Within Reason - #158 Could Consciousness Be an Illusion?

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

Get all sides of every story and be better informed at https://ground.news/AlexOC - subscribe for 40% off unlimited access.For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack: https://www.alexoconnor.com.Keith Frankish is a British philosopher specialising in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of cognitive science.Read Keith's essay, "Illusionism as a theory of consciousness" (2016).Find Keith's website here.TIMESTAMPS:0:00 - Is Consciousness An Illusion?4:02 - Do We Have a Private World?10:00 - The Nature of Visual Experience20:13 - Is Awareness Behavioural?28:17 - Isn’t Introspection Itself a Private Experience?33:04 - Philosophical Zombies43:05 - What Motivates Illusionism?50:02 - Psychedelics and the Dissolution of the Self59:23 - Why Are Philosophers Always Categorising?1:10:31 - Does Alex’s Triangle Exist?1:21:40 - Is Pain Just a Reaction to Stimulus?1:49:05 - Is Pain an Emergent Phenomenon?1:55:52 - What Illusion Is Actually Happening?1:59:07 - Can AI Be Conscious? - CONNECTMy Website: https://www.alexoconnor.comSOCIAL LINKS:Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cosmicskepticFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/cosmicskepticInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/cosmicskepticTikTok: @CosmicSkeptic - CONTACTBusiness email: [e-mail] enquiries: [e-mail]

Keith Frankish, welcome to the show. Well, thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here, Alex. Am I conscious, Keith? Are you conscious? I'm a little confused about this, and I have been for the past couple of years, and I'm hoping you can help me work it out. I'm conscious, you're conscious, yes.

But, of course, we need to sort out what that means, and that's really the whole focus of my work is on trying to get a good, grip on what we're talking about when we're talking about consciousness. So yeah, yeah, let's put it like this. You have experiences. You have pains, you, you smell things, you see things, you hear things. These are what we call conscious experiences. Okay, they, you can tell me a lot about them. I have similar ones. Yeah, they're perfectly real things that happen to us. The question is, what is happening? Okay, that's good. I'm glad to hear you say that, because you are perhaps the foremost defender of a view in consciousness or philosophy of mind known as illusionism.

And given that it talks about the illusion of phenomenological experience, it leads a lot of people to think that the view means that consciousness itself is some kind of illusion, which sounds a bit self-defeating because, of course, to experience an illusion, you have to be experiencing something. And so typically, when I've talked about the philosophy of mind with people and illusionism has come up, without very much thought, people have said it's kind of nonsense on the face of it. And you were just saying before we started, it's Galen Straussen, isn't it, that said that illusionism is perhaps like, I can't remember the exact quote, but like the worst idea that anyone has ever come up with or something like that. So maybe I thought it would be a bit more fair to have an illusionist on the show to you know, defend his case. Well, thank you for giving me the opportunity. So let's, I think, what Gailen imagined I was saying was something like this, that no one ever feels pain, no one never feels pleasure, no one ever has conscious

sensations, conscious perceptions. I'm not saying that, of course I'm not saying that. What I am saying is that I think people under, some people, particularly, particularly some philosophers, some people who've thought about this quite a lot, have a mistaken view of what is happening when we have those conscious experiences. The consciousness isn't quite what we take it to be, and that perhaps we don't have the sort of insight into its nature that some people think we can just sit and reflect on the nature of our own experience,

and from that, deduce quite profound consequences about the fundamental nature of reality. Now, I think those people who think that have got a mistaken view of consciousness, and I think that mistaken view is due in part to a sort of illusion created by our introspective systems, by the systems that monitor and model our own mental activity. So the illusion comes in in the, you see, an illusion isn't, when you, let's say take a stage illusion. Something's happening there on the stage when you see someone levitating.

Something's really happening on the stage. It's just not what you think it is or not what you're invited to think it is. That's what I think about consciousness. That's something real and important, significant is happening, but you're invited,

perhaps, by the nature of your introspective systems to misconceptualize it. And it's that misconceptualization that lies at the basis of the philosophical debates about consciousness. Now, for most people, consciousness is immediately accessible. As in, I mean, say for most people,

that's what they think. They think that consciousness is just the thing which presents itself to you as it is directly. When I see something red, when I feel pain, you know, someone pointed out to me that it's always red, isn't it? It's always the redness of red. It's never like the brownness of brown for some reason. I think that's an injustice. The orangeness of orange. It just presents itself to you. And it seems as though even if that doesn't line up to something in the real world, even if the external world is an illusion and it's all being created by, you know, being prodded by scientists in a lab somewhere, that you are having this experience is real. And because experience is sort of this subjective thing. that you're just experiencing directly,

no matter what the cause is, no matter how incorrect you could be about what is bringing that about, the experience itself is there. It's private, it's subjective, it's inner. And if I understand you correctly, it's that that you think is an illusion,

this idea of a subjective, private world. That's getting pretty close to it. There's a lot to unpack in what you just said because you'll find philosophers perhaps lay people saying the sort of thing you just said as if that's kind of completely innocent as if there's no theoretical framework being assumed then I think there is.

Let's just start with a term that often is smuggled in, well smuggled in, that is often employed without much reflection. I, what you said presented to you, presented to me, what is this I? What are we referring to here? Well, I'll tell you what I mean when I speak of when I use the first person. I'm referring to this particular animal, this biological organism that is the product of a certain genetic makeup and a certain developmental history and has been all sorts of experiences

and is able to do the things it does in virtue of that history. It's a, as far as I'm said, it's a completely part of the natural world the eye that I'm talking about isn't something that's associated with this body or distinct from the body but somehow the animal but somehow associated with it's sort of product of the of the body it just is this animal that's what I mean by I so when we say that things are presented to me I mean that in virtue of systems that compose this animal certain bits of information if you like are are available to be used to control its processes and to control its, ultimately, its speech. So that's what I mean by me. Okay. So when I say something's presented to me, I mean systems inside this animal are doing things that have this effect, the effect of acquainting me, if you like, with things around me,

or things inside me. And I think it all depends. on evolved mechanisms that have been, who's, if you like, whose plan has been designed by evolution, that have been tuned up through development and experience. And some of these are for detecting things in the world. Some of them are for detecting things inside me.

But they're all designed by evolution. They're all fallible. They're all capable of misrepresentation. So that's what I mean by me, by I, presented to me. Now, what's presented to me? well, let's start just at a pre-theoretical level. It doesn't seem that an inner world is presented to me at all. It seems that an outer world is presented to me.

I've just over there's a kind of bookshelves, all different colors, blue and red and so, quite a few of them are brown, actually. Purple up there and so on. And yeah, that's what's presented to me. They're the colors of those things. They're real, they're vivid, they're evocative, but they all seem to be out there. none of them seem to be in my mind.

