Within Reason - #150 Materialist AND Panpsychism are True - Galen Strawson

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

Get Huel today with this exclusive offer for New Customers of 15% OFF with code alexoconnor at https://huel.com/alexoconnor (Minimum $50 purchase).For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack: https://www.alexoconnor.com.Galen Strawson is a British analytic philosopher and literary critic who works primarily on philosophy of mind, metaphysics, John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche.TIMESTAMPS:00:00 - Is Radical Emergence Possible?08:15 - Can Physics Describe Consciousness?12:01 - Is Everything Made of Consciousness?18:34 - Why Are People Resistant to Panpsychism?21:19 - Can Experience Alone Tell Us What Consciousness Is?23:50 - Does Consciousness Require Complexity?29:03 - Panpsychism vs Idealism: What’s the Difference?36:08 - The Combination Problem40:03 - What is the “Self”?43:16 - Do We Even Need to Explain Consciousness?48:25 - Is Consciousness a Scientific or Philosophical Question?53:25 - Is It Possible for AI to Become Conscious?

Galen Straussen, welcome to the show. Hello, good to be here. You are a physicalist, that is to say, what some people call a naturalist. You also describe yourself as a panpsychist, or at least sort of aligning yourself with these terms in relatively specific ways. I want to get into that because I think my audience will find it interesting. But first, just before we started talking, you said that the trouble with speaking about this kind of stuff is that it's just so difficult to get people to agree with you. what do you think is the sort of unintuitive central claim that when you start trying to explain your views to people, they just switch off? One of the part of it is that there are a whole set of blockers, as I see it, and one of the blockers is just an normal meaning of the word physical in everyday life.

people think that it actually carries as part of its meaning the idea that the physical is not intrinsically conscious or is not in its fundamental nature conscious in any way at all. And it's very hard to get over. That's the first thing that it's very hard to get over. And so what I do, I mean, you must stop me at any time, but what I do is start by saying that you have to look at physics and there's this great theme I have, which is, I call the silence of physics, which if you look at physics, it doesn't make any claims at all about the intrinsic nature of the stuff whose structure it describes with equations. So the field should be understood to be open to the idea that there might be consciousness in some

form, even at the very fundamental level. And there are many advantages in that view. Yeah, this is a really important point about physics that I talk about all the time, which is to say that it essentially describes relations, but it doesn't tell you about the nature of the things which are related. And the phrase you use there, physics being quiet, seems to me like it might be borrowed from a certain Bertrand Russell, who was saying the same thing,

that, you know, physics is great. It's not a bad thing about physics, that it only describes relations between things, but it doesn't tell you about the nature, what Russell called the quiddity of the real stuff. But sometimes when I point this out to people, they kind of say, well, yeah, so what? Like, physics doesn't claim to do much more than sort of describing relations. And if you want to say something like, well, physics can't tell us what the nature of something is.

So let's just plug consciousness in there. It seems like a bit of a consciousness of the gaps. Well, do you want me to give you the argument? Please. Hawaii. Okay, so step one. We've already agreed that I want to call myself, or maybe we want to call ourselves physicalists.

Really what I mean by that is just as I think that physics has a description to give of everything in the universe. I'll call that physicalism, but that little interpolation wasn't without a purpose. So physicalism in that sense. Second, consciousness is real. That is non-negotiable. It's evident. There are a few crazy people who deny that consciousness is real.

So we've got physicalism is true. One, two, consciousness is real. Now we have an interim conclusion. Consciousness is wholly physical. Must be, because everything's physical, right? Okay, now here's the more substantive step. So we've got to number three here. Consciousness is only physical.

Number four. There is no such thing as radical or strong emergence. Step five, the emergence of consciousness from the holy and utterly non-conscious, would be a case of radical emergence. Therefore, consciousness must in some sense be right at the bottom of things because you can't, we know it's here, we know it's physical,

you couldn't get it out from something wholly and actually non-conscious, so it must be in some way down at the bottom of things. What do I mean by radical emergence? That's not an easy question, but it really, radical emergence would be the emergence of something out of something else given which there was nothing about

The base thing, given which you could explain the arising of the emerging thing. Is that good enough? Yes. So we've got this view that everything that exists can be described by physics. There's no sort of extra stuff that physics can't somehow get a grasp on. That consciousness exists. Therefore, consciousness must be somehow explicable by physics. That's an interesting thing to say.

But also, yeah, radical emergence. So if you have a substance or proper. of a fundamental thing, then if you sort of mix that together and get this new type of stuff that just somehow magically comes out of it, we'll call that radical emergence. And some people like to say that, well, yeah, I think that there's just the brain, which is just atoms, neurons firing, and then consciousness just emerges out of that, right? And you might say, well, emergence of that kind doesn't exist. And they'll point to examples.

