that are available to detect supermassive black holes that are in the center of the very galaxy that we live in. We can't see it, but we know it's out there. We don't have that sense, or we don't have the ability like there whatever we are as a physical structure the physical structure of a human animal

on earth dealing with gravity in the environment and going through life we only have so much of a capacity to understand all the things that are around us all the time of a capacity to understand all the things that are around us all the time. Yeah. Look, I mean, I think we've all got to accept that reality is weird. It's very different to our intuitive sense of how it should be. And I mean, so sometimes people, when I'm talking about, oh, you know, science can't, normal science can't explain consciousness. People say, oh, you're just thinking it needs to be intuitive or something. But I mean, that's,

the motivation for panpsychism is not capturing our common sense intuitions or something. The motivation is there's something real here, pain, seeing, you know, experience that needs to be accommodated. But, you know, I mean, what be accommodated but um you know i mean what what i've been thinking about recently is how whether the need to explain this this fundamental datum of experience could interact with how we think about fundamental physics and and certain theory choices there so Like if you think consciousness is just in the domain of neuroscience, then, you know, physics is completely irrelevant. But if you think consciousness exists at the fundamental level of reality,

you know, this might interact with certain questions of fundamental physics. So I've been thinking, for example, about, so I got a paper coming out and there's going to be a volume with Oxford University Press on quantum mechanics and consciousness. And my paper for that volume is, you know, thinking about, we've got these different interpretations of quantum mechanics. And as far as we can tell, you know, there's no way to distinguish between them or, you know, there's various arguments we can have. But it's really in the realm of philosophy. And this is why it annoys a lot of physicists, right? They just get on with the experiments.

But it could be that certain interpretations of quantum mechanics fit better, say, with a panpsychist theory at the fundamental level. theory at the fundamental level because, I mean, so some interpretations of quantum mechanics, you've just got the wave function at the fundamental level, which is this really weird esoteric entity, just kind of vector in high dimensional space. Now, I think that view is maybe difficult to square with a panpsychist theory because on a panpsychist theory, you've got to be able to get from the fundamental level of reality to our consciousness through some kind of process of combination or decombination. If you're just starting with a vector,

it's hard to see how you can do it. I mean, maybe it can be done, but whereas there are other interpretations of quantum mechanics, like the Bohmian interpretation, sometimes called hidden variables. I don't think that name's that appropriate, but where you've got the wave function and you've got particles.

So, you know, one of the puzzles about quantum mechanics is things that sort of wave like some kind of particle, like what Bohm thought was, well, maybe there's waves and particles. And then on his interpretation, the wave function kind of pulls the particles around. So I'm inclined to think that kind of view fits better with a panpsychist view. And so, you know, I mean, I'm not a physicist. I'm not even, you know, a fully trained philosopher of physics. You know, what I'd love to see is a new generation of physicists who take consciousness seriously, who see it as this datum that doesn't come from public observation experiment, but is real, needs to be accounted for and reflect on that in terms of choices in fundamental physics. So someone who's doing this, actually, Lee Smolin, a friend of mine,

so there was recently this issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies with 19 essays on my book Galileo's Era by scientists and philosophers and theologians. And Lee Smolin has this idea that the kind of radical rethinking we're going to have to do to bring general relativity together with quantum mechanics can come together with a role for consciousness at the fundamental level of reality. Now, I don't have some concerns with his view in a number of ways, some disagreements, but that kind of thinking about physics, taking consciousness as a serious datum, Thinking about physics taking consciousness as a serious datum, you know, I think that could be a real important pathway to theoretical progress. You know, we haven't really made many huge discoveries in physics since the 70s.