That's what's presented to me pre-theoretically. Okay? Now you may say, ah, yes, but now that you may say yes, but you could be a little secret. Okay, fine, maybe I could. But then we start to get into theorizing about what's happening in these anomalous cases.

But that's where I start. Consciousness is being aware of the world around me and the world, the physical world inside me. The feeling in my stomach, the feeling of my heart. Perhaps the knowledge of certain things, that are happening in my cognitive system. Let's use that, trying to use that neutral term.

So there, that's, I think, where I start. All that is just, as far as I'm saying, all that is just all our everyday descriptions of this. I ask you, what is your experience like, and you start telling me what your experiences like about the world around you in your room, and so, yeah, very interesting, and you might just spotter things I haven't spotted,

but, you know, so, very interesting. tells me, and of course if you maybe you can detect some things that I can't, maybe I have sharper hearing, maybe you have your colour vision better than mine, whatever. Although interesting, and this all tells me about the nature of your experience, and I can ask you lots and lots of questions about it.

But same far, we haven't got into a private world of something like mental qualities. How, if you like, if I turn to the question, How do we get from that pre-theoretical position to this world of inner mental qualities? And to whom is that mental world presented? Mm-hmm. Okay.

So that's interesting, right? Because I said that, you know, it seems like we have direct access to this, like, in a private experience, but you're quite right. The thing that we experience, just on the surface, is out there. okay that's fine then i want to say like well what is the thing out there that i'm experiencing well it's really difficult to put into words right and i think a lot of people will reach for a word like qualia um which is a sometimes helpful word uh word which is supposed to kind of get a grasp on like i said earlier like the redness of red the feeling of the pain something separable

from what might be described in atomic physics or mathematical language or whatever. It's this kind of experiential bit. So I kind of want to say that like, okay, maybe if that redness is over there, the red thing that I'm experiencing is out in the world. Like, it's still something that I'm like experiencing. There seems to be some kind of like connection. There's something going on in here, which is like out there. I mean, I kind of thought, you know, I spoke to a to a, to a,

a blind YouTuber recently on this show. And he's spent his life's been blind since birth talking about what it's like to be blind. And I spent a long time trying to think about what it would be like if you sort of saw for the very first time. And I think one of the most confusing things, I hadn't thought about this is like depth perception in that like, you know, the one thing that really battles him is forget colors and stuff. He's like, you're telling me that if something's close, it's big. and if something's further away, it gets smaller. Like, that makes absolutely no sense to me. And I thought that if you suddenly opened your eyes,

you'd notice that unlike having to reach out and touch, it's like over there, but over here at the same time. You're aware that it's far away, but at the same time, it's somehow simultaneously over here without having to be right next to it. And it's that. It's whatever the sort of thing that's gone from over there into here that I think people want to call the sort of the visual

experience. What is that thing? What is it? That's a really nice way putting it. There's some contribution from me, okay, to this, to what's happening here. I'm not just, not just, ancient philosophers, ancient philosophers tended to think that it was, that the, the qualities really were right there, and that maybe that copies of them came off the surface and somehow hit my eye, but it was a copy of what was there. Other views of projectivist. that somehow eyes went out to those things and somehow I did feel them. The point is we're getting into

theory now. Another view is, okay, there is the color of the book, which it turns out not to be the color as we ordinarily think of it. It is some sort of reflectance profile of the surface, which can be characterized

in in terms in terms of the way that light is different wavelengths of light are reflected and absorbed. And then there's another kind of colour that is just in my mind. The blue that I thought was out there is really in my mind. And that's what people call qualia. But that's a theoretical move. Okay, we started with the colours being out there, relocating them into my mind.

That's a theoretical move. It's not something that's given at the start that cannot possibly be died. It's a way of making sense of what's happening when you realize that colors look different to different people. And that's the variability of perception. But there are other ways, those ancient ways I mention. But your point about the blind person is very important because perception isn't just a matter of opening your eyes or your ears or whatever and just passively receiving stuff. It is a learned, as opposed to it as a developmental history, It requires all sorts of associations to build up the, to create this kind.

Let's talk about it as an interaction. That's how I want it at all. It's an interaction between me and the thing there. And the nature of that interaction is determined partly by the nature of the thing out there and partly by my nature. And my nature isn't just something that's just, it's just, it's just colors just created, bang, and I, or whatever it. It's a matter of my learning the significance of things out there in the world. Let me tell you a little story. I may not get the details right, but it's a bit.

about a patient who was studied by a psychologist, neuro-psychology, but I don't know how we characterise it, what he's called him psychologists, anyway, see as many things, Nicholas Humphrey. In the early 1970s, a patient called HD. And she had been, not blind right from birth, but she'd gone blind quite early due to a, I think, an infection that had damaged her cornea.

Cornias. And later in life, I think about 10 and her 20s, I think she was living in Iran, who was given the opportunity to come to the cocaine, have a corneograph, corneal graft that would hopefully restore her sight. And she had the operation, and she'd been looking forward to this,

hugely, the idea of, she'd read a lot of literature and such, the idea of how wonderful the world was going to be once she, her eyes were open as it were, like Mary coming out of her black and right room. And the operation, technically, it was a success. But she wasn't, it wasn't the revelation,

she's expected. It was, she was seeing things in the sense that she could detect them and respond to them, but it didn't have any of the significance, of the richness of the, what we talk about what experiences like, didn't have any of that. It was quite an effort for her to classify things visually, and they didn't delight her. They didn't mean anything to her. It was just like she had to go through this process and saying, yes, that's there and it's this shape or this kind of whatever. And she actually was so distressing to her that she decided it was not worth it. She put back on the blind, the class, the sunglasses and went back to living. Huh.

As a blind person. And my one possible explanation is the one that I favorite is that learning what it's like to see. Knowing what it's like, if you like, to see something is a process you have to learn. And it's a matter of building up associations with different sorts of stimuli. Learning certain patterns of reaction to those stimuli, those stimuli have. effects on us, okay, psychological effects. I'd say, well, can they conjure up associations, memories, dispositions to react in various ways, including most basically the disposition to say that's red.

And we learn this on the moment that we're born, even before we start learning it, and our sense that the world is infused with a richness and what it's likeness is coming from us. We are, as if you like, projecting onto it the psychological significance that these things have for us. We're not observing an inner private copy of that same colour that was out there. We are, if you like, what we're tracking, I think. I'm running ahead quite a lot of people. What we're tracking when we talk about the colour of the thing is the impact that that kind of stimulation makes on us, the global psychological impact. What it means for us.

