The Rich Roll Podcast - What Is Consciousness? Philip Goff On The Nature of Reality & The Science of Mind

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

What is consciousness? Where does it come from? What happens to consciousness when we die? And what is the nature of reality? It’s time to ask the big questions and tackle the hard problems that have perplexed humanity since the dawn of inquiry. Our guide for today’s journey is Philip Goff, PhD, a modern philosopher who has devoted his life to better understanding the qualities of reality. Philip is an associate professor of philosophy at Durham University who specializes in the nature of consciousness. He is a proponent of panpsychism—the controversial theory that everything material in our universe is imbued with some element of individual consciousness—which he beautifully captures in his fascinating book, Galileo's Error. This is a fascinating, awe-inspiring conversation about the science of mind, the nature of reality and consciousness, the meaning of the multiverse, artificial intelligence, and spirituality. A conversation that I must admit began to stretch past the boundary of my intellectual capabilities—but in the most enjoyable way possible Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: InsideTracker:  insidetracker.com/RichRoll LMNT: drinkLMNT.com/RICHROLL BetterHelp: BetterHelp.com/richroll Indeed: Indeed.com/RICHROLL Athletic Greens: https://www.athleticgreens.com/richroll Plant Power Meal Planner: https://meals.richroll.com Peace + Plants, Rich

The Rich Roll Podcast. We need to expand the task of science to construct a theory that can accommodate both the data of observation experiments, of course, but also this privately known reality of consciousness. My guest today is Philip Goff. Philip is an associate professor of philosophy at Durham University in the United Kingdom with a focus on the nature of consciousness. But when we're trying to explain consciousness, it's not about explaining behavior with mechanisms. It's about accounting for this invisible but undeniable privately known reality of our feelings and experiences. He is a proponent of something called panpsychism, which is this

really interesting theory that everything material in our universe has some element of individual material in our universe has some element of individual consciousness, which is a theory that he explores in his fascinating book called Galileo's Error, which I highly recommend. It's consciousness that's fundamental, and the physical world arises from underlying facts about mind or consciousness. We explore panpsychism, of course. We talk about the science of mind, the nature of reality and consciousness, as well as the multiverse, AI, and spirituality. And it's coming right up, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com.

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I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, it was really utterly fascinating talking to Philip. And this conversation is one that I must admit began to stretch just past the boundary of my intellectual capabilities. And I mean that in the most enjoyable way possible. So from the mystery of my mind to the mystery of yours, please enjoy this appearance in consciousness,

my conversation with Philip Goff. Welcome to Los Angeles. Welcome to the United States. I know that you were just in London and New York City engaging in debates on the nature of consciousness. How did that go? Yeah, it was great fun. It was brilliant. There was sold-out theaters of the general public,

first in London, then in New York. It was incredible, actually, to see so many people interested in consciousness. Interested in science and consciousness. It's unbelievable and great questions and hanging out chatting to people afterwards. And yeah, it was really loads of fun. It's pretty cool. Well, I'm delighted to have you here today.

This is a long time in the making. I think it's been a couple years of us going back and forth. We were trying to do this before the pandemic and it took a while, but here we are. We got there in the end. Exactly. Yeah. Thank you. So today the intention is to tackle the hard problem of consciousness. I think in order to engage in that discussion, we have to define our terms a little bit and set the context and the terrain. Before we even define consciousness, though, maybe it's worth explaining why it is a hard problem. Like we call it the hard problem.

What is the kind of genesis of characterizing this in that form? Yeah, I think that is a good place to start because I think so many people, my view misunderstand the nature of the problem and I think that is one of the things that's really starting to block progress so I mean the way this maybe I can start with the way it's standardly set up it's standardly characterized as a purely scientific problem you know, the challenge of explaining how brains produce consciousness, you know, how electrochemical signaling is able to bring about this inner world of colors and sounds that each of us knows every second of waking life. And the thought is generally, oh, you know, we just need to plug away

with our standard ways of investigating the brain and we'll crack it. But I would argue that actually what we have at root here is a philosophical rather than a purely scientific problem. And I think until we confront that the philosophical underpinnings of the problem, we're not really gonna make progress towards a solution. Right, and talk a little bit about your evolution to that realization that the answers that we seek

lie in more of a philosophical exploration than a materialist physics, hard science path. Yeah, well, this is an old problem going back a few centuries. It's what's traditionally been known as the mind-body problem. And I think the problem arises because we have two very different ways of accessing reality, perception and introspection. So through perception, we access the physical world around us via our senses. And we've learned to do that more accurately and

precisely through science. And through introspection, we access consciousness via our immediate awareness of our own feelings and experiences. So the challenge of the mind-body problem then is how to bring together these two seemingly very different things, consciousness and the physical world, into a single unified picture of reality. And broadly speaking, there are three options. Option one, the materialist option, is that it's the physical world that's fundamental that we know through science, and consciousness somehow arises from physical processes in the brain.

Second option, the one I prefer, panpsychism, turns that on its head, right? So it's consciousness that's fundamental and the physical world arises from underlying facts about mind or consciousness. Third option, dualism, which is the option that we take both consciousness and the physical world as fundamental but different aspects of reality. So this is an old problem philosophers have wrestled with for hundreds of years. And it's essentially a philosophical problem because all of those three views I've just described are empirically equivalent, which means you can't do an experiment to distinguish between them. So it's not in essence, experiments are very important in ways we could talk about,

but it's not in essence a scientific problem. So I think it's almost like we've taken this ancient philosophical problem, labeled it science, and then we find science can't answer it. It's like maybe, you know, like trying to solve a math problem, looking down a microscope or something. We need to understand what the problem essentially is. Wouldn't the materialists contend that we can solve it with hard science? We're just not at the point where we're capable of doing it yet. Yeah, yeah. So it's a tempting thought.

I mean, and that's, well, I was just debating in London a couple of nights ago, Anil Seth, the neuroscientist, really great neuroscientist, a good friend of mine, as well as a philosophical enemy. We, you know, we've debated each other

a couple of times now. And this is his line. He makes the analogy to life. We used to think life was this big mystery. Maybe we'd never give a scientific explanation without the supernatural vital spark or something. But then we plugged away with the science and the problem kind of dissolved.

And so he thinks the same is going to happen with consciousness. But I think that's not a good analogy because life was a purely scientific problem. It was just about accounting for observable data, what you can observe about the living functions of organisms. In other words, defining what constitutes being alive versus inanimate. Yeah, explaining what organisms can do, what they're made of, how they behave, how they function, where they came from. That's where evolution comes in. But the distinctive thing about consciousness

is that it's not publicly observable, right? I can't cut open your head and look in your brain and see your feelings and experiences. We know about consciousness not from experiments. It's not something we discovered in a particle collider. We know about consciousness in a very different way way just from our immediate awareness of our own feelings and experiences if you're in pain you're just directly aware of your pain now you know science is used to dealing with things you can't observe like fundamental particles or quantum wave functions or even other universes some physicists entertain but there's a really

important difference in the case of consciousness in all these other cases we theorize about things we can't observe in order to explain what we can observe that's the whole task of science explaining the publicly accessible data of observation and experiments. But in the case of consciousness, that's not what we're doing. In the case of consciousness, the thing we are trying to explain is not publicly observable.

And that's why it's a wholly different kettle of fish. Do you have that expression? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's almost too difficult to even talk about because you can't tease out or parse consciousness from anything else. Like it is the essence of being, right?

There is nothing that is not conscious experience. Yeah. So you can't create a distance between yourself and the subject of the discourse, which is consciousness, because you are participating in it, right? Is that a way? Absolutely. I don't know, it's a very strange thing.

So before we even go any further, like let's just define consciousness, like how you define it, how you think about it. So we know what we're talking about here. It's a good place to start because it is such a slippery word that people use in all sorts of different ways. But the way I would define it,

which is pretty standard, I think, among both philosophers and scientists, is that your consciousness is just what it's like to be you. So right now you're having a visual experience of this room, an auditory experience of my voice speaking to you. If you pay attention, you can notice the tactile sensations of the chair under your body. This is all aspects of what it's like to be you right now, all aspects of your consciousness.

This is the classic kind of Nagel definition. That's right, Nagels. I find it to be not that satisfying though. Like to me, it feels like it's similar to the Supreme Court's definition of pornography. Like, you know it when you see it. It's sort of like, what is it like to be you is what consciousness, it feels circular, like defining consciousness as someone who is experiencing consciousness. Yeah. Well, I think you're right. I think it is circular because I think what we're dealing with

is essentially a primitive concept. You can't define it in other ways. Maybe it's like Louis Armstrong, when asked about, allegedly asked what jazz was, he said, if you have to ask, you'll never know. But for some people that Nagel term works. So Nagel said in his famous paper, What's it like to be a bat from the 70s?

