Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Bernardo Kastrup and John Vervaeke [Round 1] Theolocution on Consciousness, Idealism, and Naturalism

Starting point is 00:00:00 Excuse this long introduction, it's a bit different, but this preface can be skipped. You can go to the timestamp there if you want to get straight to the Bernardo Kastrup and John Verveke conversation. Many of you may be new to this channel, and if so, my name is Kurt Jeimungal. I'm a filmmaker, as well as I have a background in math and physics, and I'm intensely interested in something called theories of everything. Now this includes the standard unified field theories that I'm sure you've heard of, but it also includes the philosophical theories of everything such as that of Carl Fristons or Donald Hoffmans or Ian McGilchrist, each of whom I've interviewed on this channel, and the links will be in the description. their respective positions. Bernardo Kastrup defending idealism, that is the philosophical

Starting point is 00:00:45 doctrine that we are all part of the same mind, or at least that all that exists are mental states rather than a material reality. Whereas John Vervaeke takes the position of monism and naturalism. When I speak to the different prodigious interviewees on this channel, I generally ask them about their views on other intellectuals, such as Douglas Hofstadter, or what do you think of Roger Penrose's idea of orchestrated objective reduction and so on. And I, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, call it Theomachy, that is to say, Battle of the Gods. Now clearly this is facetious because it's a sin, or at least I think it's a sin to consider any human a god, but there is some truth in the sense that they're

Starting point is 00:01:23 godlike in their intellectual and cognitive prowess. However, this episode is different. First of all, it's the first time I've had on two people at once, and I'm less interested in critiquing that is battling skirmishing than I am about getting the interviewees to understand one another's positions and constructively critique if they're going to critique at all. So I call it theolocution and it will likely be a new series started on this channel as well donald hoffman

Starting point is 00:01:50 was supposed to show up but wasn't able to and it actually turned out wonderfully because castrop and verveke had so much so much to talk about and if you read the comments or i'll list some of the comments right now it seems like it's one of the best interviews or podcasts on this channel. In other news, the Patreon for this channel is going to be revamped as it stands right now. It's currently 100% for support. I do zero in terms of making a nicety like signing cards and mailing it to someone or creating a custom video. I don't have time for that. My time is, I feel already stretched to my limits as it is, but there may be a way to integrate the work already conducted into incentives for patrons. So for

Starting point is 00:02:31 example, I may be writing a book on theories of everything. I definitely take notes on the different interviewees as research, and what I can do is publish some of that or give some of that to the different tiers. People seem to be interested in that as well as watching or being with me while I live stream a studying session for some of these interviews. That's another incentive for a certain tier. There are other ideas I have, and I'm also interested in hearing what perks you think I should offer. But the whole point of this is that this channel is growing. It's growing. It's extremely flattering that it's growing. It's a rate that I didn't think it would. It far surpasses my

Starting point is 00:03:10 expectations for what people are willing to listen to. Three-hour conversation on meticulous technicalities and intricacies and abstruse mechanics of these different theories and theorists, while simultaneously it's taking a huge toll on me, both physically for sure, I'm exhausted much of the time, and then spiritually, yes, because it's destabilizing to have to entertain many different ideas as to what the heck reality is. And then cognitively, for sure, studying for this is difficult. It would be great if just the Patreon covered income, and then this way I could find time to spend and relax and

Starting point is 00:03:49 even sleep while I sleep but sleep well and spend time quality time with my wife and quality time with my family. Plenty of that is mismanagement of my own time, but it's also the stress of uncertainty as to what I'm going to do for income and so on. And hopefully this would mitigate it. Another reason is that I'd like to invest in equipment. So for example, I was lent this green screen yesterday by someone who's been a fan of the channel for months and has been helping out with the Discord. His name is Phil Shertook. Phil, thank you. Thank you so much, Phil. The reason for this green screen, as an aside for those interested, is that this door behind

Starting point is 00:04:30 me is a washroom door. I rent a one bedroom, one washroom place. Now, my wife is, we're in lockdown. This is Ontario, so you can't actually leave your home. And for some jobs, you can't actually perform them. So my wife is home much of the time. And when I'm conducting these podcasts, I tell her, you have to stay in the room. You can't even get food to eat.

Starting point is 00:04:52 Get your water. If you're going to get food, just bring the food into the room. And if you have to use the washroom, take these empty cups, please. Because I can't have you come in the background, distract me, potentially interrupt the guests when they're right at their most profound point and As well as she may be embarrassed because she's wearing pajamas and so on whatever one time I was interviewing Bernardo Castro up and it was supposed to be an hour to two hours long I told her at most it's gonna be two and a half hours to stay here, babe. I love you and then

Starting point is 00:05:19 It ended up going for five hours long now. That was great for me, great for you, great for Bernardo. We didn't even notice the time went by. You can watch that interview. It's one of the best on the channel. But then I remember reeling from that, just shivering with excitement and elated, going into the bedroom, opening the door, the huge smile on my face, and my wife is livid. Seriously, babe? Five hours?

Starting point is 00:05:44 She's holding multiple filled cups okay i would like that for that to not happen so i was speaking to phil shirt took again someone who runs the discord and is helping out with this channel he said kurt just get a green screen i can lend you one you put it here you make it look like it's this background and then she can come and go i would like to invest in equipment and gear like that, so that's another reason why I'm hoping for this Patreon to grow. Lastly, these podcasts take days and days and days to prep for, sometimes weeks.

Starting point is 00:06:15 Ian McGilchrist took weeks. Thomas Campbell took months, actually. Now I have Stephen Wolfram coming up, and I have Chris Langen coming up, who is the person with the highest IQ in America, at least reportedly so. Either way, Stephen Wolfram has a theory of physics that apparently derives the standard model and some non-standard general relativistic models, which means I have to become familiar with those before I become familiar with Stevens, and that's taking some time. with Stevens, and that's taking some time. Chris Langan has a cognitive theoretic model of the universe. And that's, well, it's abnormal. And so it's difficult to wrap one's head around that

Starting point is 00:06:51 takes quite a bit of time. Chomsky is coming up at the end of the month that actually June 1, Rupert Spira is coming up. And apparently his philosophy is so drastically different than the way that I think I'm, I'm, I'm extremely analytical. And he abjures the analytical. So I don't know how long that will take for me to wrap my head around. And at the same time, I always have an icky, slimy feeling about promoting myself or even asking people to go to the Patreon and support. You can even see it right there where I'm stumbling over my words saying it. However, some of the patrons already told me, Kurt, stop feeling like you're selling something. Stop feeling bad about it. Just tell people about it. I wouldn't have known about it if you didn't advertise it once, and

Starting point is 00:07:37 I'm happy to support, so please let other people know. And so this is me doing that. The Patreon and the PayPal are huge, huge boons that help me consistently produce podcasts of extremely high quality with extremely high technical depth, which is different than much of the other podcasts that are out there, which at least in my opinion are watered down. Now there's nothing wrong with being watered down, especially if you want to get an overview of someone's theories. I watch them plenty. But paradoxically, for me, the more watered down it is, the more dry it is. And if you look at the comments on this channel, many of you agree, and it seems to indicate there's a huge craving. There's a huge, huge craving for people interested in the recondite inner workings of a theory,

Starting point is 00:08:21 and this isn't provided almost anywhere else, please go to patreon.com slash KurtJaiMungle if you'd like to support. Thank you so much and enjoy this podcast. Judging by some of the comments already, at least one commenter said that it's like the 2021 version of Sam Harris versus Jordan Peterson. That is to say, it's Bernardo Kastrup and John Vervaeke. Links to both of their work are in the description. Thank you. Sometimes there's a time lag and you want to interject, but you're not sure if it's going Links to both of their work are in the description. Thank you. but I'll take it out when I finally edit it together. I'll just put the other person's face so you don't see it. Hopefully we cannot be rude. That'd be good. Choose the finger wisely.

Starting point is 00:09:14 Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I have to say I suffer from high blood pressure, so I take diuretics also for my Meniere's. I don't know if I can go like three hours without going to the bathroom. I'll try. I haven't had much to drink this morning, but I want to forewarn. I don't know if I can go like three hours without going to the bathroom. I'll try. I haven't had much to drink this morning, but I want to forewarn. I can't guarantee that because of the means. Yeah, go to the washroom as much as you can.

Starting point is 00:09:31 You can have a cup in front of you too if you need to. Yeah. That would be very rude. While someone else is speaking, the trickle may then turn the camera to you. The jig is up. Turn the camera to you. The jig is up. This one is an experimental podcast because usually what I do is I do a prodigious amount of research beforehand and ask guests precise questions. But this time I thought, how about I get two people on and have them get to know one another, which usually happens behind the closed doors of academia.

Starting point is 00:10:08 behind the closed doors of academia and have these two titans, the people who are at the top of their respective academic game, speak to one another, converse jovially instead of trying to critique and debate, and watch them get to know, get familiar with one another's ideas. That's the whole point of this. I'm taking much more of a backseat than I usually would take, and I'm just facilitating questions between you both. How does that sound? Great. Let's see how it goes. a background in math and physics, which is why I'm interested in theories of everything.

Starting point is 00:10:50 And theories of everything to me don't just include grand unification, but also philosophical worldviews, which is why Jonathan and Bernardo are here. Jonathan, the great John Vervaeke, is a professor of the University of Toronto in cognitive science, and I believe he's the only professor that has a cognitive science course on buddhism mindfulness and wisdom in 2012 he gained an award called the ranjini gauche excellence in teaching award and there are many more accolades i can say for john but i'll save that because he's a towering figure and that would take quite some time b Bernardo Castro has a PhD in both computer science and philosophy, the latter of which is what we're interested in today. His work leads the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism,

Starting point is 00:11:34 the notion that reality is essentially mental. I respect both of you greatly, and I want you to know that both the Bernardo interview on the channel, the Theories of Everything channel, and John, your interview on the channel the theories of everything channel and john your interview on the theories of everything channel are some of the highest rated if not the highest rated of all the interviews and i still get comments to this day saying that it's not only the best on the channel but maybe the best interviews with you so i am so honored that

Starting point is 00:12:00 you gave your time and that that happened thank you so much thank you fantastic to know that's resonating so well it's great to be here kurt it's been a while and it's good to see you again it's a pleasure to meet you bernardo my pleasure john okay just so you know the audience for this podcast is generally colossally clever so if you have to use abstruse terminology that you don't think ordinarily people would understand, it's okay. Speak as if you're behind the academic doors. This is what this is. It's an experiment. And if you have to make logical, deductive steps quickly, go

Starting point is 00:12:34 ahead. Do so. It doesn't matter. People can rewind. People can pause. I'll start with philosophically. How would you all, John, how would you describe yourself? So there's obviously isms like you're a realist, you're a logical positivist, you're a materialist, whatever it may be. Why don't you give the audience an idea as to where you're coming from? And then Bernardo, you'll do the same. Sure. If you want my metaphysical stance, I don't know if that's the most important aspect of my work, but maybe that's the arena

Starting point is 00:13:00 we're playing in right now. So I would describe myself as a naturalist and to try and make that clear, I reject the term that people often apply to me, materialist. I don't think that all of reality is just matter. I don't know if I know anybody who actually takes that stance. And so, you know, like most physicalists, I think that we have to talk about other real entities like time, space, cause, structural, functional organizations of things, information, etc. And I think they're all good arguments for that. And then I'm not I'm a non-reductive physicalist, which means I think there's genuine emergence. I actually sort of sort of heretically, I think there's also emanation as well as emergence, but we could get into that later. And what I mean by that is I don't think

Starting point is 00:13:53 it's fair to say or correct to say that the only thing that really exists is the very bottom level of our ontology, maybe quantum probability waves or something like that. I think that this level at which we do science must really exist for science to really exist and for us to draw the conclusions about the reference of science, such as conclusions about the quantum domain or the relativistic domain. So that's why I call myself a naturalist. So a naturalist says that the ontology is going to be consistent with the natural sciences, biology, chemistry, physics, and perhaps hopefully down the road cognitive science, but it is not going to be reducible to them. And so it's a quite layered and rich ontology. And then within it, I happen to hold a position called deep continuity, which means this is from work by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, a

Starting point is 00:14:55 lot of people in what's called 4E cognitive science or third wave cognitive science. There's a deep continuity between the principles that regulate and generate cognition and consciousness and those that regulate and generate living systems so i i take it after a lot of argument that in order to be a cognitive thing you have to also be a living thing um and then and then there is also deep continuity between living things that are auto poetic self-making and self-organizing systems like tornadoes and eddies within streams and things like that so it's a naturalism with deep continuity is for me the ontology that I think I find was plausible, convergent, and the one that best helps to explain how science itself is possible. And so it's also an ontology that's deeply influenced by Neoplatonism

Starting point is 00:15:53 because Neoplatonism tends to emphasize building your ontology off the prima facie datum from which you try to build your ontology is intelligibility, the existence of intelligibility, which is presupposed by science. So I think that's it. I hope that was not too coarse of a nutshell, but that's where I come from. Bernardo? I think like John, I'm a naturalist as well. Whatever is not part of nature, even if it exists, it escapes so much the realm of what is relevant that may not be interesting to look at it. Unlike John, I am a reductionist. I'm probably an extreme reductionist. And the reason I am that is I think there are very fundamental, even insoluble problems that you face if your reduction base has more than one thing.

Starting point is 00:16:48 Because then you run into the interaction problem, you have issues of parsimony, that you really need to postulate many things in your reduction base. And large reduction bases, they don't explain anything, And large reduction bases, they don't explain anything. They just avoid the need for explanation by just pronouncing a number of things to be primitives, dispensing with explanation. So I am a reductionist, even though the one element in my reduction base is different from the elements in the reduction base of mainstream materialism today. Today I think the mainstream view would be that all quantum fields are part of the reduction base. There is yet no unified field theory, so we have a reduction base with multiple fields. Now I don't go for that. I am critical of strong emergence. I think what we might call weak emergence,

Starting point is 00:17:50 what David Chalmers calls a weak emergence, obviously exists. Sand dunes emerge out of sand grains and wind. So we know that these things happen ice crystals emerge out of water and temperature variations but strong emergence as an explanation for instance for how phenomenal consciousness could arise from arrangements of matter I think at best it's an appeal to a complete unknown

Starting point is 00:18:24 and probably it's a's an appeal to a complete unknown, and probably it's a flat-out appeal to magic. It's a way to put a label on something that is actually incoherent. We label it a problem, and we say, well, one day we will explain it, but we are just insisting on a path that is leading nowhere. So to summarize it all, my position is what I like to call analytic idealism. It's an idealist philosophy that postulates that at the bottom level of nature, there is only mind. Not your mind alone, not my mind alone,

Starting point is 00:18:55 but only mind stuff at the bottom of nature. And it's a mix between objective and subjective idealism. I can go more into that to explain it more later. Yeah, I think that summarizes it. John, what occurs to you when you hear that? What questions pop up? I guess maybe there's a question around the notion of strong emergence. I'm actually proposing, it depends what you mean by strong emergence. I mean, strong emergence is the claim that there's not going to be any explanatory relationship

Starting point is 00:19:34 between the levels. I take it that what we say happens in weak emergence, like how water emerges out of hydrogen and oxygen, is because we have some account. And then the idea is differences of degree, if enough of them become differences in kind, because then you not only get water emerging, and then you get water has a particular set of relationships to organisms such that it's a nutrient, and there's no such thing as a nutrient in physics.

Starting point is 00:20:03 It doesn't belong in the physics ontology things like that and so i think the position that i'm arguing for is you know is a form of what would technically be called weak emergence because i do think there is emerging no pun intended an ongoing explanation so for example we used to have a position that looked like strong emergence for life, vitalism. Most people in biology, myself included, reject that because now we have a very complicated, but nevertheless, I think you could rightly say version of weak emergence of life from inorganic material. And so, And I think we're getting a similar thing happening with the weak emergence of intelligence out of non-intelligent things.

Starting point is 00:20:55 And so I think given the explanatory base provided by living things that weakly emerge and intelligent things that weakly emerge we have pretty much we need what we need in order to generate a lot of the theoretical explanation for a lot of consciousness which is where this hangs in namely that i think that we many people are already coming converging this is some of the stuff I've worked on, towards a weak emergence explanation of the function of consciousness. That's becoming less problematic. That was even somewhat excluded in Chalmers' distinction around the heart problem.

Starting point is 00:21:35 And I think as we get a richer and richer account of the functionality, we will get a richer and richer account of the nature of consciousness, the phenomenal aspects of it. So I think I would ultimately say that I'm not defending a strong emergence position, I'm defending a very complicated, but the complication isn't the issue here. The issue is whether or not I'm advocating for a non-explanatory relationship in the emergence. Now, is there a degree to which this is promissory?

Starting point is 00:22:08 Well, everybody's position right now is promissory, because the only way we wouldn't have a promissory position is if we had our completed science. So what we have to ask about is, is it a plausible promise? And of course, we might likely disagree on that. But that would be my initial response. John, you have an articulated notion of what it means to be plausible. Do you mind explaining that first? Yeah, so this is some of the work I do outside of these thorny issues of ontology, because I'm very interested in trying to understand understanding and how understanding differs from knowledge. One of the differences is people generally talk about knowledge

Starting point is 00:22:52 in terms of evidence that justifies, where understanding is relevance that basically signifies. And there's an important difference there. And so one way of understanding this is that when people have a particular kind of understanding, they give it a normative status. When they say something's reasonable or makes good sense, or they'll even say it's plausible, and they don't mean it as a synonym for probable. They just mean, oh, it's reasonable. That makes good sense. And so when you take a look at what's going on there, there seems to be a bunch of factors.

Starting point is 00:23:28 This is based on a lot of other people's work on plausibility. And I won't try and cite a lot of people here for brevity's sake. One is the idea that we want a lot of independent lines of converging evidence. The idea being here, this gives what Rescher calls trustworthiness. If my particular theoretical construct comes out of independent lines of argument and evidence, that reduces the chance that it was produced by theoretical bias or empirical bias, etc. For example, that's why even infants prefer information that is multisensory. That's why even infants prefer information that is multisensory. They will give priority to information that comes through eyesight and hearing and touch

Starting point is 00:24:11 than over just eyesight, et cetera, because it's much more likely to be real than a subjective illusion, for example. That's trustworthiness. You want your construct to have some structural functional organization, some way in which it's structured. It's not just a list of features, but a way it has a structure that indicates its function. And then its function, of course, is explicable in terms of its structure. And then you want elegance. You want that that construct will map into many new domains, find problems, formulate problems that hasn't been found before,

Starting point is 00:24:46 and make them potentially solvable. So this is sort of elegance. So you have convergence into something like a cognitive optimal grip, elegance out, and then you want to balance between them. So if you propose something that will explain a lot of things and looks elegant, but isn't very trustworthy, well, that's when something's far-fetched. You can have the opposite. You can have something that's very trustworthy, but has no elegance to it, and that's trivial. And then you can do various kinds of slips between them. You can do what Dennett calls a deepity, where you equivocate, or you can do a Mott and Bailey thing. So when I'm talking about plausibility, I'm talking about a standard we have to use. We can't rely on, because for example, I can't test all possible hypotheses. The logical number of those is indefinitely large. So if I'm a scientist,

Starting point is 00:25:41 I have to select the plausible ones. And then when I'm testing it, I have to control for confounds. Do I control for all possible alternative explanations? No, that's impossible. That's combinatorial explosive. So I select the plausible ones that I control for. Then I get my data, and I have to derive my interpretations from it. Do I derive all logically possible implications? No, that's combinatorial explosive.

Starting point is 00:26:02 So I make use of the most plausible implications. So plausibility is before, during, and after empirical investigation, so it's irremovable. Now the thing about it is it's pragmatic, it's defeasible, because what it does is it just gives you the normativity of taking something seriously. We have, that's not a sufficient normativity for a knowledge claim, but it is a necessary normativity of taking something seriously. That's not a sufficient normativity for a knowledge claim, but it is a necessary normativity for getting your knowledge acquisition processes going. That's what I mean by plausibility. Bernardo, I'm sure thoughts present themselves to you. Oh, there's a lot to comment on. Look, I think there is a heart of objectivity in our notion, in the concept of plausibility.

