Within Reason - #139 David Bentley Hart - All Things Are Full of Gods

Episode Date: January 18, 2026

Get Huel today with this exclusive offer for New Customers of 15% OFF with code alexoconnor - https://huel.com/alexoconnor (Minimum $50 purchase).Come to my tour in February, click here for tickets.TIMESTAMPS:0:00 – Intro 0:32 – Are All Things Full of Gods? 8:51 – Subjectivity and the Scientific Third Person 18:56 – What is the Materialistic Worldview? 28:45 – Consciousness of the Gaps? 38:21 – What’s Wrong with Emergence? 1:00:18 – Why Panpsychism is False 1:10:25 – Is There a Fundamental Unit of Consciousness? 1:23:08 – Why Are There Individual Selves? 1:27:43 – What’s Special About the Brain? 1:40:35 – Where Does the Self Go After Death?

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in the description, and I hope to see you there. David Bentley Hart, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. The presocratic philosopher Thales is said by, I think, both Plato and Aristotle, to have claimed that all things are full of gods. You chose this phrase as the title of your second most recent book, and I suppose a good place to start is, what do you think Thales meant by that? Actually, I have no idea what Thales meant by that. I know what I meant by stealing it, but in the case of Thelies, I would say this. It reflects, obviously, a vision of the cosmos.

It's not mechanistic, obviously. And that's why I chose it. My contention throughout the book is that there is, in the workings of nature, there is a necessity, a kind of intentionality and a kind of consciousness that's primordial. And I tend to think that this was, in some ways, better intuitive in ages when people thought that gods or demons or demones or spirits inhabited nature. and, you know, it might have been understood in a largely pictorial way as nymphs and niads and nereids or whatever, but I think it reflects a more insightful view of the way nature works than what became increasingly the default view after the 17th century in the west of a mechanistic and either haunted or, utterly eliminativist reality.

I wonder, I mean, my listeners will know that for some time I've been discussing the idea of mind as fundamental and materialism, not accounting for things like consciousness, or maybe not even accounting for anything. But I suppose just one thing that we haven't really covered in detail on this show is the historical trajectory, so to speak. So maybe briefly it might be helpful if you can tell me what you think happened with the development of the science. method to sort of ridge the world of this mental agency and mathematicize the whole surroundings of us. Well, it was a perfectly honorable project in the 17th century in some ways, in other ways not. I mean, when Leibnett speaks of putting nature on the rack or bacon speaks of knowledge as a path to mastery of nature, you can see the seeds of all the most destructive aspects of modernity and capitalism and the culture we now inhabit in which the world really has been reduced in many ways in our minds to, and well not an endless, but a vast reservoir of resources to be exploited by the will and for consumer astens. But it began more humbly simply as an attempt, obviously, to create a working inductive method that didn't presume more than it could conclude from the evidence.

And so it tried to prescind from the Aristotelian fourfold nexus of causality, due away especially with formal and final causality. And by that time, I should point out, already Aristotle had been begun to be misconstrued as somebody who had created a defective, mechanical model, already what he meant by Atea was being, but what the school meant by Kauzei was now being thought of already in terms rather like what we mean by causality, that is, the energetic exchange between objects in motion. But it was an attempt to prescind and in so doing to banish from our picture of nature anything that had the characteristics of mind or spirit, That is the things that we could presume from our own experience of ourselves, having a proposiveness or a formal causality, and all of that was segregated into a separate space. And so, of course, the age of the mechanical philosophy began as a kind of dualism in which nature is mechanical and mindless.

mind is like a resident ghost, you know, Gilbert Riles' phrase, the ghost in the machine, and it was simply assumed that the two could, you know, just exist in an immacable divorce. Under some sort of regime, some sort of occasionalism in which perhaps the two acted in harmony or under some obscure occult form of causality is in Descartes in which the mind being utterly unlike mechanism or race extensor nonetheless can exert effects. And I'm quite happy, you know, having no pretense of being able, therefore, to understand a mind or spirit or God or whatever, or the soul in mechanistic terms. Two problems, though, of course, quickly emerged.

One was that you really can't perfect pure induction. As a method, it's an ideal, but it's not actually a practice, always some degree of, always some question, especially in the life sciences, even to this day, one asks what is it for, you know, and trying to understand some aspect of an organism. But nonetheless, it was perfectly, it was like wearing tinted spectacles so you could see certain things and not others and understand natural processes in terms of machine processes. But, of course, scientific ambition is necessarily omnivorous. It wants to understand everything, so it soon did turn to the phenomena of mental life.

The problem is you have a model then that exists solely by virtue of the exclusion of mental phenomena from our picture of nature, and then using that model an attempt was being made to understand mental phenomena, which leads, and I'm taking a long time to say this invariably to the sort of diffuse materialist strategies we have now, like Eliminativism, which is the most consistent and the most insane at the same time, other forms of reductionism, supervenience, being sort of middle position, emergentism, none of which I think really holds water. Yeah, I was trying to find a direct quote from the text, because I remember you speaking quite powerfully about specifically this idea that the modern

scientific method comes about by removing this phenomenological aspect. It sort of focuses on, I mean, if you ask a scientist, what's the point of science? They might say something like, well, it's an attempt to move away from our subjective assessments of the world. You know, I'm looking at this table and you're looking at this table. So what we want to do is look at the table from a third person perspective. And we want to say, what is this table like really doing? What's it actually made out of not according to me or according to you, but consciousness itself is the first person. That's what consciousness means. It means to sort of be this first person experiential kind of state. And so you speak a bit. And the text is, of course, in a dialogue in that sort of celebrated

philosophical tradition. It's a very self-indulgent book for those who have to bring them. But I think it's a wonderful format. And there's a reason why philosophers have done it for so long. Although I have seen, I saw an internet meme like a joke the other day about like how philosophers will talk about how wonderful the philosophical dialectic is. And then in reality it was just like this wall of text and then one of Socrates's opponents going like in dubitably so Socrates. Yes. Well, that's inevitable. I'm afraid. I tried to avoid that. I actually tried to give Hephaestus his own voice. I think you've done quite a good job of doing so. But what I wanted to ask you was, specifically this idea of the third-person perspective of science. You write in this dialogue form, but I suspect it's your own personal view, that there is no such thing. What is this third-person

perspective that science seeks to discover? Well, it's a curious thing. In fact, it's a maxim of method that has become inverted almost into a metaphysical premise by some Daniel Dennett, probably most obviously. I will not speak ill of him now, de mortuaries and all that. And he was a brilliant man. He was just wrong about a great number of things, I think. But the third-person method says, yeah, not only moving away from subjectivity, but moving away from the structure of subjectivity and trying to impose it on nature, presumably then we can step back and achieve advantage on a phenomenon that doesn't bear the impress of our own personality or will or longing. But this consists in, of course, an accumulation

of other reports and trying to sort through them. And yet it does seem to be something that's sort of systematically forgotten that the third person perspective as such does not exist. The third person perspective is itself, a distillation of first-person perspectives. And so in trying to understand what it is we're seeing in this view from nowhere, you know, the scientific images, what Wilfrid seller is called it, rather than the manifest image. We never actually get away from having to examine what the conditions of the manifest image are at the first-person level. And then trying to do that, I mean, as with Dennett, you can end up with, say, you know, the appearance of intentionality is something that we attribute to other things.

And to ourselves, when we're taking the intentional stance, you know, there's a heroic Herculane effort there to make the self an object of a third-person perspective rather than acknowledge the third-person perspective is based on that first-person perspective, to the point that he could say I am attributing intentionality to myself when I'm looking at myself from an intentional advantage, which obviously is an infinite regress in the making. Again, a perfectly honorable thing to do, and at the humblest level of methodological abstention and asceticism and discipline, it's a good practice. But when it becomes absolute and changes from method to metaphysics and changes from a limited method to a conviction about the shape of reality itself, you're doing nothing other than what you're accusing those who rely on subjectivity of doing. You're simply taking your subjective impression under the form of, and the somewhat dissembling form of a perfectly disinterested and perfectly detached third person perspective.