He said, something's conscious if there's something that it's like to be it. So there's something that it's like for a rabbit to be cold or to be kicked, to take a vivid example. But we tend to think there's nothing that it's like for a table to be cold or to be kicked or to be sawn in half there's nothing that's like from the inside as it were uh so for

some people that works i don't know how well it translates actually and some people like yourself think i mean i find most people just when you say experience or subjective experience they kind of get onto it and you know teaching philosophyuates, there's a lot of philosophical concepts they find it hard to get a grip on. But this one, people tend to get pretty easily. So there are some people who think there isn't a real concept here and we're playing language games and wasting our time. There isn't a real concept here and we're playing language games and wasting our time. But most people on both sides of the debate tend to think there is a notion

we can get onto and work with here. Right. So we have this materialist notion, which is that the nature of consciousness is something that can be deduced through the scientific method at some point, right? Then we have this dualist notion, which is a much more mystical notion,

which is that there is the material world that we can study. Then there is this world of consciousness that lives in some kind of realm beyond matter that we don't quite understand and to which the scientific method does not apply. Both of these are problematic from your perspective. Panpsychism is sort of the best explanation

from your point of view in a world in which nothing is quite adequate in terms of understanding or explaining the nature of what consciousness is. Is that a fair assessment? Yeah, I think so. I think maybe contemporary dualists might push back a little at the way you described the position. I suppose we do tend to think of it as something kind of mystical

and religious, supernatural. But actually, probably the most famous contemporary dualist, David Chalmers, who was in the audience at the New York debate last night, I mean, I think he's probably the most secular, pro-science, atheist guy I've ever met. And I once asked him if he was religious, and he said, only in the sense that the universe is cool. But he calls himself a naturalistic dualist.

So he thinks consciousness is not physical. It's separate from the brain and it's separate at least from the physical processes in the brain. But he wants to bring it into the scientific story. He wants to expand science to incorporate this non-physical element. And so he postulates what he calls psychophysical laws. These are special laws of nature over and above the laws of physics, which somehow connect up the physical world to consciousness. And he thinks then it's a scientific question. We need to work out what these laws are. We should look to neuroscience. So he wants to sort of expand science. And

with materialism saying it's the scientific option, I suppose I would qualify that a little bit by saying the materialist tries to explain consciousness in terms of physical science, saying the materialist tries to explain consciousness in terms of physical science, chemistry, physics, neuroscience, these kinds of things. So that's the materialist position that I ultimately think is inadequate. But science could be something a bit more general. Science doesn't have to be tied to physical science understood as chemistry, neuroscience, and so on. So I guess all of us would want to say, we're not giving up on science. It's just some of us like David Chalmers

from his perspective, his dualist perspective, me from my panpsychist perspective, want to have a slightly more expansive conception of what science is. And that expansive notion of it would consider things like particle physics or string theory. When you sort of think about

what we don't understand about physics and science, we think of things like dark matter, et cetera, like these mind blowing kind of concepts that me as a non-scientist, you know, have a difficult time just understanding the idea of, you know, alternate realities and parallel, all these sorts of things that quantum physics contemplates. Perhaps there is some explanation or path to clarity

that can be gleaned from those disciplines that we haven't quite mastered at this point. Yeah, so it's, you know, I'm not here to tell scientists not to do their job or to do it differently. It's about having a more expansive conception of what science is because the way we currently think about science, the whole task is accounting for the data of observation and experiments. That's the job.

Once we've done that, if we could have some grand unified theory that accounts for the data of observation and experiments, that's job done. We can pat ourselves on the back and go home. But I want to say that's not all that we need to explain because there's this other thing we know about, this other thing we know to be real that's not known about for observation experiments,

namely consciousness, something we know about in a quite different way, just through being immediately aware of it. And so we need to expand the task of science and we need to be aiming to construct a theory that can accommodate both the data of observation experiments, of course, but also this privately known reality of consciousness. So, I mean, in Galileo's era,

I framed that as expanding science. These days, I guess I would say more about, it's just about appreciating that we need to do philosophy as well as science. We need to understand that philosophy has a distinctive and ineliminable role to play in this project of finding out the nature of reality that we're all aiming at.

And that's both, this goes both to the error that Galileo made from your estimation, but also to the sort of correctness of his assessment that there are things that can be physically measured through scientific tools. And then there are other things that are not that require a different sort of toolkit, I guess,

to better understand. So explain why you made this the title of the book and where that bifurcation has kind of led science in terms of how we think about consciousness, perhaps wrong-headedly. Yeah. I mean, it's a somewhat provocative title. I actually, I'm a huge fan of Galileo. It is a click-baity kind of thing. Yeah. There was an earlier book by Antonio Damasio called Descartes' Era. And I guess i'm a bit a bit sick of everyone bashing day cards so i thought i'll

provoke a little by uh having galileo's era but um no i think galileo in many ways had a much better understanding of these issues than we do now what galileo essentially wanted to do was have science to be purely mathematical, which is something we kind of take for granted now. But this was a really radical, unusual step for Galileo in 1623 to declare, right from now on, what he called natural philosophy, I guess what we now call physical science, is going to be purely mathematical, have this purely quantitative language. But I think Galileo appreciated that you can't capture the qualities of conscious experience in these terms,

that deep red you experience as you watch the setting sun, the smell of coffee, the taste of chocolate. You can't capture these qualities in the purely quantitative language of physical science. You can't even articulate them, you know? So Galileo essentially says, well, you know, if we want a mathematical science, if we want a purely quantitative science, we need to take consciousness outside of the domain of science. So, in Galileo's worldview, you have this division between two domains. You have the domain of science, the physical world with its purely mathematical quantitative properties, and the domain of consciousness, consciousness with its qualities, colors, sounds, smells, tastes. And that's gone really well.

And I think we're now at a point where people think, oh, it's gone really well. It's gone so well, it's going to explain consciousness. But the irony is, the project of physical science has gone so well since and arguably because galileo put consciousness outside of its domain of inquiry so the fact that physical science has done incredibly well once we take consciousness out doesn't really isn't really going to give us confidence that it's going to be able to deal

with consciousness itself that That's the- Right, and the tricky thing here, at the risk of sounding like this is gonna take a turn into like bong hit philosophy, is that science can explain, to extend the chocolate metaphor, like science can explain what chocolate is, the chemical composition of chocolate,

what happens to your nervous system when that chocolate hits your taste buds, et cetera. But what it can't explain for or account for is the experience of enjoying chocolate. Like that is like a incalculable thing that exists beyond language or the ability for the traditional scientific method to adequately explain. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So don't get me wrong, science is crucial for dealing with consciousness. But in relation to the mind-body problem, I think the primary thing science can help us with

is working out which kinds of brain activity go along with which kinds of conscious experience. So you can't access consciousness through perception. You can't look inside someone's head and see their feelings. But you can access brains through perception and you can scan people's brains and you can ask them. If it's a human being, you can ask them what they're feeling as you scan their brain or maybe look for external markers of consciousness. And in this way,

neuroscientists try to work out which kinds of physical activity in the brain go along with which kinds of conscious experience or more generally what what in general what kinds of physical activity in general are unnecessary and sufficient for consciousness and that's really important data but that's not the complete story of consciousness what we ultimately want is an explanation what okay why why does certain kinds of brain activity go along with conscious experience why should that be and it's it's then that the philosophy kicks in then we're at the mind body problem because that then what you need is a theory of ultimate reality that explains why consciousness appears in the physical world at all. And that's

where the experiments can't settle the matter because consciousness is not a publicly observable datum. And that's never been what physical science has been aiming at, as I think Galileo understood. Yeah. And it's also very difficult. It's, I don't know if I would call it counterintuitive, but it's very difficult. Like our intuition around what consciousness is, is it doesn't really kind of land at the bullseye, right? Which makes this hard to talk about and hard to kind of even wrap our brains around.

But essentially, you know, what you're saying, and please again, correct me if I'm wrong, is that the traditional modality for understanding consciousness has more to do with consciousness arising out of matter. And the panpsychist would say that matter arises out of consciousness, which is a way of saying that consciousness is fundamental to reality and to matter itself, and that it is at the baseline from which the genesis of everything else emerges. Yeah, yeah. We have this essentially philosophical choice that we have to confront.

It's not a scientific choice that you can settle with an experiment. It's a philosophical choice. Do we start with matter? Do we start with the physical universe and try and get consciousness out? Or do we start with consciousness and try and get the physical universe out? Or do we start with both? That's the dualist option. And I mean, as far as I'm concerned, if we think about the materialist option of trying to get consciousness out of physical processes in the brain, we find that there has been absolutely no progress on trying to make sense of that. Nobody has ever managed to make sense of how you could get consciousness out of purely physical

processes in the brain. The science has gone really well, you know, of telling us which kinds of brain activity go along with conscious experience. But no one's ever come up with an explanation of how, how you could get consciousness out of physical brain activity. Whereas when you come to panpsychism i would argue actually we've already worked out how this can be done the problem is essentially solved and i guess we can get onto this but here i think bertrand russell should be seen as the darwin of consciousness in the 1920s he essentially worked out how we could account for physical reality in terms of underlying facts about mind and consciousness.