Starting point is 00:26:48 And I think John has elaborated on it very well. But in practice, a lot of what we call plausibility is a psychosocial phenomenon. Why? Because the interpretation of data is never neutral. I mean, we know that from Thomas Kuhn, that the very interpretation of data is already paradigm-laden or theory-laden. If you look at the history of science, there was a point a couple of hundred years ago in which phlogiston was perfectly plausible, an invisible elastic substance that connected shaft to an amber rod and accounted for what we today call electrostatic attraction. There was a point in time in which Newton's gravitational force, an invisible force that acted instantly and at a distance between bodies, celestial bodies, was considered utterly

Starting point is 00:27:43 implausible. In fact, in France, it took like 50 years for the French to stop laughing at Newton. And then later on, we figured that we can laugh at Newton again because there is no such invisible force. It's the fabric of space-time that bends and curves and accounts then for what we call gravitation. So plausibility, I think it's something we have to take with a grain of salt because it is culturally manufacturable. And we have been manufacturing plausibility at the highest rate in history lately. For instance, we are very busy in the mainstream media manufacturing plausibility for the outright incoherent notion that you can upload your consciousness into a computer,

Starting point is 00:28:30 which betrays all kinds of misunderstandings about computers and about consciousness and neuroscience. idea that now a lot of highly educated people with PhDs consider plausible because our cultural milieu renders it to us as if it were plausible and since knowledge is now so broad that every single person can only know a tiny bit of what there is to know we buy into it it's very difficult to have an overview of all the salient and relevant aspects of knowledge to pass judgment on that. So I would be careful with plausibility in science already. But when it comes to consciousness, you know, it's not just science because science is a study of nature's behavior, not a study of what nature is in and of itself. of itself. What nature is, I would say, is irrelevant to science because science makes predictions about how nature will behave. What an experiment confirms or disproves is the behavioral

Starting point is 00:29:32 predictions of a certain model of nature's behavior. And that's what experiment answers. Experiment produces an answer in the form of a certain thing that nature does, a certain behavior. Now, of course, if you have a metaphysics, a theory of what nature is, that makes itself predictions that are contradicted by science, then you have to discard that metaphysics. So science informs philosophy or metaphysics, but it doesn't settle philosophical questions. And when it comes to consciousness, I don't think it settles the question at all. I think what's happening today is we think that strong emergence is a plausible account for consciousness because this notion has

Starting point is 00:30:13 been culturally manufactured. It's not grounded in objective reasoning or evidence. Because I think what happened at first was that scientists started from where we all start, from conscious experience, the experience of the world out there, the colors, the melodies, the flavors, the scents that are around us. And then they figured out that it was very useful to model those qualities, conscious qualities of the world with numbers, which could then be tied up in equations. And that was very useful to describe the world with numbers, which could then be tied up in equations. And that was very useful to describe the world. So carrying a heavy piece of luggage is described with 50 kilos, and holding a feather is described with 50 grams. And now you have a quantitative way of dealing with these relative differences and making predictive models in the form of equations that relate all these quantities together.

Starting point is 00:31:07 These are all descriptions of the qualities. But at some point, something very strange happened around the time of Descartes and the conflict between science and the church and that attempt to find space for both without the church having to burn scientists alive. The question was sort of settled by saying, okay, there is mind, the mental sphere, that's for the church. And then the church was very happy because from the church's perspective, that was all that existed, right? And then we said, and the descriptions now are not only a description of the contents of mind, the descriptions exist in and of themselves, and moreover, they precede the contents of mind. And that's when the conceptual idea of matter arose.

Starting point is 00:31:49 We said that those kilos, hertz, length, weight, or spin, momentum, electric charge, mass, amplitude, frequency, we said those things aren't just descriptions. We said, those things aren't just descriptions. Those things have standalone existence, and they somehow generate the world of experience, the colors we see, the sense we feel. It's like trying to pull the territory out of the map, because we have the territory. We described it.

Starting point is 00:32:21 We created the map. And then we said, the map precedes the territory. It exists before the territory, we described it, we created the map, and then we said the map precedes the territory, it exists before the territory, the description exists before the thing described. First incoherent move, second incoherent move, somehow consciousness, the qualities of experience, arise out of that. It's like pulling the territory out of the map. And then we face an insoluble problem, the hard problem of consciousness. But because we've manufactured now a century and a half of plausibility

Starting point is 00:32:51 for this idea that matter precedes consciousness, instead of realizing that the hard problem of consciousness is not a problem at all, it's a reduction to absurdity of the materialist postulates, it's just incoherent. The message is backtrack, try another path because this one goes nowhere. Instead of admitting that,

Starting point is 00:33:10 we don't throw away a century and a half of manufactured plausibility. We label it a problem and we say, one day we will solve it and we call it strong emergency or whatever. One day we will account for it in order to sort of preserve what we've built so far? Okay, John, first, do you mind recapitulating what your understanding of what Bernardo said

Starting point is 00:33:34 is and then seeing if it matches? I think there's a difference between how I was trying to use plausibility and he is. I'm not equating plausibility to every claim to plausibility any more than I would equate the claim to validity to validity. Many people claim things are plausible for reasons that Bernardo rightly pointed out. We have a particular paradigm. But I would point out that what he's offering to challenge that is a plausibility argument. He can't make it one of deductive certainty. We've sort of given up on the idea that we can produce a deductively certain metaphysics,

Starting point is 00:34:10 at least as far as I can tell. And so what he's doing is presenting, and he's good at it. I'm not denying that. He's good at presenting something that's very reasonable. He draws independent lines of argument and independent lines of evidence together. So I'm talking about plausibility in the normative sense. I'm not talking about it in simply what people claim. And what I'm claiming is in that normative sense, that's ultimately what we have. This is sort of a pragmatist stance. And the fact that, and he's invoking it, Lawton's, you know, pessimistic history of science,

Starting point is 00:34:41 right, shows that most of our theories turn out to be false. So it couldn't have been truth that was guiding us. It had to be something like plausibility and probability that were guiding us. And that's what I think we should sort of say we're doing. Now, that doesn't mean that I don't think he's not offering a plausible argument. I'm not saying that. So I understand that we should periodically step back and criticize our paradigms. But I would point out to him that that means there's something we appeal to above and beyond our paradigmatic standards in order to make such challenges and hopefully get them understood and accepted. I reject, I don't know if he does too,

Starting point is 00:35:26 I reject sort of a pure Kuhnian response that it's just happenstance and historical circumstance why people adopt new positions. I do think they do something that is trans-paradigmatic, but I don't think it's Cartesian certainty because I've never been convinced that such a thing exists. So that's what I'm trying to invoke when I'm invoking plausibility. And I think metaphysics, and I think even philosophy at large,

Starting point is 00:35:50 is the art of disciplined and justifiable plausibility, something like that. So there, that's that. Now, I don't know what to do about some of the historical, because Bernardo said a lot. I happen to think that the point he's pointing to happens a lot earlier. I think it happens around Scotus. Yes.

Starting point is 00:36:13 Okay, from now on, from this point forward, I'm going to take extreme backseat. I'm very curious about your point about Scotus. I would like to continue to hear it. You're bringing that back to the, what, 10th century? 9th century? No, no, no, no, no. Scotus is post-Aquinas, so we're talking like the 13th, 14th century. We're talking about Scotus and Occam. That's where I think the change is made, because what happens with Scotus is you have the idea of the universe, that being is univocal, that whenever we say being we're saying this it's the same for everything and that sort of demolishes platonic realism uh well

Starting point is 00:36:52 demolishes if you think scottish is right and then occam's nominalism uh uh brings out the idea that there aren't any actual structures in reality because all that really exists are bare particulars, bare individuals. And I think that's what severs the idea that there is something, it destroys the conformity theory, that there is something identical in being between the knower and the known. So, you know, the idea is when I know something in the older theory, there is some shared structural functional organization in my mind and a thing that is constitutive of the reality of the thing. And so there is a and I think it's with Scottus and with Occam. And then you get the idea of knowledge, not as a conforming to reality, but as coherence of propositions held somewhere inside.

Starting point is 00:37:44 And I think that starts the severing in an important way. And so I think the important move is, you know, a shift out of what I think, I think it's plausible to say, you know, ancient realism, ancient philosophy, right up until and including Aquinas, is ultimately realistic in its notion. And I think the severing from realism precedes the emergence of matter as a substantial thing. And so that's where I would start to talk about where the main issues are. Now, I think what you're talking about does happen with Descartes, but it's also prefigured and made possible by, you know, the ideas of individual conscience with Luther and

Starting point is 00:38:32 things like that, separate and give a kind of internal authority separate from, you know, demands placed on you by an external authority, whether that's the real world or God. So I think there's a sequence of stages that unfold. And I think the issue of consciousness is downstream from these earlier decisions about, well, realism versus something like, I don't know what to call it initially, but it, you know, because it's normalism, which is a minimalized realism. And then you get a flat ontology with Scotus because all the idea of real differences in being disappear.

Starting point is 00:39:20 And the irony of that is if you posit any kind of reductionism, you are actually invoking levels of being again and saying things like there are more real levels than other levels, which actually undermines the Scottish position that started the whole transition in a powerful way. So we're actually in a really, I think, within this paradigm, if you'll allow me, we're actually in a kind of incoherent place where we want to say, we want to, we're holding to a view that came out of the idea that there's no real differences in levels of being, but now we are moving towards positions in which differences of being are taken to be sort of, you know, a plausible thing. So people will regularly say things like, well, tables don't really exist. And, you know, all this, you know, love doesn't really exist, all that's at the bottom. And so that's to invoke a platonic distinction between levels of being. And so we're actually in an

Starting point is 00:40:21 incoherent place with respect to our notion of being, I would argue right now. Okay. When I said that I'm going to take a backseat, what I mean is no longer from this point forward, John, do you refer to Bernardo as he, because that means you're talking to me about Bernardo. You just say you, because now you're speaking to Bernardo and Bernardo same. So now you say you, so John, so-and-so. Bernardo, take it away. And John, if you need to interject, you go ahead. John, there are many points, I think, that we have in common based on what you just said. I'm trying to make a mental list of those points. I'm not for total relativism either. I think there are good objective epistemic criteria that we can follow in order to have a higher degree of certainty or a lower degree of uncertainty about our postulates and inferences.

Starting point is 00:41:16 I would go as far as to submit to you that Kuhn himself wasn't a relativist in the way he's often portrayed to be. And he was very frustrated, in fact, for the fact that he was portrayed that way. I agree with that. I would refer you to an interview done with Kuhn by my friend John Horgan from Scientific American back in 1996, I think, in the final years of Kuhn's life. In 96, I think, in the final years of Kuhn's life. Another thing that I think we have in common is that I'm not postulates that we can have inferential certainty here. I don't think, you know, apes evolved on planet Earth in a corner of a typical galaxy somewhere in the universe have the cognitive apparatus to capture with certainty the salient aspects of what's going on of course not reality is filtered through our

Starting point is 00:42:13 cognition and our cognition has evolved to allow us to escape tigers and find fruit and hunt bison that's basically what we evolved to do even Even our symbolic thinking is what, 30, 50 thousand years old? I mean, to characterize this as the blink of an eye in the history of the earth is to vastly overestimate the amount of time since we've evolved that capability. And third, I also think that there are guidelines that are more or less objective.

Starting point is 00:42:52 I'm not sort of surrendering everything to paradigmatic subjectivity. The role you attribute to a more objective notion of plausibility, I would attribute to conceptual parsimony, because it's countable. You know, how many different kinds of things are you postulating to account for observations? And although it's not written or etched in stone in nature that the best explanation is always the most conceptually parsimonious, it may not be. If we abandon parsimony as an epistemic guideline, we open the doors to all kinds of nonsense. For instance, there is an example I often like to use.

Starting point is 00:43:39 If I wake up in the morning and I see strange footprints in my backyard, I can offer two explanations. Explanation A, a burglar went around, checked my door, figured that it's well secure, and gave up and went away. Explanation 2, aliens landed on my neighbor's backyard, stole his shoes, came for a stroll in my backyard, left the footprints behind, went back, boarded their spaceship and flew back to the Pleiades. Now, neither theory can be disproved on the basis of the data available. Both account for the data, but one postulates a lot less than the other. One postulates a burglar, a human being of the kind we know exists. The other postulates spaceships, alien races, illogical straws, illogical shoe robbery. So if we abandon parsimony because we know it's not etched in stone,

Starting point is 00:44:36 if we abandon that, we are lost. So I think that's one fairly objective criterion for guiding our epistemology. If you start postulating too many things and interactions between too many things or appealing to too many unknowns, it doesn't go anywhere or it's not reliable. It's not reliable. Now, finally, regarding the question of consciousness, you said we will always have to have a promissory theory when it comes to consciousness. I would submit to you that that's only true if you're trying to reduce consciousness to something that isn't consciousness. Then whatever theory you come up will be promissory because we have no idea how that reduction can take place. That's why we talk about strong emergency. It's a way to not have to make the reduction explicit. But you see, every theory of nature needs to have at least one thing in the reduction base. You can't explain one thing in terms of another forever. Otherwise,

Starting point is 00:45:44 eventually you will beg the question, your reasoning will be circular at some point. So you have to always have that one thing, at least one thing in the reduction base for which you have no explanation. In other words, you can't explain that one thing in terms of anything else. That can still be your best theory of nature, because so long as you can explain everything else in terms of that one thing, then you're fine, because you always need at least one thing in the reduction base. I would offer to you that if you put consciousness as the one thing in that reduction base, you eliminate the hard problem of consciousness because you're no longer trying to reduce it.

Starting point is 00:46:25 The promissory notes are off the table. Your challenge now is to explain then the phenomenality, our inner phenomenal life and the empirical observations of the world outside, which are always qualitative ultimately, in terms of that one thing in the reduction base. That is the challenge. But then I would submit to you that that challenge is of a whole other level and character than trying to reduce consciousness.

Starting point is 00:46:58 It entails no hard problems. It entails no appeals to unknowns. You can do that by using phenomena that you already know occur in nature. So I think it's much more promising to go that way. And then there is no promissory notes. So I would respond to that. I mean, parsimony is a difficult thing. I mean, it depends on how you individuate your entities. And there's no canonical way of individuating entities. And the attempt to find conceptual primitives, I think, has been a largely failed project. So the number of entities depend on how I individuate them.

Starting point is 00:47:39 Is consciousness one thing or many things? How do you know that? How do you determine that? And how do you determine that in a reliable way? And if you're talking about reduction, do you have one thing or do you or is everything an illusion above that one thing? And then you do have a hard problem of how is it we're doing science at these illusory levels to point to the bottom level, but that we're claiming is the only thing that really exists. And if you say, well, no, I don't mean they don't, they're all illusions, they also exist,

Starting point is 00:48:09 then I posit to you that you do have a complex ontology, and you do have multiple things. I mean, so, so I don't even know what we're referring to when we're individuating this thing you're calling consciousness. Is it one thing? I don't know. I mean, it seems to me that there's aspects of my consciousness that are qualitative in nature. There's aspects of my conscious life that seem to require relationship to something that's unconscious. My memories come and go.

Starting point is 00:48:46 I wake up, I fall asleep. Has there actually been one consciousness through all this time or multiple consciousnesses to the point that my consciousnesses disappear? I mean, and I seem to be able to have experiences where I have sort of a dual consciousness, where I'm sort of aware of my own consciousness, but I'm aware of the world as well.

Starting point is 00:49:08 Is that one consciousness or two? I mean, and I'm not trying to be obtuse here. The invocation of parsimony, it seems to me, is to, I think it's really an indication of elegance because most people qualify, even Occam did, parsimony is you reduce to the minimum needed to generate your explanation. And that depends also, as many people have pointed out, on how we individuate things, right? And we can't make it syntactic because all I can do is I can just replace every relation with a higher order noun or a lower order noun. You know, is baseball one thing or many things?

Starting point is 00:49:47 How do we count it? Well, it's made up of many people. Oh, so it's made up of, oh, like, whoa, is a person one thing? Is consciousness one thing? Like, so I think invoking the notion of parsimony is ultimately something that we do heuristically and pragmatically. I don't think we have an algorithmic formal account. I mean, the accounts that we have that approach that, like Golmogorov simplicity, prove to be computationally intractable. So they can't be what we're using when we invoke parsimony.

Starting point is 00:50:30 And other than that, I don't know any formalization of simplicity that isn't question-begging. Now, we all use it, Bernardo. I'm not denying that. But what I'm saying is, I think the appeal to it as an absolute methodological principle, it just runs it objectively. I'm not convinced by that argument. Now, to the point about consciousness, again, maybe, and this is what I need to get is, and I'm also conscious, pun intended, that we're trying to make this dialogical. We disagree, and we have to be honest about our disagreements, but I don't want to come off as like imperious or I want to come off as receptive and listening to you. Not I don't want to come off.

Starting point is 00:51:15 I want to be that. That's what I aspire to. So I'll try and live this as enthusiasm rather than anything aggressive or anything like that, because I don't want to be doing that. So I'm not quite clear what you're pointing to when you say, like, let's take sort of a standard human thing. I'm actually not aware of my consciousness. I'm actually not aware of my consciousness. I'm aware of things consciously, but I'm not aware of a thing, an entity consciousness. That's Hume right there.

Starting point is 00:51:53 Hume versus Barclay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they're both empiricists. So that's why I'm doing that, because they agree on the same methodological principles, as far as I can tell. And so. John, give. sorry to interrupt. John, give, let's have some shorter bursts of speech and then just hand off to the other person,

Starting point is 00:52:19 maybe one question or two questions and two statements. I spoke very long, so maybe you should have a chance to comment on everything I said. Well, no, I'm willing, I'm willing to do, a chance to comment on everything I said. Well, no, I'm willing to do, I'll just make those two points. The point is, I think that, I think, and I don't think we actually ever go for simplicity, I think we go for elegance balanced by trustworthiness. I think that, and that's, so I think parsimony is a problematic notion. But then trustworthiness is even more problematic because what is trustworthy? But I get your point. And then my other point was, since we are counting a single entity,

Starting point is 00:52:57 there is a sort of, you know, the human problems as well. Are we equating experience to consciousness? Because that's a problematic move. And are you really making consciousness? Like it seems to me you have a double in consciousness. You have consciousness as experienced and consciousness as experiencer. And therefore, you're not actually getting the one thing at the bottom. And then all of this over here, the experiencer is something that's not within conscious, but I'm inferring it from my experience. And then if I'm willing to infer things outside of my consciousness, well, then why not be a realist? I guess that's what it sort of comes to.

Starting point is 00:53:39 Okay. I want to start with a point where I agree with you, but just with a preamble first. Everything you said is directly applicable as a criticism of physicalism and any other ontology. So you are not sort of singling out idealism. You're criticizing your own position with the arguments you just put on the table. There is one thing where we agree, and I think a lot of people miss on it. put on the table. There is one thing where we agree, and I think a lot of people miss on it. Our carving out the world into things is purely nominal. There is no ontic criterion for saying the car ends here and here begins the road, or here the river ends and the ocean begins. We separate the universe into things out of convenience. It's arbitrary and nominal.

Starting point is 00:54:31 Because if you say, well, I would define a car in terms of functionality. So if I need the spark plugs for the car to move, then the spark plugs are part of the car. Well, then you need the road. Because without the road for the tires to grip, you don't move. And you need the air to enable combustion. And you need the gravity of the Earth to pull the car towards the road. I mean, soon you have the entire universe. And now with quantum entanglement, you literally have the entire universe. So partitioning the inanimate universe into things

Starting point is 00:55:06 is completely nominal. I do think we have an ontic criterion for saying that we end here. Like if you shoot a bullet through the chair where I'm sitting, I will not feel it. But if you shoot a bullet through my belly, I will feel it. If a photon hits my retina, I see it.