I find it really helpful to speak in analogy when trying to get this idea across. And there are all sorts. One of the best that I've come across is this idea of the aeroplane. And that, you know, you can fly an airplane blind because you just have all of this instrumentation which measures your, velocity and your height, the air pressure outside and stuff like that. And it kind of represents it on graphs and in sort of mathematical formula. I don't know what a plane really looks like, but it's all there on the dashboard. And this is kind of a method to use. You don't have a pilot license? Unfortunately not, although I don't have a driver's license either. I thought it would

be funnier. That takes me. I'm in Britain actually knowing people without driver's licenses. It must be very true thing. It would be more of a hindrance than anything, especially. in London. I know someone who got their pilots license before their driver's license, because that's just what it's like to live in England. But even in a car, you know, you have these representations, you have the speedometer. And we find these sort of useful ways to sort of, a sort of useful method to understand what's going on outside. But it would be this insane mistake to kind of forget that we've come up with that description, you know, to help us navigate the world and think that the description there is the actual world, that outside of

the airplane, there just exists like a speedometer and, you know, this, this various set of instrumentation. But this is, of course, this is the problem with method in general. On the one hand, what you're saying is something that's a, I don't know why I keep mentioning Dennett, I guess, just because I have a beard like his now and going bald and looking more like him every day, is he would say, yes, the user interfaces that, uh, you know, are sort of evolutionarily determined algorithms by which we navigate a terrain that otherwise would be impossible for us, because we wouldn't be able to move down into the systems and subsystems. When we go for a walk, we're not consciously operating our tendons and our nerves. It's when that, and we all acknowledge that, you know, even before Kant, we're aware that there's a realm of representation. that, if not, again, it doesn't necessarily disassemble,

but also doesn't necessarily reveal. It allows us to operate in a world that would be impossible for us if it were just a one-to-one correspondence between our neurology and the complexity of sensible data out there. But then, having said that, you have to recognize that the user interface is on that side of an economy, which on the other side is still, And I don't want to just speak of consciousness.

It's the full, it's the totality of the activity of mind, consciousness, intentionality, unity of perspective. And to say that that too is a user interface available to, and then it would always resist the notion of the Cartesian theater and say, you know, there's not one. There are multiple drafts of knowledge. There's not one panoptic central module. And yet, invariably, he ended up talking that way anyway, soonerally. there was always this occult figure there of the one for whom there is an intentional stance, of the one who is using the user illusion. And so method whenever, and it's not just materialists, of course, obviously anyone

who employs a method with such strict fidelity and such absolute credulity that the method becomes your metaphysics or becomes your ontology, sooner or later you're going to end up in absurdity. And I think at least the forms of materialist reduction we have for mental agency have been uniformly absurd. Whether some sort of, say, panpsychism or other that's more plausible than, say, integrated information theory, which I don't think works at all, could come along. I don't know, because I have problems with that as well, at least in its modern forms. But what we're talking about, it's not an accusation heave just at materialist. This is the problem of method whenever we mistake our method for the reality of what we're using it to try to get a perspective on.

Yeah, another area that sometimes crops up is in quantum mechanics, the so-called Copenhagen interpretation is also known as the shut up and calculate approach, which is to say we have this mathematical model of probability distributions and the collapse of the wave function. And as long as the maths work, we'll just say that's what's really going. on when the critique for many people of this interpretation is to say, well, it's a great model. There's a great way to make predictions about, you know, quantum mechanics. But to say that's actually what it is is a little bit crazy. And I think they're right in saying so. And it's a similar kind of mistake that's being made here, perhaps. I would say so, yes.

Mind you, I prefer the Copenhagen interpretation to say the Everettian. Sort of drawn to the notion of decoherence because that has a kind of fascinating ontological shape to it that you can negotiate in terms of measurement of the perspective of the measure and all that. But on the whole, yes, the Copenhagen interpretation at least leaves us. Neil Spauer was right about that. You know, you have the predictive apparatus in place. But he and Schrodinger, too, would say, do not mistake this for the really real. Okay, don't do that. Yes.

Quite, yeah, some people forget that Schroding as cat is supposed to be a reducteo ad absurdum. Right. I'm supposed to actually believe that cat is said in the life. You're supposed to believe that, you know, this is the ludicrous sort of outcome of believing that the method is the metaphysical truth. This is the bait of ed. On that, we'll get back to the show in just a moment. But first, if you're anything like me, getting the right. kind of food in your diet can be a bit of a challenge. There's quite a lot of vitamins and minerals

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And if you use the code Alex O'Connor at checkout as a new customer, you'll also get 15% off. Complete nutrition while saving your time and your money. With that said, back to the show. Yes, quite. On that point, then, I mean, we've used a few words so far, one of which is like mechanistic or material. And the kind of mind-first metaphysics that you have, and I am increasingly becoming susceptible to, is often posed against this mechanistic, naturalistic, physicalist, whatever sort of term you want to use.

And yet, the question that I always find it difficult to even begin answering is, what is that thing? Like, when we say mechanistic or a universe that's just made of, like, inert matter, like, what are we talking about? what is that picture of the universe? And I ask you because, even though it's not your view, your book is in many ways an exercise in steel manning the opposition because you have different characters holding different views. Yeah, no, and I did try to be honest about that with Hephaestus. I didn't want to make him a straw man. And in part because I have some sympathy

for his skepticism regarding how much you can actually conclude, and more because I have sympathy for his problem of evil meditations at the end of the book. But as I say, it began merely as a matter of method. That is, you can isolate processes in nature without presuming, you know, what their final calls would be in Aristotivian terms, not even necessarily assuming that there isn't such a thing, but they're just, they have to be banished from method as ghostly distractions from the phenomenon before you, supposedly. And in that act of isolation, you learn a great deal. I mean, so much of modern medicine and all of the rest of our technology comes from this shut up and calculate

or shut up and chart out the circulation of the blood. And so we should be grateful for this. But what quickly accumulated around it like an impenetrable panoply was this vision of reality as nothing but the mindless exchange of energetic forces between masses in objects, mass, form a quanta of mass in motion. Now, again, as with Schrodinger, for instance, Galileo was misunderstood on this when he said, you know, the realm of the sciences is the realm of the calculable, which is this realm of absolute quantities, not qualities, therefore not of color and taste and says, all the things that we experience as reality and what I've called the semantics of reality as opposed to its bare mathematical syntax. And Galileo wasn't saying, again,

that this is reality as such. She was saying this is what the sciences can learn to calculate because measurement was the great thing. I think we failed to understand how much of early modern science was the discovery of the absoluteness of measurement. But that picture that then becomes such that by the time, with Descartes, for instance, and having a very restricted notion, nothing like the ancient sort of multifarious, multi-layered view of what spiritual mind is or how it interacts with the material order. We have a realm of just pure mechanism and a realm of pure soul. And souls have, are sort of monads that have all the characteristics that we attribute to ourselves, including reason and discursive powers, all that. So anywhere where

where any of those powers are lacking, therefore everything, the power to perceive qualities, the power to have sensation or even no pain. And so animals are treated as machines. Well, right there, of course, we see something that's obviously horribly untrue, which led to abominable practices of cruelty with an easy conscience. But anyone who hasn't been bedazzled by this mistaking of method for metaphysics or for an ontology, can see the pain that an animal suffers, can see the joy it suffers, experiences. And right there, that should apprises that this mechanistic view of nature, at least in either reducing mind to this sort of pure monad that accounts for every aspect of subjectivity and agency, and matter

in the material realm is just pure, mindless matter, already has a destructive effect, not only to the sanity of our vision because we're denying what's evident and obvious, but also because it leads to incredible license. It once gives us power over nature and a sense of license to use it as we will. And sooner or later, this will, of course, translate itself into a way of seeing humankind as well, even, you know, we saw that in the 20th century, how much of the special evils of the 20th century, there's special evils in every century. I'm not doing a comparison here, but had to do with seeing all of nature and all of humanity as a technology, a genetic metatomy technology, a racial

technology, an economic, a political technology, to be corrected, to be re-engineered, to be redesigned. And we see it still now, in some of the more lurid fantasies that come out of Silicon Valley and other insane asylums. Yeah. And so, I mean, you say you contrast like, what, mindless, like, fundamental reality. You say the universe is made out of sort of mindless stuff. How do you envision what that stuff looks like to the materialist? Just like a bunch of little tiny marbles, little physical matter that doesn't have any kind of mental agency?

Well, even when they deny it, that is, in fact, what they're seeing. They're 17th century revisions of Democritus. They're atomists who sort of see the universe as the fortuitous result of an especially complex billiards game. And, or pool. We don't really play billiards in this country. Yes. But billiards is more interesting. And one of the curious things about Daniel Dennett, for instance, to keep going, reverting to him.

Maybe it's because he can't defend himself now, so, you know, cheap shot, is that as much as he would try to stay at the cutting edge of things like molecular biology, and he was quite good at understanding it, you know, I, too, a medabler in these things, and I know how hard it is to stay abreast of that. And he was extremely bright in that way. But he still, when he began to apply philosophical conclusions, he kept coming back to mechanistic prejudices. Now, they may have become more cybernetic in grammar. That is, he would talk about robots rather than threshing machines, you know. And he saw computational models of mind, which I believe to be just total category areas. He sold these as deflationary pictures of what mental processes are in us. And so that, again, our subjective states are like the icons on the computer screen.

They're just algorithmic distillates that we use as the data processing engines we are. And the syntactic engines of our brains, having become semantic engines, we use them in a way that looks like intentionality to, someone who goes unneged. But yeah, I do think there's, and even quantum mechanics hasn't done much to change that. I mean, those who are strict materialists will often talk almost magically about the quantum realm, as if, you know, I think Alex Rosenberg is a good example. He uses it as proof, mechanistic proof of a kind that the principle of sufficient reason

doesn't hold because particles spring into existence and can only, in a way, that can only be statistically accounted for, not locally accounted for, right? But he seems to fail to realize this happens within a quantum field that, you know, has rather, if it has laws, rather mysterious laws of its own. So it's a bad argument, but it's indicative that he's seeing even quantum and mechanics is somehow unfolded into this coarser mechanistic picture. So I think in their most unreflective moments, which unfortunately are the moments that get translated into their actual philosophical conclusions, yeah, they are still thinking that way.