They'll say, well, what about, say, temperature? You know, an individual atom isn't hot, but if you put a bunch of them together, you get this new thing called heat, or the wetness of water. You know, a H2O molecule isn't wet, but water flows, those kinds of examples. What do you say to people who point to those as examples of radical emergence? I just say they're not radical. I mean, heat reduces to the motion of the little particle liquidity is a function of the molecular interaction laws. I think they're called VanderWaltz molecular interaction laws. They all reduce smoothly and nicely to only physical properties to do a shape, size, motion,

number, blah, blah, blah. So I fear that you're going to go on to ask me to say, what about life? Are you going to do that? You know what? I wasn't going to do that, but people do that to me all the time. I should put my colours on the mast and say that I am on your side here. I do

agree with you broadly about panpsychism. I just, I'm seeing this as an opportunity to place all the objections that I keep hearing to someone like yourself. Well, I'm going to say that as far as I'm concerned, life reduces smoothly. It's just a matter of electrochemistry. What I mean is life, once you bracketed consciousness.

Yes, right. So, and, you know, the people resist that already. That's another blocker. They think they've got a killer argument. But when I say, look, life reduces smoothly, they may just protest. But consciousness is a whole different order of things. all life can be just ultimately seen as the motion of particles and electrochemical going on. That's my position.

Yeah, consciousness is obviously something very special, at least it seems that way. And I like to point out that in these other examples of emergence, the thing that people are really interested in as having emerged actually emerge as conscious experiences. So like take temperature, you're quite right. Temperature is just the vibration of atoms, right? And if all you mean by temperature is just the sort of motion of atoms, then nothing has emerged when you have a big object that's made of vibrating atoms. But people want to say, oh, but there's this extra thing. You know, when I touch it, it feels hot. And that's what emerges without realizing that it emerges as a conscious experience. Similar to an image on a screen emerging out of a computer system or even, Even, I believe, like, the interesting part of the wetness of water, all of the bits that could be said to emerge only emerge as phenomena, you know? Exactly. So when people talk about liquidity, they're actually thinking about something about the experience of it. Yes. Because if they're just describing, if they just mean the sort of molecular makeup and motion of H2O molecules, then nothing is, there's nothing you can't account for.

in terms of the basic physics, you know. But so I'm interested in the fact that you describe yourself as a physicalist in that everything can be described by physics. Many people want to say that consciousness is something that physics can't account for, it can't grasp, can't, not quite sure what the right word is there, but what do you mean to say that it can be described? Well, yes, this is another issue. What I mean is when you have a pain that it is,

in my view and perhaps also your view too, just a certain complicated synergy of neurons and neuromodulating thing. Physics cannot describe the feeling at all, but it can describe the pain because the pain just is that going on. That's all I mean. Physics can't give positively descriptions of the nature of the stuff at all. So it's actually almost ambiguous. When I say physics can describe everything, you're quite right.

Many people misunderstand that in just the way that you worried about. They think I can describe the feeling of pain. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying there is a thing called a pain, which is a neural going on. Physics has a description of that. Neurophysiology has a description of that. So it falls within the ambit of physics, but physics can't describe its intrinsic nature.

It's intrinsic non-structural nature at all. It can't describe the intrinsic non-structural nature of anything. So there's reasons for misunderstanding that. And I have to try to put it better. And this is important because it's not just, the claim isn't just that, well, physics can't describe the nature of consciousness. It's that physics can't describe the nature of anything, including therefore consciousness.

Which is why, I mean, you've written a paper which essentially, I mean, the title is essentially that there is no mystery of consciousness, that consciousness, whatever it is, is not a kind of mystery. But it's also, I mean, the full title, there is no mystery of consciousness and the demand for explanation begs the question. And you write about how, as soon as you say that consciousness is this special mystery, you're sort of assuming that the nature of the rest of the world, firstly, exists, that there is non-conscious stuff. And secondly, that it's somehow less mysterious. But of course, for most

people, it does feel more mysterious that there's a conscious brain than that there is, you know, a rock on the on the road over there. But are you saying that's a bit of a sort of false distinction? It's not a, it's extremely natural. What can I say? It's based in the character of our everyday experience. But when you go into physics and philosophy, it's something that you simply have to give up. But when I'm saying consciousness is, I think all animal consciousness or our consciousness does need an explanation, but I think the explanation is at hand, which is evolution did it. But evolution needs something to work with. And what I think it had to work with was already some kind of primitive conscious stuff, which I really can't say anything about. So that got worked up

into animal, into interesting, remarkable consciousness. So that does need explanation. But the claim that the very existence of consciousness at all needs explanation does, I think, beg a question in the technical sense of bigger question, that is it presupposes something that we are not right to presuppose. So to say that consciousness, or some kind of consciousness,

is present all the long. way down, as it were. Do you mean to say that there's this sort of stuff that people call matter and that that matter is conscious, like has the property of consciousness, or maybe there are like foundational elements of the universe, including things like spin and mass and charge and then consciousness? Or do you think that it all kind of breaks down to consciousness such that rather than foundational stuff having consciousness, foundational stuff kind of is consciousness? Yes. I think I think that's what economists call the least worst view, that that is, you go all out. So spin, mass, and charge are just really appearances of the intrinsic nature of consciousness.