You know, I think it's a possible way forward. Um, it's possible, possible way forward. Now, how does one go from trying to understand consciousness in the human being, trying to understand consciousness in living organisms to consciousness exists in water or consciousness exists in the environment, consciousness exists in other things? Like what evidence or what what even motivation do you have to make those leaps yeah so i mean i guess there could be two questions there is one how the hell do you know it's there you know what's your justification for this belief right another question is what's it what's it if it conscious, what the hell is it like? What's it like to be a quark or what's it like to be a water molecule? If there is something that's like to be a water molecule.

I mean, on the first question, I would just say that what panpsychism offers us is a so i mean it's it's not it's not something you can demonstrate experimentally because just because we consciousness is not publicly observable just as i can't look in your brain and see your feelings so you can't look in a particle to see whether it has feelings right you wouldn't right you can't confirm or disconfirm it. That's not the motivation of panpsychism is the beautiful, elegant solution it gives to the heart, bum, and consciousness. I think, you know, I think we've been hitting our head against a brick wall for decades now, trying to give a kind of materialist answer to that problem. We've got precisely nowhere. I think the motivation for trying to do that is rooted in a sort of misunderstanding of the history of science and why it's been as successful as it is. This is an alternative research program.

You know, rather than trying to explain consciousness in terms of utterly non-conscious processes in the brain, we try to explain complicated human consciousness in terms of simpler forms of consciousness, simpler forms of consciousness that are then postulated to exist as basic aspects of matter. So this is an ongoing research program. You know, nobody has a complete theory of consciousness. Right, but what's the motivation? Like, what's the motivation? Solving the hard problem of consciousness.

But how do you even make the leap to try to attribute consciousness to rocks? Right, so whether... Look, the panpsychist position is that consciousness is at the fundamental level, right? Of everything. So it might be particles, or it might be, you know, many theoretical physicists prefer to think of fields

as the fundamental building blocks of reality, sort of universe-wide fields, and then particles are just sort of local excitations. So if you combine that view with panpsychism, the fundamental forms of consciousness are the ultimate nature of these universe-wide fields. And the thing that has those forms of consciousness is the universe itself. So this is sometimes called cosmopsychism, the universe itself.

But you needn't think of it as God or something. It could be just a mess that the universe has experienced. A mess? But it's just – so you might think – It's not God. It's a mess. It's not God, it's a mess. It's either God or it's a mess. Yeah, that's the truth. You know, we are experienced

as a result of millions of years of evolution. But if the universe has experience, it hasn't evolved. It could be just, you know, you needn't think of it as intelligent or an agent. It could be, but just a mess. But back to rocks. Yeah, so panpsychists need to think rocks are conscious but look it's you know i see this as a collaboration between science

and philosophy this is partly an empirical question of what kind at higher levels what kinds of physical activity go along with experience you know so the the philosopher had a hassle Merc who's also a panpsychist a spent a year in in the lab of Giulio Tononi who's the originator of the integrated information theory of consciousness a proposal about the neural correlates the physical correlates of consciousness spelling that theory out in a panpsychist way. So on that theory, we get consciousness at the level at which you have most integrated information. And that is a notion they try to give a mathematically precise definition of. So on that view, probably the cup of water is not conscious because there's probably

more integration in the molecules than there is in the liquid as a whole. And in a rock, likewise, probably there's more integration in the components of the rock than in the rock as a whole. What's distinctive about the human brain, or at least certain parts of the human brain, is that there's massively more integrated information in the whole than there is in any individual neuron. The way the brain stores information is heavily dependent on its connectivity. So if you combine panpsychism with that view, then rocks wouldn't be conscious. So it's a collaboration between science and philosophy. Panpsychism offers us a broad brushstrokes account of the kind of approach to solving the hard problem. Materialism is a dead end. Here's a more promising approach.