They are still thinking about little billiard balls and why so many of them can take something like the computer game of life and how it generates complex patterns through a few simple rules within, a quarantined virtual topography of discrete cells, they see that as somehow telling us something about the integrated organic, creative processes of biology, which it seems to me obviously, and especially neither at the level of the organism nor the level of the genotype of its evolution.

So, yeah, I'd say there's a lot of a kind of, I don't want to say superstitious. I do, actually. It's a superstition. They still have this picture, even when they're sophisticated enough at other moments to know that it's a crude sketch. Now, of you that's often levied against, I don't know if there's a good word for like idealists, panpsychists, pantheists, like any sort of mind first people. God is sometimes. Yeah, that would do. Theism would be an obvious category there. Yeah, well, I want to. to get to that.

But in fact, as a means to getting there, I kind of wanted to ask, like, about this accusation that sometimes pose, which is like, okay, fair enough. So, look, the scientific method is a method, and it might be a mistake to assume that, you know, that is our metaphysics. But the fact that that's a mistake isn't enough to say that it definitely isn't the metaphysics. And it also isn't enough, even if it did do that, it isn't enough to say, oh, therefore, you know, it must be like mind at the foundation of reality. And some people get the impression that

there's this kind of idealism of the gaps where people are saying like, you know, we know that consciousness is there and we know that science doesn't offer a metaphysics. So let's put consciousness in there. But we want to avoid that, right? So could you tell us how we get from where we are now to like the actual case for like the metaphysical truth? Well, sometimes in fact you do get an idealism of the gaps. Of course, you get a materialism of the gaps, too. I mean, you know, emergence is a magic word in materialism and trying to get past the conceptual difference between weak or structural emergence and strong emergence and the way the two are sort of merged without commentary in a way that doesn't make sense. But yeah, there is an idealism of the gaps,

but that's, in the book we're discussing, I tried to do just the opposite, which, was to say that when we attend to the phenomena of mind, of life, and of language, those are the three topics of the book. And I take them to be one in the same problem, actually, for a materialist metaphysics. It's not enough just to say, or it's not only enough to say that the materialist narrative is defective, it's also not enough to do what, say, the intelligent design people do and speak of irreducible complexities, because they're still thinking in terms of mechanical complexities, in which, yes, there's an intentional agency, but they just think that's sort of a higher order in the same way that I could design a computer, perhaps, if I knew how to do that. I can't even fix a toaster, you know. But if I could, you know, I could then go on to argue that evolution has forged me as a system that is mechanical to, you know, simply saying that these orders of complexity look designed from outside also isn't sufficient.

The issue that's interesting is the nature of the order. Is it an order that really can be shown to be topped down in an irreducible way and at an original and primordial level? Now, I don't believe that you can rest content with the terminal dualism. You can't just say, well, there is a power of mind and there is a power of matter. Because this is an old metaphysical quandary, of course, if they can interact at all, that means there's some ontological context. of non-repugnancy that they share in common, that still has to be looked at as the more original principle. So for me, a dualism doesn't work at any number of levels,

but especially it doesn't work as an explanatory model. But when we get to the issue of actually looking at what mind does, and whether it's not whether it's compatible with the mechanical narrative or whether, in fact, it demands something more like, well, the Aristotelian model is a good example. I'm not like a Thomist who's just, you know, dogmatic Aristotelian, so anyone, you know, just throw the word out like formal causality. But nonetheless, the etiology that Aristotle developed

was not an attempt at a mechanical explanation of how different forces converge to create natural forms. Rather, it's a set of rational relations that are mind-like. Now, the question is, Is that just a representation? Is Kant right that we're just totally limited to that apparatus? Or is Hegel right in saying, well, no, even the ability to recognize representation as a limitation means we've already got a rational power going beyond it and recognizing a more

prior condition. And I agree with Hegel that, you know, that there's something fundamentally incoherent in proclaiming the nature of a limit that you can't get past. Because if you can't get past it, you shouldn't be able to understand its nature. you don't know what it's limiting you from, all right? But, and just saying, ding on Zich, well, that in itself is already an assertion about ontology and manifestation, right? So we look at the phenomena around us what mind does and try to construct a narrative and find that in many ways it seems to rest entirely on itself. Consciousness has an infuriating quality that, you know, everyone from Aristotle,

de Brentano and Husserl agonized over, or at least noted, I don't know if Aristotle agonized over it. We don't really have his dialogues. We only have lecture notes. But that consciousness is instantly recursive. Consciousness is only consciousness because it's conscious of itself being conscious. So if you're trying to say reduce this to a mechanistic, narrative one module, pro-preceptively, looking at a larger module as part of, you do get an infinite regressive causes, whereas if you do something more like what Schelling did or what Kashmiri Shaivite philosophers did understanding that, or in Vedanta, supremely adish chakurit-charia, recognizing that consciousness is its own premise and rests upon

itself that you avoid that sort of interest. This is just one argument among hundreds of it. But the same is true with intentionality. Intentionality, always. always, when you look at it carefully, has both a transcendental or remote and within the compass of which, more proximate ends and desired. And again, how do you square that with the materialist narrative when you look at it? You find that there's always this prior purpose to having a purpose. But then you can get much more concrete than that. I mean, you know, all these movements in the life sciences in recent years have been attempts. like systems biology and processual biology and Dennis Nobles biological relativity and all that.

Honest attempts to get in touch with the sort of hierarchical structure of life in which there seem to be not only infrangible composites like at the lowest level nucleic acids and proteins and things like that. Again, that's the intelligent design approach. But more than that, a whole system of intelligibility and coordinate. activity at the top of which there is a literally semiotic level, semantic and syntactic and symbolic thought being involved in it, in which there's an actual hermeneutical dynamism going on in, first of all, within an organism, how cells can re-edit their own genomes and coordination with one another, but how they pass information on to another generation in which an RNA polymerase has to read it out from the DNA,

and then it's re-inscribed in the DNA, you know, this is an interpretive activity. And then you have to say, well, this is more than just an analogy to language. This is doing what language does. And then you can look at the structure of language, and can you really reduce that to an evolutionary narrative

that starts from a pre-linguistic, pre-semantic, pre-Semiotic? And I think absolutely you cannot. Again, that would take up many hours arguing that, and so on and so forth. The one last thing I'll point out when I talk about the life sciences, one of the great biologists who was also a philosophical intellect, you know, sort of the next generation after Pallani, was Robert Rosen. And his book life itself actually was one of the great, one of the books that really challenged

my own sense of what I understood. It took me to a much deeper appreciation of, for him, the laws of life are fundamental, and the laws of physics are just limits condition. So you cannot get to life starting with physics as your only canon of laws. Rather, you have to start with, and this is a rather radical proposal, but it makes sense. But if you follow that to its end, I think you're going to end up finding that you're back at formal and final causes, and structure of mind becomes the paradigm for understanding the structure of everything, language, life, and certainly the agency of mind. Now, I could go on and on, but as you know, it's a long book, so why I believe this.

Yes, it's a long book for a reason. And what I'm interested in doing is picking out areas that I think will be of particular interest to our listeners, based on some of the conversations I've been recently having. So one question that you've covered, but perhaps people will want a bit more detail on, is what's wrong with emergence? I mean, there is this view that, okay, it is a bit weird that the universe is made out of, you know,

material stuff, just a bunch of inert marbles that bump into each other, and that somehow you get things like the taste of Coca-Cola and the redness of red from their arrangement. But what's so funny about that, given that we have all kinds of processes which are not present in the fundamental part, the wetness of water is not present in the hydrogen and the oxygen. You know, the sponginess of the cake, to borrow John Cottingham's example, isn't in any of the ingredients. None of the ingredients are spongy, but if you put them together in the right way and the right temperature, you get sponginess. Why can't consciousness be something like that?

Oh, for the simple reason that, again, that's what I was talking about. earlier the way the word emergence covers a multitude of sins. It also covers a gap. There are two kinds of emergence. The one you're talking about is obvious. It rationally follows not only from a materialist metaphysics, but just any knowledge that composites do things that the individual ingredients don't do. We also know, however, that what composites do are structural amplifications of powers resident in the ingredient. So the wetness of water follows from the specific nature of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom and the way in which the combustible nature of either is negated in this

combination. And there is a, you can see the molecular stacking. You understand that water is a physical extension of a physical process. And you'd say, well, okay, brain processes are the same thing. and brain processes may be. The structure of consciousness, however, to begin with, poses a very radically different. And this is where we get to strong emergence. And the really, again, as to say, the most consistent materialist position is sort of like

that of Paul and Patricia Churchill and other illimitivists who want to say that everything is weak emergence, if we could just understand, if we could just get rid of the folk lore of things like intrinsic intentional states. But you notice, in order to get to that, you have to not show how intrinsic intentional states arise from intrinsically non-intentional ingredients. You have to do away with intrinsic intentional states as illusory.