Starting point is 00:55:23 If it hits the wall behind me, I don't see it. So there is a ontic criterion for saying here we as, you know, our inner lives can be delimited in physical space at the boundaries of our body. And that's not merely nominal. It's not arbitrary because in some cases I feel, in other cases I don't feel. Now, where do I want to go with this? I lost my train of thought where I was going with this, but it was very important what I wanted to tell you. John, then do you want to step in? Can you just summarize briefly again?

Starting point is 00:56:01 Oh, yeah, I remember. The idea of parsimony, and how do you say whether consciousness is more than one thing, and Hume's critique of Barclay. So for the sake of the audience, Barclay said, well, everything is in the mind, and Hume's critique was to ask, well, what is the mind? I'm not aware of a mind. I am aware of different experiences. So how can you pull a psyche, a mind, a soul, out of the variety of experiences I have? And back in the day, that seemed to have been a strong enough criticism

Starting point is 00:56:38 back in the 18th century. But it misses out on a very clear intuition that we all have. Although the qualities of experiences can vary wildly, the quality of having a bellyache is totally different from the quality of falling in love. They are experiential. They are not theoretical abstractions. They are not something that can be exhaustively described through quantities or physical parameters. They are qualitative. So I would offer to you the following definition of consciousness, which is consistent with the idea that consciousness is the one member of the reduction base. Mind or consciousness, which I will use interchangeably, is that whose excitations are experiences. And if you define it that way, then there is only the experiencer.

Starting point is 00:57:35 And experiences are different patterns of excitation of the experiencer. So there is nothing to experience but the experiencer, in the same sense that there is nothing to experience but the experiencer in the same sense that there is nothing to a ripple but the lake where it ripples. We use different words because it's convenient in dialogue to speak of ripples instead of patterns of movement of the lake. But we have to keep in mind that all along there is only the lake. So all along there is only But we have to keep in mind that all along there is only the lake. So all along there is only subjectivity. There is only the experiencer.

Starting point is 00:58:11 And experiences are just patterns of excitation of the experiencer. This has another advantage, which it eliminates any interaction problem between experience and the experiencer. Because there is no such a thing as an experience outside the experiencer. There is only the experiencer. What is the experiencer above and beyond the set of experiences? Like, why are they not just an atomic sequence of experiences, a sequence of atomic experiences? That would lead you to all kinds of problems. For instance, what binds these experiences together? Why do we have the inner feeling that these experiences are being had by us as a subjective point of view into a field of phenomenality? Right. And so I answer a problem by inferring a relation. Right. And then that relation and the mechanisms by which that relation works, how things are bound together, is actually not something I'm consciously aware of.

Starting point is 00:59:06 Let me give you a concrete example. I mean, I'm hearing your words and I'm getting ideas out of that. And that's binding them together into an integrated proposition in my mind. I have no idea how I'm doing that. My introspective awareness of that gives me no account. In fact, and any common and, and any in common sense intuitions I have, I have largely turned out to be wrong. So most of the processing that is allowing me to do the binding is not a processing within my consciousness. It's a

Starting point is 00:59:35 processing that makes my consciousness possible, right? I mean, that's the Kantian argument, right? The Kantian argument is you have to propose some sort of transcendental binding, but it's, it's precisely transcendental. You argue for it as that which grounds and makes possible the experience, not as something that's found within the experience. Here, this has a lot to do with one point you made before, which is you said a lot of my conscious experiences seem to be anchored in something that is not consciousness, something that's sort of operating in the dark, in the background. I find that more generic criticism to hold better than what you just said. I would say, how do you know that there is binding?

Starting point is 01:00:17 Well, that binding is itself an experience. It is itself a pattern of excitation of your subjectivity that arises maybe as an interference pattern. Wait, but I'm not asking how I know the binding is there. I'm asking what it is that exists in order to explain the binding. And those aren't the same thing, right? I don't think the entity you're looking for is necessary. The notion of binding is itself a pattern of excitation of consciousness, because the binding, so far as you can speak of it, it is some kind of experience you're having. No, no, the binding that, so I have a conscious experience of you making sense, but I don't have a conscious experience of the binding of those sounds into meaning that then make, and you know, and I have no conscious experience

Starting point is 01:01:09 of acquiring English, but here it is, and I have it, right? How is that bound to me, right? I want to answer this, but yeah, I wanted to answer a better example because I think here you are looking for an entity that doesn't need to be there. I think there is a very natural flow of experience, which we call understanding. But I agree with you that you are appealing to a lot of background stuff to enable that conscious binding. You're appealing to knowledge that you've had before and which is no longer in the screen of your memory being relived right now.

Starting point is 01:01:44 and which is no longer in the screening of your memory being relived right now. And look, there is over 100 years, 150 years now, if you count far back enough, of depth psychology, which sort of has accumulated evidence for parts of the psyche that we cannot report on, feelings that we have and we can't report on, memories that we have and we can't report on, and which may lead to the notion that okay there is something other than consciousness, because if my consciousness is operating on the basis of something that I can't consciously report, then there is something other than consciousness. I would dispute that based on the modern differentiation between consciousness and metaconsciousness, between conscious experience and conscious metacognition.

Starting point is 01:02:25 I think what we report is an expression of what we are metacognizant of, the contents of our metaconsciousness, the experiences we have and know that we have. But in the background, stuff that we cannot report because we don't know that we are experiencing that stuff, it is still consciousness. And we have everyday examples to show that you're breathing right now. You're always conscious of your breathing. But only right now, because I mentioned it, did you become metaconscious of your breathing because you placed your attention on it. you reflected that experience of breathing so this stuff in the background that you have referred to i would say it's all experiences which are not available to your

Starting point is 01:03:12 introspection right now for you to report because they are obfuscated by the limited contents of your metaconsciousness or they are dissociated or inferentially isolated. We know dissociation exists, and it's for real since the advent of neuroimaging in the 21st century. So I do think that Hume's critique of Barclay was a straw man because he wanted to produce a thing, a psyche, a soul. You don't need that. All you need is a field of subjectivity

Starting point is 01:03:46 whose excitations are our experiences. And now in the 21st century, we now have a century of examples in physics in which we've done exactly that. We've reduced now elementary subatomic particles to the patterns of excitation of a quantum field and going to M-theory. This even goes into the direction of unification theory. There's an enormous tradition about reducing things towards excitations of extended fields, so to say. Okay. John looks like he's bubbling with rage, so please. Not bubbling with rage. Get it all out, John. No, I want to get it all out because I want to make space. So you're dividing consciousness into metaconsciousness and things in the background that I can't get access to

Starting point is 01:04:34 because I currently don't have knowledge. And it sounds to me like you have parts of my consciousness that are not aware of each other, are not conscious of each other. So again, now you have a multiple entity, as far as I can see. No, ontologically it's only one thing. It's consciousness. But why? Because it's only one kind of stuff,

Starting point is 01:04:52 and there are dynamisms within this consciousness. No, no, no. We're not talking about just one kind of stuff. We're talking about the entity. No, no. We were talking about the number of entities we propose in our explanation in order to generate our explanations. That's what we were talking about. And to say I'm proposing one kind of stuff is to beg the question, because then you're invoking the parsimony.

Starting point is 01:05:15 And that's the very thing that I'm pointing to, which is it seems to me you're multiplying your entities in order to try and generate your explanation, as you should, as you should. I mean, because... I deny that. I thought by appealing to feuds, I had to counter that, but okay, go ahead. Okay, but so you've got things in my consciousness, my introspective consciousness, that are nevertheless... So there seems to be a distinction. There seems to be a distinction between what's in my consciousness and what's available to my consciousness via metaconsciousness. So metaconsciousness must have a functionality different from the rest of consciousness to explain the fact that it's limited in some fashion. Yes? Yeah. So in terms of the functionality,

Starting point is 01:05:59 I can count different things there. Yes? No. No, because consciousness and meta-consciousness are both consciousness ontologically. Do they operate the same way according to the same principles and the same functions? Does an electron operate the same way as a quark? Both are parts of a field. So, yes, you can have one thing manifest different patterns of behavior or to function in different ways without requiring that thing to be many things. Ontologically, it's still one thing with multiple different patterns of behavior. In a non-question begging manner, what makes it one thing? It's experiential. But it's precisely not because my metaconsciousness can't experience parts of my consciousness.

Starting point is 01:06:45 No, your metaconsciousness cannot report parts of your consciousness to yourself. But my point is exactly that what is not reported is still experiential. Just as your breathing is experiential, when you're not reporting to yourself, I am breathing. How is that different from your experience being experiential't and I'm not aware of it right now? I would postulate dissociation as something that exists in nature. We may not understand it fully well but we know it exists and it could account for the appearance of there being multiple minds instead of one and the study of dissociative identity disorder now it has advanced so much that we know it's literally blinding sure and and and but we we also have you know accounts of the dissociation um in terms of trauma i mean there's

Starting point is 01:07:32 serious disanalogies uh because notice what you tend to invoke when you do that you have now three entities you have the metaconsciousness that can't report to myself what's going on in my consciousness. And that seems to me to be, and that's the kind of machinery you typically invoke, at least in the psychological discussions of, right, of dissociation. Like I get dissociation from this part of my mind, from this part of my mind in order to protect myself this part is protected from trauma from that part etc um and so it now sounds like you've got metaconsciousness that can't fully report to the self what's going on in consciousness both are consciousness metaconsciousness is a particular configuration of consciousness what is the self it's reporting to? It's the one field of subjectivity where all these experiences are happening. Some of them are reflected and therefore can be reported.

Starting point is 01:08:32 Other experiences are not reflected. But I'm asking, what is the reporting going to? If it's going back to the field and metaconsciousness is in the field, why is metaconsciousness unaware of it? Because it's not reporting to itself all the patterns of excitation that are happening in the field, because it folds in upon itself in such a way that it focuses the ability to focus, to reflect on a subset of what's going on. And that's presumably very important for survival. So it's reporting to itself that it doesn't have everything. Is that? Well, it's not reporting to itself some of the experiences it is having. I mean, from psychology, we know this happens. I mean, we don't need to go very far, especially men are not able to report even to themselves a lot of the emotions

Starting point is 01:09:26 that they are actually having having and which is impacting their behavior i mean therapy rooms world the world over are filled with okay let's turn this into a therapy room for a second right now we're talking about the disagreements and in previous podcasts what i like to refer to is something called theomaki which is a battle of the gods. And it's tongue in cheek because obviously you're not gods, but intellectually you're, let's say, mini daemons, whatever you want to call it. And so I like to say that this is Theomachy. And I wanted this to be more of a theolocution. In fact, I was going to coin that term because you have dialogos for Veki.

Starting point is 01:10:03 Sure. It's a theolocution. And I don't care if it turns into theomachy. It's actually entertaining, much like the debate that was about truth between Sam Harris and Peterson. And maybe this is going to become one of those where we hammer down specifically onto one instead of the broad array of subjects, which I don't mind. So to turn it into a bit of a therapeutic session, why don't you first each say something about the other's point of view that you agree with or find interesting, and then you can go and battle it out once more. Well, I mean, I think we are battling it out precisely because we are respecting each other and we're trying to do science. And the problem

Starting point is 01:10:43 here is science is a little bit different configured. I mean, science in terms of scansia, not in the sense of just empirical science that we're trying to do science here. And therefore we're, we're, we're doing the kind of thing you do in science, which is pit arguments and evidence against each other. And, and I, and, and, and I think that's sort of appropriate within the scientific discourse.

Starting point is 01:11:07 If we move to more, you know, existentially encompassing issues, I think then we shouldn't stay in the realm of debate. We should move into dialogos. There's a lot I respect. First of all, I wouldn't be giving my time and effort to, and this is not meant to be left-handed, to Bernardo if I didn't think he was articulating his position very well. And so I do want to acknowledge that. And I do think that there is, I would agree with him, I hope this comes off as an appropriate compliment. I think most of the versions of materialism that are prevalent, even within some of the cognitive science community, especially within neuroscience. Neuroscientists, for example, the vast majority of them adopt a strong identity theory that I think would just be devastated by the kinds of arguments that Bernardo was bringing up. theory that I think would just be devastated by the kinds of arguments that Bernardo was bringing up. And so that's why I don't, it's because of the sophistication of these arguments

Starting point is 01:12:10 and their plausibility, I'll use that if you'll allow me, that I think any hardline materialism like that is not a viable position. So I like that about what he's doing i like that he is um trying to give a larger place to our phenomenology than is typically given in a lot of the analytic discourse around consciousness and the mind-body problem and that's a bit of a disjunct between the continental and the anglo-american tradition and like that. That's why I've been trying to shift into the phenomenological with him right now and play there because I think that's important. And so those are two or three things I really like. I like the rigor. I think the arguments against mini versions. And again, this isn't a trivial thing to say. I like the rigor. I think the arguments against mini versions,

Starting point is 01:13:06 and again, this isn't a trivial thing to say. I just pointed out that many neuroscientists, I think, adopt the position that his arguments would be very cutting against, and I want to acknowledge that. And I think that's important, and to not say that's important, I think is just ingenuous. And I do like the fact that he is trying to bridge between the continental and the Anglo-American tradition by integrating an analytic argument with much tighter phenomenological investigation. I think that's all those are, I think methodologically, that's a very important thing to do. Bernardo. And I don't have anything against heated debate in the least. That is actually what goes on behind closed doors in academia. i know but i want i just want to thank you for doing that i i mean i think it's

Starting point is 01:13:49 i think it's important to to periodically do what you just did which is to step back and regroup and see what i mean it's a it's it's it's a sterile thing if we're not capable of listening and potentially learning from each other. Okay, so Bernardo? Well, I think John's focus on what he calls the meaning crisis is the single most important and most devastating problem that we as a species have today, and by highlighting that and offering fairly practical ways of addressing that problem, avenues for trying to get out of it by restoring the role of myth, by taking our phenomenology, our experiential world seriously and not dismissing it as just an epiphenomenon. I think that attempt to solve the

Starting point is 01:14:46 biggest problem we face today as a species, that alone makes him and his work one of the most important people alive today, I think. Well, thank you, Bernardo. That's very high praise. It's precisely because... I second that. I think many of the people in the chat second that. But they would also credit you with that too, Bernardo. be solved at sort of the political market level. It goes down to our fundamental ontology, and it deals with fundamental aspects of our ontology, like subjectivity and objectivity, and how meaning is somehow bound up with those, and the sense of self. And I think we agree on that. It seems to me we agree on that, and you're nod. So, yeah. And so I think in that sense, we're both very critical of a lot of what I think are misplaced and sometimes distracting attempts to deal with the meaning crisis

Starting point is 01:15:58 that do not wrestle with these deep problems. I'm not saying, and I don't think Bernardo is saying, everybody has to be an academic philosopher to wrestle with the deep problems. I'm not saying, and I don't think Bernardo is saying, everybody has to be an academic philosopher to wrestle with the meaning crisis. But I do think if we want to home whatever ecologies of practices we come up with to address the meaning crisis into a worldview, we have to do something to our current worldview to get us to the place

Starting point is 01:16:22 where we have a worldview that can properly home, re-home the ecologies of practices and the experience of sacredness. And I think in that we also agree. I am, so I want to be, I want to be clear about something here. I'm not happy, I thought I said this but I don't think I emphasized, I'm not, I'm not happy. I thought I said this, but I don't think I emphasize, I'm not, I'm not trying to countenance sort of the standard scientific worldview model. I'm willing to, you know, change my ontology quite a bit. I tried to convey that with some of the things I've said. And so I think the disagreement, it might be more about what are the changes and how far should the changes go.

Starting point is 01:17:06 So I think what Bernardo is doing is important. And I would not want anything I'm saying to be taken as meaning people should not wrestle seriously with his work. I'm not trying to imply that at all. Neither did I interpret you that way, John. Can I continue? Please do. Okay. Look, I do think that our mainstream ontology plays a role in this, and I don't think it's a positive role, but I'm also quick to admit that it is one role. It's not the whole story. There are not the whole story.

Starting point is 01:17:45 There are other things going on. And I think another enormous thing that you point out when you say that we overemphasize propositional knowledge, knowledge of facts as distinct from wisdom, which is very hard to define. You elaborate extensively on how we actually can get a grip on what wisdom is. But what is immediately clear is that it entails a lot, a lot more than propositional knowledge. And we live in a society in which the people we take direction from today, the spokespeople of science we see on tv often um they are and i'm sorry if i go too far in this characterization but they are very often psychically unbalanced um one psychic function is taken as the only one that matters. It's a kind of analytic, rational, conceptual thinking. And that is taken as the only thing that is trustworthy.

Starting point is 01:18:50 And they are challenged when it comes to the richness of all the other psychic functions, like intuition, appreciation for art, sense perception, being grounded in your senses as opposed to abstraction. And we don't see it we take them as the new wise man and uh and they are people who have large chunks of the human psyche amputated from them uh and they have become our wise men i i call it um the uh idolatry of nerds. And the word nerd is appropriate, I think, to be used here.

Starting point is 01:19:30 And I think it's tragic that we've been trying to replace wisdom with pure, extensive, encyclopedic propositional knowledge, as if the latter were a substitute for the former and as if doing this could be justified merely by the lack of absolute certainty that that you can attach to wisdom yeah i think that's very well said uh what you've said there bernardo. I agree. And I mean, I've argued for it extensively, which is part of what I was trying to point to where I said, I appreciate you trying to bring in a phenomenological richness to this, the discussion we were previously engaged in. Yeah, I do think that the recognition of the significance and importance in two directions, both, you know, in terms of our ontology, the significance of the non-propositional ways of knowing and ways of being in the psyche, I think. And then also the increasing evidence that it's those non-propositional

Starting point is 01:20:43 aspects of the psyche and ways of knowing that contribute the most to meaning, in a sense of meaning in life. And I think that tyranny of the propositional or the tyranny of the idolatry of the nerds is not only limiting our capacity to try and understand these phenomena and thereby create a worldview to which we can belong because we don't belong to the current worldview. That's, I think, something we would also agree on, I think. But also, just the fact that it puts individuals existentially that it puts individuals existentially at risk of all of the deleterious effects of suffering a paucity of meaning in their life. And the symptomology of that, I think, is very pervasive in our culture. Okay, let's get to the disagreements again.

Starting point is 01:21:38 Okay. Well, I think we were talking about the multiplicity of consciousness, or is it one? Well, i just wanted to point out though that that um and i think this is important this is very much like an in-family kind of disagreement uh that i i i don't want to presume i just met bernardo but uh bernardo i would say to you uh you know everything you're saying here um leads me to really appreciate the motivation you're bringing to these more sort of technical ontological disagreements we're having. And I just wanted to express that appreciation before we return back to potential debates, because I think that's important. I mean, for me, sorry, I don't want to make this sound pragmatic. One of the things, not the only thing,

Starting point is 01:22:25 obviously there's their own internal epistemic success, but one of the things that could potentially move me more towards your ontology is if I could see how it might more readily address some of the difficulties that I'm trying to address with my ontology with respect to the meaning crisis. And so that'd be something perhaps we could also discuss somewhere along the way.

Starting point is 01:22:50 Can you mention two or three concrete points? So one of the things that I've been trying to do, this was something that you admitted in your ontology, and then I got, I noted it, but I sort of got sidetracked in being heated, I guess. You admitted sort of, even within consciousness, processes of filtering. And you probably know that the core of my work on like intelligence, as distinct from consciousness, although I think these ultimately are related, has to do with this issue that I call relevance realization, which is of all of the information available to me. I can't continue and write and of all the information available to me in my memory and of all the possible sequences of operations. That's also combinatorial explosive. So yet, moment by moment, I'm somehow

Starting point is 01:23:45 realizing, focusing on what's relevant, basically intelligently ignoring, and it's a constitutive part of my intelligence, most of that information. That is not any algorithmic process, and it is always prey to the deleterious effects of the bias. So the various things that make me adaptive at this make me subject to bias, the self-deception. And we have moments where that self-correction comes out when we have aha moments and insight. And so I happen to think that that relevance realization is a way in which we're dynamically coupled to the world.