Her HD didn't mean anything because she had not had the chance to build. the neural circuits and to learn the associations and so on that would give it any meaning for her. Just saying, just the idea that all the significance is packed into a simple, pure quality that if it's not out there, must be in here, is just a very simplistic and I think very uninteresting theory of what's really happening. Once you realize there's another way of thinking about this, of thinking it as an interaction where the redness is as if were you vibrating psychologically with that particular stimulation. I think with which we can carefully, slowly, pathetically unpack and understand.

I think this is much more interesting. This opens up a whole vista. We're saying it's just a primitive color that somehow exists in my mind, can't be explained by science. All we've done is just re-describe the problem, but now it's in terms. turn around the next door. I crammed a lot in there, so you won't probably unpacking me.

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Most of it these days comes from the internet, and while it's great that there are so many new sources to choose from, they all have one problem in common, and that's bias. Media bias is, of course, something that will never disappear. But wouldn't it be great if there were a way for us to navigate this online bias, objectively comparing the way that different sources are reporting on the same stories. While that is exactly what today's sponsor, Ground News, allows you to do. Ground News aggregates thousands of local and international news outlets all in one place, so you can compare reporting across the political spectrum.

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give people a grip and also get a grip myself on how you're interpreting the words that we're using. So when you say something like when you say something like experience, when you say

we're having experiences, like we are, or awareness, I think is the word you just use, you know, you are aware of certain things, like this patient who's like aware of various things in the world, it's missing some kind of qualitative aspect. What is just awareness itself? Because if you ask a philosopher of mind, you know, what is awareness? They often just say, oh, it's what, it's likeness, it's the redness of red, which I presume you would want to resist. So what do you think awareness is?

I'm thinking of it in psychological terms. What psychological terms, I mean terms of effects. So let's put it, put it crudely. It's detecting something and being able to respond differentially to the thing you're detecting, having a sort of carving up, selecting out certain stimuli that have certain significance and responding selectively to them in a whole range of ways,

in an open-ended range of ways. The fact that something's read, that I detect something as being read. That can open up a whole range of different responses depending on the context. Okay, if it's a stoplight and I'm driving, it'll make one thing. If it's a book, it might mean another thing. If it's

a little book created by Chairman Mao, it'll mean something else. It's so on and so on and so forth. It opens up a whole range of responses but that are selective to that particular stimulus. Okay, so it gives us a kind of it's an invitation to react in a

certain way, if you like, that has been taken up by my perceptual systems. That sounds to me extremely behavioral, right? It sounds to me like a behavioral account of what experience is, which is to say experience or awareness is either the reaction or a propensity for reaction to certain kinds of stimuli. Like it is sort of, it is an invitation to, like behave in a particular way in response to a certain sort of input. That to me seems behavioral. It seems like the kind of thing that could apply certainly to plants, maybe to computers, possibly even sort of other things in the world. And it doesn't quite seem to me to capture the difference between, you know, a bike experiencing rust when it's left out in the

brain and, you know, a human experiencing regeness. Do you know what I mean? It sounds behavioral. Okay, a lot of things to say about it. First, this needs heavily qualifying. It's a behavioral in a sense that it concentrates on the effects of stimulation. Okay. Now, the actual observable overt behavioral effects are just the tip of the iceberg. Every bit of stimulation causes all kinds of micro adjustments within here. Okay? Micro adjustments to perception, to perceptual set, to attention. It's triggers associations, lays down memories, from beliefs, all sorts of things

are happening in here, masses of amounts of stuff. The stuff that you actually see on the outside is, you may not see anything on the outside, but still there's a massive amount of stuff changed inside. But it's those, certainly it's effectism, if you like. it's the significance of stimulation lies in its effects. If some, and look, lots of stimuli don't have any effects on me. Magnetic radiation around me, because I don't have any means of detecting it. It doesn't have any effects on me.

I'm not conscious of it, you know? All sorts of stuff doesn't. Morse-a-pitib in some cases. Radiation, you could stand in a nuclear reactor and you wouldn't detect it so you started bleeding. So, first of all, if behaviorism is a pejorative term, because it suggests, oh, it's only overt behavior that we can say. I would say something like functionalism.

It's a matter of what functions, it enables the system to perform. But those may be characterized at a very, very fine level. Now, take other creatures. Yes, you may find certain. So it's a matter of sensitivities, activated sensitivities, and the pattern of reactivity that is, that is internal reactivity that is stimulated by them. Yes, you might find something similar in plants.

That's no problem as I'm concerned. Rust on a bicycle is quite different because there is no, the bicycle can't do any, that there's changes happening to the bicycle, the violin, it's rasterly, but it can't do anything with that information. That information can't, it's not,

it's not sensitive to that change, and it's not using that change to modulate its responses to the world in any way. If it had a detector for, or oncoming vehicles or something and it could do things and that would be a bit like it. But of course, that would be a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver

of the kind of complex sensitivity and reactivity that the 86 billion massively interconnected neurons in our head are capable of doing. But I certainly don't think there's a bright line. There are very few bright lines in nature. It does seem to open the door at least to like that car, you say,

with the detection system, like a self-driving car that detects a pedestrian and sort of has to decide, so to speak, whether to swerve left or swerve right. It sounds to me that this view opens the door to saying that it at least has some kind of like proto-consciousness. Bearing in mind that like it sounds a lot less dramatic when you realize that by consciousness, you're not talking about this sort of weird private phenomenology and stuff like that. But the words that you're using like awareness and consciousness and just effects reacting to inputs, It seems to me that a self-driving car just would be aware or conscious on that view.

It, well, we need to think about what we're doing with the word consciousness as well. What's the, why is this word so important? One reason it's important is it marks out boundaries of ethical concern. And now, some people think, thought that only humans were properly conscious, you know, and that non-human animals weren't, and this was a convenient view if you don't care much about human animals. So the word comes loaded with ethical import, and I don't think that ethical import can be just read off the psychology, if you like.

No, we need to think about where we're going to draw our ethical boundaries. This is a matter for us how much we care. It's not just read off the fact. There isn't some, you know, there's some inner light that's on in some creatures and offing others, you can do what you like to them, and if it's on, then they really matter. I think that's a simplistic, anthropocentric view. And we need to look much more carefully at what is actually happening in these different kinds of systems

and ask ourselves how much we care about that. There is also one big difference between the self-driving kind of humans, which is that we not only respond to the world, but we also respond to our responding to the world. We have introspective systems. We can monitor, it's not just that the world affect us, but that how it affects us affects us, We can monitor our own reactions to the world, talk about them. So we have another layer of awareness, self-awareness, which again, I think of in just the same way,

not as involving some of this theory is private, well, just another layer of functional organisation, which, of course, the self-driving card doesn't have. And you might think that's very important for ethical concerns. But again, that doesn't just fall out of a description of the system. It's something we decide as a community what we care about. and we put pressure on each other to expand the boundaries or withdraw the boundary in whatever way we think is, our lights suggest to us. Yeah, okay.