Then it understood this. Rosenberg understands this. Because here we're talking about phenomena at a different level of, if you want to call it emergence, of emergence or of appearance. You can see it. I remember vividly, we don't even, again,

I'm going to sound like an intelligent design theorist, but I remember vividly reading somebody defending the notion of emergence by two examples. One was the wetness of water. That seems to be everyone's favorite. Because, you know, sure, it's counterintuitive that two combustible elements produce a viscosity can extinguish flame.

But the other was a computer and how you couldn't reduce its functions to the arrangement of its parts. And, of course, what's immediate, should be immediately obvious is that the two are discontinuous examples to begin with. So even if you want to do what I said earlier

and reduce the designer of the computer down to his or her constituent parts, you're beginning there with a phenomenon that has been created by the impress of a form upon things that produces functions that only function fully at the hermeneutical level of a conscious and intending mind, because the physical activities on the screen

have no intrinsic meanings, right? What we've done is we've created a medium by which a different kind of causality. We've created, first of all, a medium that required a real intentionality. And real intentionality is already an anomaly within a mechanistic narrative. It simply is because it allows for a finality to be a real rational and anteceding calls in the present. Not a mechanical cause, but a real rationale that determines the shape of things.

But even when you get past that, you realize that what the computer is doing is not what the computer is doing. It's what an intentional agency at one end of a process and another intentionality, the other end of the process is doing in a hermeneutical space that does not exist at the material plane at all. Or a noetic space where a finality and all of the ingredients of what go into the phenomenon that has this finality in this form exists already in a kind of ideal unity. So idealism naturally is a sort of natural intuition to begin with. Well, the more you look in to think about the structure of a language, the more you look at the structure of mind, but also the more you look at the structure of life, the harder and harder, almost to the point of vanishing away entirely, becomes the possibility of seeing it as a structural emergence. What a wheel does is a structural emergence of what the molecules in a wheel do.

What a house does is not exactly a structural emergence of what the ingredients of a house do, but with the application of another intentional agency, you get a house. What the mind that's building that house is doing requires an intentionality that I would argue is so primordial, and again, so recursively infinite, if reduced to material causes, as to be really impossible to reconcile with materialism. Again, though, emergence is a useful term because it's a qualifier, it's used as a university in order to cover over an analogy. We can strong emperors are two very different things. Structural emergence and a true strong emergence.

And so every once in a while you'll meet a materialist who will just say, okay, yes, I do believe in strong emergence. That's just the way reality works, and we see it at the quantum level. particles just appear. Okay, so we're not really now talking in terms of the scientific rationality that's trying to give an explanation of why this happens. We're just saying it happens. Two problems, again, as I mentioned earlier, with Rosenberg, particles don't just appear. This isn't ex nihilo. This is within a quantum field, there are certain statistically predictable events. All right. And when you try to translate this out of that already very reductive and questionable understanding of quantum mechanics, what you basically have is magic. And I don't mind

people believing in magic. I'm not a dogmatist regarding anyone's ontology. If you believe in magic, go for it. But don't call it science and don't tell me that this is the more coherent ontology of mind than the up and the up and the least one. You know, I find it quite... Or of language, yes. I find, I mean, it's quite, gets a bit sort of complicated and we use

some philosophical terminology when talking about strong emergence, a weak emergence. One thing I like to point out, which I think gets at a similar point, but I wonder what you make of this, is that in all of the most sort of jarring instances of emergence, you know, when I talk to people about consciousness.

And they say, consciousness is emergent, just like the image on a screen is emergent from zeros and ones in a computer. Or temperature is emergent from vibrations of atoms. Atoms aren't hot or cold, but if they vibrate altogether, then you get this thing called temperature, which emerges. And I came from reading Thomas Nagel. He says something very, very briefly in like one sentence that suddenly sort of stopped me in my tracks. And I thought, I don't know if this applies universally. But it seems to me that most of the time when someone gives an analogy for consciousness of something else which is emergent, that other thing, which is emergent, relies on the existence of consciousness to emerge. So temperature, for example, if all you mean by temperature is fast vibration of atoms, then nothing interesting has actually emerged.

You've got individual atoms which vibrate very fast. You put lots of them together and you have an object which is made of really fast vibrating atoms. Nothing interesting has happened. If you want to say, no, no, no, but there's this new thing, which is like heat, it's this thing called temperature hot and cold. Well, that's something that you experience. You don't experience the vibration of the atoms. You experience this phenomenological, like qualia, for one of the better word, of temperature. And so the thing that's emerged there, qualet, yeah, is, is, because it's singular.

Guard our Latin. Yes, quite, quite, quite. I need to be held to account. the thing that's emerged in that instance of temperature, the interesting thing, is a conscious experience. Likewise, the zeros and ones on a computer produce, well, they produce an image on a screen. Yes, only if there is a conscious mind looking at the image. Otherwise, all there is is a bunch of vibrating atoms or waves or electromagnetic waves coming out of a screen. And so when somebody says, you know, isn't consciousness emergent just like all this other stuff?

all that other stuff relies on consciousness. So you've actually still only got this one thing in the universe called consciousness, which allegedly emerges. And all of these analogies actually sort of presuppose the very thing they're trying to analogize. Does that make sense? Yeah, but can I make some distinctions here? Please. We have to be careful when we use the word consciousness, because in Anglophone philosophy, this tends to be separated from the questions of intentionality, unity. of apprehension, because there is a sort of divide-and-conquer approach.

If you can break these down to discrete faculties, you can show how each of them in isolation is a mechanistic. Now, my argument of the book, and I think argument of better philosophers than I, there's a moment of false humility there. But the argument of all is that mental agency isn't dissoluble that way into discrete faculties. That's just a facet-to-parais, and we use it to talk about this. So it's not just consciousness, it's intentionality.

It's understanding meaning as. Now, if you want to talk about temperature, it's easier to say, well, that could just be, you know, a purely functionalist way of saying it is a form of data processing in which the illusion or the epiphenomenon of experience or not the epiphenomenal, but the functional token of experience has a part to play. I find that wrong already because I think to recognize anything. as anything, even the sensation, there's always a prior engagement of intentionality. There's no such thing as consciousness that's pure patience, that's pure. So you've always got, already, you start from an ontological deficit in your description. Something primal to the experience is being emitted from your description. With the image on the screen, yeah, obviously, I mean, this is a purely hermeneutical

transaction at this point. It's not just that you're receiving data. you are you are seeing as because you're intending as a certain meaning otherwise yes all you have are photoelectric events or even that even that's too descriptive that's too thick a description for what's actually going on because but but it's you know and remember the image well you give you Now, the example, optical illusions, say the rabbit duck, is what looked at these is that you can tell yourself to see it as one or the other, right? Which should apprise you, the optical illusions are, I think, much more of a challenge

for the materialist view of functionalism, especially, than we give them credit for being. Then it would say, well, here's the purpose of having this ability. But again, that doesn't explain away the preposterous notion that intentionality is an illusion of the intentional stance. And so, yes, these metaphors, I don't remember that sentence from Thomas Nagel's book. I do remember all the nasty things that were said about him for pointing out some rather humbly obvious things by people who saw him as an apostate from the Church of Materialism, you know, like Stephen Pinker. Not to be nasty, but Thomas Nagel is far better philosopher than Stephen Pinker. It's just, that's like saying the sky is higher than the grass from my perspective. But, well, I mean, Pinker's not a philosopher really anyway, except in a sense.

But, yeah, I mean, that's the thing. We're always dependent on it. I've had people say, well, you know, the mind just works like television. You know, just as the camera sends images to the screen there, the mind, the world uses the data processing by neurology to send images to whom? Who's watching? Who's looking? It's an intending agency. And so we're not really getting closer to an explanation because I'm pretty sure the television isn't watching itself.

Yes. Yeah. That's the thing. It's like that consciousness needs to be embedded in, because we're so. so used to consciousness because like we can't but use our consciousness when we think when we when we like imagine like the TV or something we almost just like forget that the whole reason we can make sense of there being an image on a screen which is like made of fancy colors telling a story like is because we're presupposing consciousness it's impossible it is the sort of the old

Barclan point that it's impossible to conceive of not conceiving something. And so when you really try to sort of reflect on the nature of what's actually out there, if you remove all of that conscious stuff, if you remove the color and the heat and the feeling of sponginess when you press your fingers into it and all you're left with is the physical descriptions of the matter, nothing interesting has emerged at all. You've just got a bunch of It's also bumping into each other. Yeah, and it's also a curious assumption about, again, as to say, ontology, what is the really real? Now, admittedly, that's not a point you can settle because, of course, the very grammar of the question is already suspect.