But spelling it out is going to require collaboration with neuroscience physics as well um you know what's exciting to me at the moment you know i get contacted by a lot of scientists now um seeing a connection with their work and you know i want to at some point get together a kind of interdisciplinary network which or content do you see any connection with their work? I had a guy from Jonathan Delafield Button, an experimental psychologist. So he's one of the contributors to this volume of essays on my book, Galileo's Era. So he's done it, spent, you know, his career working on experimental study of autism. And he's reached the conclusion that, you know, understanding autism in a panpsychist framework gives us a much deeper explanatory insight

than understanding it in a materialist framework. So, I mean, Daniel Picard, the example I already gave you of the guy who's experimentally exploring the idea that mitochondria might be understood as social networks. There's obvious kind of connections between psychism there rather than reducible to underlying chemistry and physics. Lee Smolin, who has these ideas of, you know,

speculative theoretical physics, allowing consciousness to play a fundamental role. So, yeah, so there are some examples. So, you know, what I'm really excited about, I just, you know, I think you start to get taken seriously when you, most of the time panpsychism has just been trying to justify its existence. And we've been very successful at that, I think. But I think it's now time to just get on with getting this research program going, doing the what research could be done to prove the existence of consciousness in things other than human beings that speak a language that could

explain their consciousness to you like what what can be done to try to quantify this idea and make it like make it so that not only is it taken seriously, but it's doctrine. There's something we've got to face up to, which is that, I mean, I've said this already, that consciousness is not publicly observable. So people, I mean, often the first question when you say about panpsychism, how do you test it?

You know, what's the... I don't think any theory of any philosophical answer to the hard problem can be tested in that sense because consciousness is just not publicly observable. And that's uncomfortable, right? And that's, I think, why people who like science, you know, who think of themselves pro-science, might resist this because they think, no, look, this works, you know, think of themselves pro-science, might resist this because they think,

no, look, this works, you know, public observation experiment, it's got us technology, it's done so well. And, you know, for a lot of the 20th century, because of that enthusiasm for observation experiment, people basically just pretended consciousness didn't exist for a long period of time till kind of the 80s, 90s. But it does exist. And because it's not publicly observable, we're not going to be able to get a theory, a solution to the hard problem that we can kind of test in that way. But more broadly, what you do is what you always do in science is you just try and find the simplest theory that can accommodate the data. That's what you do is what you always do in science is you just try and find the simplest theory that can accommodate the data. That's what you do in science. And it's just that for a theory of consciousness, the data is not just public observation experiment, but also the reality of consciousness. We need to find the simplest theory that can accommodate both of those things.

theory that can accommodate both of those things. And I think the, you know, the panpsychist direction of that looks more promising than the alternatives that have kind of got nowhere. Out of the people that are critiquing this and the people that disagree with it, whether it's Sean Carroll, whoever, what is it about their, is there ever some arguments that they give you that make you have pause that make you stop and think about whether or not you're wasting your time with all this yeah no i mean i've i've definitely learned a lot you know i'm still with ongoing discussion about what what follows from what we know in physics about, I mean, this discussion that I'm more agnostic on of whether all causal dynamics are reducible to underlying chemistry and physics, you know,

I'm really open-minded on that. A panpsychist can be open-minded on that. And so, you know, it's something I used to think everything was reducible to physics. I'm more agnostic. I'm open to going back to that. But yeah, I mean, sometimes I would be more open-minded to actually the illusionist position that consciousness doesn't exist. You know, I think the regular materialist position just doesn't make sense. So the illusionist position that consciousness doesn't exist is that it's all just down to chemical reactions? And that, yeah, no one's ever had experience. We think, and look, it sounds crazy and I don't really believe it,

but then in some mindsets I think, you know, people can be brainwashed to think kind of crazy things. Like you think in 1984 there's the character who's brainwashed into think kind of crazy things. Like you think in 1984, there's the character who's brainwashed into thinking two plus two is five. Maybe evolution has just totally brainwashed us into thinking we have experience. And we just, we, you know,

you said to me, that's just total bullshit. Maybe it's just so ingrained in us. We, we, we, we can't get, not believe it,