So I'm understanding, I think, what you're saying about like the significance of like human animal consciousness, which has something to do with introspection, right? which is that like it's as a Josh Rasmussen I think once said there's a difference between noticing a tree and noticing that you've noticed a tree right and that's an important distinction and in your your paper on illusionism you make use of this term introspection and that was one of the first things that confused me when I was trying to sort of learn about your worldview which is that I thought I was being presented with this view that sort of consciousness is some kind of illusion which I know and hope we've roughly covered as is not what you're saying. But I thought to myself, if the illusion is being caused by introspection, surely that introspection is a form of conscious experience. Now, you think consciousness exists, you just don't think it has this sort of qualitative private sort of dimension. But the same question can be asked, right? Like if the illusion is being created by a misfiring of an introspective system, isn't the very active introspection also qualitative and even more private, because it goes sort of inwards and it's all about me.

Like, I kind of want to say that there seems like a, not a circularity, whatever the opposite of a circle is, you know, it seems to be sort of self-defeating. So tell me why it's not. Yeah. Yeah, well, for exactly the same reason that I just tell the same story about introspection that I told about perception, that perceiving the world around us doesn't involve creating a sort of mental

simulacrum of it, that then an inner, I observe, I tell this other story about being sensitive to stimuli and its stimulus triggering a distinctive pattern of internal activity that reflects the significance of that stimulus. Now, then I say introspection, exactly the same story. It's that the stimuli here are internal, let's say, neural ones, okay, that patterns of activity within large-scale patterns of activity within the brain. and sensitive to those, or selectively sensitive to certain aspects and the global aspects that are, that it's useful for me to know about, like whether I'm in a bad state,

whether something bad's happening to me, and that then itself triggers a distinctive pattern of reactivity to those. So when I taste something, let's say, that's very bitter, the stimulus, first or the stimulus, it books a certain complex pattern of reactivity me, introspective systems monitor that, model it, categorize it, and provoke a distinct pattern of higher level relativity, one of the most basic elements of which being to say, wow, that's bitter, don't try it. So it's not that I sort of, if I made the mistake that people think I make, then you're really a big howler because I'd be saying, look, there's no Cartesian theatre.

at the first level, the perception, but there is one at the level of introspection. But now I just said the same thing about introspection, as I say about perception, that it's a psychological process. I mean, we can tell all this in terms of representations, not representation that we're consciously aware, but representations of things in the world

that then play a particular functional role in the rest of the cognitive system. So it's all going to be a matter of sensitivities and reactions, first order, higher order, perhaps even second order. Third order. So, no, reactions to reactions to the reactions. And the general idea here is that what perception is doing is it's tuning me into the world and triggering patterns of reaction that are internal reaction that are appropriate.

What introspection is doing is being sensitive to patterns of first-order reactivity in my brain and triggering appropriate reactions. The particular use of this wood is in communication. Things don't just affect me. I can tell you how they affect me. I can remember how they affect me. I can reason about how I could go on to produce those patterns that I enjoyed, recreate them,

and avoid the ones that I did. So it enables a higher, a reflective awareness of our own experience, if you like, using experience in this deflationary term, deflationary sense. Okay, so maybe it would be helpful to think about a philosophical zombie for a second. Of course, philosophical zombies, was it, was it Charmers who came up with them? Was it someone else? I feel like it was someone else who came up with it and then Charmers like popularized it. Robert Kirk used the term in the early, I think that's about 74, but it's been a, it's been knocking around. There's the imitation. I can't go. It's, it's an idea that's been around a bit, but they've certainly boosted its, um, It's salience in the philosophical discourse. So it's this idea that you could in principle, say some, have a creature which kind of acts in exactly the same way as a human, that reacts to the same stimuli in exactly the same way.

You can imagine like some kind of almost like a robot which just, you know, when it puts its hand on a hot stove, it's just programmed to take its hand away and also to pull a facial expression and to go. ow, that really hurts and to do everything that the normal human does, the only difference is that there's actually no interior experience. And I know you're going to resist that language, right? But this is how it's characterized, right? There's no, there's no experience going on. It's all essentially sort of fake. It's all just like a mimicry of human behavior. You don't want to say that even we have this interior experience. We're just sort of, you know, interacting with the, with the sort of data as it comes in. The question I have for you is, like, is there a difference on your view between a philosophical zombie who, like, doesn't have experience,

but does act behaviorally in the same way and a normal human being? Because it sounds to me, like the theory of perception that you're proposing here is very behavioral. I know you wanted to say it's more about, like, effects than behavioralism generally, but it sounds to me very behavioral. It's like there are inputs and we react to them and we can we can use those inputs to do one thing or another thing. So can the philosophical zombie, except there's no, like, qualia. So how do you make sense of this comparison? Well, look, let's just unpack the philosophical zombie a little bit because the philosophical zombie isn't just acting like a human being. It's not just a clever facsimile, an outward facsimile of a human being. It's meant to be an atom for atom, an atom for atom

duplicate of a human. So when we talk about what's happening inside it, everything that happens physically inside here, you know, spatially inside here, happens inside it. It's got a brain with 86 billion or whatever interconnect to neurons and all the other stuff, glial cells and all the other stuff, all interconnected in the way that mine are and working just as mine do. It's a very point of a moment. It's not just like an actor on stage, just, you know, playing a part. it is doing the whole thing. So when you talked about it not having anything inside, inside, spatially inside here, everything's the same.

That's stipulated by the definition of a philosophical zombie. So when you were using the word inside, you meant inside in another sense, okay? And I'd kind of like to know what that inside is that you're into because it's not a spatial one, presumably. Let's come back to what the zombie can do. What's the zombie? Well, okay, we go to a neuroscientist and we say, what happens when someone smells coffee, what happens when they see brown, a lovely, rich, chocolatey brown? And they start telling you this immensely complex story about how, even at the retina,

there is already filtering from a significance happening. A lot of the incoming photons are just, you know, their activities just, you know, ignored. It's already filtering for significant patterns. That starts at the retina. It continues through many, many, many, many, but continually the brain is looking for significance. And as soon as it finds a bit of significance, it starts using it to modulate responses of various kinds, to modulate, to prime attention from things. It starts directing attention to certain things. It starts, and then processing those things. It starts, it's like a sponge, drawing insignificance from the world, and then trying to make use of it quickly to respond

because it's got to get us, you know, the bank can't mess about, you know, life's moving quickly. It starts triggering all kinds of, not necessarily responses, but disposition to stop, adjusting our expectations of what's going to happen next. This is the big thing. This is the central part of predictive processing and the fee energy framework.