But why would the bear distalate of physical limit conditions? Let's put this in terms of Robert Rosen's issues about life sciences. We don't have to talk about consciousness yet. Why would that be the reality, whereas the semantics of experience and of the world? Why is it? And again, as you may remember from the book, I don't, especially when I get to the conversation about information and whether information becomes a fundamental law of physics or what that would mean. I don't even like to say the bare syntax, because syntax really is something that exists

only relation to a semantic level already. I mean, again, this is my rather, I mean, platinian, I suppose, or Vedantic notion of top-down causation. I honestly believe that the syntactic level is wholly dependent on the semantic and the semantic on symbolic thought in a way that can't be. You can't invert that. You can metaphorically. you can go some way towards making it sound plausible. I just don't think it works in the end.

And why have we made the ontological decision that what does not need, you know, the things that actually need to be explained to us? Because, of course, the phenomenon itself is not the physical action as such, right? It's not the physical event. Your, the what it's like, just to use NACALS, I'm just the what it's like of that experience of temperature.

And I don't mean just at a psychological level, what it's like for you. I just mean what it's like phenomenologically from any subjective, unified vantage of intentionality and consciousness is not the same thing as the physical phenomenon. It's how these two are related. That's the question we're trying to answer when we talk about things like mind, but also of life and language. and then simply saying, well, we're going to take, you know, mistake Galileo's methodological bracketing and turn it into instead of metaphysics is that we're actually saying, and this is what happens

in philosophy of mind, that things that we know to be real, like intentionality and experience and unity of apprehension and so on, aren't real at all. They can either be conjured away as folk mythology, you know, as the way the, and sooner or later we'll be able to reduce this to how, I don't know, enzymes are working or electrochemical process. Or, you know, their functionalist illusions, user interfaces. It always turns into a weird, and it all turns into eliminatism, illuminativism in the end anyway. And why? Why is that the real? Can you just define Eliminativism for our listeners? Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm not a regular viewer, so I don't know. That's just fine. Poppics come up.

Eliminativism in America, the most famous proponents are Paul and Patricia Churchill, and husband and wife, not brother and sister, which says that all the things that we're in the custom of talking about, in the habit of talking about, like, beliefs, intentions, desires, that's a psychological folklore that doesn't correspond to any reality. Eliminativism is the belief that we can ultimately arrive at a, first of all, neurological, but then biochemical, then chemical, and maybe ultimately a purely physical explanation of these things that does away with all these mythical creatures like beliefs, convictions, love,

the what it's like of, well, you keep talking about sponginess. I'm not quite sure why that's your example. Kind of big, big, big. Hardness. I prefer hardness to sponginess. Yeah, so yeah, that sounded rather nasty, actually. I prefer solidity. Okay.

That's good for that. Yeah, well. But yeah, and I mean, to me, this is taking of the methodological piety of the mechanistic philosophy to a point of psychosis. And what we're told by Eliminativists is that we should want this to happen because beliefs and convictions, we all recognize that these are radically insufficient and defective explanations of what's going on. And I said, you know, I actually don't recognize that.

Curiously enough, you know, if you tell me what you believe and I, mistaking myself for an intentional system who has therefore an understanding of the intrinsic intentionality in what you're saying to me, and moreover attributing to you through this haze of delusion, that those beliefs really exist in your mind as intentions and convictions, I can predict what you might do if I challenge you on something that's fundamental to your beliefs, right, or how you'll answer. I'm pretty sure that no physical calculus of what's going on in our bodies or in the substrate of our molecules is ever going to be able to yield that sort of predictive accuracy. So, in fact, what they're calling a defective model that has

to be superseded by the purely eliminativist physicalist account is, in fact, a phenomenologically verifiable, accurate, and extremely durable, I would say assessment of reality, not to say. Now, it doesn't mean that it's not overlaid with a certain number of misunderstandings, misapprehensions, hasty assumptions about how it works, but it most certainly, the realm of consciousness and intentionality and all that most certainly is not a defective model that requires elimination so that we can get down to all that's really real, which is chemicals, electrical impulses and then below that, little billiard balls striking one another in the microscopic realm. So what's the upshot of all of this? We've got like an inability of the modern materialistic

picture to account for consciousness. But we sort of know consciousness is there. We experience it every day. Where does that leave us? But again, you're just talking about the insufficiency of the materialist arguments, whereas in the book, I'm proposing that when you really, and obviously that's the thing that would be the hardest to do a digest form of in a few minutes, but argue that we actually have positive reasons for seeing in the structure of language and the structure of mental agency, but also in the structure of life, the more we know, the more baffling the difference between organism and machine becomes, and the more organic life seems to violate the boundary that we want to assume tidily between mechanistic, racist stenza, and

non-mechanistic, raised cogitans, or the illusion of raised cogitons, you know. So, it's a reason that you can construct a picture of nature, and it does come closer in some ways to an Aristotelian picture of nature or neoplatonic ontolitan. in which you have to posit a sort of noetic priority above the sort of diacronic realm of experience. But there are good arguments for making the structure of mind, not necessarily a particular mind, though I think you ultimately get to that in a sense as well,

if the infinite can be particular. But you have good reasons for saying that the opposite conclusion, making mind fundamental is true. Now, so, I mean, for me, that's the upshot, is that there's a better ontology. If you mean what's the moral or psychological or cultural upshot there, I can't help you because I'm a cold, cold soul who doesn't do pastoral talk. Yeah, no, that is what I mean, is that I want to sort of, I ask that as a way to sort of plant a flag,

that the position we're at now is that we've got some good reason. And like you say, we're being necessarily brief here, but I've covered this topic enough that hopefully people will at least be able to sort of join us at this point. We're okay, right. We've got this view that mind is fundamental to reality. And what I want to then ask, if that's the sort of upshot of what we've got so far, is like, what does that mean? We started with talking about what it means to say that the universe is material. Some kind of, you know, marble, probably. When we say that, you know, well, the universe is sort of fundamentally mind.

It's like, okay, I'm all ears. That sounds interesting. But what do you mean? Do you mean that like, if I dig down into atoms, they're going to have consciousness? Do you mean that like there is one great big mind and all of our individual minds are somehow illusions or they part? How do we envision this? Well, something more like the latter than the former. As you know, I don't believe in the sort of panpsychism in which consciousness is. some sort of property like mass or spin. I mean, you are always trying to re-mechanize even our post-mechanistic models. Because we're still really hooked on this metaphysics of stuff, that the basic truth is something, I don't know, ductile or pervasive.

But is there a problem with that view? Like, I mean, the panpsychist, of course, believes, like you do, and like I increase do that, you know, that there is some kind of fundamentality to mental substance and they say, well, okay, I suppose mind is a fundamental aspect of reality rather than than just saying as you have done that you don't agree with that, like, is there something that's particularly

wrong with it in your view? Yes, you read those parts of the book, so you're just asking this as a... That is very much a job description, is asking questions I suspect I know my guest's answer to. Well, I mean, there are any number of famous problems with this, like William James is talking about mind dust, the combination problem. You know, how is this more plausible? The notion that it's sort of like a discrete physical process that grows in intensity as it's combined and yet still exhibits the fundamental phenomenon of consciousness, you know, unity, intentionality, consciousness.

part of it, my objection to it is that I do believe that mental agency is agency. It's an act. It can't be broken down into ingredient parts in that way and still be what it is. So unless we're really saying that every atom is a discrete personality and then every composite substance is too, or maybe we could be like Nizian, just so the dominant monad in this system is operating. but just as a sort of second tier physicalism in which to physicalism we add the notion of some primordial property called consciousness, I think that we're just ignoring what the phenomenon of mind of mental agency is. I don't think it can be dissolved that way. So I think it's an implausible picture to begin with.