but maybe, but maybe it's false. Isn't that where we're headed? if we continue down this virtual reality road? This is the concept of the matrix, that you will have experiences that are not real. But what are experiences? If your consciousness is taking these experiences in, are they real? Yeah. What, you mean the experience itself? Yeah. I mean, if we really do get to a point where technology is sufficiently advanced to the point where they can make a virtual reality that's indiscernible, you cannot tell the difference between this artificially created reality of pixels and ones and zeros through this amazing graphic engine that you're witnessing through whatever equipment they design,

that it's so good that it hits all of the various aspects of your sensory perceptions. Is that a real experience? Yeah, well, I mean, I think certainly our relationship as conscious beings to the world around us is going to dramatically change. And, you know, we're already increasingly living in a virtual world. And that is in some ways as real an environment as the external physical world. Right. I don't think that questions, I mean, the reality of experience itself. But one thing that could do is, you know, I mean, the question of,

could you upload your consciousness? I mean, that's, if it got to the point, not just of you being in your brain, interacting with the virtual world, but your consciousness being sort of uploaded into the virtual world, that's another question. I mean, I'm inclined to think that that would be suicide. Because as a panpsychist, I think of consciousness as the stuff of the brain. It's not software, it's the hardware.

So just if you upload the information in my brain, I'm inclined to think the consciousness would be lost. And so we might get to a situation where we think, oh, my God, we've discovered immortality and we're all uploading our minds. But we're actually killing ourselves and replacing consciousness with non-consciousness. I do worry about that, actually. Well, also, consciousness as it exists, as a human being, like as in you and I experiencing this conversation, we are, there's so many components to what we are, right? You have muscles, and inside those muscles, there's tissue.

Inside the tissue is cells. Inside those cells is atoms. Inside those atoms is subatomic particles. As you go deeper and deeper into the structure of what it means to be just a human being, where does the experience start? Does it start at a cellular level? Does it start at a structural level? Does it start a cellular level does it start a structural level does it start at a at a level of language and culture like where does the experience start like where can you say here's where it is because if you are looking at the fat and we know for a fact that we are created out of atoms right we are created out of these these these particles that are they exist in everything and all things all around us all the time.

Well, where is the experience? So if we're thinking in the concept of that there is no real pain and there is no real vision, there's no real love, there's no real experience, it's not real. Like it's not, if you get down to the lowest observable structure that we know exists, there's seemingly no change in those, in those structures between the experience and no experience. So where is it? Yeah. I mean. Right. I mean, I think actually you're really making an argument for panpsychism here, Joe.

I think you think that about everything, though. No, no, actually, right. I mean, it's been just a slight digression that panpsychism, you know, has gone from being a view that kind of nobody took seriously to being, you know, still a minority view, but pretty well respected. And this kind of annoyed certain people in the field. But anyway, but one kind of interesting recent development is Michael Tai, who's a guy who you won't know maybe if you're not in academic philosophy, but is a huge figure in academic philosophy and a huge and influential proponent of materialism for the last 30, 40 years.

And in his recent book, he's converted to a kind of panpsychism, which is, I mean, I can't convey this, but that is like, oh my God, it's like, you know, it's like, I don't know, Richard Dawkins becoming a Christian or something. Really? But his motivation actually is difficult to do with evolution and difficulties making sense of where i mean we could ask in the process of evolution you know the slow development over time or just in like a fetus um an embryo becoming a fetus where does the consciousness switch on now with with most properties it's going to be a fuzzy boundary,

right? So like you think, I don't know, where does life emerge? Maybe there's a fuzzy boundary, you know, where it's like, I think most concepts admit of these fuzzy boundaries, like, you know, whether someone is bald or not. people are definitely bald some people are definitely not bald I'm a kind of borderline case I'm kind of thin and you know

life maybe there was a time in evolutionary history is it life is it not life with consciousness that's hard to make sense of

it's hard to make sense could there be something where there was no fact of the matter as to whether it had experience or not? What do you think?