It starts adjusting our alignment to the world, our expectations of what is going to happen next. If you had to have one frame, from what the brain is doing, it's trying to predict, it's trying to prepare for the next second, to anticipate the future. It starts doing all this immediate of this information. Way before it's entered what we might,

before we're aware of the information, multiple channels are doing this. Bits of information have been extracted about lines, shapes, colors, edges, there's particularizations happening, all sorts of different categorizations, some of which get rejected straight away. It's a cat. No, it isn't a cat.

It's just a trick. whatever. Some of these once get boosted into greater significance. Some of them become available through linguistic reports. Some of them become available for decision-making. Some of them trigger emotional response, trigger memorabilism. All of this characterized

in psychological terms. All of this stuff happens. And your scientist would sit you down and talk to you for days about this, and they would say, and still we only know a fraction of it. Now, all of that is happening in the zombie. Every bit of it. Okay? Everything that happens in here is happening in the zombie by definition.

The neuroscience is going to tell the difference. A psychologist could subject this zombie to the whole battery of psychological tests that it can have for awareness of stimulation, and it would pass them all just as well as I would. My zombie. What's it missing? The thing, now, also it would do the introspective thing as well. It would be able to tell you, we'll be able to tell you, yes, I can see that now.

I couldn't see it a moment ago, but when you just increase the, You just titrate that a little bit. Yeah, I could see it. No, I can't see that. That one's a little bit darker than that one. Yes, I think the red light's a bit bigger. All the things that the optician has you, when you go from an eye, do all that perfectly, just the same as I would.

It would say, that smell reminds me of my grandmother's garden. You know, that's, you know, it reminds me of the last time I was there. I did I do everything. And it would tell you, of course, as well, that it was phenomenally conscious. because that is one of the effects of all this self-wrenchments. Yes, I'm having an experience. I'm conscious. And you know what?

This conscious experience, when I think about it, I can't imagine how it could be physical. I could do all of this. This is accepted by people who, by Thomas, for instance, cause it the paradox of phenomenal judgment. His phenomenon, his own between will be as convinced that it's conscious and that consciousness is a mystery as he is. But something's missing, supposedly.

that thing that's supposedly missing is what I say is illusory. Right. So you would, in doing so, therefore, just, I suppose, reject that there could be a philosophical zombie, because if you build a philosophical zombie who's atom for atom the same as a human being and has no interior private experience, that is just what you are. Interior, private experience in this sense that isn't captured by any of the description of all the activity

that's going on in there. Because remember this interior practice, remember that this interior private experience, and again, interior to what, I want to ask? Not interior to, remember I said, I am this organism, I am this animal. It's not interior to me, the animal. Not spatially.

So where is it? Interior to what? To my soul? I suspect that's hanging around in my background. that there's this Cartesian idea that I am not really an animal somewhere back. But anyway, I don't want to press that just now. The point you've got to remember that if there is this something extra, it's not necessary for all of that other stuff to happen.

Okay? So it's not playing any role. It's not essential to my saying things like, oh, well, that one's slightly darker than that one, and oh, I can just see the pattern of the light coming through the leaves. It's so beautiful. And it reminds me of my mother's garden and yadi, yad, yad, yad. Everything you asked me to describe my experience.

to report my phenomenology. The zombie does all of that perfectly. So the actual quality plays no role in that. It's just a fifth wheel. And my claim is that our talk of qualities is a kind of our pre-theoretical, clumsy way of describing the reality that's going on. We can't pull it all apart this reactivity. It's too far, far too, far too,

complex, two multidimensional. We can't pollute parts. So we say, oh, it's just, what's it like to see that? Well, it's what it feels like to taste strawberries or see a lovely, rich, luscious brown. Can't tell you anymore. You can't. That doesn't mean that there is a pure quality there that you are immediately detecting. It means instead of having direct revelatory access to pure qualities, you have indirect. selective, distorted access to immensely complex patterns of reactivity. And we mistake one for the other. That's the illusion. Can you tell me about the motivations for this view in that I'm going to ask you to be as honest as possible here in that most people like want to think that their view is just thought out first principles. This is most plausible. But I don't know. Are there any like, I'm trying to think if there are ways in for people like for somebody to say,

well, hey, look, have you ever wondered why this is such a mystery? Have you ever thought it's a bit strange that no one can define consciousness? Have you ever thought it's a bit odd? What are the kinds of things that you might notice about the state of philosophy of mind or the conversations that people are having, which can make you come along and say, well, hold on a second, maybe this answers some of your questions. I mean that in the sense that when I speak to a panpsychist, they might say, have you ever noticed that no one can tell you what an electron is?

Have you ever noticed that science only talks about what things do rather than what they are? And then they say, look, here's a really good motivation to take this seriously. Are there similar, like, contextual factors that would work here? Oh, this is a nice question. First of all, who knows what one's motivation? I mean, I don't think we have sound introspective access to all of our motivations. So who knows? I mean, why am I talking to you today?

What role does vanity play in that? am I hoping that people will love me because they've seen beyond here being charmingly whatever. I don't know. I don't know. So there's a level at which our motivation. I think when we talk about our motivations to a large extent we are fabricating a narrative based on actual things that have happened to us, things that we've noticed, things that we've felt. But we are creating a self-story and the different self-stories you can tell.

Here's one that I could tell about this. I don't think humans are special as, as, I'm going to say, some of my opponents think they are. I don't think that just sitting in an armchair and reflecting on one's own experience gives one direct insight into the nature of reality. I just don't think we are that special, the fundamental nature of reality. I think we are evolved, biological organisms who have capacities for self-monitoring, self-modeling. This gives us a certain picture of ourselves, which is very adaptive to have this simplified self-image and maybe even to think of ourselves as having a private inner world. It may be very useful.

But I don't think it's, I don't think evolution wouldn't need to equip us with an insight into the fundamental nature of reality, and I don't think the universe has been so kind as to just sort of make it pop out of things evolution has given us. It just seems too arrogant to think that like that way. Another reason is that I suppose that it's a reason I've not a Christian or religious person, that in some ways I'm kind of tempted by it. I can see the attraction of these views. I have dwelt on the and in my youth I think quite a lot about religion. I have dwelt on the mysteries of consciousness. I have really tried sincerely to think myself into the mindset of people like Philip. And I think I understand it.