Starting point is 01:24:26 I can give that argument in more depth later, but I'm just trying to give it just here. And I think that underwrites our cognitive agency, but we also experience that connectedness as deeply rewarding. And that reward is different from the reward of pleasure. It's the reward that we call meaning in life, which is also different from subjective well-being. And so I think that sense, that positive, rewarding sense of meaning in life. And man, well, people do a lot for meaning in life. They will sacrifice a lot of pleasure and a lot of contentment in order to get meaning in life. And they reliably do that. For example, when they have a kid because pleasure and subjective wellbeing go down

Starting point is 01:25:09 dramatically, but meaning in life go up significantly. Absolutely. So, yeah. So I, I think that that connectedness is central to into meeting in life. And then I use basically an evolutionary model of trying to explain what that connectedness is. Like there's something in our brain, no, that's the wrong way of putting it. There's something in the relationship

Starting point is 01:25:35 between the brain and the world that is strongly analogous to biological adaptation, biological adaptivity. And then there's something analogous to how that evolves in a self-organizing fashion that we call intelligence. And that helps me to explain a lot of the progress I see within artificial intelligence, a lot of the convergence I see within cognitive science and cognitive psychology. And so I tend to see that in that way. And I'm wondering if,

Starting point is 01:26:08 well, I want to make it a genuine question. Is there a way in which your ontology would speak to that in a way that might be particularly helpful? I mean, I'm not trying to put you in a corner. If it doesn't, I'm not, I'm not saying, Oh, well, there it's false. I'm not doing that. It's an, it's an open question. It does. I mean, that that's that's my motivation for doing what I do. I don't do this just because I want to win an academic argument in a world of abstractions and academic journals. Yeah, I totally get that. Yeah, I do it because I think it makes a difference.

Starting point is 01:26:46 it's not even clear to us anymore that the story we tell ourselves about what we are and what the world is and our role in it is the key source of meaning in our lives. Why are we not aware of this anymore? And I think that's because of fluid compensation, to use a technical term in psychology. We are fluid compensating all over the place. We've replaced authentic sources of meaning with self-validation, with the idea of leaving work behind that survives us, with differentiating ourselves as part of an elite group. This happens a lot among scientists. So even if we adopt a worldview that is flat and bleak, as I would say, mainstream physicalism is not not perhaps. Well, certainly not your version of physicalism, but the mainstream physicalist view that consciousness doesn't even really exist. That is so flat and meaning draining and bleak. But we don't notice that because we find ways to fluid compensate and find other sources of meaning. I mean, when we killed God in the second half of the 19th century, we were quick to erect another edifice of meaning giving.

Starting point is 01:27:56 And that has evolved now. And I will link that to artificial intelligence, which you mentioned as well. which we mentioned as well, that has evolved now into Singulitarianism, which is a purely physicalist religion, which postulates that if we create an AI that can build a better version of itself faster than we could, then that would accelerate the evolution of AI exponentially. And then we would create a de facto God who would then take care of us. And like we take care of animals in a zoo. I mean, that's the religious impulse, the search for meaning right there. We never abandon that search for meaning, even though we fluid compensate and we find sort of decoy targets for it.

Starting point is 01:28:39 But if you ask me honestly, where do I think it went wrong? me honestly, where do I think it went wrong? I think it went wrong the moment we started telling ourselves and believing that the world we see is all there is to this story, that the world is its own meaning, as opposed to being an image of something else deeper, as opposed to being how the world as it is in itself presents itself to us. But there is this extra dimension of depth and meaning. The images that we call the world are pointing to something beyond themselves, are pointing to intrinsic meaning. Sorry to interject. Can you explain what you mean when you say the world itself is meaning?

Starting point is 01:29:22 Today, under a physicalist ontology, matter is all there is. So if you have a material world around you, then there is no extra dimension of depth to that world. That world is all there is. So whatever meaning it has, it is that meaning, because it's not pointing at anything else. It's not representing anything else because it's all there is. And this is a notion that is today called naive realism in philosophy. We know from science and philosophy that this is absolutely and categorically wrong because one, evolution wouldn't have given us a transparent windscreen to see the world as it actually is. Evolution doesn't do that. Evolution equips us to survive. So evolution would have given us a dashboard of dials, not a transparent windscreen

Starting point is 01:30:17 into the world. We also know from hardcore neuroscience that if our inner representational states, you know, our perceptions, if those states mirrored the states of the world as it is in itself, our inner states would be too dispersed and we would basically dissolve into an entropic soup. We wouldn't be able to maintain our structural and dynamical integrity. So we have to encode the information we have about the world in an inferential manner in order to maintain our physical integrity. So we know that the world as it is in itself is not what we see or even measure through instrumentation, because even measurement follows the paradigm of perception. You have to see the output of a measurement instrument, or you have to see a

Starting point is 01:31:06 histogram on the screen. I mean, when I was at CERN, that was my life. It was looking at histograms and calling them particles. The world as it is in itself is not available to our direct inspection. The only way to know it as it is in itself is to be it. And already said that and schopenhauer echoed that um so if we recover if we put back into our explicit metaconscious awareness that this is what's going on then the world regains a dimension of depth and mystery and your life in it now has a meaning not only the world as it is in itself is the ultimate meaning, which you have to interpret out of how the world presents itself to you, out of the dials that you have, that evolution has given you. Even your role in it is now mysterious, because you are in the

Starting point is 01:31:59 world. Even though you don't see it as it is in itself, you know that you are in it. And that dimension of mystery and meaning, I think, is this so, losing contact with that dimension is one of the key sources of the meaning crisis. And one way to recover that is to take myth, myth seriously, not literally, but seriously. And we've lost the art of knowing how to do this. Not literally, but seriously. And we've lost the art of knowing how to do this. So I think that was fantastic and beautifully said. Yeah, I think, well, I've already said I'm a, I think that flat ontologies are incoherent theoretically.

Starting point is 01:32:38 And I think they make their adherence engage in ongoing performative contradiction all the time. In which, like you said, the scientist espouses a meaningless universe as he or she desperately tries to climb to the top of whatever status hierarchy they belong to, and that's all kinds of performative contradiction. So I think there's incoherence and there's performative contradiction. So yeah, I don't think that flat ontologies, I think, are viable. And then I think the idea of recovering, I like what you said, a depth dimension to it, to our ontology is important.

Starting point is 01:33:43 I think that that depth dimension comes in when we invoke, well, kind of what I was saying before, that, like, I'm sorry, I'm just worried about, I don't want to sound overly Kantian, because I disagree with Kant's idea that we have no access. I disagree with that, too, by the way. Okay, go ahead. Okay, thank you for that. And so let's say we always have filtered access or something like that, and I think that follows directly. I think that's something that I argue for and perhaps even presuppose in the account of relevance realization that I just talked about. By the way, I would argue this is the hardest problem in artificial intelligence,

Starting point is 01:34:10 almost as hard as the hard problem of consciousness. I think relevance is a very hard problem. And I do happen to think the two problems are related. Maybe we could talk about that at some point. But I do think that reality in that sense is other than it's the way, see, the obviousness of our experience is exactly what we need to explain rather than take as the basis for our explanation. Our brain-mind and its interaction with our brain-body-world interaction has so filtered things that we have avoided the combinatorially explosive nature of reality itself. And so that's why, and I've been trying to make an argument, and this is a bit of a side thing, of reconfiguring the sense of what you call mystery, and I use that term. I mean, I'm deeply influenced by Gabriel Marcel's work on ontological mystery, that a mystery is different from a problem. In a problem, we frame it, and then we can bring clarity to it. In a mystery, we find that the

Starting point is 01:35:15 framing itself is problematic, and we keep doing this, right, and we keep expanding the frames, and then we realize, oh shit, it's bigger than I could possibly accommodate, and we get experiences of awe, which are tremendously efficacious for transforming individuals at the kind of level we're talking about, conducive to the cultivation of virtue and wisdom, and doing experimental work on that right now. And so I try to think, and maybe this goes back to some of the points i made earlier i try to reconceive of that mystery and sacredness not as completion or perfection uh because but in sense as as an inexhaustibleness there and so there's a bit of a neoplatonic spin on this there's an inexhaustible fount of intelligibility for us um so we like uncover more in the trajectory into the mystery,

Starting point is 01:36:09 it seems to have an underlying order to it, an underlying pattern and intelligibility to it, which does not close off the fact that there's going to be more that's going to surprise us. And so I tend to think of the sacredness as being exactly that horizon of intelligibility, where we can look back and see all the fields of intelligibility that have arisen for us, but we have a tremendous sense of what we're nowhere near, and we'll never be anywhere near exhausting this. It's kind of like, is it Schelling's? The finite always longing for the infinite.

Starting point is 01:36:46 That's the sense of sacredness in some of the early post-Contian. That's what I'm trying to argue for now. And I think part of the thing that I'm critical of, of the Cartesian paradigm, which also gets taken into the modernity of the interpretation of religion is this idea of certainty and completion and closure as the things that we are most seeking. And I don't think that is the case. I think that humans want, I mean, what we know from the meaning in life literature is human beings want to be connected to something larger than themselves and to matter to it, be connected to something larger than themselves and to matter to it, to fit to it rather than have it fit to them. And so, sorry, I've spoken too long. That's my attempt to say something I think may be convergent with you. Jung said the only important question is whether we are related

Starting point is 01:37:40 to something infinite or not. And he nailed it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the way we long for it and the way that has a normative impact on the way we live our lives. And I think, again, we agree on this, that we both, if you'll allow me to speak for you, we're both sort of distressed by the, well, I'll use it in the psychological sense, maybe in your ontological, but the dissociation between the worldview people

Starting point is 01:38:12 espouse and believe in and the way they're trying to live their lives. And that disjunction comes, that dissociation comes at terrible cost, terrible cost. I mean, and the way social media is doing exactly the opposite of what it promised. It's accelerating all of this rather than alleviating it in any function because it's not getting at the root of the problem. There, I'll be quiet, Bernardo, so you can say something. I can listen to you for a long time because this subject is very close to my heart. I wanted to ask you a question, but before I do that, just a quick clarification. I also am not with Kant that we can never have any sort of access to the noumena. I think he went too far. I think through perception, we cannot have access to the noumena. But the key insight that he missed and Schopenhauer added very quickly after Kant was that we are our own

Starting point is 01:39:07 noumena. So through introspection, I can access my noumena. And since I'm part of the world, I can make educated inferences about the noumena out there, because I'm also sort of material, made of matter, at least as far as perception goes. So if the matter in my body is the representation of my will, then I can conclude the world as it is in itself is also something like the will. So I think there is a channel to the Newman, and that's introspection. And then that's what the world's religious traditions have been saying all along. But the question I wanted to ask you is this. I have some clinical psychologists that i count as friends and we have discussions now and then and the subject that always comes is especially when you have a

Starting point is 01:39:52 depth psychologist a psychologist oriented to the depth as opposed to behaviorism or anything like this or or anyway um the question i always ask is if the task is to help your patient recover meaning, can that be done in the absence of a certain ontological position? Can you be ontologically neutral? Because psychologists talk about giving meaning. It's a literal translation from Dutch, but I think it works in English as well. How do you give meaning and and and my feeling is that if if i am a patient and i have done therapy by the way uh i i always come out of that with the feeling it's like i'm trying to cheat myself because

Starting point is 01:40:36 either meaning is really there or it's not and my giving meaning to it is some kind of self-deception it doesn't work out for me. So do you think we can solve the meaning crisis without addressing ontology head-on? So first of all, I want to refund the first thing you said as a way of preparing for my answer to the second thing. So I think the key and the most foundational, the key to the most foundational kind of knowing, which I call participatory knowing, which I take from ultimately inspired by Plato. But you can see it either, you can see it in all kinds of Platonists, and I count Jung as a Platonist. I think he's basically the Plato of the inner psyche, and the archetypes are the forms, and I think you can make a good argument

Starting point is 01:41:19 for that. And that's why he was attracted to Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, things like that. But that's an exegetical claim. But it's this notion. And the reason why I think it's important is I see convergence from, as you said, other religious traditions. I read a lot of the Kyoto school, Nishitani, Nishida, Maso Abe, Suzuki, things like that, and what was going on there. And so the notion that comes out is like from these two traditions, and they converge on this idea of that unless you, that at bottom, and I can make a more long argument for this, but I think you'll get the gist of it. If I reject skepticism, if I reject an absolute skepticism, I have to rely on that kind of participatory knowing that I know it because I am it, right? And that, and because I am it and that that part of the world

Starting point is 01:42:16 is also it, we participate in the same thing. That, that is how, that is how my mind and the world touch. I know this might step on a couple of your toes, but that's my way of talking right now. And so the idea that there's a kind of knowing that is simultaneously how I know myself, and I don't mean my autobiography, I mean how I ontically and even ontologically know myself, that is necessarily bound up with how I know the world. When I see Plato, and I, you know, this means I reject sort of standard academic interpretations of Plato. I see Plato, no, that's not, that's not true. Some, there's a growing group of people that would agree with this interpretation of Plato. So I see Plato as basically the person who sort of proposed that, that at the of his argument, is that idea of participation ultimately grounds us.

Starting point is 01:43:08 And then that leads me to, you know, the second point you asked. Do I think we can address the median crisis without fundamentally addressing our ontology? So there's two ways of asking that question. And since you brought it up in the context of clinical psychology, it's important to distinguish. Like I wouldn't want to claim that everybody has to do fundamental ontology in order to get alleviation from anxiety or despair or depression or loneliness. I would say there's a level at which they do need an ecology of practices. Simply changing their beliefs is radically insufficient.

Starting point is 01:43:48 That's why people go into therapy. Many people, I think, live, and this is not meant to be any kind of elitist insult, but they live very pragmatically. If they've got an ecology of practices that's working, that's it. That's good, right? So in that sense, I don't think everybody has to do it. But in the deeper sense, are they ultimately dependent on scientists and philosophers finding a way to ground and legitimate that ecology of practices in a worldview? Yeah,

Starting point is 01:44:21 I think they do. Because I think our worldview, this is I'm deeply influenced by Clifford Geertz, our worldview is our meta-meaning system. I'm not equating our worldview completely with our ontology, but I'm saying our worldview is our sort of, our shared ontology, our shared commitment, if you'll allow me that, okay? And so, and I think our worldview is our meta-meaning system. It is that, it is not itself a meaning system. It is that which, like you said, at the bottom, makes possible all the other meaning systems by giving a participatory relationship, a pattern of co-identification between the agents and what Chris and I in our book and Philip and I call the agent in the arena. The world becomes a place that is shaped either physically or mentally to fit me and by which I physically, and that also includes technology and or mentally shape myself to the world so that we have a participatory relation. So there are affordances for behavior. And I think for me, there has to be people out there doing that. There has to be

Starting point is 01:45:29 people who are saying the current worldview does not home us. I mean, we don't belong in our worldview. There's no place for us in it. And that means ultimately everything we're doing with our ecologies and practices doesn't fit in that worldview. And like means ultimately everything we're doing with our ecologies of practices doesn't fit in that worldview. And like I say, most people don't have to solve that problem, but that problem cannot remain unsolved, at least in the sense of seriously plausibly addressed. So I hope that was an answer to your question. Yeah, yeah, I am with you. I even agree with you. And actually, I have no problem admitting to this and reinforcing this. I don't think any conceptual buy-in into a specific ontology will solve anybody's psychological problems.

Starting point is 01:46:15 Because conceptual understanding is not embodied. It stays rotating somewhere in the head, and it doesn't go down into your emotional life. somewhere in the head and it doesn't go down into your emotional life. I do think though that we are in a culture where the intellect is the bouncer of the heart. So even if you could have... Excuse me, did you say bouncer? The bouncer. Yeah, like at a bar? Yeah, club bouncer. Okay, great, great. I just want to make sure I heard you correct. That's a great metaphor. I love that.

Starting point is 01:46:43 Yeah, the intellect is the bouncer of the heart. So even in situations where somebody would have a transformative experience or a transformative insight, they don't give themselves intellectual permission to take it on board, to even perceive it, let alone take it seriously. And when the insight sort of muscles in, like the experience of awe that occasionally we have, it comes in. We have the awe. But 15 minutes later, you're saying, ah, that's nothing. Emotions are just a side effect of evolutionarily encoded behavioral patterns driven by physiology. And off it goes.

Starting point is 01:47:21 It doesn't sink in. So I think that although an ontology would not solve the problem, it literally opens the door for whatever solution there might be. Because right now, there is a closed door and a very big, muscleful bouncer at the door that's preventing us from relating with more richness and depth to ourselves in the world. I would agree with that, Bernardo. Although I guess I think a little bit more like a bifurcation point. I think there are many people who do exactly what you say, the dismissive, distractive response. However, I've met, even within an experimental paradigm,

Starting point is 01:48:02 because I've done experiments on people, mystical experiments and stuff like that. I've met people who have the opposite. So they have a very powerful, and there's literature to back me up on what I'm saying. They have these powerful experiences and they precisely can't dismiss them. There's something in, and so I call this onto normativity.

Starting point is 01:48:21 So people do dismiss many of their altered states of consciousness. And again, that's adaptive, and many of them should be dismissed, perhaps. But what's really interesting is people, and it looks to be about 30 to 40% of the population, which is not insignificant, have these experiences, and they do this. They don't say, oh, it doesn't fit in with this worldview, therefore it's not real. They do the opposite. They say that's really real, and therefore there's something wrong with this. That happens too. And that happens, again, it's not majority, but 30% to 40% is not insignificant.

Starting point is 01:48:55 That's a lot of people. But what typically happens, though, is they go looking for some guidance and they can't find it and then they do an autodidactic thing which can often spin off in very crazy things because precisely there is no ontology that seeks to bridge between if you'll allow me everyday obviousness and the kind those kinds of experiences of awe and like onto normativity. And, you know, if you take a look at Yaden's work, when people have these experiences,

Starting point is 01:49:32 they will reconfigure their entire lives, their relationships, their careers, even their sense of identity, because they want to, and here's where I want to invoke it, they want to conform more and more to that really real. The really real has an independent normativity and value to them above and beyond, you know, practical power. And so, and they do these major transformations, but they're often thwarted or that can go awry precisely because they often have to do it in a very autodidactic fashion. And that, you see, and that's where I would hope, you know, however we manage to, you know, you know, flesh out the ontology and make it work. And I think we,

Starting point is 01:50:13 we should both keep working. I would hope that it would allow people to turn to individuals that they plausibly accord intellectual respect to, not because the project is intellectual, but because they can take seriously the ontology that would allow them to talk to each other. It would give them a lingua franca by which they could do what human beings often need to do, which is to do this in distributed cognition, not as isolated individuals. So that would be one of the hopes I would have for an ontology. One of my hopes is that this distributed cognition includes Bernardo's cat. Okay, when I hear that, he will literally be on my face.

Starting point is 01:51:04 What occurs to me is a question I'd like you both to explore. That is, what is real? What exists? How do you define what exists? And can we ever know what's real? So Bernardo, why don't you start that? think apes evolved on planet earth have the cognitive apparatus that would be necessary for us to know conceptually the ultimate salient truths of nature i don't think that is possible so i don't think the game we are playing in ontology is a game of finding what the truth is.

Starting point is 01:51:46 I think the game is given our limitations and our best learnings and best practices and our epistemic value system. How much closer to truth can we get knowing that we will not arrive? closer to truth can we get? Knowing that we will not arrive, but can we do better than we are doing right now, given what we know and our value system? But by value system, I mean our appreciation of empirical evidence, our appreciation of internal consistency, coherence, of, yeah, I'll say that, John, conceptual parsimony, plausibility. So given this value system around which there is some degree of cultural consensus, not full consensus, but some degree of cultural consensus, at least in academia, how well can we do? Can we do better than we are doing now? And I submit to you guys that I think we can do significantly better than we are doing now. And I submit to you guys that I think we can do significantly better than we are doing now. That will not mean that we can get to the truth of the matter

Starting point is 01:52:52 as apes evolved on planet Earth, but we can get closer than we are. And by getting closer, I also think, and this is not by construction, it so happens to be like that, by getting closer, I also think, and this is not by construction, it so happens to be like that, by getting closer, I think we will also get healthier. And we will live in a healthier way, more aware of the depth of the mystery where we are inserted, which is that dimension of depth and mystery that we lose sight of today. That I think we can definitely achieve. Now, a quick observation. I need to have a bio break shortly.