So here's our choice. The materialist explanatory project that no one has ever made any progress on or the panpsychist explanatory project, which is already complete. So in my mind, it's kind of a no-brainer. Right. All right. So in my mind, it's kind of a no-brainer. Right. All right. So, so much to unpack here, but explain to me how you arrived at this perspective yourself. I mean, you're somebody who by your own admission, like has been obsessed with consciousness from a very early age. So you've been thinking about this for a very long time and panpsychism wasn't your initial, you know,

time. And panpsychism wasn't your initial knee-jerk default perspective on all of this. Absolutely not. No. So when I studied philosophy in the dying embers of the 20th century, we were just given these two options. No one told me about panpsychism. We were given... I didn't even read David Chalmers actually as an undergraduate. I had philosophy of mind every year in my degree and i didn't read david charmers but anyway we had these choices are you a materialist explain it in terms of physical processes in the brain or are you a dualist somebody who thinks consciousness is outside of the body in the brain um and i wanted to defend the materialist option i thought this is the uh you know this is the scientifically credible, not like all that superstitious religious stuff, which I now think is a bit unfair

on the Jew list. But anyway, that's how I was thinking as a young man. And, you know, I defended the materialist option, but I slowly came to think, for some of the reasons we've just been talking about that you just can't explain consciousness in these terms you can't account for the the qualities of experience the redness of a red experience for example in the purely quantitative language of neuroscience and so i thought well i still want to be materialist so I decided I was going to deny the reality of my own conscious experience. This is what's become known as the illusionist position, defended, for example, by my co-host on my podcast, Mind Chat, Keith Frankish, who denies the reality of consciousness

under a certain understanding of that word, at least. So I bravely tried to embrace this, you know, and defended it. But then I think I lasted about three months. And then I just remember just kind of sitting in a bar, I don't know, enjoying a drink and a cigarette. You could smoke in bars in those days and feeling the music, a bit of adrenaline

and just couldn't do it anymore. The reality of my own conscious experience. You were having such a palpable experience. It's not an illusion, is it? It's hard to make sense of what an illusion would be without consciousness. But after that, I think I was a sort of closet dualist. So I sort of thought I had problems with dualism,

but thought that seems to be the only problem. And I actually wrote my end of degree dissertation arguing that the problem is irresolvable. And I just tried to forget about it. I lived in Poland for a bit, just tried to get into- Distance yourself from this obsession with consciousness. Read about science that was,

yeah, so people think I like mysteries because I'm dependent upon psychics, but I don't like mysteries. I hate, I want to get rid of mystery. And so this was, so I, you know, try to focus on reading about science that was more tractable. And, but then I just happened across,

well, actually another article by Thomas Nagel. I think he was a kind of a pioneer here. He had an article, very tentatively defending panpsychism in the 70s and it was almost apologetic he was he was sort of giving an argument but he was like of course this is ridiculous but it's something to the argument but um and i just read it and i just thought oh my god that just it just avoids all the problems the problems of dualism on the one hand the problems of materialism on the other and it just gave me a kind of deep sense of

intellectual peace you know that i that there's something that can accommodate both the scientific truth but also the undeniable lived reality of conscious experience. And so that just was transformational really. And then I just tried to find probably the only philosophy department in the UK then that had a panpsychist professor, Galen Strawson at the University of Reading. And so I started graduate study and turned out okay. Yeah.

It's something that I find myself wanting to be true, which is not a sort of place of integrity to kind of look objectively at a situation and try to understand the nature of it, but I can't help it. It's like, I just think like the world would be cooler if consciousness is the fundamental kind of base layer of everything that exists, whether you are a complex organism,

like a human being, all the way down to inanimate objects. I just think that it colors everything about how you understand the nature of reality. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I'm right with you that I always say, a little catchphrase of mine, we should ultimately be interested not in the view we'd like to be true, but the view that's most likely to be true. And, you know, in Galileo's era and in the new book I'm working on now, you know, I want the truth, you know, but I always find when I'm arguing with somebody who I disagree with,

I can't deny that there's a bit of me that wants them to be wrong. But there's also a big, a stronger part of me think, wondering, are they right? I want to know if they're right. I want to know. You know, I really do have a deep thirst for the truth. You know, we'll never know for sure, but to have our best guess. And so yeah, in Galileo's error and in the book I'm currently working on, you know, most of it is just the cold blooded case, the evidence the evidence the arguments but then we do also want to think about the implications for human existence so i tend to have a final chapter you know yeah what what does this mean to live this out and i you know so the great thing about panpsychism

is i think we've got good reason to think it's probably true, but also I think it's slightly better for our mental and physical health, I think, because this isn't just an abstract intellectual puzzle. Consciousness is at the root of human identity. It's arguably the source of everything that matters, from deep emotions, subtle thoughts, beautiful sensory experiences. And yet I'm inclined to think

our official scientific worldview, materialism, is actually just inconsistent with the reality of consciousness. If it was true, there wouldn't be consciousness. If all there was was the purely quantitative story of physical science, there wouldn't be qualitative experience. And so if i'm right about that which is of course a little bit controversial then we're at a very odd period of history where our official scientific world view denies the existence of the thing that's most evident and the thing that gives life meaning.

And, you know, in a way, that's wackier than any religious- It's the craziest thing ever. Like when you think of it, right? Think of your craziest religious doctrine, I don't know, heaven, hell, whatever. I think we'll look back in history to this time when people had this worldview

that denied their own conscious feelings and experiences. And I think,'ll look back in history to this time when people had this worldview that denied their own conscious feelings and experiences. And I think, what the, how did they get in that mindset? And I think it's something to do with being blown away by the success of physical science and the incredible technology, which is, you know, which is incredible, which is rightly celebrated. But it leads us to think, this is the truth. We've found the way of getting to the truth. But I think, again, the irony is physical science has been so successful precisely because it's focused on something quite specific, you know, roughly understanding how stuff behaves. And once you understand how stuff behaves,

you can create technology, right? You can manipulate the world. But when we're trying to explain consciousness, that's not what we're trying to do. It's not about explaining behavior with mechanisms. It's about accounting for this invisible but undeniable privately known reality of our feelings and experiences. of our feelings and experiences. Right, this cornerstone idea that we, when it comes to hard science, we understand matter through the lens of how matter behaves,

but that doesn't account for what matter actually is. So the thesis is that matter is composed of the base elements of consciousness somehow, somewhere. And that this is like at the basement floor of everything that is real. It is infused with consciousness, whether it's a rock or whether it's a human being.

And that conscious experience is something that is binary. Something is either conscious or it isn't, but the complexity of that conscious experience toggles up with the complexity of the organism. Is that a fair? Yeah. I mean, just, I don't think panpsychists necessarily have to think that literally everything is conscious. I think I watched your chat with our friend, Annika Harris, and I think her version of panpsychism would think that literally everything is conscious.

I know she's a bit agnostic on whether it's true. I mean, her book was my introduction to this notion. We talked about it briefly in that podcast, but that's what led to this conversation, obviously. Yeah, it's been great that she's managed to really done a lot to get the idea out there. But I don't think panpsychists necessarily have to think that. As you say, the basic commitment

is that the fundamental building blocks of reality have some kind of very very rudimentary conscious experience maybe fundamental particles or maybe universe-wide fields many theoretical physicists inclined to think that reality is made up of fields rather than particles. But just sticking to particles for the sake of simplicity, just because the particles are conscious, it doesn't mean that every random arrangement of particles has consciousness in its own right. It doesn't mean your socks or rocks or tables and chairs are conscious.

It just means that the smallest building blocks they're made up of have consciousness. So I'd be more inclined to think the conditions under which conscious particles combine to form a conscious system that is conscious in its own right are comparatively rare and natural selection, as it were, discovered this and exploited it. So probably the natural world is filled with consciousness, but more generally, in the universe more generally, it's probably confined to the level of fundamental physics.

But this is an open empirical question. We need to look to neuroscience to try and pin down and make systematic where we get consciousness at the macro level of reality. Do you think that neuroscience is capable of doing that? I hope so. I hope so. It is hard because consciousness is not publicly observable. You know, the neuroscientist Christoph Koch bet David Chalmers 25 years ago that it would all be wrapped up by now. He bet him a crate of fine wine. But I think it's time to pay up

because there are at least four or five different theories. We're just talking the neuroscientific theories. And there's really no consensus. But I don't know. I still have hope that we can work with the human case and organisms similar to ourselves and try and work out some kind of systematic theory of what kind of systems do and don't have consciousness. I still have hope in that project,

but it's not easy at all. Yeah, I think it's interesting that, first of all, we're even having this conversation, like what you're proposing is quite radical. It's still, I don't know if it's on the fringes of how we're thinking about consciousness, but if it is, less so than it used to be by dint of your book and Annika and other people who are thinking about this a little bit more deeply than we have in the past. And I think we're at an interesting kind of juncture

in terms of how we're grappling with the nature of consciousness. But I would say, I'm interested in from your perspective, most people are probably still quite dismissive of what you have to say. And to straw man, your argument would be to say that there is no scientific or objective evidence to support any of your thesis.

I agree with you, I agree with you. I don't think you can scientifically prove the particles have consciousness because consciousness is not publicly observable. This is the hard problem. You can't look inside an electron to see if it's conscious, just as I can't look inside your brain to see if you're conscious.

So this is, I mean, this is why more and more what I try to press is just getting people to say, look, this isn't just a scientific issue. There's a philosophical puzzle here that we have to address as a philosophical puzzle. And that puzzle arises because, the puzzle would not arise

if the only way we knew about reality was through experiments. Then we'd just do science. And some philosophers like Daniel Dennett seem to think that is all we know about reality. You know, just through experiments. But I think most people think, no, there's another way we know about reality. We know about consciousness through our immediate awareness.