Actually, I mean, I like what Heisenberg says. Heisenberg says it's quite good to think of energy not just as a property, the property of being able to do work, which is how physicists think of it, to think of it as a substance. And I think it is the best completely general name for the stuff of the universe, and it behaves in certain ways. But what is its intrinsic nature? The proposal is that the simplest solution to the problem of consciousness is to say that it's already some conscience of some kind, but it's extremely hard. I like what this man's C.A. Strong says, a man who's been completely forgotten.

He says, just don't try and think about that. You just have to put, it is something that is intrinsically already of such a nature that consciousness can emerge in a non-radical, non-magic way. One of the points is that people think that it's sort of metaphysically insanely extravagant to suppose that's consciousness everywhere. But there is just no good reason for thinking that. The form of the argument that I gave you is what's called an inference to the best explanation. Everything's physical.

Here is consciousness. We could not get consciousness out of something that was wholly and utterly non-conscious. So we must suppose that it's in some form already down there at the bottom. That's how we'll get back to the show in just a moment. But first, I want to tell you that today's episode is literally powered by today's sponsor, Huell. I didn't have very much time today before recording this episode, but luckily this small bottle is a complete meal. 400 calories, 35 grams of vegan protein, 26 vitamins and minerals,

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Like, why not just posit that you could end up with qualities or substances that aren't products of the individual parts? Well, there is no argument. It's just a core position. What you can say is that it's not appealed to anywhere else in science. I mean, it really says, what it really says is, I mean, I don't believe in God, but if you take God to be some kind of omniscient creature, it says, this would be unintelligible. The emergence of consciousness from the holy and utterly non-conscious would be unintelligible even to God. There would be nothing about the holy and utterly non-conscious

stuff given which you could see how or wide consciousness could come out of it. And so it's, in terms of good theories and what's metaphysics, what's theoretically extravagant or reasonable, it's terribly theoretically extravagant and unreasonable to ask, to, to, to, to posit radical emergence. And I say, really it's negative. Why do that? You can just, you don't need to. All you have to do is suppose that consciousness is in some manner or read down there at the bottom of things. Well, they say that's tremendously theoretically. I say that's just prejudice. That's just habit. There's no intrinsic reason for thinking that. And certainly, physics isn't going to give you a reason. And then add a sort of general remark about, look, what physics in the last

century has just shown that everything is far more extraordinary and we can ever even hope to begin to understand. Why is, so, you know, wave-article duality that, why, why think that it isn't, it must be extraordinary in some way. So, get over. I've made this point a few times recently what I've been talking. I've been considering panpsychism and idealism with people, and they sort of raise their eyebrows to the back of their head. And I say, look, it's a bit offensive to me that if I want to know what an electron is, for example, what its nature is, I could ask some quantum physicists and else one of them might say, well, it's an abstract cloud of probability whose wave function collapses when it's observed. And everyone goes, okay, yeah, interesting.

One other person says, oh, it's an electron could be in all, it is in fact in all of those different positions and a new branch of reality is created for every single possibility. And there are trillions and trillions of multiverse realities being created every second. And people go, okay, yeah, that makes sense. And then someone comes along and says, I think there might be like proto-conscious properties. And everyone goes, you have lost your mind, haven't you? What are you talking about?

Exactly. I am talking to a number of people about this. And they very committed, they will, they choose radical emergence over the other option because they can't dare to give up the idea. So, I mean, I could, you know, Stephen Pinker, we'd be talking to him and Peter Controry Smith, and I think Scott Errington, who's my colleague here, but I'm not sure about him yet. So, I'm not. But why are the resistance? Why is it that people are willing to accept all kinds of, I mean, brilliant and fascinating interpretations of quantum mechanics and the like, but are just so resistant to the idea that what we call consciousness might be present at the foundation of reality?

Don't get me going on that. I have a huge file of quotations about why people find it difficult to give up the views that they hold. Do you think there's a philosophical reason, or is it just a sort of a personal bias? It's human nature. I mean, you know, I was sort of a drag kicking and screaming into this view. I had no, back in the 90s, I didn't want to particularly it to happen, but I couldn't see any other way. Once you're committed to physicalism and the reality of consciousness at all, what follows from that? And it turns out you've either got to put consciousness down at the bottom in some way or agree with radical emergence.

And on most sort of accounts of good theory construction, putting consciousness down at the automosity is the better, simpler, most economical, elegant, parsimonious way of doing it. Yes. Well, I mean, some people approach this question by saying you've kind of got, you've kind of got three options. One is what you call dualism, that there's mind stuff and then there's physical stuff. One is that there's only one type of stuff and it's all like material. And one is there's only one type of stuff and it's mental. And given that you call yourself a physicalist panpsychist, I know you're a monist. You don't believe in dual. But I'm not quite sure how you would characterize those last two options in terms of which you agree with. Sorry, I didn't get them. So there's only, in opposition to dualism, you've got, there's one type of stuff, monism, and it's all like material. It's all the body. And the mind comes out of that. Or you've got, there's only one type of stuff and it's mental and the material kind of comes out of that.