Starting point is 01:53:34 So if we can find a point. Do you all want to take a Washington break right now? Maybe John can answer the same question. So there is. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Bye, Bernardo.

Starting point is 01:53:44 We'll see you right back. No, I want to hear the answer. And then I hope we can. And then we can both break. Yeah. If possible. Yeah. So, I mean, real can be used in two different ways.

Starting point is 01:53:56 It can be used as an absolute or it can be used as a comparative. And I happen to think that it makes more sense to treat it as a comparative. And I think that's what you're saying, Bernardo. I think although we can't say this is real in an absolute sense, we can, with good reason, good evidence, and good argument, say, but this is more real than that. We can make those comparative judgments in a way that seems to be progressive judgments in a way that seems to be progressive in the sense that we don't keep losing previous claims in some sort of chaos. There's a slowly building coherent structure that emerges and we

Starting point is 01:54:34 revise it and blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm not denying any of that. But I think the comparative sense of realness is something that we have to, and I think we can put our epistemic trust in. And, and, and so I think we, that is to say for all of our epistemic boundedness, I agree with you, Bernardo, we are, we are, we are slightly super evolved apes that have culture and culture ratchets, which is, that's an important, that's an important difference. We don't, we don't individually have to relearn everything from scratch and that does help, but I think culture ratchets precisely because we can make this progressive improvement. I don't think there's any teleology or anything like that. I think we can go, we still could massively just screw this all up. Nevertheless,

Starting point is 01:55:21 I agree that we can get, we get better and in a comparative sense of saying this is more real than that and then this is more real than that and then soon as we do that like again i think that means we're all we are already committed to a non-flat ontology um and and i think that soon as we do that we start start drawing relationships of, well, okay, this is dependent on this, and this is dependent on that in terms of our judgment. And I think for me, that, and this is where I'll put my neck out a little bit more, perhaps, than Bernardo did. That's where, to me, again, that original sort of platonic insight about, you know, intelligibility and realness, that our best, the best way we participate in the

Starting point is 01:56:06 way we talked about earlier, reality, is through intelligibility. It's our best way of getting the platform by which we can walk a little bit more and more closer to what is perhaps real in that absolute sense. But I agree. I think it's hubristic. And I think it's just, I think it's damaging to think we have the real in the really real sense, in some sort of complete sense. I argue against that consistently.

Starting point is 01:56:37 On the second point, I agree that if we don't get back to helping people improve those two things in an integrated fashion, intelligible realness, that they have, that things make sense to them, and they feel that that sense is, people want both, right? There are different poles, in fact, of meeting in life. People want things to make sense, but they also want what they make sense to be in some sense real, right? So I'll do this with my students. I'll say, how many of you are in deeply satisfying romantic relationships? And they'll put up their hands. And I said, keep up your hand if you would like to know that your partner is cheating on you, even though that would destroy the relationship. 95% of my students keep their hands up because they don't want it if it's not

Starting point is 01:57:26 real. Even if it's making beautiful sense to them, they ultimately also want it to be real. And so I think that if we do not afford people a way of, well, I don't know, drinking more and more from the ongoing fount of intelligibility in a way that they think is realizing them in some fashion. I think it's going to, it is, I wouldn't even say it's going to, it is producing ill health, both at the individual and collective level. And so these issues are not, and I don't mean, I don't use this adjective pejoratively here, but these issues are not academic issues. These are existential issues. And so I think people ignore them at their peril. One more time, I'm not saying everybody has to be a philosopher or a scientist, but there has to be, this problem can't be left unaddressed.

Starting point is 01:58:20 Okay, let's go to the Washington. Do you have two minutes? Yeah, I'll be back in two minutes. John, do you have to go as well? Yeah, I'm going to go as well. All right. I'm back. How's it going?

Starting point is 01:58:31 Good. How's it going? Good. I'm relieved. You're relieved? How? The washroom. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:58:40 Are we getting a lot of, are we going to take questions at some point? Yeah, it's actually better if you all continue talking. And I'll wait for Bernardo before I say my next comment, but it's better if you continue to talk. There are questions, but these questions will then be the seed of a four-hour discussion. And you're already in one, so you may as well just continue. Okay. Well, I like moving between these two, between debate and dialogos.

Starting point is 01:59:13 Thank you for doing that. Yeah, we're going to get back to debate. Okay, that's fine. I'm happy to just stay here too, because these issues are issues that really matter to me as well. But, I mean, Bernardo is coming at this, and I mean, this is a real compliment. He's coming at this, like in really good faith. And I'm always willing, I want to talk to and I want to be open to listening to people who are coming at this with,

Starting point is 01:59:41 you know, thoughtful, good faith. And that's clearly the case with him. And so. Yeah, well, so is it with you. So thank you. Okay, well, you're welcome. I just, this is very, very enjoyable. Yeah, thanks. It's always enjoyable when I speak to you, or at least when I get a chance to listen to you.

Starting point is 02:00:01 Most of the time I'm listening rather than speaking to you. I enjoyed, I think it was two years ago, we had a couple of conversations in person. Was that long ago, eh? Yeah, almost two years ago. In the summer it would be two years. You were abstaining from chocolate then. Yeah, I've been able to,

Starting point is 02:00:19 well, I'm on new medication for my many years and I've been on it since about six months now and it's been just enormously successful. And so, yeah, I can indulge occasionally in a chocolate. You're looking good, man. Someone said that you're sexy, but wrong. Which one would you rather? I don't know. Which one would you rather? I don't know.

Starting point is 02:00:50 I just, I don't, I mean, I, you know, both, both aspects of what was been going on with us, Bernardo, I've been really enjoyed it. I was, I was telling Kurt, you know, I, you're obviously, I love to talk to people, even when I disagree with them at some points, but people that are coming at this with reflective good faith, it's deeply appreciative. So I suppose maybe in the end that I'm choosing sexy over. I reciprocate your feeling, by the way, John. I'm having a lot of fun.

Starting point is 02:01:22 I can hardly believe it's been two hours already. Yeah. Okay. Let's get to debate debate now because we were just talking about idea hugging forget about that let's conflict let's have some swords where do you all disagree the most well i'm not i'm not quite clear, actually, given a lot of the discussion here. I know ontologically you disagree, whereas Bernardo, excuse me if I'm paraphrasing incorrectly, but you were saying that we can have different contents of consciousness that are all the same, much like there are different fields in quantum physics that are all one underlying field, at least in a grand unified theory. No, no. What I meant is you can produce diversity out of unity if you take into account the notion of excitation.

Starting point is 02:02:19 And this is what physics does all the time. So you can have a single field. It's all that exists. So you would say, well,, it's all that exists. So you would say, well, then there is only one thing. How come there is this idea that there is diversity in the universe? And physics solves this by saying, okay, that one field has many possible different patterns of excitation on harmonics. And those are the differences. So you account for the phenomenological difference or diversity without departing from ontological unity. And so it's something that physics has regularly done more and more.

Starting point is 02:02:53 Maybe it's overdoing it, but it gives us a sort of a handle on how to deal with diversity without inflating the reduction base. without inflating the reduction base. And so the analogy, I take it, is that when I was pointing to multiple, I guess they'd be analogous to particles within consciousness, that you are saying that they are just modes of a field. Is that a good way of putting it? Yeah, under quantum field theory, there is no electron as an entity.

Starting point is 02:03:37 It's just a shorthand for a ripple on a field, so to say. And that field can ripple in different places, in different ways. And those different patterns of rippling would account for the properties of the elementary subatomic particles. So under quantum field theory, there are actually no particles.

Starting point is 02:03:59 There are only fields. And that's the only way to reconcile quantum theory, which we know is true at the microscopic level, to reconcile that with general relativity, which we know is true at the macroscopic level. The only way to reconcile them is to use this notion of fields, which began with Maxwell in the 19th century. That was Maxwell's great insight following up on Faraday's notion of an electromagnetic field. Maxwell's insight was to treat it mathematically as a field. But I take it that the patterns in the field are also real, because that's precisely what allows you to explain

Starting point is 02:04:40 the differences. Yeah, that would be the postulate. Of course, John, as far as philosophy of science is concerned, I am an anti-realist. I think theoretical entities are useful fictions, and I don't think they need to be anything more than useful fictions. In other words, nature behaves as though there were quantum fields, And that's all we need to know. We do not need to know whether the quantum fields are actually and literally real, so long as they allow us to build a model that is predictively accurate, that predicts nature's behavior. So that's why I would not agree fully with what you just said, but under the premises of realist philosophers of science, the quantum field would be real as such, although it's entirely abstract. Yeah, so I didn't mean to commit you to something there. I was just trying to get the depths of the analogy.

Starting point is 02:05:39 And so I'll take it to be an analogy and not commit you to anything at the level of quantum mechanics. be an analogy and not commit you to anything at the level of quantum mechanics. So what I'm trying to get at is that there is a field and the field is real, but there's also mods and modulations in the field and they're also real. Yeah, those harmonics of the field are taken to be real insofar as they are the basis to explain the reality of measurable phenomena, which are then taken to be real too. Okay. So, and then that's one thing I'm trying to, I think I'm getting from your ontology. And the other is the idea is a kind of monism, that at base, your ontology has to ground in one thing because if you have more than one thing you then you have an unexplained relationship between the

Starting point is 02:06:33 things is that kind of is that correct yeah the argument against substance dualism is one interaction problem if these substances are ontologically distinct how can they interact the other one is the causal closure issue we are very convinced that the physical world is causally closed even though we don't really have a reason to think that because you know from microscopic laws to macroscopic phenomena all kinds of unknown things can be playing which we cannot know because there is no control, no experiment done under controlled conditions in the world at large. But so the causal closure of the world would be another argument. And the third argument is

Starting point is 02:07:17 parsimony. Right. So why wouldn't you, why wouldn't those push you towards something like a Neoplatonic conclusion or a Spinozistic conclusion or some versions of non-dualism which say, well, no, actually mind and matter are actually two different modes of some underlying thing that would explain ultimately the relationship between them without denying their different, here's, I'm using this, I think correctly, their different modalities. And so, and, you know, and so ultimately, there is like a Neoplatonism, there is the one, and the one is neither conscious, nor material, it transcends both. And therefore, right, or Spinoza's God, who is neither, right, who is neither mental nor physical, etc. So, and that, and that strikes me as following very cleanly from those two things we've just talked about, right, where you've got Ammanism, Where you've got a monism and you've got this idea of modes, that everything that isn't the one thing is a mode of that one thing. This is a position in philosophy called the dual aspect monism.

Starting point is 02:08:43 Arguably, Spinoza was a multi-aspect monist. Yeah, he's not just dual aspect. That's unfair to Spinoza was a multi-aspect monist. Yeah, he's not just dual aspect. That's unfair to Spinoza. He really thinks of it as an inexhaustible thing, right? That you can't actually capture it. So this is an official position in the sense that it's seriously discussed. I don't adopt it for the following reason. I don't think we need to postulate a third unknown thing which only reveals itself

Starting point is 02:09:10 through material and mental aspects I don't think that's needed because all we know and can know about what we call matter is essentially mental even our abstractions are mental our inferences are mental the material quote material world we see around us mental. Even our abstractions are mental. Our inferences are mental. The material, quote, material world we see around us is made of qualities. It's made of colors, scents, flavors, mental things. So to postulate anything that isn't essentially mental, I think is justified only if

Starting point is 02:09:41 you cannot account for the facts based on nature's one given, which is mentality. The primary datum of existence is mentality. If you cannot make sense of things based on that one given, then I think you are entitled to go into abstraction territory and invent unknown things in order to account for everything. I happen to think that we can make sense of everything without having to take that step of abstraction. Well, what about a standard sort of platonic argument that goes something like this? Well, minds seem to be spatio-temporal things, at least if we're doing what you said, which is how I experience it. And yet I seem to need to invoke non-spatio-temporal things, you know, that certain logical principles, for example, that I need to make use of in my

Starting point is 02:10:33 reasoning and trying to, like, does the law of non-contradiction have a spatio-temporal existence? That seems wrong. That seems to not capture the kind of entity it is, or most of math. And so the idea is, well, and then which do I use to explain which? Well, I actually use the logic and the mathematics to explain and make my inferential conclusions about my consciousness. And those things don't seem to be spatio-temporal. And therefore, and there you go. And that's what I need. I need something other than mentality in order to get intelligibility. I think the tendency or the notion to postulate non-spatio-temporal things, I think it's when we do that, we are confusing a mental archetype with a thing. For instance, Aristotelian logic, it's something for which there is no objective proof.

Starting point is 02:11:36 Logic is a set of axioms. For instance, using the law of excluded middle, that's an axiom. There is an entirely coherent alternative in logic called intuitionism, which dispenses with the law of excluded middle, and it's valid. So logic is founded on a set of axioms that appeal directly to our intuition in a way that seems to dispense with the need for argument. It's self-evident. The whole of mathematics, in a sense, is based on these things that are self-evident. Two plus two is four, by definition, because we make it so, right? And we have arguments, for instance, for why multiplying a negative and a positive number results in a negative number.

Starting point is 02:12:18 But these are things that are not empirical, they are mental, and yet they seem to be entirely objective. So I would say the objectivity arises from the fact that these are archetypal patterns of mind. These are the natural harmonics, the natural ways in which mind gets excited, the intrinsic natural modes of mentation. They aren't things, and yet they are objective because of that. So we don't need to postulate something non-mental to account for mental objectivity all we need to understand is that mind itself has some preferential modes i mean that goes back to jung and goes back to plato's forms so archetypes are just regularities of behavior they don't need to be things that exist in a place somewhere. I think that Roger Penrose makes this

Starting point is 02:13:05 mistake. I mean, if I am to be so bold as to point out a mistake by Roger Penrose, but Roger is a trialist, and what he sees as the domain of values, platonic values, I think we can account for those as merely the natural frequencies of excitation of mind. We don't need to go beyond mind. So, I mean, this is what I find challenging, because it seems like this is getting into a kind of normalism again, which is the... and that it gets... I find it very hard to reconcile that with scientific practice, because if I'm going to... the relationships between spatio-temporal things are not themselves spatio-temporal if I want to make the kinds of inferences I'm making. For example, you're making inferences about all of reality. And I take it that all of reality is not itself

Starting point is 02:13:58 a spatio-temporal thing. Oh, I see what you're saying. Right. And so therefore, you have to invoke non-spatio-temporal things, and they're normative on us. We acquiesce in them. That was Plato's point. We say, oh, this is better than that. Yes, and we can move around in our logics, but I don't think that's radically other than my experience of my mind, which is as a spatio-temporal, limited, locatable, perishing. I talked to my sister and she tells me, and I think she's being directly honest, that there was a time when I did not exist. And I take that to be the case. I don't think she's lying. And I'm not a solipsist. And I don't think you're a solipsist. and I don't think she's lying and I'm not a solipsist and I don't think you're a solipsist. And so it seems to me that there's aspects of reality that are unlike my mind in that my mind seems to be essentially spatiotemporal and these things are not spatiotemporal and yet they're normative on our decisions about what is real. I think your mind as an individual person with private conscious in their life, I think that is finite.

Starting point is 02:15:06 I think our bodies, our metabolism is what dissociation looks like when observed from across a dissociative boundary. And dissociation comes to an end. But the underlying mind, which is the only thing that ever existed, I don't think that comes to an end. It's the thing where all beginnings and ends take place. I don't think that comes to an end. It's the thing where all beginnings and ends take place. On what I mentioned about archetypes and science, there's a paper written in 1960 by Eugene Wigner,

Starting point is 02:15:34 I'll paraphrase it, the amazing effectiveness of mathematics to describe the laws of nature or something like this. And he used the word miracle 12 times in that paper. And his wonder was, why would axiomatic human thinking, the things we take to be self-evident, why would those axioms of human mentation apply to the behavior of the universe at large? That's a great mystery.

Starting point is 02:16:01 And I think associating the laws of nature to archetypes of the same minds that underlies us in nature in a way that we are ontologically continuous with nature would make sense of that. But I do understand the point you made, which is if I frame everything in spatial temporal terms, then I'm taking space time as a sort of objective primary scaffolding of nature out there. And do we have reasons to believe that to be the case? No, we have plenty of reasons to believe that that is precisely not the case. That's coming up from neuroscience. Now it's coming up from physics with loop quantum gravity in which space-time is now a derivative phenomenon of quantum processes.

Starting point is 02:16:43 It's not a pre-existing scaffolding of the universe. So the problem is that space-time is built into our language, our way of making arguments. So I cannot escape that. So when I talk about excitations, I'm appealing to space-time because we think in spatial temporal terms, as Kant put it in Schopenhauer too, space and time are modes of

Starting point is 02:17:06 our cognition. If I am to talk about something without pre-assuming space and time, I can't even open my mouth, because language already presupposes tenses, present, past, and future, presuppose a distinction between object and subject, which requires space. That was Schopenhauer's Principium Individuationis. For two things to be different, they have to be within a certain extended dimension. So don't take me wrong. I don't think space-time at primary

Starting point is 02:17:37 is just that if I try to be consistent with what I actually think, I can't open my mouth. So everything I say that is framed under the notion of space and time, you should take it as what I believe to be penultimate truths. They point at an ultimate truth that I can't capture, can't corral into the space-time framework of language. Well, I'm happy with that. I mean, that's a very, that is a neoplatonic conclusion, that the one as the ground of intelligibility is not something that we can intelligibly grasp, because it affords all intelligible grasping. And so it's by definition

Starting point is 02:18:18 inherently a mystery, because we can't frame it because it's behind all framing. And I think that that's going to follow in any monism, that you're going to have something at the bottom. By the way, I'm also a monist, so I don't have a problem with that. I guess what I was pointing back to was the phenomenology, which is, it seems to me that, I don't know what to call it. I think in one of your videos, you called it cosmic consciousness. I'm not, I don't want to give you the wrong, I want to talk about the consciousness that isn't my introspective personal consciousness. That's fine. Mind at large, cosmic consciousness. I'm not, I don't want to give you the wrong, I want to talk about the consciousness that isn't my introspective personal consciousness. That's fine. Mine is a large cosmic consciousness.

Starting point is 02:18:49 I find this perfectly good descriptive terms, which I used cosmic consciousness in an academic paper on purpose, tongue in cheek a little bit, because I wanted to dispel this association with new age. Cosmic consciousness is perfectly descriptive. Okay, I won't, I'm not, I'm not invoking any new age woo-woo. I just wanted your term for this, because there seems to be then, it seems to me, a difference, a very significant difference in degree, or maybe difference in kind between my consciousness, which seems to be, again, a perishable, spatio-temporally bound thing that is not fully present to itself, and the cosmic consciousness, which seems to be very different, because I take it that it ultimately is identical to the ground, what I would call the one, which I take to not be spatio-temporal, to be,

Starting point is 02:19:48 in some sense, if it's one, it has to be present to itself throughout, because if it's not present to itself, it's not one. And so there seems to be a radical difference between my consciousness, and I assume your consciousness, and the cosmic consciousness. and why isn't that that's really big because you know spatial temporal and mysterious and not and co-present and not these are all big differences you know and when you get enough differences in degree don't you get a difference in kind isn't it different isn't it a different kind of thing i don't know okay but okay i think it's a common i'll use a certain word and not in disrespect to you it's just that it's a common, I'll use a certain word, not in disrespect to you. It's just that it's a technical word.