Now, as soon as you accept that, then you've got this philosophical challenge. How do we bring these things together? What we know through our senses, the physical world, what we know through directly our direct awareness of our consciousness, how do we bring them all together? Now, that's not a scientific question you can answer with an experiment. It's a philosophical question. So more and more, before, you know, before we get onto panpspsychism I just want to try and persuade people of that essentially philosophical challenge and the only way you can avoid it

is the way Daniel Dennett does Daniel Dennett is incredibly consistent he wants to think the only things we know about reality are through experiments he knows I think that we don't know about our first person conscious experience in that way. So he denies its existence. My good friend,

Keith Frankish does the same. So that's one option. Daniel Dennett's consistent. I think I'm consistent. But I think most people are sort of in this confused middle ground where they, of course, accept the existence of consciousness, ground where they of course accept the existence of consciousness but then they don't follow the implication of that that there's something we know about reality that's not from experiments right and so we need to engage with a bit of philosophy you know if if you just zealously follow this line that no the only the only way we know anything is through experiments, then consciousness is out the window.

So you can't have your cake and eat it. You've got to- Sure. It's the philosophical zombie problem, right? And I feel like this field of consciousness is gaining in kind of mainstream popularity because we're all paying attention to the advent of artificial intelligence.

We're watching as AI starts to come online and we're all grappling with that Rubicon at which point it becomes quote unquote conscious as we understand it. So we've seen these experiments where computer scientists are engaging in dialogue with these AIs and they seem to be mimicking human behavior almost perfectly at times. So is that consciousness? I think we would all agree at this phase, it probably isn't. It is a sort of philosophical zombie situation,

It is a sort of philosophical zombie situation, but at what point does it become conscious? And to take your perspective on panpsychism in that everything on some level is rooted in some form of consciousness, it's not a stretch to then say that that AI has some form of consciousness. It may not be the kind of consciousness that we think about or that we experience,

but there is consciousness baked into that. And at some point, that consciousness will mature to be indistinguishable from how we think of our own lived experience. Yeah. Which is a really tricky, fascinating, and also kind of terrifying thing to think about.

Yeah. I mean, you're quite right. Again, another reason this isn't just an intellectual game. There are very real-world implications. Whether AI is conscious, does that mean we have to start to think about the ethics of artificial systems which animals are conscious forget you know forget computers which animals are conscious and

what does that imply about our moral responsibilities are plants conscious people with Anika talks about that in her book the whole thing with the fungal networks and the fir trees but actually I don't think panpsychism necessarily the whole thing with the fungal networks and fir trees.

But actually I don't think panpsychism necessarily settles any of these issues. Because as I say, as a panpsychist, you don't have to think every arrangement of conscious particles forms a system that's conscious in its own right. So for that question, actually, I would just look to the look to the neuroscience

i'm i'm quite partial to the integrated information theory of consciousness and if that turns out being right if that turns out to be right actually computers of anything like the kind we have at the moment are not conscious and will not be conscious because, I mean, the way computers work, in contrast to the brain, the brain stores information in a way that's highly dependent on connections and integration. And that's the mark of consciousness

for the integrated information theory. But the way a computer's set up, that's not the case. You can remove a few transistors, you don't take away too much information. So actually, I think we can distinguish these philosophical and scientific questions and I might give the same answers as a materialist or a dualist.

So there needs to be a marriage here between science and philosophy. But yeah, can I just come back to maybe just pinning down like why we should believe this yeah so just i think the core of it is as you say of course it's not it's not about scientific proof it's not about proof you can't scientifically prove the electrons are conscious what what is attractive here is the beautiful form of explanation that Bertrand Russell came up with in the 1920s that was forgotten about for so long, but has recently been rediscovered. And that's why there's so much buzz about panpsychism, surprisingly, in Anglophone philosophy.

So I think what Russell was doing in the 1920s was thinking really hard about the fact that our fundamental science is purely mathematical. It's due to Galileo again. And you know, that's really useful if you're a working scientist, you can have really precise predictions. But what does it mean as a philosopher interested in the ultimate nature of reality that our most fundamental science is pure math? And what Russell realized is what it means is science isn't really telling us that much about fundamental reality.

It's merely describing it in terms of its abstract- How it behaves. How it behaves, exactly. It's abstract mathematical structure so so really ultimate reality could be anything as long as it it does it has the right behavior has the right mathematical structure so the way this leads into panpsychism so the panpsychist story is what's at the fundamental level are networks of incredibly simple conscious entities behaving in very simple predictable ways because they have very simple consciousness through their interactions realizing certain mathematical structures and patterns and then the thought is those mathematical

structures and patterns are what we call physics so we get physics out of underlying facts about consciousness absolutely beautiful so just to sum it up you can't get you can't get conscious you can't get consciousness out of physical matter, but you can get physical matter out of consciousness. We know it can be done. So that is why this is such an attractive theoretical story. To my mind, it just solves the problem. And that's the case for believing it. So there's believing it and understanding it from a theoretical point of view. do you think that the human animal is capable of understanding it beyond theory

to really truly understand it? Or is that something that eludes our capacity and our limited faculties? It might not be possible to fill in all the gaps. I was talking to Rebecca Goldstein last night who was in this debate in New York last night who said it on the stage. In her youth, she was sympathetic to panpsychism.

But she now thinks, you know, there's so much we could never know. For example, what is it like to be an electron? Say we accept there's something that's going to be there's going to be there's so much we could never know for example what is it like to be an electron okay say say we accept there's something that's like to be an electron what is it like to be an electron i mean as nagel pointed out we don't even know what it's like to be a bat are we ever going to be able to and and then think about our own experience that so many different kinds of qualities, all the different colors and the difference between color and sound and proprioception, that's your awareness of where your bodily parts are.

All of these qualities that seem to have nothing to do with each other. You seem like, what does color have to do with sound? There seems such radically different kinds of quality. Are we ever going to be able to have some theory that can predict the very precise quality of human experience from the kind of consciousness at the level of particles that it emerges from can we will we ever be able to do that i don't know maybe maybe not maybe we won't

be able to fill in all the details just because to understand something's consciousness you bet you have to be able to adopt its perspective. You have to be able to, as it were, look out of its eyes. We can't adopt the perspective of a creature that echolocates its way around. So maybe we won't be able to fill in all the details. But actually, I think that in very broad terms, that explanatory story Russell tells,

I think is pretty explicable, actually. I think it makes perfect sense. And so I make the analogy to natural selection, right? There's the basic genius insight Darwin had, or Wallace rather, you know, there was the other guy, Wallace, who had it at the same time, and I always feel a bit sorry for him. Anyway, that genius idea of evolution by natural selection that just made so intelligible how you could get complex organisms emerging without design. And then, you know, you have to fill in the details and it takes a century to get to DNA.

That's why I think, you know, the story Russell told about how you can get the physical universe out of more fundamental facts about consciousness. You can do it because physics is purely mathematical. So as long as the consciousness stuff gives you the right mathematical structures, you've got physics. I think that makes perfect sense.

And that was the eureka moment to me reading about this stuff. But the way we filled out the Darwinian project and continue to do so, whether we can ever do that with something like consciousness that's not publicly observable, I don't know, but we can have a good go.

Well, I think that to your point about, forget about trying to understand what it's like to have the experience of being a bat, let alone an electron. I think that our instincts around our own conscious experience are not great, right? Like we know that we're having a conscious experience, but I don't feel like we're very astute

in understanding the parameters of what that is, right? And so for example, if you're to do Sam Harris's meditations and waking up, a lot of the prompts in his meditations are around trying to qualify that for you, trying to get you to understand that you're not being made aware of consciousness, but that you are aware as consciousness,

that everything that you are experienced from the pro, what is it? Pro perception. Yeah, to every thought that everything that you are experienced from the pro, what is it? Pro perception. Yeah. To every thought that occurs to you, the extent of your visual field, what you're hearing, everything is but an appearance in consciousness, right? And to kind of break that illusion

of the observer of your conscious experience. Like I had always thought of it as like, I know my mind is running a loop and I can have distance between what I would call my higher consciousness and like the ruminations of my running mind to say, Oh, it's interesting that I'm feeling that way. Or I keep thinking this, I should stop doing that. There seems to be a dualistic kind of like relationship there.

Sam would say, no, this is an illusion. It is all just appearances in this field of consciousness that is everything. So much so that you can't even find the locus of it. Like we have this instinct that it lives in our head, right? Like who we are, our identity is this thing behind our face. All my instincts tell me that that's true. And, you know, Sam's position would be to disabuse you of that notion to get you to understand that that is just part of the conscious experience,

but it is not rooted in true reality. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, this is, again, what an unusual phenomenon this is that to understand it, you can't go and look down a microscope to understand it. You've got to turn your attention on yourself. And as you say, part of that is breaking through

our preconceived ideas about our own consciousness even, ways in which we can even get our own consciousness wrong. I mean, a lot of evidence comes out of that from neuroscience, but also through meditation, having a deeper understanding of what's going on there. Yeah, I'm sort of, I guess, more agnostic on the self than Sam and Annika are. Maybe I need to meditate a bit more. But I mean, one thing that makes me hesitate is I do think there is a deep unity to conscious experience.