And I don't, you know, and the more systematic coordination you get, the more problematic it becomes, the more life is a cooperative reality, the more the way mind reacts with the world out there in a harmony that's actually useful, if nothing else. The greater the systematic coordination becomes, the more impossible, it seems to me plausibly to assert that there doesn't have to be. if this is what we're saying, there has to be some central, again, you get the same problem that you have with the Cartesian theater. Is there some panoptic module that's keeping it all going in the same direction or working together in these ways so that you have a coherent phenomenal realm and a rational realm, the causal realm, and all these things, and that they hold together or, you know, and I'm not talking about like the mind of God in the Malabranchian sense of just, you know, all these things that really don't belong together or just are held together in a sort of mystical occasionalism by the will of God, because, again, that's just a terminal dualism. I don't find that explanatory. I believe that rather, when you say mind is fundamental, it does mean that matter is more fundamentally mental. It is mind. It's not something separate from. It is one modality by which this universal reality expresses itself. And yeah, I mean, if I could add certain moral virtues and grace,

is to say a Spinozaan picture of things. I'd be closer to that. But yeah, I do believe that, you know, that's the end of the book, of course, those last chapters in which I bring in Blondell and Lonergan, but also Shankara and others, to argue that the experience, first of all, of representative unity in us,

which is anonymously the same, that I think that even Kant talks about that's not reducible to Mechanical. radical causes, and that ultimate horizon of transcendental orientations of intentionality are participations in one great act of mind. Yeah, I mean, I do believe in the mind of God. Now, that doesn't, how anthropomorphic that you want to make that sound, I mean, I try to avoid, you know, I mean, obviously, one of the great, I don't know if it's a scandal or one of the great

leniencies of religious traditions is you have the philosophical traditions. You have the schoolmen and the church fathers with philosophical training or the Vedantists or philosophers like Molasadra or Ibn Arabi and so on, Surrari and others, who think of God in terms of the high metaphysics of classical theism and that, you know. And then you have a tier below that of sort of Bhakti or devotional or whatever in which, you know, the imagery becomes more pictorial and more anthropomorphic, and this works its way all the way down to, you know, folk religion where God is like your next door neighbor and you're really trying to persuade him to give you a new Maserati or something less. It sounds like Heel a Melanone or something. And so where you should fit your picture of God on that continuum, I'm not going to say. But the level of that that I think is philosophically discernible is that level of classical. Theism, which I still find more convincing and compelling, but I also think logically solvent

than the alternatives. So, yeah, I think that we are all in him, we're in him or her, or in it, we live and move and have our being. But I will say this for religious consciousness, because, of course, you know, I also work in a theological vein times, and very fiction, too, so I want people by that and things like that. But the greatest Christian theologian in the 20th century was Sergei Bogakov, and he makes very good arguments about how everything we possess as a perfection, including personality, has to be more eminently present in the ultimate, you know, the infinite real of which we're part. And so even the personal cannot be absent from it, even if it's, you know, almost infinitely analogically remote from how we understand persons as the little psychological

critters that we are. So, yes, long answer to a brief and pointed question, yes. The mind of God would be my final answer to this point. Well, can I ask you then, in rejecting the panpsychist view that you've got these little sort of orbs of consciousness, billions and billions and trillion, of them that make up the universe. Fair enough, but there is still this question of like,

you know, if I hold something in my hands, I often use this microphone just because it happens to be in front of me. And I like start chopping it in half. It just happens to be in front of you. Surely you put it there on purpose. I mean, don't become an eliminativeist on me now.

No, I just have this thing attached to my body because I podcast so much these days. So I just look down and there it is. It is an object that's in front of me. and it is something which I can break down, and I can break down the metal into its sort of constituent atomic sort of makeup. And it does get a bit murky, right? When you talk about quantum mechanics,

it's difficult to observe exactly what's going on down there. But metaphysically speaking, something must be down there. And so if our vision is like, you know, we are participating in a great big mind, rather than there's mind at the bottom out of which we're kind of made. Those are kind of the two directions this often goes in. I would not have you think that I believe that there's ever any level at which matter is mechanistic alone. So yes, I do believe there's consciousness at every level.

The thing is what I don't believe is that it can be discriminated from all the other agencies of mind and then treated as a kind of physical property that then is combined. in the way you know, we combine discrete material ingredients, that there's, the nature of

the unity of conscious acts is such that, but I believe that, and this is again why I suppose sort of metaphysical monist with a high neoplatonic or Rhineland mystic

or Vedantic leaning when I'm being exotic and not writing just philosophy, is that I believe that whatever that that mental agent is at those lowest levels, it too has a unity and an intentionality that may not be psychologically self-aware of the way I am, but that it is participating in this one mental act that constitutes

all of reality. So I'm not denying consciousness of those levels. There's no level at which I say, well, this is just, oh, this is just mechanistic stuff. To that degree, I am a dual aspect monist in that sense. It's just I think that dual aspect monism still always bakes a question, when you look at what the ultimate reality as we deal with, you're still going to end up with a depiction of whatever that basic, whatever that lowest level reality is that tends either towards materialism or towards idealism. It just is. It's going to give a priority more to the top-down, symbolic, semantic, syntactic, causality than the top-up, which, none the less is every bit as integral and every bit as original of, you know, let's say the material potential, whatever. And so I would still, you know, say that what I would reject is the notion that there's any conceivable way. And William James's arguments are good enough for me, to be honest, of treating consciousness as just like another property and then, again, segregating it from all

the other phenomena of consciousness. But I do believe, level. of participation. I mean, I think that it really is. If you've ever studied Hymenoptera, for instance, bees especially, the degree to which each individual bee is an integrated, organic, and intentional system can really be determined by, they actually, you know, it's amazing. But there's a book, I can't remember the author is called The Democracy of the Bees or something. You look it up fascinating the degree to which you have both a social, and I don't know what else to call it personal level here that extends both to the hive but also to each individual

members. And I think that, yeah, I mean, I think that there's a sense in which there are all these different levels of intentionality. I believe our cells are really intentional systems. I think that more and more, whether you, who's a fellow at Tufts, who is a friend of Dennett's, the scientist who is Michael Levin. I think Michael 11, whether you see those things he calls xenobots as proof of this or not. Nonetheless, since the 1930s or 1940s, we've known a great deal about how the individual cell edits its own genome and then learned more and more transposable elements and horizontal transposition

and this systematic coordination. So this act of mental intentionality that's going on in all things at all times in us achieves a certain kind of consciousness. But that consciousness isn't the whole story, because things are also going on in our bodies below the threshold of consciousness. I'm not aware of what every cell in my body is doing, whatever intellectual. And well above it, I would say as well, that the mind can ascend, this mystical experience of ascending to that, if you like, no edict level is real as well. But in most daily consciousness, I'd say, We participated in a certain way, and as individual psychological persons, this organism,

we participate in it within a certain modality, and we have a certain psychological experience of our consciousness. But that's part of a flowing river, you know. It's part of an ocean, and every part is in some degree part of this moving act of thought from the infinite oneness of God to the infinite fullness of God. right off the rails right into no no that that's that's good because that's where we want to end up right essentially but the questions that spring to mind for me for clarification here are you said you know there's consciousness at the level of ourselves and then you said but there's

also stuff below the level of consciousness like say the cell do you mean to say that those cells are sort of somehow made up of mentality but are not conscious or do you think there's some kind of consciousness in the cell i mean what i don't know what i don't know what consciousness is well enough in its... I think there has to be a level of consciousness. And I mean, that's what people like James Shapiro speak of cells as sentient, at least. Sentient systems. And so they have intentionality.

And what is consciousness? Well, they do respond and they do coordinate to a surprising. It's amazing. But also that coordination, of course, is in some communication with me because it's my knowledge of my environment. phenomenological but psychological presumably as well, which will be part of what instructs my cells for the need to adapt the genome to new conditions, maybe use transposable elements. I mean, there has to be some level at which the awareness of grasshopper, awareness of a certain privation of available protein, turns, makes the cells aware that they have to change the grasshopper into a locust because this is one in the same same. species just in different gene expressions, different epigenetic realizations of one in the same genomic sequence. So I assume that there is a cooperation, a coordination of sorts with my own awareness that I'm part of this system. So, but do my, are my cells, is these individual

cell conscious in some sense, you know, but I don't believe that, I don't believe that consciousness is univocal. As I say, I don't take the Cartesian view that it's all one thing that there our levels. So I much prefer something like the Neo-Platonic notion of, you know, the one, the noose, Psyche soul, you know, creating life and all that, or the Aristotelian

notion of the rational soul, the vegetative soul, you know, and our platonic notion of sort of the chariot driver of Themos. So, yeah, I don't, again, I'm not

a Cartesian in any sense. I do believe there is a cooperative continuum here, and that every level participates to some degree in this mental act that is consciousness, intentionality, unity, finality. I guess in trying to place this. I think that explains life systems to. I think Robert Rosen and James Shapiro in their different ways are onto something, and Dennis Noble. And in a different way, Evan Thompson, I disagree with him on. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask, like, you know, being sort of, in a sort of context of being sort of contra panpsychism here, still, if you were to fundamentally cut down into reality into what we call material objects, right, and keep sort of digging down in there. And you said, I want to be clear that there's no point of like digging down where mentality or consciousness isn't present anymore. What I wanted to ask is, do you think, and maybe the answer is just, I don't know, but maybe you have a,

hunch, like, do you think that you would hit some kind of rock bottom, that there is some kind of foundational unit of stuff? And if there is such a thing, what would you suppose it to be? You know, in the way that a string theory says it's a vibrating string and a, you know, somebody might say, oh, it's just a fundamental particle, like an electron or a muon, would you say, given that there is no point at which consciousness is not present, although the universe doesn't sort of come out of these individual conscious units, would you still be looking at, in the sort of super ultra microscope, would you still be looking at something like a fundamental unit of consciousness or something else? Well, I don't think a microscope would be able to see the actual

consciousness. The metaphysical microscope, you know. I mean, at the lowest level, the dreams of God, I don't know precisely there. I just know that, let me put it this way, just as when you phenomenologically take apart mental agency, or perhaps the systematic coordination of organism as opposed to mechanistic, I mean, replicating organisms especially, or the structure of language. You can identify a syntactic or a paratactic or a material level, but at no point does it exist an abstraction from the total act that has that intentional finality, that antecedent finality, and in that formal structure. And so at that lowest level of whatever physical reality is,

I would say the same thing, is that whatever the mentality there is, it exists by virtue of its participation in this already or super eminent downward causation. And so it is first and foremost, an act of mind, even if it's also material. Now, I'm not anti-Pan-psychist. I want to point out,

I don't reject pan-psychism as such because it's a huge term. I mean, in that, I can't, I can't really, I have to be a horrible trouble with names today, forgive me, Jim. I, I, I, but pan-psychism has been used to describe the dominant philosophy of antiquity in the middle ages and everything unto modernity. So all I'm rejecting is a panpsychism that's become just, as I say, captivated by the metaphysics of stuff to the degree that it's re-mechanizing. It's trying to get past mechanism by, again, just creating another mechanistic picture. I think the paradigm is defective. It's always going to turn into an infinite regress if you do that. But, I mean, do I understand the mind of God?