Starting point is 02:20:28 I think this is a common and ever more popular fallacy. The idea that differences in degree can lead to a difference in kind. I think life is a particular state of consciousness. If you've ever had a high dose, deep psychedelic trip, you will know that that's not spatial temporal. You get into territories, into certain configurations or states of mind that are not spatial temporal at all. And you come back and you can't talk about it because we just don't have the words. But those are very concrete, very present states of mind. I think life is a particular state of consciousness,

Starting point is 02:21:06 a kind of trance. And we shouldn't attribute the qualities of this particular state to mind at large. For instance, I always warn people to not anthropomorphize mind at large by attributing to it our ability to plan, to act in a premeditated way, to self-reflect. I think mind at large is instinctive, and that's why the laws of nature are so predictable and stable. So I think there

Starting point is 02:21:34 is an enormous difference in quality, but not in kind. I think both are mental in the sense that both are qualitative or experiential? Well, okay. I mean, I think you get into Soraites paradoxes if differences of degree don't eventually become differences of kind. And so I do think there is a need for that. But the problem with that is that you would have to pinpoint exactly at what point there is a sudden translation in kind.

Starting point is 02:22:04 Because you see, I can add more speakers to my hi-fi, but at what point does it turn into a television? You see what I mean? It's a category error. Well, I can add a lot of individual units that can't do computation together, and they together can do computation. individual units that can't do computation together, and they together can do computation. I mean, and so there is, there are all those kinds of transitions.

Starting point is 02:22:34 Let's take that, let's take that as an example. This is close to me, because I'm a computer engineer first. That was my first doctorate. Everything that a computer does, and look, my hobby is to build computers, 8-bit computers here behind me. There is a corner of society in which I'm more or less famous for building this computer from scratch. Everything a computer does can be done with pipes, water, and pressure-driven valves. Sure, multiple realizability, yeah.

Starting point is 02:23:00 So all those computations, it's just a difference of two states, zero or one. So you can have a valve that is shut or open, pressure-driven valves, pipes, and water. So if people in strong AI now who say that a complex enough computer will be conscious, the challenge to them is to explain at what point you add enough pipes, taps, and water for a system that is only pipes, taps, and water to become conscious if it already doesn't start as being conscious? What is it about extra pipes, taps, and water that turns it conscious? I think what we are doing there is the classical hand-waving. We are trying

Starting point is 02:23:38 to bury the problem under a layer of obfuscating complexity, and then we hand-wave our way, saying, and then something magical happens there. And I can't explain it to you because it's too complex. No, it's still just pipes, taps, and water. If it didn't start as conscious, it will not become conscious because the properties you change or add by adding pipes, taps, and water are incommensurable with the property you want to emerge or the transitioning kind you want to have produced that would be my view and then if you disagree i would challenge you to explain to me exactly how a sufficient high number of five steps in the water can change something in kind

Starting point is 02:24:16 okay well let me try to finish the point i was going to make because I wanted to because I think you have an analogous problem which is if cosmic mind is not itself intelligent you now have the problem of how does it get arranged such that intelligence emerges I think it's intelligent you said it can't plan or it's it act instinctively you can have instinctive intelligence that is not informed by metacognition. So it's not capable of rationality then. It can't reflect on itself and correct its own behavior in any fashion. That's what I think. Because the laws of nature are so predictable and because it took so many years, so many billions, three and a half billion years of evolution.

Starting point is 02:25:03 So we still have the problem of how rationality emerges, right? From things that are not rational. Oh, that's not a hard problem. That's a problem of AI and AI exists. Right. And so what you admit is I can take things that are non-rational and put them together in the right way and get rationality. Yes.

Starting point is 02:25:22 Yes. Okay. So why? And we now think that we can we got a pretty good answer of how we can take non-living stuff and put it together and get living things yes that's a more subtle problem i i would say yes but a qualified yes okay okay so i've got a qualified yes for life and i've got a strong yes for intelligence. Yeah. And I didn't, I can't actually in either one of those say to you, this is the line, the dividing point. This is the

Starting point is 02:25:52 threshold point. Biology hasn't produced it. And I, but we don't, we don't thereby say, oh, well, that means it's not real. It doesn't emerge. We say, no, no. Right. It's precisely a continuous change, not a bifurcation change. And so, again, what's the difference between consciousness and, you know, I'm putting this, we're talking about the emergence problem. countenance for life, and at one time we didn't. We thought, no, there's no way, you know, and Ilan Vittel and all that stuff. And then for the longest time, no way, no machine could possibly be intelligent. And now that's becoming less and less a plausible place to stand. What's the difference then? Our concept of intelligence is something that human beings came up with. There is information processing in nature. We apply the label intelligence not based on neutral objective reasons, but based on what we feel is similar enough to us to be considered intelligent. Arguably, a paramecium is intelligent in the

Starting point is 02:26:58 sense that it goes after the food it needs to and runs away from threats. So there is no such a thing as a defining boundary in which there's a difference in kind. All you have is information processing. You already start with it, simple information processing, like a transition between two states all over in nature. You flip your switch. It's a transition between one state to the other. Then we get more complex interrelated transitions of states. There is no fundamental

Starting point is 02:27:31 crossing of a boundary. It's just where are we comfortable to put the label intelligence. In AI, we devised an arbitrary test to justify that. We call it the Turing test. Yeah, the Turing test is problematic, but go ahead, go ahead. So there is no fundamental transition. It's just a spectrum. It's a continuum, I would say. When Searle, in 1980, wrote his paper on the Chinese room experiment, he was appealing to conscious understanding. His argument had nothing to do with intelligence. The MIT guys were right in their in their review to Searle, because for them, intelligence is just more complex information processing. So the room is intelligent if the manual the clerk is using contains enough complex instructions for that information processing to be considered intelligent. The intuition Searle was appealing to was understanding, not intelligence. And what is that intuition? That intuition is the conscious experience that goes coupled with certain types of information processing. That conscious experience we call understanding.

Starting point is 02:28:38 And then the clerk inside the room, which is the only conscious entity there, does not have understanding because he's not absorbing all the information processing into his mind. A lot of it is in the manual. So that's for intelligence. As for life, I am sympathetic to you there, but I feel obliged to remind you that we have not achieved a biogenesis. We have arguably achieved intelligence. There are server farms today or, you know, computer farms using a lot of graphical accelerators running neural networks, which I would be personally comfortable to say this is intelligent. My intuition would acquiesce to that immediately. So we have achieved that. We've created that.

Starting point is 02:29:25 But we have not created life from non-life. What Craig Venter has achieved was to artificially create a DNA molecule and insert it into a molecule that was already living and then zap it with electricity and the molecule changed the way it makes proteins. But we have not achieved abiogenesis. So I think the jury is still out. But even if we have not achieved abiogenesis. So I think the jury is still out,

Starting point is 02:29:46 but even if we one day achieve abiogenesis, and I personally think we will, I think what that will mean is that we've found an artificial way to induce dissociation in the universal mind, because life, metabolism, is what dissociative processes look like. Okay, so it seems to me like that, I don't want to get into the exegetical disagreement about how to interpret Searle in the Chinese room, because I think there's independent arguments. I think he ultimately said the argument has to do with multiple realisability, not with understanding. I mean that's what came out. That was my interpretation. I didn't mean to attribute that to Searle himself. Okay, okay. So fair enough, fair enough.

Starting point is 02:30:26 But I don't think we have to resolve the interpretation of Searle to continue our discussion is what I'm saying. So it sounds like that for you, the emergence of things like life and intelligence are not problematic, but there's something different for consciousness. And the problem I have with that is we also have deep intuitions about the deep relationship and interdefining of intelligence and consciousness. Most of our attributions of consciousness, other than yours, Bernard, I don't want to misattribute to you, they generally track with attributions of intelligence. And the measures of intelligence,

Starting point is 02:31:16 measures of like working memory, correlate also with models of consciousness, the global workspace, things like that. Consciousness seems to exist for those problems. So you can compare behavior, which requires our consciousness, for the behavior that doesn't. And consciousness seems to be those situations that require our most sophisticated intelligence, situations that are complex, novel, relatively unpredictable. We can't do those unconsciously or semi-consciously. We have to do them full consciously. So there seems to be what I'm saying is this very tight interweaving between intelligence

Starting point is 02:31:57 and consciousness. I recognize what you're saying. The way I would try to make sense of this, well, I would say that we are conflating phenomenal consciousness with metaconsciousness when we make this argument. Metaconsciousness entails phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness, using the definitions from... From Block. Block. Block, 1995. Yeah, yeah. Almost all research on consciousness is actually exploring metaconsciousness insofar as it depends on the subject's ability to report on what they are experiencing. So, for instance, blind sight studies, we say it's unconscious sight.

Starting point is 02:32:44 Well, we say that because the subject says, I am not seeing, but the subject is behaving as if he or she were seeing. So I would say what has gone broken there is the feedback loop that is required for reportability. Giulio Tononi's information integration theory, that magic phi number, that if you cross the phi number, you're conscious. Well, that's empirically calibrated based on subjective reports. So phi captures the moment you cross the threshold of metacognition, not the threshold of experience, pure and simple. It's very hard to study experience, pure pure and simple in an objective setting, because you can only study that through introspection. It's only when you suddenly become metaconscious of something you were already conscious of all along that you realize, oh darn, I have known this

Starting point is 02:33:40 all along. I knew this. I just didn't know that I knew. So this is the only way for you to realize that there was an experience. The only thing that was missing was the metacognitive loop. And I think topographically, it's really a loop because research on the neural correlates of consciousness always points out that you have to have a cycle, a loop closed. Phi depends on that structure of loops being closed. That's what's called information integration. Previous research prior to Tononi points out that you need this feedback and feed forward ping-ponging of information between two brain areas.

Starting point is 02:34:16 For instance, the visual cortex and the limbic system. If you cut that, then you get, for instance, blind sight. And then we say, well, the person is not conscious of sight. No, the person is not reporting the experience of seeing, but the person is behaving entirely consistently with the awareness of seeing, the phenomenal conscious of vision. So, look, this is an area where so many misunderstandings have happened throughout the history of psychology and neuroscience. If you read Jung, let's go back to the early 20th century. If you read Jung and you distill how he defines consciousness, you will see that what he's talking about is metaconsciousness. He talks about consciousness requiring an associative web.

Starting point is 02:35:03 If you don't have this web of associations, it's not conscious. He talks about consciousness having to be coupled to a wheel. And if you read what he means by the wheel, what he means is deliberation, reflection. He's talking about reflection, self-reflection. He talks about children slowly becoming conscious in the first years of their lives. Does he mean by that that his five children did not experience anything until they were seven? Of course he didn't mean that. There are neuroscientists today who define consciousness as metaconsciousness. And I think it's fine to use the word that way. The moment where it goes wrong is when we think we've solved the problem because we are using the word

Starting point is 02:35:46 consciousness when in fact we are we mean metaconsciousness and we are not solving the problem of consciousness at all that's my grievance about what happens today so is metaconsciousness though the only way we have access experiential access to our consciousness to consciousness i don't i mean i don't have access to your consciousness um so uh i think the best paper on this was from 2002 i forgot the name of the author um i can send it to you offline afterwards sure sure the author explains that we have experiences, and metaconsciousness is what happens when we re-represent those experiences. So suppose we're talking about perception, then we have a direct perceptual experience, that's representation by definition,

Starting point is 02:36:40 it's perception. But at some point, we re-represent our own inner representations in order to investigate the contents of our own awareness that's the point where metaconsciousness arises it's this step of re-representation and that's that's not built into experience so if you'd say do we need that to access our experiences? I would say no, because experiences are accessible as experiences, but we need that to explicitly access our experiences. If I go back to Jung, Jung has said it all in old-fashioned language, but everything is in Jung. Jung said in answer to Job, God is omniscient,

Starting point is 02:37:23 but he doesn't know how to consult his omniscient. The devil is much more clever in knowing how to consult omniscience. What is he talking about? He's talking about metaconsciousness. So I think we have experiential access to everything in our own minds, but we cannot deliberately access all of it because not all of it can be placed under the microscope of reflection at our own will we don't have that much control over our over the entirety of the psyche so um let me make sure i understand you so what you're saying is we do have access to experience that's non-reflective access.

Starting point is 02:38:10 You have experiential access to that, yeah. Sorry, that sounds circular. You're saying you don't want to say, like, you don't want to get into an infinite request that I have qualia. Qualia is what it is to experience because then I'd have to have qualia for my qualia and I'd have to have qualia for my qualia. I was trying to use the word you used before. We experience everything that is in our own minds, but we cannot explicitly re-represent everything that is experienced in our own minds. instance i'd maintain that five minutes ago you were experiencing your breathing but you were not re-representing the experience of your breathing therefore you

Starting point is 02:38:53 were not reporting to yourself i am breathing but i wasn't experiencing my belief that africa was a continent which i'm experiencing right now yeah was? So what are you trying to say? Well, I take it, yeah, I mean, I have the belief, but I'm not experiencing it until I just did now. Africa is a continent, but I have the belief. And I know that I have the belief because if you ask me, I'll say yes. And when I look on a map, I'll say there's one of the continents, but I'm not doing that constantly. So that's not the evidence. That's the evidence that I have the belief. It's not the belief.

Starting point is 02:39:32 So I reject behaviorism of belief, right? The beliefs are something other than the behavior. And you're nodding. So I think you agree with that. And yet I wasn't experiencing that. And in fact, most of what I believe I'm not experiencing right now. Right now. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:39:49 I understand the heart of your argument. And you're poking in the right place because you already understood that a direct implication of what I'm saying is that everything has to be experiential. There is no other place for psychic contents to lay dormant, waiting to be experienced, because by definition, analytic idealism says everything is experiential. So we have to have a mental mechanism that is able to compartmentalize experience, such that you are not able to access all of those experiences. And now, of course, what we mean by you is part of the answer. But I would postulate two things as mechanisms for that. One is what we've been talking about, metacognition.

Starting point is 02:40:32 Metacognition not only amplifies the contents that are re-represented, because we can pile up re-representation on top of re-representation. You can know that you know that you know that you're experiencing and so on. And it obfuscates everything else. Another mechanism I would put forward to use dissociation. I mean, and I think there is now plenty of empirical evidence that dissociation is strong enough

Starting point is 02:40:58 to do exactly what I needed to do, which is to compartmentalize experience completely, including your experience of the knowledge of Africa. Because in 2015, people in Germany, two researchers in Germany, they were dealing with a woman who claimed to have multiple dissociated alters, amongst which two claimed to be blind, although there was nothing wrong physically with the woman's ability to see, and the host personality could see perfectly well. So they had this brilliant idea of hooking her up

Starting point is 02:41:30 to an EEG cap and measuring her visual cortex activity while a sighted alter was in control, and then there was no more visual cortex activity. And when the blind alter would take executive control, visual cortex brain activity would disappear, even though the woman's eyes were wide open and things were happening in front of her. Now, dissociation is powerful enough to be literally blinding. So I would think of a hierarchy of dissociative processes. We know many types of dissociative processes, not only forgetting things, but losing the sense of ownership to your own memories, even though you still remember the memories, but they feel like they are alien memories,

Starting point is 02:42:14 somebody else's memories, all kinds of dissociation, all different degrees of dissociation and multiple levels of re-representation, hierarchical re-representation. I would put forward to you that these two things, these two complex processes that we know happen, the existing nature, there is no empirical doubt about it, they are sufficient to compartmentalize mind in such a way that you think a lot of things that are happening in the mind of nature are not actually happening because

Starting point is 02:42:43 they're not accessible to you. You may be dissociated from them. You may not be re-representing them. You may be obfuscating them. All kinds of hierarchical levels of compartmentalizing processes may be taking place. And I submit to you that although this sounds complex, it's a lot more plausible and less complex

Starting point is 02:43:02 than the alternatives, like the combination problem in bottom-up panpsychism or constitutive panpsychism, or the hard problem of consciousness for which we don't even have in principle answers. So I guess you're willing to countenance the existings of processes that are outside consciousness, modifying it, because that's what dissociation is. I mean, if it's blinding... Outside your consciousness. Well, whose consciousness is it residing in? Is it residing in cosmic mind consciousness?

Starting point is 02:43:37 I think there is only one consciousness. And what we consider to be us is a dissociative complex of that one consciousness. So is the one, where is the dissociation? Where does it exist? In the one consciousness. Who, yeah, but some consciousness must be aware of it. So is the cosmic consciousness aware of the dissociation? That's what consciousness means.

Starting point is 02:44:03 It experiences the dissociation from both sides, from the inner side, which is us. We are part of nature. We are not a separate entity. And it experiences the dissociation from the other side, the side of the inanimate universe. And those experiences are presented to us in the form that we call the inanimate universe, which is a representation of what is essentially natural instinctive mental processes unfolding beyond the boundary of our own dissociation. So I'm with Schopenhauer. It's the will inside and it's the will outside. So why does this dissociation occur?

Starting point is 02:44:48 It's a question that I get all the time. I will answer, but I'll first invite you to ask yourself why there needs to be a why. Is anything else in nature? No, no, wait, wait, there does, because your whole, I mean, the whole defense depends on the dissociations and the differences between metacognition and dissociated cognition. That is the main thing you use to explain the external world. So if that, if I don't have any principles by which this operates, then it's not clear to me that I've gained anything by just saying, oh, there's, well, there's an external world, right? And I don't quite know how that works any more than you can explain to me how the dissociation and the metacognitive leveling works. Yeah, okay. I understand what you mean now. You didn't, you were not asking for a reason.

Starting point is 02:45:45 You were asking for a process, a mechanism. I understand it now. We will answer that question once we figure out how abiogenesis ever happened, how life arose from non-life. Because I would submit to you that from the point of view of representation, the Kantian phenomena,

Starting point is 02:46:04 the Schopenhauerian representation, what that process looked like was the emergence of life. Because for me, life is the extrinsic appearance of dissociation. So the answer to your question is exactly the same as the answer to the question, how did life arose from non-life? It's just that you're looking at the same process from two perspectives, a first-person perspective

Starting point is 02:46:24 and an outside third-person perspective, the perspective of representation, but it's one in the same process and therefore it follows one in the same mechanism. If there is a need to have a why beyond the mechanism, like why did the universe do this? I don't think there is a need for that, but if there were yeah i wasn't asking for a motive you know okay okay i was so i i mean i take it that that you're saying that there are processes that are self-organizing in some fashion uh because we right i you you even use that metaphor in a couple of your videos you You talk about eddies within the river. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:47:07 And life is... You talk a lot about... Sorry. No, I'm not making accusations. I'm just making sure that I'm getting you correctly. And whatever life is, it's a very complex self-organizing thing. And I actually think that Varela's right.

Starting point is 02:47:19 It's an autopoetic thing and not just a self-organizing thing. And that's what allows me to say that the paramecium is to some degree intelligent and the tornado is not. Because the tornado does not do anything. It does not seek out the conditions that produce, protect, or promote its existence. And the paramecium does. And so... I'm with you all the way. What I'm putting forward does not require any change in our scientific understanding of how life works and how it arose.

Starting point is 02:47:47 It just provides another perspective to the same process. I'm saying that there is actually an inner perspective, that the representation is not the whole story. It's a valid story. It is an accurate representation of the process. So knowledge gained by looking at the process as it unfolds in the physical world is valid knowledge. All I'm saying is that the thing in itself, which lies behind how it's represented by our perception and cognitive apparatus, that thing in itself is mental, and it is of a dissociative character. So I'm not changing any science. No, no, but yeah, I get that. I hope I wasn't implying that because I didn't see you saying that.

Starting point is 02:48:33 But that's sort of what the problem I'm coming up with. It looks like the science stays the same. Yeah. And we do, okay. And then you invoke the principle of parsimony, I'll invoke a principle, which is don't invoke in your explanation an entity more controversial than the entity in the thing fashion i would need an i would need independent evidence for cosmic mind right um in in order to make this argument run and that's been a very problematic thing to do for a very very long time the thing is you're appealing to controversial something controversial which is an entirely culture laden uh thing is it controversial or not? It's entirely subjective. I didn't talk about God

Starting point is 02:49:28 anywhere. I even volunteered to you that I think this universal mind is instinctive and naturalistic. It's not premeditated. It's not anthropomorphic. So that you attribute the quality of being controversial to it, I would dare to submit to you that it's an entirely subjective value judgment. Okay, what I meant was, other than that, let's try and make it a little bit more formal, that I don't invoke something that requires argumentation as much as the argument I'm giving. I'll submit to you that mine is the simplest

Starting point is 02:50:07 in terms of argumentation. It requires no miracle. It requires no strong emergency. It requires no magical combination of fundamentally separate subjective points of view. And there is a host of empirical substantiation for it. Beat that. Well, I mean, I still think you have the equivalent of what the

Starting point is 02:50:30 panpsychist has. You have an explanation, it needs to be forthcoming, of how I get living-minded, rational entities like me out of a mind that is not biologically alive, that is not capable of rationale, etc., etc., etc. It seems to me that I don't know what I've gained by replacing the external world, from which I have to explain intelligence and consciousness and rationality, from saying, well, there's this other mind out there that is, but it's not capable. It doesn't have rationality. It doesn't have personality. It doesn't have all of the features of God, for example.