So right now I'm having a multitude of different experiences, colors and sounds and tactile sensations. But they're not just existing in isolation from each other. They exist as aspects of a single unified field of experience, if you like. So there's something unifying the diversity there. And I think that's traditionally, philosophers have plugged the self in there, the I there as the thing. Maybe it's very different to how we ordinarily think about it,

but there's something there which is parceling off, which is bringing unity to the diversity which we might call the self and i mean it's a further question does this thing persist for long periods of time my my phd mentor galen strawson has a book selves where he defends the idea that there are unified selves but they just last a couple of seconds. So there's these sort of chains of little unified selves that pop up and disappear. Or another alternative that some people have defended

is that the unified self lasts as long as a period of waking consciousness. But when you have dreamless sleep or um general anesthetic you that self ceases to be and and another one pops up when you wake up so yes i i recently had a small operation with general anesthetic i was kind of terrified thinking who's gonna wake up is it gonna be some different person with with all my memories but so i i so I'm very agnostic on all this stuff. I'm not as, Sam and Annika seem pretty confident. Maybe I just haven't meditated enough.

Well, I mean, that goes in, yeah, the nature of self and identity. And then of course, you know, the implications for free will and choice that come with that. I mean, I think it's pretty fascinating to assume the panpsychic perspective begs questions of self and identity, right?

If consciousness is the base layer to everything and it pervades everything, what are the implications for identity? This sense that we're always evolving, we're always changing, that consciousness is this, on some level, like independent of who we are in this sense of personhood.

And as we grow older and we look different, when we look in the mirror, there's this uniformity that we are the same person and have always been the same person. Even if we undergo surgery or go to sleep at night, we wake up and we have those memories. And, you know, there is a, you know, an unbroken kind of chain of essential experience that we consider to be part and parcel of who we are. And so does panpsychism upend that or change how we think about identity in that regard?

Possibly. It depends what direction you take it in, I think. So I guess there are connections between panpsychism and certain forms of Buddhist thinking or the Advaita Vedanta tradition in Hindu mysticism. My friend, australian philosopher miriel bahari defends a sort of advaita vedanta inspired sort of mystical philosophy rooted in that tradition and it's just interesting because she defends it with the tools of our philosophical tradition analytic philosophy in this sort of dry rigorous rigorous, cold-blooded way. But she's defending this kind of mystical

philosophy on the basis that she thinks we should take the testimony of expert meditators as a sort of expert testimony. I believe the universe is 14 billion years old. Is it 14, 13? Something like that. I don't know all the science, but I trust the experts.

So she thinks we should think the same about expert meditators. But that's one. I mean, that, you know, but on the other hand, another great panpsychist philosopher who was in the audience at this debate in New York last night, Luke Roloff's, who is a panpsychist because he wants to explain consciousness, but he has no mystical or any kind of spiritual tendencies insofar as that takes you

beyond the regular scientific picture. That's no fun. He's lacking the fun part. He's a lovely guy. He is a fun guy don't so the way i normally tend to say is you know it's there's no necessary connection between panpsychism and anything spiritual but maybe panpsychism is more consonant with those sort of spiritual views so you you know if you if you're a materialist it's hard to take mystical experiences seriously as revealing to you something about ultimate reality. Because ultimate reality for the materialist is what you get from physics. And it doesn't seem physics,

physicists aren't telling us about this unconditioned consciousness of the root of things. But if you're a panpsychist and you already think there's fundamental consciousness at the base there, then, you know, it's not too much of a leap to move to those views. I don't know, again, I'm agnostic.

In the case of panpsychism, that Russell story, I really find that persuasive. But here, if Miri or Anika are telling me, trust meditators, I mean, there are different meditators in different traditions. There does seem to be in each tradition, something about, in some sense,

transcending the self and some deep oneness. But different traditions interpret that in different ways. The Buddhists say the self doesn't exist. The Hindus say it does exist, but it's identical with the sort of divine mind or something. The Abrahamic traditions think it's about understanding our unity with the divine. And so, I don't know, I think maybe there's something there that's interpreted in different ways in different traditions.

So I'm not so confident that the self doesn't exist as yet. What it brings up for me is this idea of connectivity. Like if consciousness pervades everything and we don't live in a vacuum and there are billions of atoms separating us as we talk today, on some level we're connected and there's a consciousness that is part of that connectivity, right? And when you think of it from that perspective, you can't help but think of the

nature of a unified consciousness or almost like it brings up the question of like a hive mind consciousness. Like if you're, I'm sure when you flew here from New York and you were, you know, descending over Los Angeles and you're looking down at the urban sprawl and the cars and all of that, it does look like, you know, either like the semiconductors of a computer or the, you know, the veins and arteries and organs of some kind of super organism

in which human beings are participating and performing some sort of function without their conscious awareness, because we're all sort of operating under some broader consciousness that isn't part of our conscious awareness, but it's consciousness nonetheless, that's driving our behaviors and our decisions

in some kind of macro way, in the same way that ants construct an anthill or birds know how to flock together. They're not making conscious decisions. They're just operating under some kind of instinctual impulse that perhaps has something to do with the consciousness that pervades everything. Yeah.

I don't know if that makes any sense at all, but like to like entertain that as a thought experiment, I think is interesting. I think there's definitely in panpsychism, there's a picture of the universe we fit into much more, you know, we're conscious creatures in a conscious universe. It's a universe that somehow welcomes us more.

And certainly going a bit further than that there does seem to be something consistent you know you give people psilocybin they they talk about some deep connectedness some deep oneness they talk about some living presence pervading all things and i take that very seriously and some people might say well maybe that's just your brain doing funny things but i i always come back to the um you know to that challenge i always come back to the response of william james in his great book in the 19th century the varieties of religious experience when you say, well, why should a mystic trust their experience, trust that it's telling them something about ultimate reality? He says, well, you can't

know, but it's the same with ordinary sensory experiences, right? I've got this experience at this table here. I can't get outside of my consciousness and check. You just trust that your ordinary sensory experiences are connecting you with reality. So, not Russell in this case, William James says, if you say it's okay for ordinary people to trust their sensory experiences, but it's not okay for a mystic to trust their mystical experience,

there's a sort of double standard there. I think all knowledge is rooted in just the decision to trust experience. But so there's something there I take seriously, but there's just such diversity in how that's interpreted in different spiritual. But what does it mean to trust experience, right? If everything is an appearance in consciousness, and when we put our hand on this table, we feel it, we know our hand is here, but actually that sensation isn't occurring in the hand, it's occurring in the brain in the same way pain isn't, if I cut my finger, the pain isn't happening in the finger,

it's happening in the brain. And if that's just an appearance in consciousness, it's not that much of a leap to then wonder, are we in this simulation experience? Like, how do you think about the notion that perhaps we're in the matrix or that we're all operating in accordance with some kind of hive mind consciousness

that's driving us towards the innovation of an artificial intelligence that will ultimately supplant us. Wow. I mean, maybe this comes to maybe the difference between me and Donald Hoffman, for example. You know, there's certainly something very close about these views that they have consciousness at the base and everything else flows from that. But Donald has this idea, I guess, that in some sense the physical world doesn't really exist. It's just tools on our interface, icons on our interface, rather.

And I don't really feel the need to go that far. I'm not seeing the compelling reason to go that far rather than just saying the physical world is very different to what that far. I'm not seeing the compelling reason to go that far, rather than just saying the physical world is very different to what we thought. Hey, it turns out it's made up of consciousness. But I don't see why that's just a surprising theory about the nature of physical reality doesn't mean we have to say physical reality doesn't really exist. So maybe there's this, I mean, there's another view on the table here, idealism, which I think Donald Hoffman,

I don't think he calls himself an idealist, but I think it would fit into that camp that in some sense, the physical world is an illusion or it's not fully real or it's undergirded by more fundamental facts about mind and consciousness. Whereas the panpsychist tends to say, no, the physical world is real. It's really out there. It's just about mind and consciousness. Whereas the panpsychist tends to say, no, the physical world is real.

It's really out there. It's just made up of consciousness. So maybe these are just two slightly different takes on the same idea. Yeah, no, I get it. I mean, I think another cool aspect of contemplating panpsychism is this sense of unity. Like if everything is consciousness,

that helps us to really grok that we're all in this together, right? So whether, you know, when we're facing these existential threats to the health of the planet and the future of humanity, climate change, et cetera, it does put you in a more compassionate, you know, mindset of cooperation, right?

Like there is an interconnectivity between everything. We are interdependent and linked in ways that, you know, perhaps we haven't fully contemplated previously. Yeah, yeah. I mean, in my book, Galileo's Era, I do kind of speculate about what it'd be like to be a child raised as a panpsychist, and raised to see the movement of a plant

as in some way expressing its desires, its inclinations. Because I mean, our official scientific worldview tells us that a tree is just a mechanism and it's sort of ridiculous to hug a mechanism it's sort of what you know that's why we think of tree hugging is kind of idiotic or some people do and if you're thinking of a tree as a mechanism then it's it has no moral significance in its own right it's just important because of looking nice or what it can do for us. Whereas if you think of a tree as a conscious organism in its own right, then the tree has a moral status in its own right.