I think I understand it. Philip Goff, you know. Philip Coff, yes. Sorry. Philip Goff. And Dave Charles. Phil. Phil.

Phil. Goffy. Sorry. He's a friend of both of ours, so we can do this. I have, I think, thought myself into their mindset. And indeed, I can. And that's one reason why I don't want to say, oh, they're just wrong. We should just eliminate

old talk of this. No, I'd say, it's real, it's compelling, it's vivid, but it's an illusion. And one reason I do that is because I'm quite, again, this is my story, is that I'm, and one of the same, I find it hard

to adopt any sort of religious belief is that I'm quite an anxious person and I'm anxious about self-deception. I'm anxious about believing stuff just because I'd like to believe it. There are I would dearly love to believe that I would see some of my lost loved ones again, dearly love it. But I don't want false comfort.

I want to try and live life with my eyes open, try and deal with things as they are. Because I think in the end, self-deception lets you down. Yeah, it can't do that. It's a, it's a, it breaks, it's a crutch that breaks eventually. And I think the same goes for thinking about, the specialist of the human mind. The third reason is that I absolutely love scientific explanation. I love finding out about, well, I don't do first order science myself,

but I love reading about how, about scientific discoveries, about how we've unpicked the mechanisms, say, of cellular metabolism. It's amazing stuff and stuff that's work that's being done on developmental biology. It's amazing. And it's wondrous and it's wonderful. more wonderful to me than the stories that religions might tell. And I think there's a fascinating stories to tell about unpicking the nature of consciousness and whatever we, the consciousness in the sense that I believe. And I don't want people to stop. There's a danger that philosophers

are going to discourage people from trying to tell that story by saying, well, you can't do it. It's a hard problem. You've got to just leave it to metaphysical theory. realizing people sitting in their armchairs, mulling this overs. No, let's get on with the work. Let's find out what's really happening. But sometimes people say, well, sometimes people suggest that I haven't really had rich in-of-conscious experience. Now, it's true that I haven't done psychedelic drugs, but I do suffer from quite vivid

migraines. And if anything, they are more, I think perhaps more impactful. then perhaps so they're certainly more unpleasant than psychedelic. I know what it's like to feel that you are part of the war, that you've split into two, that your senses have merged together in strange and unarticulable ways. I've had some pretty strange experiences. So the people who think that they convince me that I'm wrong,

but I give me a punch on the nose, won't get far. Although they might make me pretend to agree with them. Yeah. The question of psychedelics is interesting because like the kinds of experiences that people have when using them involves some quite strange things like the concept of an ego death and the conviction that consciousness is kind of everywhere and foundational and that the whole world is alive and whatnot. But particularly this idea of like the self,

which so far you've been saying that I am just this sort of biological organism. I think that requires a little bit of investigation in that, you know, I don't feel like I am the same thing as my hand. Like I could probably cut off my hand and it would no longer be like a part of me. I kind of feel like I could cut out my, like, parts of my brain, and I'd still be, like, here. It's not clear to me where this biological sense of the self actually lies, and there are all kinds of problems in personal identity as to what that is, as to, you know, as to what counts as, like, continuity of one person, you know, what makes me the same person I was 10 years ago. And then also on top of that, given that lots of people just are convinced. that they have experienced the death of the self and whatnot. I wonder if we just grant for a moment that the self is a dubious concept, if it were a

dubious concept, if the self sort of didn't exist and was an illusion, then like, how would that affect your view? Because it seems like a lot of what you're saying relies on the idea that there is this you that is having experiences that is reacting to the world. It's you that's conscious. When I touch a hot stove and move it away, it's not my hand. that's conscious, because a panpsychist could say what's going on there is like every little atom in my hand is, you know, going, get out, get out, go away, go away. And like, sort of cumulatively together,

that is felt as the pain of a hand or something. But I think you have to say that there is some kind of sort of central part of you, maybe it's your central nervous system that, like, reacts to that. So how much of your view, like, depends on the notion of there being a self, which can have these reactive experiences. What I said was that I think I'm an animal, a particular animal, an individual animal, a token animal. And the identity conditions for that animal, we can debate about that. I'd say this animal could lose a hand and still be the same animal. I mean, so we can get into identity conditions for individual animals.

How much of you, how much of me could you take? This is a really interesting question when you get to my age, by the way, because you find bits of yourself stopping working. you're a long way off yet, but give it 40 years and you will find that bits of yourself stop working, both the peripheral ones and the more central ones some days. So I'm afraid you will. I still feel it's me even though I go into the kitchen. I think, what did I come here for? I have no idea.

So there isn't a, like, you know, self isn't a clear-cut concept. But the idea of this individual animal, okay. When does this individual animal, let's distinguish two, the individual animal, then we'll say something about the self-separated. Individual animal, when does it cease to exist? What if I, you know, if I got serious form of dementia or something, would I still, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's no hard and fast line. When I actually die and they put me in the ground or, um, or, you know, burn me, whatever they're gone then, all right. Um, but basically, as long as, as long as there's still a pulse, then in some sense, this animal is still around. But it's not there are no bright lines I don't like bright lines that's it's not a

there are very few bright lines in nature they're looking for essences and definitions this is a thing that philosophers are preoccupied with and it's a pointless endeavor what there are our words and how we choose to use the concept now okay so that's this animal

now the self I do think I won't say a bit more about the self I most of the my views are very heavily influenced by those of Daniel Dennett And I do really like his idea that there is a sense in which we have a self as distinct from the body. But it's a sense of a fiction.

It's a narrative that we animals, we human animals, tell. We're very talkative. We love reporting stuff about ourselves. That's one thing that the self-monitoring, self-moburnal allows us to do. We don't just have experiences. We recognize that we have them. We talk about them. We tell other people about them, often obsessively and annoy.

And from this, we construct a kind of narrative. I am the person to whom this happened, and who feels this and who likes this and doesn't like that and who wants this, and we tell this. And it's a selective one, of course, because we just, you know, you can get into the habit, you can tell bad stories about yourself and get yourself into a really unfortunate state of affairs. Some people respond to trauma, it seems, by constructive power. stories to help them deal with it.