Oh, yes. I see the problem here. You're using material in a way. I wouldn't use it because I would just say the mental is material. So I would list the options as dualism, which I think there is never been any good argument for it. So down to monism, and then two more positions, radical emergence or panpsychism or something. So that's my trip of dualism, panpsychism, or radical emergence.

You've got to choose between them. I know that you said before that, like, as for what, like, consciousness is, as for, like, the real nature of the thing that's at the foundation of the universe, you kind of don't have much or anything to say about it. Yet, in your paper, you sort of say that to experience consciousness is just to know what it is. And there's an intuitive force to that. Like, everyone knows what consciousness is because you're experiencing it right now. But is it guaranteed that just because we experience something, we know it's nature? You know, like I might want to say that, well, like I can experience water, right? I can experience swimming through the ocean without knowing its nature, without knowing that it's hydrogen and oxygen.

It's just experiencing consciousness enough to say that we sort of know what it is, especially if when asked, we struggle to put it into words. Yeah, I mean, no, I would just say it's a special case. It's a special. The having of it is the knowing of it. But I don't think we know everything there is to know about an event that is. an event of a conscious experience because of course I also think there's a lot of neural stuff going on and nothing of that is given to me in the having of the feeling of pain or the, you know, the usual case, taste of garlic or whatever you want. It's not given at all and I do have to

think that that's part of the intrinsic nature so it's only partial. I'm just saying there is something that we know entirely as it is just in having it. And then it's worth having the point that here we know something about reality and it is in itself, because there's a classic argument. You try to think that your current experience could be an appearance. Well, then the having of the appearance experience is already a case of an experience. So this is the great argument against the deniers of the existence of consciousness, the people who now call themselves illusionists that it's just hopeless.

because if it's an illusion is already an experience. You've said in the past semi-famously, I think, that, you know, what they call illusionism or eliminative materialism is not just the worst idea in philosophy, but perhaps the worst idea that any person has ever come up with, like in the history of mankind. Well, I think it's the silliest. But a good philosopher called Eurya Kriegel who said, he thought that he could think of one that was at least equally silly, which was just that nothing exists.

So I had to go on. Well, okay, so it's always interesting to think where listeners will be at. They'll either be right along with us saying, this is great, yeah, this makes loads of sense, or they're still thinking to themselves, hold on, can we just pause for a second? Conscious electrons, it feels like we kind of brushed over that. I asked you a moment ago why people struggle to, so struggle to sort of get on board with this. And my best guess is that they're thinking about the nature of consciousness wrong in that I think the biggest mistake is people think consciousness requires complexity. And the reason for that is because when you go looking for consciousness, people typically actually go looking for particular kinds of conscious activity, like memory and emotion and sentience, the ability to feel pain.

And if something has those things, they go, oh, it must be conscious, right? But you could be conscious without having any of those things. Consciousness is just experience. You don't have to have memory. You don't have to have a sense of self. There could just be experience occurring. And when you strip away all of the complicated things that consciousness can sometimes do, you're actually left with something very simple.

And if it's really something quite simple, it's easier to attribute it to an electron or something. That's where I think people are going wrong. But I suppose you would agree that when people say consciousness requires complexity, or the consciousness is the product of the most complex thing we know in the universe, which is the brain, that something's going sort of foundationally wrong there. Yes, that's right. First thing I would say is that I don't really believe in electrons in that kind of way.

I think you have to accept the field theory approach, and they're just passants of excitations in fields. So, I mean, it is true that I've given talks in the past, and someone says, what's it like to be an electron? I understand why they do that, but we don't have. Yes, so that's the first point. The second point is, yes, one has to think of it as something very primitive or in some way. Something that evolution, so I like to say that the existence of complicated consciousness like ours or, you know, the eagle's eye or something,

is just like the existence of the opposable thumb. An extraordinary piece of, as it were, engineering produces the disposable thumb. or if you like the eye considered just as a physical object that's no more remarkable that extremely complicated consciousness has evolved than that opposable thumbs have evolved well to be clear

do you think there is something it is like to be an electron or a quark I don't think there are electrons really I think there are fields I mean we're now approaching another difficult area because I think one has to think that there is, as it were, a consciousness field. This attracts some people because they think now we're heading in the direction of a great big cosmic mind of some sort.

Quite. And, well, maybe, but not in any sense that has any religious implication. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I mean, because the way you describe it, like, electrons are excitations in a field and people talk about the sort of the wave function of an electron but a lot of quantum physicists want to talk in terms of the wave function of the universe that there's one great big wave function and that all sort of physical matter is just an excitation in that field and that sounds like it lends itself quite nicely like in the same way it can be difficult to imagine well how do you get like matter out of what we call experience. How does experience take up space? But the physicists say that, you know, everything is foundationally waves. And you could say, well, how do waves take up space?

You know, it's a similar kind of problem. It's hard to wrap your head around. But it does seem to me that if you start talking about like one great big wave function and excitations in the wave function, that the image I'm getting in my head is of like not panpsychism, but idealism. That is rather than lots of tiny little incantiation of consciousness that you put together to build big things, one big consciousness out of which you divvy up smaller parts. I'm afraid that this sounds like what I could seem to be a great muddle and misunderstanding

that's been introduced into the debate by Bernardo Kustrop. No one should ever have sort of fingered panpsychism as to view that there are a lot to little money. It pansy is a form of idealism, absolutely no question to me. Strong versions of idealism are equally forms of... I've actually dropped the pan. Now, I just like to say psychism.