And, you know, if you see these terrible burning of forests in Brazil of late, hopefully changing now, you know, if you see that as the burning of conscious organisms, of forests in Brazil of late, hopefully changing now. If you see that as the burning of conscious organisms, it really fires up your environmental desires to solve the environmental problem even more significant. But yeah, I haven't managed to persuade my kids. I was trying to ask my kids if they think trees are conscious. And my daughter said, no, they're outside.

So I don't know what... You can only be conscious if you're indoors. Actually, my daughter said something great to me in my five-year-old. We were on the bus and I said, actually,

Annika and Sam wouldn't like the sentiments here, but we were on the bus. I said, do you think the bus is conscious? And she said, no, it's just a machine. And I said,

well, aren't you a machine? And she said, no,'s just a machine and I said well aren't you a machine and she said no I've got I'm a person which means I don't have things inside me that make me move I thought that was you know it's this real kind of free will sense there wasn't there

that it's you know there's not I'm not a mechanism I guess but anyway do with what that what you will yeah I do love the idea of there wasn't that it's, you know, there's not, I'm not a mechanism, I guess, but anyway. Do with what that, what you will. Yeah, I do love the idea of, you know, really understanding the conscious, you know, aspects of ecosystems. We think of a tree as a tree, it's an independent entity, but then to really understand it is to know

that there are, you know are this complexity of underground root systems that interact with mycelium and the communication that exists between trees, among trees, that partition so much as to like take care of progeny of trees, like understanding, oh, this tree came from me, so we're gonna, and the way they share resources, et cetera. Like it's, the more you learn about that,

the easier it is to take that leap of philosophical faith into this realm. And it is like, again, like calling myself out, like I want it to be true, because I just think it's beautiful and it allows me to inhabit a space of awe and wonder that I think is just a better way of living, quite frankly. Yeah, I mean, on the trees there,

I do try and encourage my kids to think about, which is just science now. It's nothing to do with panpsychism, that the so-called wood wide web, the interconnections of trees under the ground, sharing across species. Human beings struggle to cooperate between ethnicities sometimes. These trees are helping each other out across species. An example that we should, yeah, exactly. There is a buzzing, blooming community

underneath our grounds as we're walking through the forest. We're just seeing these things that stick out of the ground. But you keep coming back, Rich, to you want to believe it. But I think sometimes we don't always have to think, is this true or is this not true? Is this true or is it bullshit? You can engage with something, you can engage with a possibility. As a possibility, you um work with a possibility you know i think something if you're thinking about spiritual experiences or experience of the transcendent or something i think people are people think either either you think they're real or you think it's just bullshit something your brain something going wrong with your brain but there's a middle way

option of engaging these kinds of experiences and working with them in a spiritual practice or whatever without definitely deciding. I mean, who the hell knows what's going on? You can engage with experiences whilst remaining agnostic about. So here you are taking this middle path again, right? I hate the dichotomies. It's always the dichotomies like, are you a US capitalist or a Soviet communist? You know, are you a materialist or a dualist? Let's all get along, let's merge these worlds. Because yeah, it is natural to go from where we just were

into this realm of spirituality, religion, what is God? Like when you think of consciousness pervading everything, is that not God? Or could you not perceive that as some definition of God in perhaps a secular sense? Spinoza's God, I guess. Yeah, so we've been talking about panpsychism as the little particles being conscious conscious but as we've also said

theoretical physicists tend to prefer the idea that it's universe-wide fields that are the fundamental building blocks and particles are just kind of local excitations in fields if you combine that view with panpsychism then it, then it's the universe-wide fields that are the fundamental forms of consciousness. And hence, the fundamental conscious entity, if there is one, is the bearer of those fields, i.e. the universe itself. And I actually think that's a more attractive philosophical conception of panpsychism as well, sometimes called cosmopsychism. You know, that the universe is the fundamental conscious entity. philosophical conception upon psychism as well, sometimes called cosmopsychism, that the universe is the fundamental conscious entity. So there's a macro field of energy that enervates the subatomic particles

that comprise the nature of consciousness. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, so the fundamental thing is this universe-wide mind and everything else are just aspects of that universe-wide consciousness. I actually defended something like this in my academic book. So I first wrote an academic book, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality,

which is probably a bit impossible to make sense of if you haven't done some graduate philosophy study. But that was the direction I took that in my academic book. So yeah, but then is that, it's a further question, do we want to call that God? I mean, you might just think- I mean, we could use a different word. God is a problematic word. It's just, you know, fraught. So we use a different word. Yeah. Yeah.

You might just think it's the, even if the universe is conscious, maybe it's experience is just a meaningless mess. It doesn't mean it's, it doesn't mean it's got intelligence or goal directedness. You know, our consciousness is the result of millions of years of evolution,

but it could be that the universe is conscious, but it's just kind of this messy, meaningless consciousness. Although I have also explored, if you start from that cosmo-psychist position and bring in other kind of data like the fine tuning of physics, that might push you towards something more like a goal-directed conscious entity rather than just a sort of meaningless mess. So again, panpsychism doesn't entail anything spiritual or anything in that direction, but it can lead you there if you bring in other considerations, I think. And what is your relationship personally with the spiritual and the mystical and all of this? Yeah, well, this is, I guess, the new book I'm working on.

I just last week signed a contract with Oxford University Press. So my first book was an academic book. My second book was aimed at general audience. So I want this to be both. So it's with an academic publisher, but they're going to market it as a trade book. And each chapter has a more accessible bit and then a digging deeper bit

to try and take you into the more technicalities. But what I'm exploring is the middle way between, the middle ground between God and atheism. That's the pitch, really. It's, you know, again, it's all these dichotomies. You know, it's like, whose team are you on? Richard Dawkins or the Pope? You know, and I often find like when you're talking to people,

it's like they're trying to work out which side you're on. And I just, as in the case of materialism and dualism, it's like they're trying to they're trying to work out which side you're on and and i just as as the case as in the case of materialism and dualism i just came to find actually both the classical theistic religious position and the classic the classical kind of atheist meaningless universe position are pretty implausible for different reasons i think there's things the traditional atheist picture can't explain. There's things the traditional religious picture can't explain.

And there's just a huge range of underexplored positions in between. So that's where I'm currently engaged at the moment in trying to map out that territory. And so what does that look like specifically though? Like how would you characterize that for yourself? Not atheist, but not the Pope or whatever. Maybe it's not a perspective that is dogmatic

in a religious sense, but perhaps strains of spirituality pervade this. Like what does that specifically mean? Like what does that look like? Yeah, so one thing that motivates me here is the discovery of recent decades that physics, the laws of physics seem to be fine-tuned for the possibility of life

in the sense that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall in an incredibly narrow range such that it looks incredibly improbable that just by chance our universe would would have ended up just by chance with the right numbers for life so i think the example that seems to puzzle physicists the most is the um the cosmological constant so this was um you know we discovered in the 1990s that the universe is actually accelerating in its expansion. And so there is postulated a kind of repulsive force, which we refer to as dark energy.

And the strength of this force is measured by the cosmological constant. And what you hear high profile physicists saying is it's just what that number turned out to be was incredibly surprising because it's it's it's it's not zero but it's a really really tiny number it's like i can't remember the exact number now but it's like 0.38 zeros 138 or something it's like tiny number but it's not zero zero. And physicists like Brian Green saying, you don't find these kinds of numbers in physics. And it didn't seem to fit with other things we know about physics. But it's fortunate we did have that kind of number

because if it was a little bit bigger, so if this repulsive force was a bit stronger, everything would have shot apart too quickly for gravity to clump things together into stars, planets. We wouldn't have had any kind of structural complexity. Whereas if it had been less than zero, then it would have been an attractive force rather than a repulsive force.

So it would have added to gravity rather than countering it. And everything would have collapsed in on itself within a split second of the start of the universe. So to have any kind of structural complexity and life, that number had to be in this incredibly narrow range. So that's like the God number, right? Like that's the number you're like, this had to be the result of some kind of higher intelligence or divinely inspired design i would put it slightly more generally than that i would say look we face a choice either it's just chance that those numbers are right for life or we have the numbers right for life because they are the right numbers for life.

In other words, that there's some- Some other type of life would have- Some kind of goal-directedness. A different number. Some kind of goal-directedness at the fundamental level. So, and I consider a lot of different... So some people would say, oh, that's God. But I don't like that hypothesis either.

But for a familiar reason. You know, I just think it's really implausible that a loving or powerful God that could create anything would create a universe so full of suffering and seemingly preventable evil. And so to my mind- That's like the sort of anthropomorphized God, right? The God defined as some kind of human-like intelligence

that has a moral compass and a code of ethics and marching orders for what the world should look like or the universe should look like, as opposed to some kind of intelligence that doesn't adhere to that limited structure of intelligence. Yeah, absolutely. So what I'm rejecting is the very traditional

Western idea of God as philosophers call it the Omni God, omnipotent, all omniscient, omnibenevolent, i.e. all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good. So I think there's data that that view can't handle, suffering, evil, but there's also data that the traditional meaningless universe picture can't handle. Right. Namely the fine tuning and certain other philosophical considerations. So, but yeah, as you say, that's just maybe the very traditional idea of God.