No. but I think we have more than enough good reason to think that what the mind does is not an epiphenominal froth on the surface of an vast ocean of pure mindless material energy. Yes, I can agree with that. And in, I suppose, because, you know, you've taken a lot of your time here, but there's just one more sort of question or like body of questions that I just have to get your thoughts on. I think to give a complete picture to the viewer here, which is that, okay, so maybe we're, we're dealing with a, with a kind of idealism or a kind of pantheism or a kind of penentheism. And in some sense, you know, our selves are just these consciousnesses that are participating in a great

big consciousness. And in the same way, all physical matter is really somehow part of this big sort of mental act. you still are left with, I think, two important questions. One is this. If one of the sort of characteristics of mentality and consciousness is it's like unity, the fact that, you know, when I have a conscious experience, it feels unified and singular to me. It's not made up a part. It's like this one sort of thing altogether.

If we are all existing in the mind of God, then why do we not all exist in this one great, big, sort of abstract sort of singular thought. Why does it feel like there's a me and there's a you and there's a him and a her? And like there's all this distinction going on within this graphic mind. Yeah, but why wouldn't there be modalities within it? Because my contention would be that we aren't psychologically circumvalated by our individuality, that even the premises of what our thinking is, as I said before, when you retreat, to that

representative unity that Kant talks about but which I would prefer to call loose or the Fung Klein or the Atman or whatever. You find that it's perfectly anonymous, in a sense.

It isn't your psychological self. You can distinguish your empirical ego from the pure, I think. And also, if my description of intentionality in the book is correct, and don't tell anyone, but it is.

The ultimate horizon of all intentionality exceeds again, anything that's characteristic of you simply as a self. Why there shouldn't be modalities or these prismatic reductions to, well, wouldn't that too be part of an infinite thought, an infinite thought in all its possible facets would express? I mean, there I do have the sympathizing, with Spinoza's, thinking, yeah, infinite substance and infinite modes is necessary. You can't

separate the many from the one if you make the infinite devoid of the richness of diverse experience. So I assume that there's not really, again, at this point, though, I'm not trying, I'm not, you know, I'm not going to take the preposterous sort of Hegelian position that I can actually know the real in a full rational and encompassing thought. I mean, that's, and if that's a caricature of Hegel, I apologize to his guest. But there is that tendency there. I'm not trying to build a system with anything quite like that architectonic fullness, but I have no problem seeing, you know, subjective, the,

objective experience of consciousness at my level, and at a different level, perhaps, of the cells in my epigastrium or, you know, in cerebral cortices, as participating in different ways. Because I think that we again and again happen upon grounds of unity that we share. And again, I do think the experiences of contemplatives and mystics are illuminating here, or perhaps persons on psychedelics, that These all may be derangements, okay? But there is a certain uniformity and unanimity to this experience of the loss of self in a greater self, the loss of finite empirical horizons in a more embracing, a sense of, you know, experience of the infinite. and to me it would be an impoverished infinite so to speak infinite simplicity whose rational content were not also infinite diversity I think that that makes sense and I suppose to really make this clear I want to ask and my final question am I God I know no no Although,

because Jev's argument about Hegel, wasn't it? You know, that if you follow Hegel to the end, he's actually saying that, you know, he's more Jesus than Jesus was. Yeah, quite, quite. No, that's not, I actually kind of want to go in the opposite direction and say, okay, so I've talked about that enough that without going into too much detail, I hope our listeners will understand this idea that maybe this sort of individuation of the self that we're talking about as being this slight mystery is not even real.

There's not like a real distinction between selves. It's just sort of an illusion. Well, it's certainly not absolute. I mean, I think it's real in that it's a real phenomenon that we are, you know, I can't, I can't taste the coffee you're drinking. But I don't think it's absolute. I mean, I think there are experiences where we break through those boundaries. There is something weird, and it takes us right back to the beginning before anybody has ever thought about consciousness. There is something that everybody notices, which is like, you know, I've got a book here.

It's a book by Rodney Stark. I use it to prop up my laptop. And I maybe, I know, poor Rodney. Maybe, for Christ, actually, is a picture of him on the front. There's probably a bit blasphemous, but it was unintentional if anybody's. I don't like the sociological arguments in the book all that. Some of them are true, but they're too deflationary for me. Yeah.

Well, there's a lot to be said on Rodney Stark, and perhaps that's a podcast in itself. But, you know, he's serving as a useful placeholder here. Not talking about Rodney Stark, I'm sure that he's conscious just as I am. But I mean to say the book, right, I will notice that I, even though maybe I am just this thing which participates in a great big mind. Likewise, this book being made of matter is really just something which is participating in a great big mental act. And we're all just participating in this mental act of God, the mind of God. And yet, I've got something that this book doesn't have, right? And it's not just like in the way that I've got something you don't have.

I've got a singular mustache and you're wearing glasses, that kind of thing. But I've got this extra thing, which typically we associate with something like the word consciousness. Now, we want to say that's maybe a mistake. Oh, no, no, it's not a mistake. Consciousness. Just don't separate it from the other aspects of the mental act. It is consciousness, yeah. So what is it in, if we're, if I and this book are both just these things which exist in one great big mind, what is it that I have that the book doesn't have, that you and I share that the book doesn't have?

Well, I guess a rational and an animal and a vegetable nature, a soul, if you're going to be Aristotelian about it. But how does the book exist, though? What is its ontology? What is the book? It exists as atoms, it exists as a composite of pulp and polymers and other things and of inks. But the book also consists in its intentional content, right, which exists only because it's in relation to you. So it's a medium, it's a form of uttered word of intentional communion and communication. And in that regard, there's a level even of a book that exists outside its physical calculus that exists instead in this hermeneutical or no edict space.

Again, for a panpsychist who's materialist, that's more of an issue, I would think, because they're thinking that the atoms of the book have to add up into something. Whereas I don't think that. If there's a level of consciousness, of the level of matter as part of the greater whole, and it serves its part there as the part there as the, the physical vehicle or platform by which is spiritual, using that in the sort of geisly, you know, the German sense, spiritual or mental reality of Rodney writing down, you know, communicating something and you communicating it and you receiving it hermeneutically at the level of semiotics and intentional meaning, it participates at many different levels. It doesn't necessarily, it's not, but it's not, you know, it's part in the whole.

It's not that of an organism, no, but it's certainly part of the whole continuum of the mental agency that composes all things. Again, if you think about panpsychism in terms of metaphysics of stuff, yeah, I think that's an interesting question, but that's not how I'm thinking of it. Yeah, I mean, I get what you're saying. about the book and the language of the book, but suppose it was just like a rock or maybe a leaf from a tree or something. Yeah, a leaf is very complex, a brain is very complex. The materialist typically says that there's something about the complex organization of the brain that gives rise to consciousness. Your view seems to be no, that like consciousness gives rise to something like the brain. Consciousness also gives rise to something like a leaf.

Is it just a difference in the complexity of like the arrangement of consciousness? Is it Is it, well, intensity, what is it that gives one? But consciousness isn't arranged. I mean, again,

you're talking about a materialist, at that point, you're talking about, how does the composite work? But that's not, you know, the reason I was talking about honeybees earlier,

it's a good example of what I mean. There is a hive mind. There is such a thing, curiously enough. It works, again, at a profoundly semiotic level, but also at a level

that involves decision and debate, you know, when a colony gets to the side where it wants to have a, which it needs a second hive, all right, certain bees go out and search and take in the lay of the land, and then they have a sort of coded way of communicating this that's choreographed and apparently audible as well, that communicates what the difference is. are. Now, what happens is that bit by bit, as this parliament undertakes its deliberations, more and more bees begin sharing the dance of the bee, ultimately, whose choice is the most useful in the one that they agree on. Well, you know, on the one hand, bees are more conscious, I believe, than the cells in their bodies. And yet, in sense, the hive has a kind of of mental agency that depends on some, I would say, also unified ground and unified.