So this is just a complete mischaracterization of panpsychism, so I don't know what to say. So try to set up an opposition between idealism and panpsychism is just a mistake. So then what is unique about panpsychism as opposed to the long history of idealism that's existed for basically as long as philosophers have been thinking? What's unique about panpsychism, if not that it's atomistic? No, absolutely not. This is absolutely no necessary part of it. Idealism. The thing is idealism is usually associated with Berkeley, and that is utterly different view.

It's a view that there is a mind and that all the objects in the world are just ideas in that mind. My panpsychism, which has nothing to do with little atoms of little subjects, as it were. Sorry, I'm where I'd just gone blank.

You're okay. You were about to say your panpsychism is not like Barclays. First of all, it's utterly, yes, it's the world is really out there, solid stuff, completely, may I say solid, but that triggers the wrong idea, really. Just, I mean, but it's absurd, you know, solidity is just electric charge. Objects are kind, you know, they're almost, as we say, inaccurately, almost empty space.

There's nothing there is a way. It's all extraordinarily in diaphanous, and this is, okay, better stop rhapsodizing about that. I don't know I'm having trouble I'm not having just forgetting I'm not having trouble with replanting but yeah yeah for Berkeley the this idea that

as you say like there's this sort of great big mind and physical objects are ideas in that mind but yeah like when you say we're picturing like the the global wave function and physical matter as essentially excitations in that great big wave function. Is that not kind of a similar language? Well, it's real concrete stuff out there.

I, you know, concrete stuff. So, I mean, look, you can, you can bring them together, I think. You can form a conception of the Barclay story, which it might begin to look like. the story of a real universe out there, just a field with all these characteristics. So maybe I can ask the question this way. I mean, you'll disagree with this characterization and this is how I've seen it, but I'm glad to hear that this is probably untrue. But I've thought of it in terms of like, if you want to say that the universe is made

out of consciousness, that consciousness is somehow foundational, that you can kind of go in two directions. You can either dig down to the bottom and say that whatever's down there has consciousness or is conscious, and that's like panpsychism, or you can sort of go upwards and you can say, oh, everything sort of all put together is one great big mind, and that's idealism. Now, I know that's probably not how you want to characterize those, but there is this question of like, which way we go to get to, let's say, the foundation. Is it, do you picture like the small stuff as building up the big stuff or the small stuff as made out of big stuff. In other words, do we account for the, do we account for the cake in terms of its crumbs or do we account for the crumbs in terms of

the cake? Because for me, that seemed to be the difference in approach between the big, great mind idealist and the slightly more physicalist like panpsychist. No, that's, I think I reject the choice. I think I got thrown off because see it's happening again because there were things I wanted to say that I'd lost them and I couldn't get them back I don't know

I mean Barclay is by definition he's an immaterialist I mean it's as if there's no real substance out there there is no universe out there to say that everything is just ideas in minds has, it's naturally thought I was saying they're not really real at all and that's completely completely complicated. Maybe I would have think, I don't know, I don't know much about

what Kastrop has said, but I would think that we're probably hold the same view. I don't know. But it's real sort of, it's not just, there's something about ideas in mind, it's just ideas in mind, so they're not really real and that's just completely wrong. There is a universe. it's out there. It is a field. Actually, on that, that's one of the things I wanted to say, which is that physics say there are sort of

n fields, 17 fields, or sometimes they say there's 25 fields, but 15 of them are really stuffy, and some of them are just mathematical. So, the really stuffy fields, but I don't, I don't think

we should think that there are 15 of them. There are just, we have different takes. I think there's just one. And maybe this is shocking to people who think there's the electromagnetic field and the gravitation. There's just one and it is extraordinarily complex and we have, we access it with all these sets of descriptions which have nice equations and so on. So that's one of the things I wanted to say and I do, yeah.

Well you said you're not sure what Castrop would say. I think when I spoke to Bernardo Castro, his, I ask him about panpsychism. And what to me, I agree with you that it sounds like we're sort of driving at the same thing at the very least. But he said that, I mean, his, one of his biggest criticisms is of the scientific revolution. He thinks that it's sort of totally upset the way we think about the world, that we've started to see, you know, kilograms and centimeters and extension as the foundational stuff and experience as the secondary stuff. Even though it's experience came first and we get all of our knowledge of the world through experience and we've sort of done this reversal.

But he says, so he thinks of it in those terms, but he said to me that the problem with panpsychism is that they're holding on to this sort of scientific idea of atomism that the universe is divisible into tiny little marvels. That is just a terminological decision that he's made on his own. That's how I felt. That's how I felt. And I get what he said. I get why it would be, it's very useful to critique that sort of atomistic marble view of the world. But I think to say that that somehow discredits panpsychism is just to sort of make enemies for no reason. The word, yes. The word is hopeless. All these words become hopeless. I mean, I just say psychism now.