So these, I think, this is this is one way of retaining self-talk without the inflated metaphysics. That's essentially what Dan was doing all the time, and it's done it, and it's what I'm trying to do, is to take these folk conceptions of things, like free will,

consciousness, intentionality, meaning the self, say, look, as they stand, you can't really make them do the kind of really heavy metaphysical lifting you think they can't or even scientific lifting. But they're still useful. So let's just re-engineer them a bit. Let's see what they're really doing for us, that they have a pragmatic value, notion of the self as a private value in presenting yourself to other people and to yourself, make you better track of who you are and what you want. It's a useful story that you tell. It doesn't correspond to some

thing associated with the body. But it's a usual notion. We can do the same with free will with consciousness. We don't have to throw the notions out completely. We re-engineer them a bit in a way that makes them. I think this re-engineering is very important because it doesn't make these concepts hostage to some dodgy science,

or potentially dodgy science, or heavy-duty metaphysics. If you think of ourselves as being free-responsible agents, is very, very important. If you think of yourself as a passive victim of circumstance, then you can all sorts of sorts of strong. And you think of some freedom response, but if you think that freedom and responsibility

depends on, let's say, physics being wrong, or in some way, I mean, oh, he does, maybe it doesn't, but if you think that it does, then you're in the danger of losing it if science turns out the wrong way. If you think that being conscious

depends on making sense of the idea that quarks are conscious, then again, you might sort of think, well, maybe I'm not conscious then if it would have to be the case that everything was conscious in order for me to be conscious. Let's just, you know, these concepts are important ones. Because they're important, let's not make them do work that they can't do

and may collapse under the strain of trying to do. So, oh, I've got a bit preachy there. It's good. We like that. We like that. I always find it great. I was thinking when you said about free will, I was thinking about the sort of debates that Sam Harris and Dan Dennett would have and how.

Despite talking about something like relatively sort of, you know, intellectual and highbrow, it got quite sort of personal and excitable. It happened sometimes, and I think it's great. The thing that I'm most interested in what you just said, sorry, go ahead. Yes. No, no, I was just a note that I think Sam said that Dan thought we were just puppets. And Dan said, yes, in the sense we are puppets. But we're also puppets that can have strings that can control their own strings.

It's where we're puppets that have the ability to control those first strings with other strings. Okay, there's no ultimate puppet master. But it's the ability to control your own strings at different levels of organization that gives you freedom. It's a mechanism of autonomy. And you should love these strings, these deterministic mechanisms that allow you to exercise autonomy. Anyway, that's. I just remember,

yeah, Sam Harris saying, I think it's fair to say that one could watch an entire season of Downton Abbey on Ritalin and not detect a finer note of condescension than you manage for 20 pages running. You'd think that they were like talking about each other's wives or something, but no, they're talking about whether, you know, humans have agency

over their own actions, which I think is fascinating. The funny thing is that they're metaphysically. they were pretty much on the same page. It was the moral that each of them drew from it that was different. Yeah, and so much it might even just be linguistic, that it becomes kind of crazy. I think Sam has since, you know, not maybe if not apologize for that, at least sort of toned it down. I remember they had a conversation afterwards and it kind of awkwardly addressed it. You know, a moment ago you said that philosophers are obsessed with trying to like categorize and that it's hopeless.

I agree with this, by the way, in that like, you know, we want to precisely define what is the difference between a table and a chair. What is the difference between a tiger and a lion? What is a species? You know, if I, I don't know, if I, if I lie down on my desk, is it a, is it a bad bed or is it a good desk? And it's all a bit silly because quite clearly what we're just doing is taking, you know, this physical stuff and we're just arranging it in various, ways and we're putting a label on it. Or we're looking at the natural world and we're seeing that the natural world sort of ebbs and flows and sprouts out various bits and bobs and we sort of arbitrarily put like borders around them and give those borders labels like species and things.

I agree with that. And I've talked about that a lot in the context of myriology, which is the study of plants and holes. Now, to me, as a myriological nihilist, I just think that there are no sort of real categories. There are no real like distinct objects except in so far as matter just pre-existing matter just gets rearranged, given a label, and we call it a new thing. It's like matter and form, right? You give it a new form and we just decide that that's what a new thing is. However, there is something that has to be there to be arranged in this way. So the myriological nihilist thinks that, you know, the table and the chair and the, you know, can of Coke or whatever, they're all just like atoms or meriological simples, as they call them, like arranged and

given labels. But there must be something that's being arranged. There must be this myriological simple, right? And I think that the motivation for like panpsychism is to say, well, okay, maybe there's just sort of one type of stuff. And all it is is just an arrangement of stuff. but I know that consciousness exists somewhere because when it gets arranged complexly enough in my brain, I'm having these experiences and awareness. And so, you know,

as long as emergence doesn't exist, which is a thing in itself, they just say, look, I mean, there's only one type of stuff. You know, brains don't exist, tables don't exist, it's just arrangements and labels. But I know consciousness exists somewhere

because it's here right now, then it must be there at the foundation. What I want to say is like, or what I want to ask is like, do you have like a metaphysical view on, when you said that philosophers trying to categorize stuff is a bit of a fruitless endeavor, the stuff that they are categorizing, the stuff that makes it all up. Do you have a strong view on what

that is? Are you a physicalist? Are you agnostic? Do you know what an electron is? You know, I just wonder what you think. The 2006 Chevrolete Equinox awarded the most dependable compact SUV in the U.S. by J.D. Power is designed for your every day. And with available all-wheel drive, you can handle your to-do list with total confidence. Start your build at Chevrolet.ca. Details at J.D.power.com. Twizzlers keep the fun going.

Yeah, I know. I just stopped whatever you were listening to to tell you that Twizzlers keep the fun going. Well, irony isn't my forte. But twisty, chewy, yummy Twizzler sure is. So think of Twizzlers as a little palette cleanser for whatever's queued up, which, by the way, should be coming very soon.

Like any second now. Okay, Twizzlers, time to keep the fun going. Hi. Insofar as we have a science of the fundamental reality, it's basic physics. That's our best attempt at it. I'm not a physicist. I'm whatever. It's quantum, universal wave function, the superstrings.

I don't know. I've got no sort of a stake in that game. Dogging that race? I don't know. Dogging that fight. That's an argument. Yeah. Stake in that fight.

Sorry. At some point I turn into... At some point I turn into Alan Partridge and start using bad metaphors. I don't know. I mean, it could be little angels. I don't know. I have no idea. It's not what in it.

It interests me. I'm fascinated by it, but I've got no... What I do think, though, is that just by sitting and reflecting on my own mind, I don't get access to it. I think finding out about the fundamental nature of reality to be. And I think it'd be incredibly arrogant to think that a, you know, building enormous particle accelerators that are bound boundaries of European countries to try and crack this problem that they're doing. But I think I can crack it just by sitting in my, in my armchair, and thinking about my own mind. I think that, I think maybe evolution has given us a sense of the, of the,

and it won't be surprising if it did given us a sense of the the importance of our own self-conception given us a way of modelling ourselves and our mental activity in a way that makes it seem really vivid and potent hers and you know that we could understand Nick Humphrey I mentioned earlier

has written a wonderful book about this soul dust about why this idea of that we have a magical inner realm is an adaptive one that it has all sorts of wonderful functions the idea, not the reality. So, yeah, we've got this sense, yeah. I mean, a lot of people have a sense,

and a very powerful sense, probably as powerful as the sense that they're acquainted with Qualia, that they're directly acquainted with God, that they have direct, immediate experience of God, and that's something they know with more certain than anything else. Well, that's interesting that they have that.