But I consider a range of hypotheses in between. So basically I consider kind of three different options. Firstly, kind of non-standard designers. So you might have a bad designer, an indifferent designer, a limited designer, or maybe the simulation hypothesis. Maybe we're in a computer simulation and our creator isn't any kind of godlike being at all. It's just some guy, some scientist in the next universe up. So they're kind of close to God in that they're still designers, just a bit tweaked.

But it's not obvious to me actually, this is why I kind of qualified what you said a bit. It's not obvious. I think the fine tuning is evidence for goal directedness, but it's not actually obvious to me you need a kind of mind behind goal directedness. So we're back to Thomas Nagel. He had this book in 2012, Mind and Cosmos, where he defended the idea of what he called teleological laws. So teleology just means the Greek for purpose or goal. So he had this idea of

laws of nature. So not a personal designer, just laws of nature with goals built into them. So the standard way we think of laws of physics, they kind of work from past to future. You take what's happening now and that determines what's going to happen at the next moment, and the next moment, the next moment. But Nagel's teleological laws are aiming at some goal, sort of work from future to past. They're aiming at some goal in the future and impacting on the present moment

to bring us closer to those goals. So maybe there's just a law of nature that has to kind of fit in with the standard laws of physics, but which is in some way inclining the universe towards life. And the third hypothesis I consider, which fits with my earlier work on panpsychism, is cosmopsychism, right? If you've already got a conscious universe, then maybe this goal-directedness is just the goal-directedness of the conscious universe.

Maybe in some sense, the conscious universe fine-tuned itself. So, you know, it's all- Right, but it begs the question of who designed the consciousness in the universe. There's always, you know, there's always another veil to step behind with this. Yeah, well, I mean, Wittgenstein said explanations have to end somewhere.

Everyone has to stop somewhere. You know, the theist stops with God, the atheist stops with the Big Bang or the laws of physics. The question is, is it an acceptable stopping point? To my mind, stopping with the fine tuning is not an acceptable stopping point because it's just at least in the physics as we understand it now it's just so wildly improbable that we'd have the right numbers for life by chance so we can't stop there but i think we could stop with teleological laws i don't know or some kind of non-standard design of course other people stop with the multiverse that's i've got other problems with that hypothesis. So I used to go for the multiverse myself,

but I've been persuaded by philosophers of probability that there's some fallacious reasoning going on in that whole multiverse explanation. That's interesting. I mean, that could be a whole other podcast. I mean, because when you get into, I mean, does not an exploration of quantum physics bring this up? Like it conjures dimensions beyond the perceptible

three dimensions to which we experience reality, right? Yeah. And that means that there are alternate realities occurring theoretically, right? That the math can prove out. All right. Is that not the case? So linking that to the multiverse, you mean?

Sure. So if that's the case, is that not an argument for the existence of a or the multiverse? Yeah, there's a great philosopher of physics at Birmingham University called Al Wilson who takes the multiverse in that direction. And so, I mean, standardly, when physicists or philosophers try to explain

the fine tuning in terms of a multiverse, it's the inflationary cosmology models where we have this sort of vastly expanding mother universe, mega universe, and then these smaller bubble universes slow down within it. And we're one of those. But what is less explored, but which has been explored by Al Wilson, for example,

is taking the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and trying to work on that multiverse to explain fine tuning. But you need to at least tinker a bit because so that the many worlds doesn't give you every logical possibility it gives you every possibility consistent with the laws of quantum mechanics but as physics is right now the laws of quantum mechanics are fine-tuned. So you're going to have to somehow get to possibilities that are where the constants vary. And so that's moving a little bit beyond just the many worlds interpretation.

And you could try and justify that with the need to explain the fine-tuning. But this is where I think this fallacious reasoning comes in. Should I? Yeah, go. Yeah, please. It is moving beyond my ability to understand what's actually happening. So this is one of the things I'm...

So I used to think the multiverse was the obvious explanation of fine tuning for a long time. I feel kind of stupid. I feel silly defending this cosmic purpose stuff. But I was just persuaded by philosophers of probability that there's some very dodgy reasoning going on here. And you know, I just really believe in that enlightenment aim of, you know, trying to follow the evidence or the arguments where they go. And this is where it's taken me. And this is one of the things I'm really excited about arguments where they go. And this is where it's taken me.

And this is one of the things I'm really excited about with this book, actually. This is not my own idea. It's been in the philosophical literature for decades. But it's a typical example of academics talking to themselves. Nobody knows about it outside of academic philosophy, despite huge interest in this fine tuning stuff,

you know, from physicists or theologians or whatever. All right, well, I'll just run you through the basic idea. There's a huge discussion here, but I've got an article in Scientific American making the basic case as well. So the charge is that this inference from fine tuning to the multiverse commits what's called the inverse gambler's fallacy. Okay. So let me try and give you an analogy, right? So suppose

you and I go to a casino, right? And we walk in and the first thing we see is this guy having an incredible run of luck, right? He just keeps winning and just this incredible run of luck. He's rolling double sixes all the time. So I, and then I say to you, wow, there must be loads of people playing in the casino tonight. And you say, what, what do you mean? What are you talking? We've just seen this one guy. And then I say, well, look, if there's just one person in the casino, then it's incredibly improbable that someone would have such an incredible run of luck. But if there's lots of people playing in the casino tonight,

then it's not so surprising that one of them is going to have an incredible run of luck. Now, I think you'd rightly say to me, that's a fallacy. You know, we've only seen this one guy. And no matter, that's our evidence, this one guy, and no matter how many other people are playing in the casino, it has no bearing on whether this one guy is going to play well. And everyone agrees that's a fallacy. So that's the inverse gambler's fallacy. Everyone agrees on that. But it looks like the multiverse reasoning is strikingly similar, at least insofar as they're explaining fine-tuning.

They say, oh, wow, look, you know, it's so improbable that physics is fine-tuned for life, has the right numbers for life. We won the cosmic lottery. So there must be loads of other universes where the numbers are really crap. But it's the same fallacy because all we've observed is this one universe.

And no matter how many other universes there are out there, it doesn't make it any more likely that this universe, the only one we've ever observed, has numbers fine-tuned for life. So there's all sorts of discussion and responses and selection effect. But, you know, I think I'm just pretty persuaded that this is just not an option. And so weird as it is, we have to try and make sense of some kind of goal-directedness at the fundamental level of reality. Doesn't need to be the traditional God, but it's going to be pretty different to how we normally think of science. Yeah, it's, I'm sort of resisting the temptation

to just continue to dig this hole deeper in here. I don't know where we're gonna end up with it, but I feel like those statements require you to define life in a certain way. So we have this decimal number and laws of physics and our understanding of what life is and a confluence of circumstances that have allowed us to flourish essentially.

But perhaps if that decimal number was different and the role of the dice to extend the gambler's metaphor was a little bit different and the universe is either expanding or contracting at a different rate, that that would have produced a form of life that is something we have no understanding. Yeah, I see, yeah.

Right. Yeah. So is it just, so yeah, this is a, you know, this is an important response to these arguments. Are they relying on just our kind of life or carbon-based life or something? Some of the fine-tuning is to do with carbon, although even there, you know,

it's not, carbon isn't just the stuff we're made of. Carbon is incredibly versatile as a chemical element. The number of things it can combine with, I can't remember the details offhand. And, you know, you need to get stars going and to get carbon out of them um but i think a lot of the fine tuning or at least some of the fine tuning it's not just to do with carbon-based life or our kind of life it's to do with any kind of structural complexity at all, any kind of chemistry at all.

So, you know, take the cosmological constant example. Either the universe expands so quickly that no two particles ever meet or everything collapsed back on itself in a split second. You know, you're just not gonna get any kind of, it seems even without being able to pin down exactly what life is, I think we can say in either of those possibilities,

you're not gonna get anything we could call life. That would be it. Yeah, I understand, I understand. I think where my mind goes is this idea of taking a step back and having an honest sort of accounting of the capacity of the human mind to understand things. Right?

And I think we are hubritic as a species in terms of what we think we can and can't do. Like I think that we operate with this sensibility that there is nothing beyond our grasp in terms of understanding. It's just a matter of time before we figure it all out. But I think that that is qualitatively incorrect. Like if you look at your pet,

or let's say you have a snake, that snake is never gonna understand the human language. Like it doesn't have the neural capacity to do that. So why do we think that our neural capacity is complete? Like we're just missing a lobe or two that would make so many of the questions that we grapple with completely obvious. But it just eludes our ability to understand

because of our inherent physiological limitations. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've got a lot of time for that kind of position. In fact, this is the position Rebecca Goldstein was defending in this debate I was in last night. I guess it's what philosophers call the mysterian position, at least in the context of consciousness, that maybe this is just beyond us.