Yeah. But so do you think of, I mean, it might sound like an odd question, but the way you say you don't. really believe in electrons as like definable entities, let's say. Like, how do you sort of picture how the universe is made up? Because I think most, like, physicalists who aren't psychists, kind of do imagine, like, a bunch of tiny little dead marbles that you sort of stick together, and it creates these complex structures. But if we're talking about, like, excitations and fields and stuff, like, what, like, how can you help people to understand, like, how you're picturing what the universe is

made out of? Like, is it a bunch of vibrating waves? Is it like a thought in a mind? Is it like conscious, like, probability distributions? Like, what are you picturing? I'm sort of picturing a sort of wavy, shimmering sheet. If you're asking me literally what I'm picturing. Yeah, I kind of agree that I sort of picture this great big, well, like this wave function, this great big, wavy thing and there's sort of excitations. But I think the, question this might lead to and something we should definitely touch on is why it is I kind of want to talk about the combination problem for panpsychism but particularly yeah well I mean I suppose that goes because once you've got rid of the little bits

but that's that's what I want to ask about is that like it even even if we accept that consciousness goes all the way down and that you know consciousness is everywhere and everything's made out of consciousness there's definitely something which I have and say a dog has that a table or a rock doesn't have. And I just wanted to ask you quite straightforwardly, what is that thing that I have that they don't? Well, it's just that some collocation, some clumpings of matter. I say matter because I don't think that matter means not conscious. It's conscious. The matter is energy and the fundamental nature of energy is what it's like. It's something like that. So there are some things of matter, which are such that they give

rise to, as it were, a large thing, a large subject, but obviously tables don't. Of course, you get teased when you put forward pancyclism, oh, you think the chair you're sitting on is conscious and so on. I don't think that for a moment. I'm sure that it takes certain sorts of very complicated electrochemical interactions for you to get, as it were, big-scale consciousness. And some people then say, well, you can't think, they go back to the little bits picture, And I say, which I'll accept for the purposes of argument just from now, they say, you can't think lots of little bits can clump together and not make something conscious.

And I say, well, what about a football team? You know, when a football team goes into a hug or a huddle, there are 11 subjects of consciousness, but they don't suddenly make a big single one, unless you're a bit mystical about sort of team spirit. So, yeah, it's not the case that if you think that somehow the fundamental stuff, it's conscious, you have to think that every clumping of it together is, and I

don't think the moment it takes some very complicated electrochemistry for that to happen. So I see no difficulty that. I suppose the problem is why, you're quite right. Just because everything's made of consciousness, it doesn't mean that

every object made of consciousness is itself conscious, has like a higher level consciousness of its own. But the question is why do some things, like brains, get that? And other things don't. Is it just a matter of complexity? Do you even believe in the nature of individualized selves and sort of senses of consciousness? I thought I answered that. I mean, it's because you get this electro-mechanical complexity. So I don't think I have more to say than that. Perhaps you could tell me what you think of the term self and how it's appropriately used best in philosophy.

So, wow, that's a big one. Sorry to bring that on you. Well, I'm sometimes sympathized with the man called Eric Olson who thinks we shouldn't use it at all. I think there is, are you asking me to sort of get into some of my more views about the self which are not related to this issue? Well, I'd be interested insofar as I think that they can help. people to get a, get a bigger picture, because especially if people aren't super on board with panpsychism, or maybe this is their first introduction to it. The first question that might come to mind is like, well, if there's all this consciousness everywhere, then what is this sort of,

this sort of conscious gravity I feel inside of myself towards like, you know, it feels like there's a me that it's all happening to. And helping to step outside of that can, can allow people to see consciousness everywhere rather than just in their own heads. Well, I mean, it's what you would expect, given that evolution has come up with these complicated, conscious organisms that move around on their own. They need us, as it were, a place where the incoming data about the environment, which is useful to them in order to survive and so on, gets unified. And that is what our experience of self is. There are indeed, we are a locust, meaning Latin meaning a place. we are low-key places of consciousness.

Local, yeah, that's just a fact, and that is the foundation of all the experience of self. And funnily enough, here I rather favor some of the things Dan Dennett has said, although I disagree with him about many things, which is he thinks that it's in some sense a construct which is extraordinarily useful in helping us organize our experience, this sense of self. But, okay, that said, there's a very solid foundation

and for the idea that you are in sense a single subject of spirit, which is you are indeed a single body, and you move around as a single body. And so I think you can explain the sense of self. That's dispensable. Yeah, it's interesting to hear you refer to Dennett because he is one of these illusionists that in other contexts you would find so difficult to agree with,

but you think, I suppose, would you agree with him as like an illusionist about the self, just not about consciousness, perhaps? Yes. Though I'm not denying the experience of being, one is indeed, one really is a single subject to experience. But I think that the, that is, I don't, and there is a continuing brain,

I don't think there's a thing called a self, which is a continuing thing independently in the existence of the brain. No, I don't. I agree. That's just... I agree with anything. I heard about religion and about Darwin.