Starting point is 02:51:12 And then there's some self-organizing process that emerges. Well, that sounds to me like, well, there's matter. It doesn't have all these properties. There's some self-organizing process and mind and life emerge. What's the difference between the two moves? If you think it's implausibly complex to say that complex minds like ours have evolved from a very simple, phenomenal substrate, imagine how implausible it is to say that complex minds like ours emerged out of non-mind.

Starting point is 02:51:46 Which one is better? They seem to me to be not different. That's my point. They seem to me to be... One requires a huge ontological jump from non-mind to mind. The other one only requires degrees. The thing is, you're very focused on this notion that degree can lead to a difference in kind, which I think is a fallacy. But you're invoking it. You're invoking it, because you're saying that the cosmic mind is ultimately different in kind from my mind. That's why me calling it something like God is fundamentally a mistake, because it doesn't have some of the fundamental features of my personhood, which is what the traditional definition of God is.

Starting point is 02:52:30 I'm not saying it's different in kind, because I'm saying it's also mental in the sense that its processes are of inner interactions, the changes of state, the structure and dynamics of those processes can vary over large degrees. And the substrate is still the same field of subjectivity, the same field of phenomenality. So there is no, ontologically, there is no transition in kind. It's a transition of sophistication, the complexity of the processes that unfold there. If you will, the underlying mind at large, you can look at it as a lake with simple straight ripples, and our minds with all kinds of higher level mental functions, feedback mechanisms, intelligence, rationality, self-reflection, self-awareness, re-representation, and all that stuff, as a very stormy water in a cup, but very stormy water in a cup, with all kinds of patterns of movement that are much more complex,

Starting point is 02:53:38 waves that fold in upon themselves and form reflective surfaces, all kinds of access patterns going on. But it's still water. But you're invoking new kinds, all kinds of patterns, all kinds of things. All kinds of patterns of excitation. That are real. Yes, but not a different kind of the medium that is excited. So look, you can have... So there's ultimately physics, which isn't just matter. It's time and space and quantum crap and relativistic crap. And some of it gets very complex, and that's me. And some of it doesn't get very complex, and that's a rock. I mean, again, and I take it that there's a difference in kind between me and rocks. And I think you do too, because you treat persons with morality in a way you don't treat rocks with morality.

Starting point is 02:54:29 So there's a difference in kind there that comes out in your behavior in a very predictable manner. I think there's a difference in complexity, which leads to different properties. And you can pass judgments based on the properties that are available. But I don't think there is a difference in kind as far as the ontological substrate is concerned. It's still mental. It's still subjectivity. You can have very simple ripples and very complex ripples, but it's still just ripples in water. It's still just water. Or you can have a silicon chip. I want to point out to you the irony that you're using a physical analogy to describe this, thereby pointing to the fact that physical things can actually do the kind of stuff you're pointing to. I'm not denying that which we call the physical.

Starting point is 02:55:13 I'm denying the theoretical inference that that which we call the physical has a root in something non-mental. But I'm not denying the experience of the world that we call physical. Right. John, I feel like you're holding back. What are your true thoughts? No, I'm not holding back in the sense that there's stuff I want to say that I'm not saying. I think there's, and I don't mean this pejoratively to either Bernardo or myself, I think there's an intuitive vision here that we're not necessarily sharing. What do you mean by that? I think the intuitions about, I mean, it seems to

Starting point is 02:55:58 me like Bernardo was saying, you know, the world exists independently of my mind. But it doesn't exist independently of some mind that I'm not directly aware of. And that's, that strikes me as problematic. Because I would need evidence for that mind independent of me in order to make the argument run. I got it. So the analogy I like to use for this is the following. Unless we are solipsists, unless we think that the only mind going on is our own mind, the ones we have direct access to, so I will consider that something that we don't need to debate. We can reject that. I even wrote about an argument to reject that. I know you reject it.

Starting point is 02:56:43 Yeah. As Russell said, even those who purport to believe in solipsism actually don't act as if they believe. It's a performative contradiction, yes, totally. Okay, so unless you are that, you have to infer something outside of that which you have direct access to. You have to make an inference beyond your own mind, unless you're a solipsist. So the difference is, what is that inference? How complex, how parsimonious, and how explanatorily powerful is that inference? But everybody has to make that inference. So the analogy I use is the following. My mind is the earth I can see until the horizon. Beyond the horizon, I cannot see directly.

Starting point is 02:57:27 until the horizon. Beyond the horizon I cannot see directly. But I need to infer that the earth, that there is something beyond the horizon to make sense of empirical experience. Otherwise, I do not have a satisfactory explanatory model for how you and me seem to be sharing the same world and all that. Granting that you also are conscious. I reject Solipsism too. I reject solipsism too. So my inference is the following. Up to the horizon, it's my mind, it's mental. Beyond the horizon, it's just more mind. It's just that I cannot see it. The physicalist will say, up to the horizon, it's my mind, it's mental. Beyond the horizon, it's a totally different kind of stuff

Starting point is 02:58:01 that is exhaustively definable in terms of pure quantities and out of which we do not have a way even in principle to derive qualities. Take your pick. Okay. Oh, well, I mean, that's a little bit of a prejudicial description because it sounds like there's no problems in your position also. But let's do that then. So we agree that there isn't solipsism. So we agree that there's things that exist outside of my consciousness and that takes care of the problem that I didn't exist at one point and I won't exist at another point. And so the issue then I guess becomes I should there.

Starting point is 02:58:43 And the reason why people believe in the external world typically is they think of things going on outside of any human consciousness. You know, that there before, you know, before there were sentient beings, the earth was forming, the sun was forming, you know, you know, things like that evolution was eventually going on you know, et cetera, et cetera. And what they, the physicalist will then say is, well, when I look at reality, when I first come upon it, where there has not been any human

Starting point is 02:59:13 beings, I don't see any evidence for intelligence and I don't see any evidence for directed behavior. I don't see any evidence for what I typically need in order to attribute mind to something. So I don't attribute mind to my refrigerator normally, because it doesn't have blah, blah, blah, blah, it doesn't do all these things. And that's why, you know, and that's how I make distinctions between my mind and the dog's mind, etc, in terms of the behavioral consequences. And the physicalist says, well, it looks like most of the universe is behaving as if there is no mind. And what I would need for the cosmic mind is evidence outside of human consciousness of things that are mental

Starting point is 02:59:52 like in behavior. And that's exactly not what the universe seems to operate like. It seems to operate non-teleologically, non-intelligently. It seems to happen like really haphazardly. It doesn't seem to have even the basis of moral concerns or emotional attachment to anything why would i attribute mind to that okay i don't think you're right when you say there is no evidence for that but suppose you were right that there is no evidence for us to attribute mind to the world, I would still say that is by far still the least problematic option, given what options are on the table. How do you produce qualities out of purely quantitative properties, or how do you merge fundamentally different fields of

Starting point is 03:00:40 experience? It's different. It's a different matter. This is coming down to intellectual taste. I mean, really? I mean, because what you're asking me to say that we that, you know, we have some our experience has some special role. Like, you know, this is one of the criticisms made by speculative realists, you know, correlationism, that we're binding all of ontology to our particular ontology. And that seems like a really unjustifiable. I want to be able to talk about things having relations among themselves without me being around. I think you agree with that, right? I will answer that. I will answer that.

Starting point is 03:01:19 Let me just very briefly insist on the point I made before. In the technical literature, there are papers arguing that the problems faced by physicalism and panpsychism leads to incoherence. And these are technical arguments made by different people. I've read a lot of these arguments too, right? And there are also people that counter those arguments. I mean, it's not fair for you to present it as a resolved debate or consensus. I don't it's not fair for you to present it as a resolved debate or consensus. I don't think that's fair. There has been no technical argument saying that analytic idealism is incoherent in principle. These arguments have been made for the other two options, but there is no in principle incoherence argument. For instance, for constitutive panpsychism,

Starting point is 03:02:06 the incoherence argument takes the following form. If fundamentally separate fields of subjectivity experiencing different qualities were to merge, you would lose the original fields of experience. If the compound subject is seeing purple and the sub-subjects were seeing red and blue, then they would subsume themselves into the higher level subject, which contradicts what the panpsychism is trying to do, which is to follow the rules of chemical combinations in physicalism. The molecules that compose tissues don't disappear. So you have an argument like that. There isn't a technical argument claiming incoherence for analytic idealism. There may be, I find it very hard, but there may be. But still, let me grant you that I cannot use this line of

Starting point is 03:03:03 arguments. And let's look at what you said. You said for something to be minded, you need to care about relationships. You need to be emotionally bound to something. Solving problems even. Yeah. Does a mosquito have those properties? Does a crocodile have all these properties you're alluding to?

Starting point is 03:03:21 Can you envision that a water flea is a purely instinctive, reactive, conscious being that does not have any of these experiential qualities that we have? A paramecium. I think paramecium has the sort of basic abilities of making sense, aspectualizing its environment. So it relates to some things as food and some things as poison. And I think that aspectualization is continuous with how you're aspectualizing right now.

Starting point is 03:03:59 You're seeing me as a man. You're seeing me as et cetera, et cetera. So there's deep continuity between their capacity for aspectualization and mine but that doesn't mean that they could aspectualize right uh everything that i can because i don't have to attribute the same intelligence to them as i attribute to me that's exactly my point but can you attribute a lot simpler conscious in their life to them than you have like i think you would have none of them than you have. Like the paramecium would have none of the emotions you have. It wouldn't be anxious. It wouldn't fall in love. I think the

Starting point is 03:04:30 paramecium in some sense has to care about some information rather than the other. It wouldn't be my full-blown subjective experience of love. But there's many subjective emotions I have, like pride, that I don't think a dog has, but I think a dog is nevertheless conscious. So I think a paramecium, I mean, that's one of the big differences between us and between standard existing computers, is we have to care about the information we're processing, which means we devote attention and arousal, we dispose metabolic energy towards it. I think the paramecium is doing all of these things. Okay, so I am with you that there is a continuum. I'm just trying to establish that in that continuum, there is a point of much lower,

Starting point is 03:05:18 much higher simplicity than where we are. That's the only thing I want to establish, that they can be conscious in their life with a lot more simplicity than the one we experience as human beings. And we are both in a continuum. Okay, now, the paramecium has what philosophers call intentionality, because there is something outside the paramecium that isn't the paramecium. Now, for the cosmic mind, there is nothing outside of it by definition, so it cannot have intentionality so all its conscious states have to be endogenous and there can there can't be this actualization that you're talking about because there isn't an outside environment so my what i propose is

Starting point is 03:05:57 it's very in terms of emotions and qualities it's much simpler in their life and it does not have intentionality it's a it's purely endogenous it's of a in their life, and it does not have intentionality. It's purely endogenous. It's of a different kind. Now, is there evidence that that might be going on? Even if there weren't, I would say I still have the best theory on the table, because the problems of the others are insurmountable. But recent research is showing two things, and this is fresh out of the oven, one of them, not the first I would talk about. There is a lot of study now showing that in terms of network topology, and I'm not talking about pretty images, pretty photographs. I'm talking about network topology, which is quantified and mathematized. There are surprising similarities between the network topology of the universe at its largest scales, galaxy clusters and all that,

Starting point is 03:06:46 and neuronal networks in mammals. Yeah, that argument's been in existence for quite a while. Design and nature. I forget the author of the book. He points out that formal similarity, but it's also a similarity with how things branch in your lungs, how river deltas branch out, things like that. Recent research, the most recent one is done

Starting point is 03:07:12 by an Italian neuroscientist and an Italian physician. Sorry, an Italian physicist. You have the advantage on me then, I guess. Go ahead. Bernardo, is that not a moot point? Because if we had more cosmic data and we find out that the universe looks completely different from another point of view, you still wouldn't say that your theory is invalidated. So in some sense, it's neither a pro nor a con.

Starting point is 03:07:33 This is more than just what it looks like. That's what I'm trying to highlight. Quantitative studies have been done at the University of California at Irvine, I think in 2014. at Irvine, I think in 2014. And there is this more recent research done by this Franco Varza and Alberto Felletti, these two guys. Oh, I'm amazed I could retrieve that. Normally I'm not that good.

Starting point is 03:07:55 Mind at large has been kind to you. This is a quantitative network structure and network topology analysis. And it shows the similarity is really between neural networks and the universe. And it doesn't involve the fractal patterns of arteries in our lungs or the fractal patterns of river Delta as it goes. It's much more specific than that.

Starting point is 03:08:18 Now there is a paper fresh out of the oven published by a physicist called Stephen. Forgot, forgot, forgot his other name. Fresh Out of the Oven. Are you proposing, are these papers proposing that there's information processing going on in this structure? I mean, that's going to violate all kinds of relativistic limitations, etc. No, no, no. No, no, okay.

Starting point is 03:08:40 So, before I talk about Stefan's paper, first this, because it's a good point. Of course there is information processing. What you don't have is closed loops of information because the age of the universe is not long enough for information to go across galaxy clusters and close a loop. There hasn't been enough time for that to happen. There hasn't been enough time for that to happen. So what you cannot have is Tononi's information integration phi topologies. There hasn't been time for that, which only means that the universe is then not self-reflective. But it can still be phenomenally conscious or it can be phenomenal consciousness because the latter does not require this closed loops of information integration, for which you are right, there has not been time. But information processing in a feed-forward

Starting point is 03:09:31 manner, of course, that's happening all the time. And the universe is an information processing engine. Actually, there is a whole field of physics called digital physics, which is based entirely on this postulate. But the paper of Stephen, and it's amazing. It's the beginning of research. There's a long way to go. But what he's showing is that the laws of physics may correspond, in terms of models, may correspond to the weights of neurons in a neural network, that the universe may be learning its laws of physics. So, John,

Starting point is 03:10:07 if you say this is all circumstantial, I will be the first to jump and agree with you. But you put me on the spot of producing this kind of argument. Is there any evidence? And then I say, well, yeah, there is. There actually is. And it's evidence that we are so confused about it, we cannot make sense of it. We do not know why galaxy clusters look more like a neuron than they look like the interior of a galaxy. nothing in our understanding of nature that would suggest why this relationship is there at all. That it is there, and that its information processing can actually be modeled as the weight of an artificial neural network in the process of learning. But only a feed-forward artificial network, which is exactly the point you just made, which means it can't have a lot of the properties that we find in any networks that do feedback loops on themselves. Correct. It isn't even capable of doing Hinton's deep learning or anything like that. Correct. Right. And so the, I mean, so this

Starting point is 03:11:15 is going to be a pretty, sorry, I don't mean to be insulting to your view. I'm not. Okay. That's a pretty stupid consciousness. And it has no intentionality. I mean, and so you're talking about a mind without, you said, without intentionality and without even rudimentary intelligence. I mean, again. Well, be careful, be careful. There are methods of neural network learning which are only feedforward, particularly unsupervised learning techniques that do not require this deep feedback mechanism. So you can still have some intelligence. But remember, I started today by saying I am a naturalist. I'm just being consistent with it.

Starting point is 03:11:56 Well, yeah, and I want to I won't get into the technicalities because then you have learning speed problems and your self-correction problems and debugging problems which is why you know we plausibly have meta consciousness and meta intelligence right we can use our intelligence to improve our intelligence uh we learn literacy for example that improves our capacity for problem solving um like yeah i mean i i guess what comes down to it is uh i'm not quite sure what the difference is now, because I've got something out there that's no intentionality, which is unlike what I experienced. I mean, let me be fair to you. I do experience states in deep meditation that are states without intentionality and for which you could plausibly say I'm not exercising any significant degree of intelligence. And those are the pure consciousness events. And they're reliable. I've achieved that. That sounds like an achievement. So I've been in those states multiple times. I know

Starting point is 03:12:57 there's lots of research. Foreman has done it. And there's lots of things on that. Is that the kind of thing what people, I mean, I know it's not exactly the same, but I'm trying to get something from within what I normally point to with consciousness. Is that the kind of consciousness you see for mind at large? The kind of consciousness without intentionality and intelligence I have in pure consciousness event in which I'm not even conscious of my consciousness, I'm just conscious? Is it something like that? Yes, just a quick clarification. When I use the term intentionality, I mean it in a technical sense. I do too.

Starting point is 03:13:39 I mean aboutness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. Then we are aligned. And that is lost in the PCE. That's by definition. By definition, there cannot be intentionality because there is no aboutness. There is only the thing, by definition. There's no outside. Intentionality arises when you... But we achieve intentionality. Yeah, because there is an outside world. An outside world is created once you have a boundary. I would say that boundary is the dissociative boundary. It's the dissociation that creates the distinction between the inside and the outside. And now you can have intentionality or aboutness because there is something outside that you don't identify yourself with.

Starting point is 03:14:19 So intentionality emerges out of non-intentional states. Yeah, through dissociation but you know that the problem of intentionality is regarded as deeply a problem for physicalism as the problem of consciousness how do you get something like intentionality out of the physical universe that is non-intentional right intentional content no no the existence of the the existence of intentionality i mean so the big problems are consciousness intentionality right how do you get i big problems are consciousness, intentionality, right? How do you get, I mean, that's what I think is actually going on, by the way, and I think in Searle's Chinese room argument, Searle often describes it that way, is how do I get intentionality?

Starting point is 03:14:56 How do I get the things inside the room to be about things outside the room? And he attributes that to consciousness, but obviously that's not what you're claiming, because the universal consciousness, sorry, I keep changing the names on you, that's unfair to me. It's okay. The mind at large doesn't have intentionality. So it's no different than the Chinese room, right, because it doesn't have intentionality. No, because remember I mentioned to you that my interpretation of Searle's thought experiment was that what's missing is consciousness and here what the consciousness supplies is intentionality

Starting point is 03:15:30 that's why Searle claims again and again it's an argument about meaning all the syntax is there but as he says there's no semantics there yes the intentionality right yeah but notice now that I am already starting with phenomenal consciousness so that problem of intentionality you don't have. How does consciousness produce intentionality? Don't you have that problem? Because consciousness at large doesn't have intentionality. But once there is a dissociative boundary, then there is an outside state of the world

Starting point is 03:15:59 and there is an inside state of the altar. Through evolution, you will start trying to represent outside states into inner states because that's how you survive now that representation will never be mirrored because otherwise you would dissolve into an entropic soup we've known that since 10 years no no i i think i think i'm not presenting how would i give a machine the capacity for intentionality the moment oh no but now now you're you're not thinking within the framework of what i'm putting forward if you're assuming the machine is not consciousness no no but you've already admitted that consciousness that base consciousness doesn't

Starting point is 03:16:35 have intentionality yes so you don't get to have intentionality coming along for the ride correct consciousness that's unfair yeah i needed consciousness yeah that's what i'm trying to explain so you start with consciousness so now what you have to explain is having started with phenomenal consciousness how does intentionality arise how does it arise because it's better to survive if you can represent the external environment into inner states the organism will do that and these inner states will then be phenomenal states. What else can they be? I'm saying that everything is in consciousness. That's how intentionality arises. No, no, that's a teleological explanation. It's not telling me how it arises ontologically.