You know, dogs can't do mathematics. They just don't have the right brains maybe solving consciousness or fine-tuning is is um is just beyond what humans are able to do maybe some higher alien species would would manage it more easily but um while we've got explanations that as far as we can see would do the job, then I think the rational thing to do is to take those explanations seriously. I think the reason people feel nervous with fine-tuning

is not because we can't think of an explanation. It's because the explanations don't fit with how we've got used to science. it's because the explanations don't fit with how we've got used to science I think it's the same situation as in the 16th century when we first started getting evidence that

the earth wasn't in the center of the universe you know and people couldn't handle it so they postulated little extra orbits of the planets epicycles in addition to their basic orbits around the Earth. So the idea of everything going around the Earth.

All these crazy mental gymnastics. Yeah, and then that didn't work. So it's epicycles upon epicycles. And, you know, of course, all of that was eventually blown away by Copernicus's simple idea that the Earth isn't in the center, the sun's in the center.

And we think now, I think we think, oh, they were so stupid, you know, stupid religious people. We're so enlightened now. But every generation absorbs a worldview that they can't think beyond. And I, you know, you start talking about cosmic gold erectedness with philosophers or scientists, they're going to start laughing at you. As I'm sure, you know, people laughed at me and started saying, you know,

maybe the earth is going around the sun i just think there's always that cultural baggage that it's hard to get beyond but i think we've just got to cling to that enlightenment goal of following the evidence where it leads and to my mind you know in our standard ways of thinking about evidence it's fine tuning seems to be suggesting some kind of goal-directedness at the fundamental level. And we've just got to, weird as that is, face up to it. And I think we can formulate possible explanations. They might be wrong. We can never guarantee that they're the right explanations. But while we can come up with explanations, we should take them seriously. Yeah.

Assuming panpsychism to be true, consciousness exists at the fundamental level of matter and reality. What is your sense of what that tells us about the nature of human consciousness at death? Do you have a theory as to where that goes or what happens to that? Wow, it's a big question. So, I mean, again, there are no obvious implications that,

I mean, panpsychism is structurally very similar to materialism. And that's part of the reason I think it's quite attractive that in terms of the reason I think it's quite attractive that it, in terms of the causal structure of reality, in terms of what stuff does, we say physics gets that right. It's just that those structures are filled out in some sense with consciousness. And so, you know, insofar as our best science tells us that, you you know the matter making me up is gonna come apart and cease to be then it looks like materialists and panpsychists are going to be in the same boat

i mean except and i very speculatively explore this in the final chapter of my book these more mystical suggestions that experienced meditators in higher states of consciousness somehow become aware that there is something at the core of each conscious mind that is beyond all that change and is in some sense timeless or unconditioned or something like that. Insofar as we take those ideas seriously, that might afford some kind of impersonal, non-individual survival after death. I think maybe that's the best you can get.

The individual, like the sense of individuation in the sea of consciousness gets absorbed by the greater ocean of consciousness and gets recapitulated or somehow assimilated into the consciousness of everything yeah and um you know for people who you think of buddhists or advaita vedanta hindus who try to to struggle to get back to that being absorbed into unconditioned consciousness or whatever. They try to get rid of the bad karma.

But there's a past life, sort of reincarnation piece to all of that as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But suppose that's not true, the reincarnation bit and the karma bit. Well, maybe at death, just everyone gets enlightened because, you know, the outer layers peel off and you just get absorbed into that unconditioned consciousness at the core. I just want to be clear. I don't believe this. I take the idea seriously on the basis that it's fairly commonly reported

experience of people who've explored consciousness in a very deep way so i i don't think i'd say you know i'm confident that's true but i take it seriously and you can do as a panpsychist i think if you if you're a materialist, you have to say, that can't be true. It doesn't fit with my worldview. But as a panpsychist, it fits with my worldview.

I take the possibility seriously. But I don't know. I don't know. I'm also open to life being pretty horrific and tragic. And so who knows? But that's what I'm saying. You don't have to...

Nobody knows what's going on. You don't have to, we don't have to make decisions to, you know, to engage with these possibilities and to in one spiritual practice. And I like the idea of starting with nobody knows what's going on. Like nobody knows what the hell is going on. It kind of really is true, right?

Like how much do we really know? And the more you learn, the more you realize how little we actually know about all of this stuff. Absolutely, absolutely. You know, and so listen, so if you're asking me about spirituality, one thing that is important,

that has become important to me in recent years is living in hope that there is a purpose to existence and thinking of the thing, the good I do is contributing in some tiny way to some greater purpose. Now, I don't, I don't know whether there is ultimately a purpose. I think, you know, there are these suggestive, suggestive reasons to take the idea seriously, but even if there is kind of cosmic purpose, maybe the purpose is done already, or maybe it's not a great purpose. But I think it's reasonable

to live in hope that there is some greater purpose that's still unfolding. And I find that idea motivates me and it keeps my ego in check, you know, stops me thinking about my own narrow self-interests. And it gives me a deep sense of meaning and purpose and if it turns out I was completely wrong and it's all bullshit you know I still think I've gained much and lost nothing from living in hope of of a greater purpose to things so so that's part of what I want to advocate in this new book of that that possible way of living in that kind of hope and that there is grounds to take that possibility seriously, even though nobody knows what the hell's going on ultimately. Right.

I mean, I do like that idea, to presume the existence or the possibility of panpsychism is to embrace a qualitatively different but perhaps more expansive sense of what reality is that makes you feel like there is, I don't know if an intelligence or a purpose is the right word, but at least at a base level, at a minimum, a connectivity amongst our fellow organisms

that like, I don't know, just gives me a, what's the right word? Not necessarily purpose, but collectivism, I suppose. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there is a need for something like that. I mean, there are so many powerful forces in the modern world, consumerism and global capitalism and national sentiments. And I think there does need to be something to counterbalance that and something we can build on for a more hopeful picture of things. I think the idea that we can all just be rational and enlightened and, you know, we can all just, just through plain rational thinking, we can all

learn to be nice and respectful. I think maybe that's not an inspiring enough vision to, to motivate people to counter these more, more negative influences in life. I mean, things are, things are pretty messed up in a lot of ways at the moment. I think we need to maybe think of a worldview. I think in the absence of a worldview that gives, in which people can understand the meaning and significance of their lives, I think people turn to other ways

of making sense of the meaning of their lives. You know, sort of nationalism or consumerism and so on. And so I think there is this need to, which has always been part of what philosophy is all about, building a worldview, a way of seeing the world that makes sense of the meaning and significance of your life. So I think that is essential part of the human condition.

Yeah, that's beautiful. And I think just to kind of, you know, end this or, you know, kind of land this conversation, I mean, that seems like a beautiful takeaway from your work and from the book, but if there's anything else that you want people to really kind of understand about how philosophy can operate as a positive animating force in our lives,

like whether it's panpsychism or otherwise, we sort of think of philosophy as an academic pursuit, but honestly, they're operating systems for living, right? They're meant to be practiced. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think in many ways, the religion of our times is scientism. You know, the idea that the only things

you're allowed to believe in are those that can be demonstrated on the basis of observation experiments. Now, if you zealously clung to that, as we've discussed, you wouldn't believe in your own conscious mind because that's not something that can be known about in that way.

You wouldn't believe in value. You wouldn't believe in the kind of truths mathematicians come up with, which don't seem to concern the physical world of space and time. So I think, I mean, my conception of philosophy, the task of philosophy is synthesis. It's a matter of taking all the things we know to be true in different ways. Of course, scientific truth, some experiments, but also the reality of our own consciousness, the reality perhaps of value and the kind of mathematical truths that we know about

through mathematical intuition. Taking all these things we know and bringing them together, synthesizing them into a worldview that's that that's the the ancient noble task of philosophy that i think we've lost sight of and we need to come back to and hopefully out of that act of synthesis will emerge a picture of reality that in which we can find a place, in which we can live our meaning out in a way that's rationally acceptable, scientifically plausible,

but also good for our mental and spiritual health. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you coming to talk to me today. Thanks a lot. Is there anything we didn't cover? What did we miss? I think we've done it all, haven't we? I think we covered a lot of it is there anything we didn't cover? what did we miss? I think we covered a lot of stuff free will, we didn't do free will

free will is a whole other that's two hours in the other direction we can do that next time let's save that for next time what's the new book going to be called again? it's got the very humble title, The Purpose of Existence between God and Atheism It's got the very humble title, the purpose of existence.

Between God and atheism. So I'm supposed to finish that at the end of this month. I don't know whether that's gonna happen. Oh, that's coming up soon. Very good. But sometime next year is the plan. Well, in the meantime, everybody go check out Galileo's error. It really has provoked me and made me think deeply about things that

are counterintuitive and has given me kind of an expansive perspective on not just consciousness, but sort of how to think about life. And I think that does, as an operating system, trickle down into how we make decisions and how we prioritize how we invest our time. So thank you for that. And I think the work you're doing is super fascinating and you're always welcome to come back to continue the conversation.

Oh, thanks a lot, Rich. I'm glad we finally managed to have this conversation. Years in the making. It's been really fun. Glad to have made it happen. And yeah, I mean, we didn't, I mean, we didn't solve all the world's problems,

but maybe next time we can do that. A few loose ends to tie up. Great. Thank you. Cheers. Peace. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources

related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com.

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Plants. Namaste. Thank you.