So it's just that we... So your paper, we talked about this idea of the mystery of consciousness and how it's treated as special when maybe it's not. The second sort of claim in the title of the paper is that essentially thinking that we need to explain consciousness begs an important question. And I think what you mean there might have. have already come out in some of what we're saying, but perhaps you can clarify precisely what you're getting out there. Yeah. I learned that you can use Beggs the question anymore.

Because you meant it in the original strict sense. What I meant was, the challenge is this. Why do you think that the existence of consciousness is more needs explanation in a way that the existence of matter thought of as non-conscious doesn't need explanation? If you do, think that you've already made a move, begged the question in an unwarranted way. So what I say there is, look, there is a great big mystery, and the big mystery is this, why is there something rather than nothing? That is something we really don't know. But even that there is something, we shouldn't think that we know that it was originally just wholly non-conscious. That creates the mystery.

If you somehow knew that everything was in its fundamental nature, non-conscious, then the arising of conscience would be a mystery. But you've already blocked out what I think is the correct view in making the assumption that the basic stuff was wholly and utterly non-conscious. and you've done that. Oh, sorry. And do you think that's a product of, actually, I mean, we found some agreement with Dan. It's just terribly natural to think.

Yeah, it feels that way, doesn't it? And I think we found some agreement with Dan Dennett. And I wonder if you can find some agreement with Bernardo Castro in thinking that, at the very least, the influence of what we call the scientific revolution, the idea that everything is best to. described with mathematics and this sort of mechanization of the universe, just sort of a way of picturing it like the universe in this way, that it works a bit like a machine. Do you think that's historically sort of part of the reason why now people consider, like, it not to be begging the question, that there is something, you know, it's an extra task when it comes to consciousness? I think that's a really plausible psychological, sociological hypothesis. But we shouldn't, having

said that, we shouldn't forget that these descriptions work. I mean, they are correct, they're true, you know, the inverse square laws and E equals MC squared and all that. But, yes, they may have misset our way, our thinking, certainly. That said, you know, psychism, hence, is always alive in the Western tradition to an extraordinary extent. Yes. Yeah, it's surprising how often it shows up. Like when I first started learning about this, I was, I was amazed at the list of names and the number of people. I mean, all the way back to like Thales, our pre-Socratic sort of founder of philosophy. And you've got this idea that all things are full of gods, that he seemed to be obsessed with magnets and the fact that they seem to sort of have minds of their own all the way back from there to the modern day and up to, you know, Birch and Drussel and his monism and. And now in the modern day with people such as yourself and Philip Goff and Thomas Nagel, it's sort of it's, it's been there the whole time. But for some reason, it's probably of all the philosophical views I've ever entertained,

the most polarizing in terms of my audience. Half of my audience, I think, believe that I've lost my mind when I start talking about consciousness as fundamental reality. And half of them are like, this is really interesting. it's interesting that you're finally cottoning onto this. More so than talking about free will or God's existence or objective morality or anything, it's consciousness that really, really seems to rile people up. Yes, yes, it does. It's just because of that habit and assumption.

There are some great quotations about how unbearable people find radically new views. I do actually want to just interpolate that you also mention. Russell, but Eddington was even better in a way on all this. And so a shout-out for Arthur Heddington. So I, do you think that... There's a very good book called Panpsychism in the West. Well, I mean, it's very good just showing you how many people have held this youths by David Scrabina. I wonder if you think, I know that you think that trying to explain consciousness begs the

question, but it's, it's undoubtable. Yeah, explain the very, not explain super interesting consciousness like ours, which needs evolution. Yes. So the explaining like human consciousness, let's say, and all the work that's being done and trying to really sort of get at the heart of what's going on when, when people have experiences and the nature of the self and all that kind of stuff, broadly, you might think this is a bit of a false question and that will be an answer in itself, but people often ask, do you think that this study of human consciousness is a scientific question or a philosophical question? Maybe you think that's a distinction without a difference, but to give an idea of where you're coming from for the future of development on human consciousness,

do you think the biggest revolutions in thought are going to come from the physics department or the philosophy department? I don't think we're ever going to get any further with consciousness. Even if we really nail down the neural correlates of consciousness, even if the neuroscientists get that completely taped, because neuroscience and physics can't, that would be asking them to do something they can't do, which is to tell us substantive stuff about the intrinsic nature of the things whose structure they describe. So I think the study of consciousness, well, I mean, why not read Proust or Henry James? Yeah, quite.

Indeed. William James, yeah. What do you think, what are you hoping to get out of? What do you mean by the study of consciousness exactly? Well, I'm being careful how I word it here because I think for most people, the study of consciousness means the thing you say shouldn't be done, which is explaining the existence of consciousness, right, as a special, unique thing. Yeah.