I find that hard to think of. There's levels of that consciousness. Like maybe it's quantifiable just like everything else. Like there's weight. There's a difference in the weight of this glass of water versus the weight of a giant basin filled with water. There's more water in it. Maybe there's a difference between the consciousness of a sloth and the consciousness of a wolf,

which is a highly intelligent animal that operates in packs and has some sort of nonverbal communication. It would require some sort of a more complex consciousness and something that's slow and seemingly dumb. Yeah, I think I agree with that. So I mean, yeah, there's something that's gradable here, you know, you can have more complicated consciousness. Yeah. You can have more sophisticated consciousness. If you're kind of waking up groggy, you can have kind of tuned out consciousness or so there's things that are gradation, but

this still seems to be the case. And I don't know, I'd like to know if you agree with this. Something either has experience or it doesn't. There's either something that it's like to be it or I can't make sense of the idea. So let's say, I mean, let's say take snails, right? Let's say there's no fact of the matter about whether they have experience or not. I just can't make sense of that. Either there's something that it's like to be a snail,

or there's nothing that it's like to be a snail. But maybe it's just the amount of information that's coming to it, the amount of experience it's having. Like, here's the difference. If you are at a warehouse, and you're inside the inside the warehouse and the warehouse explodes and you manage to survive, that is a very different experience than if you're watching an explosion from a mile away. Yeah. You still have an experience. Yeah.

It's a very distant experience. Yeah. It's not quite as potent. Yeah. So we're talking about levels and gradations within the category of experience yes but could there be a creature maybe a snail some people want to say this about snails where it doesn't have any experience no no no no i can make sense of that i can make sense that a snail is just a mechanism there's no i can make sense that a snail has consciousness what i can't

make sense of is that there's that there's no fact of the matter about just like i'm kind of neither bald nor i'm a middle fuzzy line borderline case i can't make sense of that in the case of consciousness that it's that it's sort of neither definitely has nor definitely lacks it either has experience or it doesn't and so maybe this experience just lacks the ability to process it Like what is experience and your ability to process it? Are they mutually exclusive? Are they the same thing? Like what is, if just because you're having experience.

I'd say they're different things. I think, you know, I think, you know, like a newborn baby. Actually, people, you know, it's only recently people said, you know, people, a lot of people used to think babies didn't have consciousness until very recently. A guy called Peter Carruthers, he's a really good philosopher, totally disagree with. He thinks babies don't have consciousness. What? Does he have babies? I don't know.

Find out if he has babies. I think he thinks babies don't have consciousness. I bet his wife's mad at him if he has a kid. I think he thinks they don't have consciousness, but he sort of thinks consciousness doesn't matter anyway. What? It doesn't matter in what way? He's interesting. I really like engaging with people like this guy I do the podcast with.

I totally disagree with, and I love to try and get in their mindset, try and look out of their eyes. I really enjoy doing that. It's just great when you can, again, coming back to Sean Cowhery, engage with someone's worldview in a respectful way. But what were we talking about? Yeah, I think that's been a move

to like think more things are conscious. People used to think, most people used to think fish weren't conscious and babies weren't conscious. I think the dominant view now would be both fish and babies are conscious. So people are still a bit skeptical of particles. How can people think that babies aren't conscious?

That's someone who doesn't have any experience with babies. Babies look at you and they react to things. They laugh. You can get them to giggle. Mechanism. Then maybe you're just a mechanism. You're just a mechanism. You're just a mechanism. Why assume that as you get more complex, that it's not just a mechanism?

If you're wrapped up in a kind of theory of consciousness, you know, you asked the question, does the experience and the ability to process it go together? Well, one theory says they do, the higher order thought theory of consciousness. That says that to have an experience essentially involves reflecting upon it and being aware of it. And if you can't reflect upon it,

you don't really have experience. So if you just get wrapped up in that view, then maybe you bite the bullet and you say, you know, the baby can't reflectively attend, you know, reflect on its consciousness. So maybe, maybe it doesn't really have consciousness. Um, well, it's developing just like a baby has motion, but it can't run. Right. It's developing. It's a, that's part of the, the reason why they're born immature, right? Their heads are so big., this is the only way you can really viably have a woman carry a child.