Starting point is 03:17:19 It's telling me how it arises teleologically. It's like, well, how does the eye work? Well, there was evolution and natural selection selected for things that had vision. And that's how vision arose. No, no, that's not, that's not what I'm asking for. The mechanism, what you're asking for is how did sensory organs evolve? You were asking for a mechanism for that. And I would say the answer is the same. No, no, I'm not as because the answer for how my eye evolved is the same answer for how my foot evolved natural selection variation but that doesn't mean that my foot functions according to the same principles that my eye does i want to know the different things i don't want to know the history i want to know the structural functional organization

Starting point is 03:17:59 that makes it causally possible that's what what I was trying to say. You will represent external states into inner states. Representation invokes intentionality. You're invoking the very thing you're trying to explain. Because what's the difference between a representation and a non-representation? Is that a representation possesses intentionality. Then the question you're asking is, how did the first sensory organ arose? Because that's what does the representation Because that's what does the representation. That's what does the representation.

Starting point is 03:18:29 That doesn't tell me how representation works. You're pointing me to the same... What I'm trying to say is the answer to your question is the same answer that the physicalist would give you because it's the same process. It's how did sensorium arise? How did it happen? Well, we have evolutionary biologists studying that. How would the inner states of an organism represent the outer states of the world around it?

Starting point is 03:18:57 So I don't need a consciousness explanation, therefore, to explain how intentionality emerges out of consciousness. I can give a completely physicalist mechanism, because that's what evolution is. You can give a purely physical explanation if you already started with consciousness, because that's what solves the problem Searle was referring to. I don't see that, because you said the base consciousness doesn't have intentionality. So I need a mechanism of how something without intentionality gets intentionality, and then you offer me evolution, which is a completely physicalist explanation, which means I don't need consciousness to explain how I get intentionality out of consciousness.

Starting point is 03:19:38 Let me try it another way. Try it another way. So let's forget consciousness. Let's talk purely in physical terms. Let's forget consciousness. Let's talk purely in physical terms. Is it okay that we say physical organisms, very simple life, three and a half billion years ago, evolved so to represent physical states of the world outside into internal states? I think that's a very hard problem.

Starting point is 03:20:02 Knowing how that works. But you accept it happened? Yes. Okay. Now, if we accept that this happened, what is the problem remaining? The problem remaining is that those internal physical states are not conscious. So there isn't intentionality. But what I'm seeing is that the physicality is the extrinsic appearance of what's going on. But the intrinsic view, the thing in itself, those internal states are phenomenal states because they cannot be anything else. No, no. The problem is that intentionality doesn't, I think this is a problem also for

Starting point is 03:20:33 physicalism, right? So I think you're mistaking what I'm trying to do, right? Intentionality is not like any, it's not like any physical, I mean, this is Brian Kentwell Smith. I can be in intentional relationship to things that I can, to things outside the light cone. I just did it. I thought about it. That's the intention. That's what it's about. But I'm not in causal relationship.

Starting point is 03:20:55 I can't be with things outside the light cone. I can think about Napoleon and I can't be in causal relationship with him because he doesn't exist anymore. And I can't be in causal relationship with him because he doesn't exist anymore. Intentionality is not, you can't, it's not reducible to causation in any kind of easy fashion. And so I don't think you can just say consciousness without intentionality, some causal process and then intentionality. Analytic idealism doesn't solve scientific problems. It provides an interpretation to scientific problems. I think intentionality is a philosophical problem.

Starting point is 03:21:30 But what you described as intentionality just now, like Napoleon and what's happening beyond the event horizon of the cone of the universe that we can see because the light has already arrived at where we are, that's more complex than I think the normal definition of intentionality in philosophy, which is just associated with perception. You have an eternal conscious state that reflects something outside. I don't agree with that. I don't think so. Maybe we move in different philosophical circles. The part of philosophy that overlaps with Cog Sci is really, really concerned. Like take a look at like Brian Cantwell Smith. He's a colleague of mine at the University of Toronto. And, you know, all of third wave, you know, cognitive science is deeply influenced

Starting point is 03:22:14 by phenomenology. And so Husserl's notions of intentionality, which are supposed to deal with things like this, are also pertinent issues. And I think that's what Searle's talking about. He's talking about the kind of intentionality that is born in a language. That's why he uses the example of Chinese, right? He's not talking about just simple perceptual. He's talking about the kind of intentionality that's born in Chinese. I assume that Chinese people can talk about Napoleon and they can talk about things outside the light cone. I'm probably missing something in your argument. I don't see the problem. Once the inner states are conscious states, associations will be established through learning between your inner states and your model of the world outside them. You can't get intentionality out of

Starting point is 03:22:59 association. This is one of the problems that bedevils neural networks. When neural networks are firing, these two nodes are firing. These three nodes, John, love, and Mary, they're all associated with each other. But that can't distinguish between Mary loves John and John loves Mary, which is an intentional difference. And that's still an existing problem for neural networks that hasn't been solved. I think that's a representation problem because neural networks in Silicon, as we do them today, digital neural networks, they don't have a symbolic anchoring to, to the, to the thing that is perceived. Everything is encoded in bytes,

Starting point is 03:23:37 which are symbols. There is a, there is work done by an AI researcher 17 years ago, begun 17 years ago, Pente Heikkonen. He used to work at Nokia Research, and he wrote a series of books about conscious computers. I think they are flawed philosophically, but he makes this point clearly that if you preserve a semantic anchoring between the inner representations of the computer

Starting point is 03:24:03 and the origin of that signal from a certain quality of perception, that problem is solved. The problem arises because we encode things arbitrarily. Sorry, I have to interject as a moderator. Before we go forward, some people are saying, rightly so, that they know plenty more about Bernardo's position than they do about yours, John. And that's because Bernardo's is so outside the norm for us, for the majority of people that it's more interesting. I think it's also credit to how well he articulates and defends his position. I think we should give credit to him. It's not just,

Starting point is 03:24:38 thank you. Yeah. It's not just that it's a less familiar or novel. I think he's actually also, you know. I also think so. So, John, do you mind giving the audience a background as to what you believe exists ontologically or what your philosophical point of view is? Well, I tried to do that at the beginning. And part of the reason why I think Bernardo and I are not just shouting at each other is that there are overlaps between our ontologies in certain ways. So I describe myself as a naturalist, which means, as I said, I'm not a materialist because I don't think that everything's made out of matter. I think that's a ridiculous claim.

Starting point is 03:25:22 And I don't think you can do science from materialism. I think scientists who claim they're materialists are engaging in performative contradiction. I think scientists have to invoke non-spatial temporal relations to do science, and Berman and others have argued that, and therefore trying to reduce it even to causal relations and spatio-temporal relations, I think, can't explain how you do science. I do think that everything we do has to be consistent with what our science, and I don't think Bernardo is disagreeing with that either. So I think-

Starting point is 03:25:55 Okay. So thank you, Bernardo. So my position is, and again, I'm not isolated any more than Bernardo is. I think he's a little bit more of a pioneer right now. And I'll give him credit for that. But there are many people outside of, I would say, neuroscience and things like that within cognitive science. And that's the only audience I'm really that conversant with who would agree with what's

Starting point is 03:26:21 called a non-reductive physicalism. And this is the idea that you have to count the layers at which we are doing our science, the layers, these are just metaphors, by the way, the layers at which we're doing science as real as any other layer we point to with our science, because you get into all kinds of contradictions. You don't. So I think this world that I'm experiencing right now is as real as the world of quantum probabilities, for example. And the reason with that is, like, if you drop down to that level, you lose all the differences that are required for science and required for knowledge and required for information,

Starting point is 03:26:55 blah, blah, blah. I can do that at more length. But I'm not trying to defend it right now. I'm just trying to describe it. I'm just trying to show you, though, that it does come out of reasoning and argumentation, right? And so I think that there, and unlike many people, so this is where I'm a bit of a pioneer. I'm much more of a Neoplatonist. I think we have to talk about equally about emergence and emanation. I think there's ways in which the possibilities of form are really structured.

Starting point is 03:27:23 And I don't equate actuality with reality. That's the influence of Eastern thinking on me. I think that possibility, we have to treat possibility just as real as actuality. And we do this with things like potential energy and stuff like that anyway. And laws, what are laws? Laws aren't events, they're not actions.

Starting point is 03:27:40 They're real constraints on what can happen. They're real. And so as much as there is emergence bottom up from the physical substrata there is emanation down from the non-space non-spatial temporal sets of constraints on possible possibility and some people say that that's sort of cryptically whitehead's god or something like that i don't know if i have to go there but i wouldn't say it's something like the Neoplatonic one. And, you know, and that's not really that strange. If you look, if you look at the history, if you look at people, you know, John Spencer's work on the eternal law and other people like that.

Starting point is 03:28:14 A lot of the people that brought about the revolutions that we're talking about right now in science or that we're pursuing. we're pursuing so in our discussion about science a lot of them had direct like explicit connections to neoplatonism or similar things or they had connections to like what einstein was spinoza and spinoza is deeply in the neoplatonic tradition he uses uh you know he basically co-ops procluses elements of theology for the structure that he uses for the ethics and things like that um so what i'm saying is although i i, although I want to be clear, I don't present that position, a position you see in people like John Scott as Erigina, of the complete interpenetration, as the consensus position. I want to say that there have been notable people within the history, even the recent history of science, that have had

Starting point is 03:29:03 this position, and very important people in the history of philosophy, the whole Neoplatonic tradition, especially post-up and top-down fashion, that there are bottom-up causal interactions, top-down constraints, which aren't causes, and they afford all of the structural functional organization that accounts for most of the phenomena that are in dispute here. I do think, for example, and I haven't tried to make that argument here, people can look at it. I have an existing series out there, Untangling the World Not, with Greg Enriquez. I do think you can fatten up access consciousness so that you can get a lot of phenomenal consciousness out of it. So one of the main things I argue is that if you give a system intelligence and you give it relevance realization, you're giving it foregrounding and backgrounding of information.

Starting point is 03:30:06 You're giving it aspectualization. You're giving it a lot of what I call the adverbial qualia, the here, the here-ness and the now-ness and the togetherness of consciousness, which is not the same thing as the standard qualia of blueness and greenness and yellowness and things like that. And the thing that's interesting about those adverbial qualia is unlike the adjectival qualia, they don't disappear in the pure consciousness event. They're still there. People describe the here-ness as presence, the now-ness as eternity, and the togetherness is absolute unity. So the adverbial qualia seem to be necessary and sufficient for consciousness. And the adjectival qualia that gets so many of these arguments going, I think, aren't necessary and sufficient for consciousness. I don't think that means they're unproblematic. I don't think I've solved that problem. But what I think I would argue is that

Starting point is 03:30:53 we can thicken up access consciousness to get a lot of the phenomenology of our consciousness. And that makes me not so convinced that we won't be able to cross the gap even more like we have with life and with intelligence. So that's my position. Now, I am not, I hope I didn't come across arrogant enough to claim that I have a foreclosure argument and that therefore I think Bernardo is insane or his position is not intellectually respectable. Far from it. I wouldn't be doing this if I thought that. But you were asking me to state what my position is and that's where my position is. And so one, one more thing, but I don't know. I, I, like I said, I, I am, I, I,

Starting point is 03:31:33 I want to be able to explain what I think is the base state of consciousness for us. And that for Fernando said, it might be the best analog for cosmic mind, which is the pure consciousness event. And like I said, that seems to be completely, the reason we don't blank out and lose memory of it is because it's not absolutely absent of content. It has no representational, conceptual, propositional content.

Starting point is 03:31:59 It has no adjectival content, but it does have here-ness, now-ness, togetherness. It does have the adverbial aspects. And so I take those to be something for which we might be able to get an overlapping explanation between them and how intelligence works in terms of relevance realization. And many of the people, you know, bars is explicit that the function of consciousness is higher order relevance realization. Working memory, Lynn Hasher, is higher order relevance realization. Tononi, well, his isn't about relevance realization. Yeah, if you ask him for his test of consciousness, it's a test for relevance realization, a test for appropriateness, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Starting point is 03:32:41 Same thing with Clearman's and his caring higher order caring for lower order representations all the higher order ones because they can't be inferential involve some kind of appropriateness or relevance thing so a lot of the access models already are already converging on relevance realization and i think you can thicken that up if you'll allow me a metaphor to get a lot more of the phenomenology. That's my position. And now the thing about that is, the thing that's kind of like going like this between Bernardo and I is, suppose that turned out to be right. Bernardo could still make his arguments, right? His argument, I don't think his arguments ultimately would be defeated if that turned out to be right, because he seems to be running them.

Starting point is 03:33:30 And I don't mean seem in the pernicious sense. I'm just saying it is my judgment that he seems to be running them on the basis of sort of more fundamental features. So that's what I've been trying to get clear about. I hope that was fair to you, Bernardo. I hope that wasn't a misrepresentation. Can I ask a couple of clarifying questions, John? So do I understand correctly that adverbial qualia can be reduced to pure non-phenomenal access consciousness in your view? in your consciousness in your view yeah i think although part of what i'm trying to do is undermine uh the the the clean distinction and other people have noted that noted this for block right the

Starting point is 03:34:13 clean distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness um because people have pointed out well it there seems to be something it's what it is like to access right right, or to be poised. And I take poisedness, which is the defining feature of access consciousness, to be a metaphor for very sophisticated relevance realization. That's what I take it to mean, that I will bring out of my long-term memory what's most appropriate, and I will structure it in my working memory so that it best fits the environment, etc. But you do think we should be able, in principle at least, to reduce adverbial qualia to non-phenomenal access consciousness? If by what you mean reduce is that I would be able to give an explanation of how it arises

Starting point is 03:35:04 out of something that is... Yeah. That's what I mean by it. That doesn't mean that I think it's ontologically reducible, for reasons I've already given, but yes. Oh, so it could be that entity that's performing access consciousness has adverbial qualia as fundamental properties of it, at least in potentiality. Yeah, yes. So that would make a panpsychist of you. It depends. I mean, and this is a debate. And again, we've had this debate, and I don't know if we'll resolve it. I mean, it makes me a deep continuity theorist,

Starting point is 03:35:51 whereas, again, is that enough of a difference of degree, that it's a difference in kind, et cetera? And so I take it that the difference between the deep continuity, I mean, I've had debates with JP more so about this, and he is a panpsychist, although he seems to be loosening that, that there's a difference between panpsychism and deep continuity um in so that the explanatory principles might be the same but that doesn't mean the entity is the same and and and we we do sort of countenance that idea because we use the same explanatory principles for things that exist at different scales for example even spatio-temporally, etc., etc.

Starting point is 03:36:27 And regarding adjectival qualia, you think those are more problematic? Yes, I do. I do. And what I do think is that we, so this is a meta-critique, I think we are holding the topic of consciousness hostage to adjectival qualia when we have clear evidence for states of consciousness, if that's the right word, like the pure consciousness event, in which adjectival qualia are not present. And I think if we had adjectival qualia without the adverbial qualia, we would have a genuine Humean monster. We would have no togetherness, here-ness, now-ness to these experiences.

Starting point is 03:37:10 And we would have the Humean monster of these completely atomic blips of qualia. And I don't think that would constitute a consciousness anymore. That would still leave a problem there. The integration problem would still be there. Exactly, exactly, exactly. I think I understand your view. I do think the burden of argument is more on you, because you would have them to explicitly make sense of how at least adverbial qualia can emerge from non-qualia simply because of a kind of access configuration. I understand that this is where you were leaning.

Starting point is 03:37:54 I would point out that Giulio Tononi himself has come out biting the bullet and say fine, fine, ITT, IIT presupposes panpsychism. So he sort of acknowledged that. Oh, well, I think it's because there are a lot of the problems. Well, this goes to another issue. And oh, crap, I was supposed to end at three o'clock. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. No, I don't want to make the move where I say something,

Starting point is 03:38:30 but I mean, I think there's deep connections between the hard problem of consciousness and the hard problem of relevance. And I don't think that's a coincidence that most of the theories of the functionality of consciousness are converging on the relevance realization idea. And I mean, I make that argument. And then I do think that there's important overlap between, I've already argued this, between intelligence and consciousness

Starting point is 03:38:54 in some fashion. But I agree with you. It's not an intelligence that has anything like intentionality or meta-reflective capacities. And I think that has to be something like a base relevance realization ability that we get with that verbial qualia. So I'm trying to close the explanatory gap. Okay, let's close this video as well. Seems like you got to get going. I don't want to sneak in a last word like that against Bernardo. I want to give him a chance to respond. My last word is for you.

Starting point is 03:39:30 Regardless of whatever ontological differences we seem to have, John and I, I think our mission is the same. Or the reason why we are doing what we do is to address the meaning crisis. I don't use that term. But ultimately, I think we are big buddies, John. We are allies in what we are trying to accomplish. Yeah, and there's a lot about what you say that I think is really important. I mean, I don't ultimately agree with you on some points, but I think you can see that there's important ways in which I am really significantly modifying the standard ontology to try and address some of your concerns. So I at least think I'm responsible to your concerns.

Starting point is 03:40:12 I know you don't have to. I'm not asking you to agree with me, but I am asking you to see that I am responsible to your concerns. I acknowledge that and I appreciate it very much. Thank you very much for saying that. I want to thank you both. it very much thank you very much for saying that i want to thank you both i'm i'm incredibly blessed and i'm so lucky that i get to be a vessel for or a cup for your holy water or your mana at least temporarily so thank you so much for that i want to let the audience know about where to find out more about you just in a second i also should let the audience know i've been told i need to mention this quite a bit more about i have a

Starting point is 03:40:49 patreon and i always feel slimy and filled with discomposure when i talk about that but some people say just advertise it more so if you want to see more conversations like this where there are conya shenties like bernardo and john duking it out but also at the same time loving one another in their own yeah please please do visit patreon.com slash kirchai mungo it every dollar and literally every dollar helps every patron helps and it helps me extremely not only financially but motivationally to to know that there are some people that voluntarily, they don't have to pay. You'll get this content no matter what, but they support it. And that's, well, thank you so much. With that said, I wanted to talk to you all about Jesus and Buddha and what's the difference and are they compatible? And what about God and free will? And there are quite a few more questions.

Starting point is 03:41:42 I think I've got two or three. I'm happy to talk with Bernardo again. Me too. It's been a delight. And John is my brother in arms. Yeah, very much. I'd be happy to talk with him again. Great. We'll arrange that again.

Starting point is 03:41:55 And if anyone wants to know where to find out more about you, John, and then Bernardo, where do they go? The best thing, I mean, other than, you know, doing academic search on Google Scholar for my papers is, you know, go onto YouTube, go onto my channel, look at Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, which is about the meeting crisis, of course. You can take a look at a dialogical series I did with Greg Enriquez about consciousness called Untangling the World Not. By the way, Bernardo, that's a reference to Schopenhauer, right? Untangling the world not by the way bernardo that's a that's a reference to schopenhauer uh right untangling the world not of consciousness um and then i'm currently doing one called the elusive eye the nature and function of the self uh with uh greg enriquez again and

Starting point is 03:42:35 christopher master pietro uh so that would be so and then if you want to see more of these kinds of dialogues on my channel i have an ongoing dialogical series called Voices with Riveki, where I try to exemplify how we can weave together argumentation and genuine dialogos. Bernardo? Just go to bernardocastrop.com. There's a lot of free stuff linked from there. Okay, great. And if you all want, I can give you the video files for this once it's up on our site. If you want to use it as extra content on yours, you're more than welcome to. Thank you so much again. Thank you. This was far different in a positive manner than I expected it to be. I'm glad that I took a backseat because it's mainly about, like I said, Theo Maki, but also Theo Locution. So thank you all. I'm happy that you were. Yeah. And I wanted to thank you. You helped us to steer out of getting locked into local minima that I thought was very helpful for both of us. So thank you. Thank you. Great, great pleasure meeting you. Great pleasure indeed. Enormous pleasure from my side as well, John. Great to meeting you and

Starting point is 03:43:42 getting to know you. Let's do this again. I'm happy to do so. And not that I love Don. I love Don Hoffman, but I'm glad that he wasn't here because it would be far too many voices. And it was great to see you all get to know one another and try and understand each other's viewpoints. Thank you. Excellent. Take care, everybody. Take care. Have some chocolate, John. Bye bye. Okay. Bye bye. Bye.

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Bernardo Kastrup and John Vervaeke [Round 1] Theolocution on Consciousness, Idealism, and Naturalism

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.