Maybe the first step in developing a better. understanding is recognizing that's not a sort of thoughtful question to ask. But I mean to say that, you know, I think people have this optimism that one day, at least the really scientifically minded folk have this image in their head that maybe a hundred years from now, we'll all be sat around going like, gosh, can you believe that, you know, a hundred years ago we didn't, we didn't even get this consciousness thing. We hadn't, we hadn't solved the problem. We hadn't solved the hard problem. We hadn't in a position and be in a position where we're sort of no longer debating it anymore. Sort of like where we are with something like gravity, where there's lots left to, you know,

discover and uncover. But we're pretty, you know, we're pretty settled on gravity. Everyone roughly knows what's going on there. You know what I mean? Like people sort of have this optimism that will get to a similar position with consciousness. And I think the scientifically minded people say, yeah, totally, because it's the progress of science. And sometimes more philosophically minded people say, No, no, no, no, you don't understand that this is a unique problem. You want to say that it's not a unique problem, but maybe you also don't sort of give as much agency to the scientific method as those people I'm describing.

Well, I think it's unique, given the way they're setting things up. And one of the things interesting about what you've said is that people will say, 100 years ago, exactly the same sort of debate was going on about so-called vitalism. How is life possible? We did that. We reduced.

Vitalism reduced to complicated physical goings on electrochemical. But there's nothing that can happen like that with consciousness. So I do think it's not going to change at all. And perhaps I should say something here about, I'm dreading the amount of flop that's going to be generated in the next two or three decades, both by machines and humans, I'm afraid, about consciousness. So here's what I think about.

There are some people who associate the word consciousness with intelligence and they think in an LLM or whatever it is, a large language module gets smart enough. It must be getting conscious. And I think that's just a complete mistake. There's a consciousness.

The best way to use the word is simply to mean by it the what it's likeness, the feeling. And there is no a necessary connection between Zat and then in intelligence. I mean, you've already made the point that, you know, the fetus in the womb has feeling, but not yet intelligence. So there's a dissociation that way around.

You can have consciousness without intelligence, but, and I say equally, you can have intelligence without consciousness at any level. So at no point as the LLMs get more and more indistinguishable from human beings. in terms of their intelligence, will there be any good reason to think that they're conscious? Do you think that's, I mean, you said there'd be no good reason to think that they're conscious. Do you think that's, in principle, something that couldn't occur? Annel Seth's neuroscientist friend of mine just wrote a paper on the mythology of conscious AI, where he sort of says that the analogies that are drawn between brain functions and computer functions

are just insufficient and that it just sort of doesn't work like that. I wonder what your intuitions are on this nature of conscious AI. No, I agree with him about that. I'm just afraid that the bait is going to go on and on whenever. It's just not going to, some people are going to be committed to the idea that when it gets sufficiently intelligent, we must treat his conscious. Oh, yeah, you asked about the imprincipal point. don't think that this in principle impossible for, as it were, a metal and silicon thing of me

to be conscious. I don't want to rule that out. How could I, since I already think that the very stuff of reality is somehow consciousness involving? I just don't believe that any of the kind of complex puttings together of things that you'll get with machines will ever deliver what we need. And I think Anil thinks that too, Anil Seth. Yes. Yeah, well, I mean, I'd recommend people read his article. I mean, he wants to sort of say that, you know, for example, he talks about a particular kind of neuron which I think responds to metabolism. So if you were to actually replicate a brain with silicon, because there are neurons which rely on metabolism, you'd also have to then just replicate metabolism, which is not something silicon can really do. So the more and more accurately

you sort of recreate this human brain, you'd actually just be making a human brain and creating neurons. Exactly. I mean, the difficulty here is that people talk about structural isomorphism. I think if you can make a thing that has the same structure of the human brain, you should get conscious. But structure goes all the way down. And even if you'd somehow got a sort of computational, something that was computationally structurally the same, as it were, what they call the wetware, the actual biological stuff is also a matter of structure.

The only way to get a complete structural duplication would be to have a baby basically. I mean, to build another human being. So there's a lot of mistakes being made when they say, look, if it's

structurally the same, it's going to be conscious, because it's never going to be anywhere near structurally the same. Yeah, I actually I spoke to Anil for the show. It's not out yet at the time of recording, so you certainly won't have seen that, but we spoke in detail about this, and I think

it's really interesting, and I hadn't really considered it before, the extent to which you know, like, you can keep, if you look at what a neuron's made out of and you try to recreate a neuron with other material, well, how far do you dig down? Like, if you were to take sort of, if you were to just have a

bunch of protons and electrons and recreate a neuron, you wouldn't be creating a simulation of a neuron anymore. You've just be creating a neuron. And if that's what you had to do to fully recreate consciousness, then maybe you just do need the biological aspect in order to get human consciousness. It's ultimately an empirical hypothesis, and I would bet that that was right. I mean, I've been corresponding with Anil for some time, and I think he was further away from me when we started, and he is now. I think we're certainly converging to a considerable extent.

Yeah, I try to go back and forth and having... panpsychists and idealist and then people like anal and i had sean carillon to talk about you know emergence as real and and sort of non-psychic physicalism i try to go back and forth uh as much as i can but whatever the case i'm hoping that people have found uh my conversation with you today interesting if not informative some people just as you say they just they just don't want to hear it and fair enough maybe maybe they're right maybe we're crazy here but at the very least i hope it's giving them something to chew on. Gaylan Strawson, thank you so much for your time today. Okay. Thanks.