Yeah. The baby has to come out when it's not quite cooked. Yeah. Yeah, and they're just, they can't do anything for such a long time. I've got young children. This is, yeah,

they can't do anything, can they? It's a bloody nightmare. Lots of fun, though. But it's fascinating. It is. It's fascinating. I mean, you learn so much about just human life in general when you watch them develop yeah and grow it's like oh it's just fascinating to see all these little pieces fall into place yeah absolutely yeah so look is that but there's the question you know we're on this gradual train of complexity and development. Evolution does experience suddenly switch on.

I think if you're not a panpsychist, you've just got to say, there's this moment when it suddenly switches on. And it's going to look really arbitrary. It's going to look, you know, if it suddenly switches on it that's going to look really why was it just there whereas if you're a panpsychist i mean it's a much more elegant view that look it's consciousness is there all along but but simple forms of consciousness and cognitive development and evolution in the broader scheme of things mold that simple forms of consciousness into more complex forms so it's you So it's a beautiful, elegant, naturalistic view of the world. Lost my train of thought there, but yeah.

Do you think when it goes along the lines of what we were talking about earlier about how people don't want to buy a home where someone was murdered in it, do you think that it's possible that things do retain some kind of memory i believe it was uh rupert sheldrick had this idea that everything has some kind of memory like a form of memory yeah i've had i i'm friends with rupert actually we had um a, interesting discussion recently walking through London. Look, I... He's got very strange ideas, like the morphic resonance theory.

Yeah, he's an interesting guy, and he makes his case of view. And look, I suppose these are scientific empirical questions. And, you know, I guess he's going wildly against the dominant view right and but you know i suppose his case is well look there's just you know an establishment view that people aren't taking my work seriously because there's an establishment view that could be true i you. I just don't know. I don't, it's not my area of expertise to evaluate that sort of data.

I mean, maybe I should put in the time to work out the data. I mean, you know, there's a spectrum here. Like people like, some people have talked about like Martin Picard or something, where there's, it's not that radical as Sheldrake, but still it's like things are perhaps not reducible

to underlying chemistry or physics. That's fairly radical in itself. I'm much more open-minded about that possibility. But, Rupert, I mean, I just don't know. more open-minded about that possibility. But Rupert, I mean, I just don't know. I think I'm confident about panpsychism, not for those kind of empirical scientific reasons, but just it's the only viable solution to the heart problem of consciousness. So that's, as a philosopher, I feel confident about saying that. But the of you know the these unorthodox phenomena I just I just don't know it's a I don't know later but I'm fascinated

by I am as well but there's certain people that I respect that have they have experiences like in places like here here's an example. My father was in Gettysburg. He went to Gettysburg. They were just sightseeing. They went on this tour. And he said you could feel the sadness and the loss in the area. You know, it's a place where there was a great war. And so on this battlefield, he said it was the strangest thing that you could

feel the loss like you could feel something horrible had happened there like and this is hundreds of years ago right so this is embedded into or 200 years ago almost embedded into the the ground itself like the the actual area where it happened had retained an experience yeah or a memory of that experience like maybe the area had consciousness if you murder enough people on a specific plot of land maybe that the the sadness the loss the pain the suffering just gets soaked into the land itself. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there are experiences, I mean, at a gig or something that, you know, the experience of the excitement,

it sort of feels like it's not just. Yeah. But, I mean, it's difficult to exactly pin that down. I mean, I suppose the closest I've had to these kind of very strange experiences, I suppose a friend of mine who I hadn't seen for a long time sadly passed away. And, you know, I had that experience of thinking about them before I found that out, you know, that I found out the next day. Like you thought about them were something special? out you know that i found out the next day and like you thought about them were something special for the first time in a long time i thought about this person i found out the next day that they

died on that on that day i was thinking but you know i mean look i let me let me be totally clear let me be totally clear i don't i'm not saying that proves anything. You know, I guess the opposing explanation is, you know, maybe I did think about him a lot and I didn't notice. That's the standard explanation. I didn't say. And then Rupert Sheldrake says, well, he's tested that and he's controlled for that, you know, and I don't know.