And so, you know, I have no knowledge of where the difference between the singular and the collective has to be drawn, how consciousness unfolds itself. I do know what the phenomenon of consciousness is to some degree in myself and others. I can observe it. I can describe it. And the phenomenology is a very useful thing. And in doing so, I discover, again, these what seem to me, indissoliable simples regarding unity and intentionality and so on and so forth. What I'm not proposing, certainly, is that, again, it's like, you know, consciousness is like a light in the room, and the more photons you have in the room, the brighter it is. I think that there are all sorts of integrations and integrities and systems at work, all different sorts of interweavings.

I like Dennis Noble's talk of the, you know, the music of life. He's a violinist as well, and the special fondness for the contrapuntal tradition. But I see this, the question you're asking, I think, is, again, it's taking us back to a model where I have to account for a composite phenomenon built up from smaller things that would be like particles of consciousness and that I don't believe. I believe there is this I guess since we have to talk in metaphors at this point I guess it would be rather like light pouring through a prism

in which the simplicity of the undifferentiated light becomes plural but then ultimately again merges into the whole in a different way But, yeah, I don't know if I can give you an answer more than that. I mean, I think you're an organism and the book isn't. What's interesting to me about the book is even it exists within hierarchies of ontological hierarchies. It exists as an, you know, what your cat might make of the book. It's a different object for the cat than it is for you. That's true.

what do you think makes say the brain a special instrument? I mean, the brain, whether you're a materialist or an idealist or anything, quite clearly, the brain is like the center of my ego. There's got to be something that's important about it. And yet we want to say, but, you know, consciousness is not the same thing as the brain. That's a materialistic reductionist for you. But the brain's got to be doing something special. What do you think is the role of the brain?

it is a form of matter, a modality of mind that is specifically appropriate to the complexity of the sort of mentality, the sort of organism you have, is. I don't think what's special about it is that it is formed by, that's the funny thing. You say it's the center of your ego. Well, the center of your psychological ego in some sense, but the I think, in a different way, I think, is the center of the brain. It creates. It forms. And it's interesting, isn't it, that, you know, one of the things that's very odd,

I found this when reading David Chalmers' last book, you know, these fantasies of uploading consciousness onto a digital platform and all that, is, they don't seem to take into account the degree to which metal agency actually shapes the organism. You know, that it's not. This is this odd sort of inverted Cartesianism in which the mind is just code and the physical vehicle is simply, you know, fungible. It could be silicon. It could be, well, no. We know a lot about neuroplasticity.

We know a lot about laying down new neural pathways. and that's often the result of conscious agency so that we know the mind forms the brain and at least that level of dynamic organization in the course of the history of an organism. It's in a more primordial sense. Mind is always doing that. The brain is the form taken by that

which is formed by mind for human mentality. Yes. But we keep inverting... It's funny how we always... This is the heritage. of the 17th century? What is the stuff? What is the mechanical process that allows for the seemingly more than mechanical reality rather than the way I, and Hephaestus in my book, I think, poses that as well as I could make him do? And he doesn't give up in the end, I will point out.

But to me, the inverse of that question, the one that the ancient world asked, for them, matter and embodiment was stranger than mind, because they could see the structure of mind and everything. Everything seemed to have the finality and to be coordinated with other realities and to be available to mental reflection in a way that seemed more than accidental or extrinsic. For them, the question would be, how did mind become this? You know, how did this reduced, prismated or congealed or coalesced form emerge from this primordial reality which is mind in all things and I conversely enough I'm I guess I'm just pre-modern in this I regard that question is ultimately probably the one that starts from a better

rational intuition can I ask you I promise it was the last question but it just sprang to mind and I think it's unavoidable here what then and this might help to want to to really get at this mistake that you think I keep making conversational here, but that society Oh, it's not a mistake. It's a, it's a, it's a, a bondage of the reason, but not a mistake. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's, it's my

intentional, materialistic devil's advocate coming out. Um, but what do you think? So, so given that consciousness sort of proceeds, it's individual manifestation in like a human brain or something. Mine.

And people typically think that, yeah, people typically, typically, a materialist thinks that consciousness is reducible to the brain such that when I die, you know, my brain is going to rot and then my consciousness will switch off. Presumably, in your view, when we die, consciousness doesn't exactly go anywhere, but this thing that the brain is the center of, the ego, the I am, the self, what do you think happens to not consciousness, as people often frame this question, where does consciousness go after death, but the consciousness that I have as opposed to the

consciousness that you have, the fact that I can taste the I am brew that I've been drinking and you can't. What happens to that when my biological organism shuts down? You notice you said, my ego, my I am, myself, as if these were all synonyms. The ego, ego and ego sum are two different things. And self, there's a contested question. Do you mean psychological or spiritual self? Do you mean? Jiva or Atman, do you mean? But your question is much simpler than that. So I won't try to get around it with peat entries. The I am, I think, is primordia. No, obviously, I think it persists. I think that, you know, not because I have a pathetic desire for immortality. I'm, well, I'm 60 years old now. I know I look much younger, 35 at most, but believe it or not, I'm 60.

And he reached a certain age. The idea of oblivion is less appalling than it is when you're young. You have more pains. You've lost more people and pets along the way. You've become more keenly aware of the sufferings of this world and others and children, animals, and the innocent. And so I don't think that's it. I've just had experiences that convince me that it goes on. I don't mean a near-death experience.

The one time I was nearly killed, I don't recall anything else happening until I woke up again, but I don't think I was ever actually clinically dead. I was just hit by a car. But I've had other experiences that here we get into the fantastic in many people's minds. If I started talking about them, people, that's autobiographical, some of it's private. But, yeah, I mean, I believe it goes on. And I do, you know, when I take off this hat and put on the other, when I write books of theology, that's based on a set of other convictions, based not only on logic or philosophy as I understand them, but on what I believe about certain historical events, certain personal events. And so short answer is, yeah, I believe, and I guess what you'd call the immortality of the soul.

and to the degree to which, though, the ego that you are. That's what I want to ask. Well, I mean, there's the I am that is still finite, longing to become infinite, I mean, I think that's all the acts of our reason and attentionality do stretch out to a desire to be one with the infinite. But that it's still an individual experience that, if my favorite fourth century thinker, Gregory Nissell was right, expands ever towards the infinite but you know that's just one picture of the you know all of our pictures are children's dogs well yeah but i think there are aspects of your ego that you'd want to be freed from too right i mean you're also a psychological self who you're young how old are you i'm 26 okay that's old enough to have done things that you regret um hurt people perhaps you didn't

want to hurt, been selfish in ways you didn't want to be selfish. I'm not accusing you, in particular, though I've heard some awful things about you, just absolutely all. But there are presumably aspects of that of which you want to be liberated. I mean, there's a part of the self that is a transient psychological phenomenon that I like to think is, if not probationary, that's part of the crucible in which we're immersed in nature and time and history and self, and that not all of that persists and that what we shall be has not yet been revealed. But I don't think that there's a point where you

has this I am that is this pure point of perspective with this history is ever extinguished. I think it moves on from glory to glory, ideally, even if it has to go through other things to that. And there, however, we're straying beyond the realm of philosophy. You know, I'm not like Ficino. I think Kant is right that you can't, from recognition of the irreducibility of the I.M. Get to the traditional arguments for the immortality of a soul substance.

There, I think philosophy has very little to say, except to say that there are plausible ways where it would be consistent. with our experience of consciousness. We're not bound to a mechanistic view of consciousness. But beyond that, I don't think there's a philosophical argument that it's worth pursuing. It wouldn't have any specific shape, in other words. It's like, look, some good reason to think that mentality or consciousness or maybe even some semblance of the I am. Well, no, maybe who you are. Maybe who you more truly are.

you know, the degree to which what you are, who you are is dispensable. Obviously, shit is different from tradition to tradition. Within even Baktik Hinduism, not Vedanta, a great deal of what you would consider to be who you are is just a vehicle for who you truly are. The true self, the Atman is not bound even to one lifetime, right? if you're in the Jewish or Muslim or Christian continuum you might think

well no there's also a web of particular relationships you know that who I am is actually bound to the history of the life I've lived here who I truly am and that that web of communion and relationships

not going to be just realized in some impossibly remote future in which I've been many other persons along the way but that there's a there's a depth to personhood that persists more obdurately or more beautifully than that and again i don't i don't pretend that philosophy can adjudicate here so speaking as a philosopher you might say something like i you know i do believe that whatever it is we're talking about there goes on in some sense but

what sense that is in which it goes on is an ungrascible ungrascible aspect of reality i think that's a perfectly fair statement yeah that's a perfectly fair statement yeah that's a perfectly fair pracey. I think that's fair enough and perhaps also a good and relatively optimistic which is sometimes I think it's quite rare for this channel to end on a relatively optimistic

no, it might be a really boring afterlife, it might you know, just be endless of bad British comedies from the 1970s. Are you being third to 20?

Well, okay, if Martin Feldman, you know, maybe, okay. but all right well i guess we'll um i guess we'll find out when we get there david bentley heart thank you so much for your time it's good to meet you thank you