You know, so here's what I think, actually. Here's what I... I think people focus too much on the dichotomy of do you believe or do you not believe? Do you take this seriously or do you not take this seriously? So, I mean, with kind of spiritual experiences of whatever kind, I mean, you're talking about more concrete stuff, but, you know, certain kinds of spiritual experiences. I think people either think you believe those experiences or you think, no, it's bullshit. It's just something in my brain. But look, there are possibilities in

between that you can engage with an experience. You can take seriously the possibility that it corresponds to something real. I suppose I would say, you know, in terms of certain fleeting spiritual experiences, I have certain, you know, in certain deep moral experiences, in certain deep engagements with nature, I feel I have a kind of fleeting sense of some greater reality or point to it all. Now, I wouldn't say I feel confident enough to say, you know, I believe those experiences are corresponding to something real. But I would just say I engage those experiences and I take seriously the possibility that they correspond to something real. So, you know, you can have that kind of engaged agnostic position rather than just what's your decision? Is it bullshit or is it real you

know it's a possibility you can work with you can engage with your you know certain spiritual because if you think that things have consciousness that consciousness is an underlying property of matter of life itself of everything then something about consciousness must be the retaining of experiences that take place within that consciousness. Unless consciousness is always completely in the moment with no knowledge about the past and no thought about the future. And that's not consciousness as we recognize it. Consciousness is a certain amount of awareness, right? So if everything is consciousness including environments why wouldn't something retain a memory yeah i was i was interviewing

a podcast of uh a really interesting guy um what's it called is it the waking cosmos podcast so he's got you know he i think he takes seriously the possibility of telepathy on empirical grounds. But he's a really, like Rupert Sheldrake, he can make his case. And he had me on and he wanted to say panpsychism fits better with telepathy or something. But I think maybe I disappointed him. I'm not sure, actually. I think you could be a materialist and think there's some non-local connection between brains that passes information. I mean, it's an empirical question. I'm not saying I believe that, but it's not obvious to me.

You'd have to be a panpsych. I mean, some people say then, okay, what about quantum entanglement? You know, isn't that like, you know, we can have particles that are correlated, even though they're so far apart, no signal can pass between them. Problem with that is quantum, you can't pass a signal with quantum entanglement. So, you know, that doesn't show that the possibility of something like telepathy, but, you know, look, even if you're a total materialist, it seems to me that it could turn out that there's some non-local connection with brains. It could turn out that there's, you know, all the kind of, yeah, and this is maybe a disagreement I have with Rupert Sheldrake, actually. I don't,

I don't see why a materialist couldn't necessarily accommodate these phenomena. So one thing Rupert Sheldrake believes in is you can tell when someone's looking at you and he thinks he's, you know yeah he's demonstrated this but there's a lot of and then and then he think yeah like i don't know i just i just i i'm a philosopher i i don't i haven't looked at the data i'm not that's not my skill set but then he explains that by saying you know the consciousness reaches out but you know outside of your head and touches the person also i mean not literally but why couldn't if you're a materialist and you actually thought there was overwhelming evidence for this phenomenon

you could just think there's some kind of no non-local connection between brains you know i don't so yeah i actually think you know look these are just the scientific questions and there's philosophical questions the philosophical questioning and how do we solve the heart problem of consciousness scientific questions you know we just have to look at the data and, you know, and I mean, I mean, a lot of panpsychists are just total secularist atheists, you know, like David Chalmers, like Luke Roloff's, they don't believe in any kind of transcendent reality. They just believe in feelings, pain, seeing red. You know, that's obviously real and they don't think a conventional scientific approach can account for it. spiritual or psychic phenomena or so on. Although, having said that, I suppose if for independent reasons

you were motivated to adopt some kind of spiritual conception of reality, I suppose a panpsychist worldview is a little bit more consonant with that. So suppose you have a mystical experience and you think in that mystical experience, it seems to you that there's this higher form of consciousness at the root of all things, right? If you're a materialist, you've got to think that's a delusion, right? Because what's at the fundamental level is just physics and that's inconsistent. That doesn't have this higher form of consciousness. If you're a panpsychist and you already think there's consciousness at the fundamental level of reality, it's not so much of a leap to think

what you're experiencing in the mystical experience is part of that fundamental story of consciousness at the fundamental level. But that doesn't mean you should trust mystical experiences. That's a difficult question. It just removes the reason to doubt them, I suppose. Here's my last question to you. Okay.

If this is a real thing, how will it be proven? And what will change once it is proven? Panpsychism. Oh, I thought you were talking about the cup. No, no. I'm sorry. I'm holding the cup. I thought you were like, is this real?

No, sorry. I'm just swirling it around. If you can prove that things do have consciousness, what will change? And how will you prove it? So, yeah, this isn't just an abstract theoretical question. You know, consciousness is at the root of human identity. You know, fundamentally, we relate to each other as beings with feelings and experiences. You know, consciousness is arguably the source of everything that matters in life. And yet I would argue that our official scientific worldview

is inconsistent with the reality of consciousness. And so we're at a very strange period of history where our official worldview denies the existence of the thing that's most evident and the thing that gives life value and meaning. And I think this can lead to a deep sense of alienation, you know, a sense we don't fit into the world. We lack a framework for making sense of the meaning, you know, a sense we don't fit into the world. We lack a framework for making sense of the meaning and purpose of our lives. And I think in the absence of that, people turn to other ways of making sense of the meaning of their lives, you know, consumerism, nationalism, fundamentalist religion. So I think what panpsychism offers us is a worldview that can accommodate both the quantitative data of physical science and the qualitative reality

of human consciousness so i think you know i think it's deeply important how will we prove it we won't we won't prove it with experiments because consciousness is not publicly observable and so you can't and it's you can't answer all the questions you want to answer with consciousness just by doing experiments. People used to respond to that in the 20th century by saying it doesn't exist. It's weird, spooky, it doesn't exist. Since the 90s, people now say, no, consciousness obviously exists. We've got this hard problem. them. But I think people are still in the mindset of thinking, oh, we just need to do more neuroscience and we'll solve it. I think people need to grasp the philosophical underpinnings, the problems that arise from the fact that there's something we know to be real that's not publicly observable. And we just have to accept that and we have to move to a position where as a scientific community, we think the job of science is not just to account for the data of public observation experiment, but also the reality of human experience. I think once we're at that point, I think consciousness is just sort of the, sorry, panpsychism is just sort of the obvious choice. So it's more getting, I think people are at the moment in this confused position where they think the only job of science is to account for public observation experiments.

But if you religiously follow that through, you wouldn't believe in consciousness because consciousness is not known about in that way. You can't, we didn't discover it looking for a microscope. We know about it in a very different way just through our awareness of our feelings and experiences. So we're in a confused state. Humans always think that at the end of history, but at the moment, we're in a confused state. We need to move to a position where we take the datum of consciousness as a fundamental explanatory obligation. I think when we get there, I think panpsychism will just seem the obvious answer. All right.

Well, thank you very much. This has been a very interesting and brain-bending conversation. Thank you very much. Yeah. You've got me thinking, actually. I will think some more. That's kind of my job, so that's inevitable. That is your job.

Thank you very much, Phil. Appreciate you. Thank you very much, Phil. Appreciate you. Thank you. Bye, everybody.