It's an interesting psychological phenomenon. It's interesting to study it, and I wouldn't dream of being abusive to them, anything like that, it just because it's very powerful. And similarly, the fact that you think, oh, look, we don't know the fundamental nature of reality, but maybe just by sitting and thinking about my own mind,

I can discover it. That just seems to me, I don't mean to be rude, but it just seems to be arrogant and incredibly anthropocentric. I mean, suppose you have an base of aliens who haven't, don't have the notion of quality, either because they are zombies or because they never subject to this illusion in the first place. And they're studying the fundamental nature of reality.

And they learn that there is this species on this remote planet of Soul 3 that think they found it simply by thinking about their own what it's like to look at a brown surface. I think that this, you know, so I said, yes, there's a possible. But the fundamental nature of reality, they're clear. And I don't think I'll get it by, by, by, by country. So, I'm sorry. I feel like it's a bit, I feel like it's a bit unfair as a comparison, though, because, like, you know, I don't think anyone would claim that just by sort of introspection, I could know that, you know, there are, there's microbial life on Mars or something. But the facts that we're considering, at least insofar as it comes to consciousness, many people want to say that those are the kind of things that are, like, looking inwardly in respect, introspectively,

just closing your eyes, sat in your armchair, is the equivalent of, like, looking at Mars. You're, like, looking at the thing that we want to know about. And intuitively, like, let's address this, because you're sort of pulling up this Cartesian imagery of, like, Descartes, sat in his robe, by the fire at the beginning of the meditations, just saying, I'm just going to think my way into all of the positions that I already hold. And he has some sort of ideas, and he thinks, there are certain things that I could know just by sitting around and thinking about it. That sounds to me like you disagree with him, but like, how come? Like, it seems, you know, like Descartes wants to say something like, you know, I know that I exist in some form because I couldn't possibly deny it.

The act of denying it would require my existence, or at least my thinking. And so I know that I must exist. I think, therefore I am, you know, if I were to doubt that I exist, doubting is a kind of thinking, which means that there is something doing the thinking. Now, to me, that seems like the kind of thing that, yeah, fair enough, you can sit down, you can think about it, and you can know that, and you don't need to go and, like, you know, observe a bunch of stuff in the world in order to figure it out. So what do you mean when you say that you can't get knowledge that way?

Okay, well, lots of things say about it kind. I mean, there's, first of all, there's a debate about what he was actually trying to do there. One, one, there's a case can be made that he was trying to just give himself license to overturn the whole I was Stodelian scholastic framework, and that it was a bit of a tactical move to, really, to facilitate the new science. Anyway, that's one thing. But, I mean, it's often been pointed out that he wasn't entitled to the infant's. I exist, because he hadn't really said what I, what I denoted here, what he should have said

is, at best, thinking exhibits. And what is thinking? What does he mean by thinking? Does it involve having certain words being tokened in a speech? What does it involve? What's thinking? What's he talking about? Doubting what he was doing was writing words down on a page

or perhaps articulating him to himself. What's that? Could he have done that without language? If not then he has, then he can know that language exists maybe. It's a very tempting sort of thing. But look how removed it is. From our ordinary basic cases, what do you know? I open my eyes, I look around me and I know stuff.

Okay, I could be in error, right? That's, look at what, again, start with what I think we are, if all biological organisms, I mean, all our knowledge is dependent on mechanisms of some sort, for tracking things, noticing differences and responding to them, okay? That's, I just, I don't see how else I can get knowledge, but by some process like that. barring something by magic again. And that goes for knowledge of my own mind. Whatever I say about my own mind,

it must be the product of some sort of mechanism for tracking things that are occurring and generating responses to them. Now, okay, if you think you're an immaterial soul that is completely transparent to itself and doesn't need any sort of mechanism to know its own state, well, I suppose you could say that.

And that's the kind of conception that you need to make Descartes account work. Well, okay, the point of, There are no foundations here. We've got a whole load of beliefs. Some of them, some of them, common sense beliefs, some of them, you know,

product of experience in the world, or reflection on ourselves, we've got a whole lot of scientific beliefs. And we've got to try and just find the best balance between all of these we can. The idea that you can establish some foundations like in a mathematical system where you can actually just start

define your axioms and then build on that. That doesn't work for knowledge of the natural world. And what's interesting is that Descartes' thought experiment is kind of captivating. That is very interesting psychologically. And I think that tells us a lot about how our self-conception, about how the brain generates a conception of itself and its own activity. That is very, very interesting.

Psychologically, it's very significant. But then you can base a metaphysics on it. I don't think we need a different metaphysics for us than we need for any other aspect of the natural world. I don't think they're that special. So help me understand why I feel like I do have a very special inner world. And what I mean by that is it's not just that an external world presents itself to me and seems to have qualitative components or properties. But that like they kind of stay there. They kind of stay there. Like, I can close my eyes and it's, it's still kind of all there in some sense. I have dreams. I have,

I have weird sort of interior images. I always ask people, like all the time, where the triangle is that I can see in my head. Like, I offered, I think I offered like $50 to anyone who could like locate the triangle that I see in my head when I, when I imagine it. And my friend Phil Halper just went and interviewed like 15 of the leading materialists, you know, people like David Papanow and people like specifically asking them my question. And he thinks I owe him $50. I don't think that he's actually done it. I just want to get your take on this because I feel like it's a good question just to give people, people are probably sick of me asking it. Just for the record, ladies and gentlemen, I'm not just asking this because I sort of keep wanting to know the same

answer it's because I feel like how you answer the question is a really interesting way of like demonstrating what you think about consciousness. So I close my eyes. I think of a triangle. There it is. It's got properties. It's got three sides. Some people say the triangle just doesn't exist. But like I can I can attribute properties to it. It doesn't have foresight. It's got interior angles adding up to 180 degrees. You know, I can't do that for things that don't exist. Things that don't exist don't have properties. So there is a triangle. There it is. I can see it. In my my head. Where's the triangle? Okay, great. Good, good question. Okay, I don't actually have a copy here, but if I had a copy of

one of Arthur Conan Doyle's works, I would open it and read about Sherlock Holmes smoking his pipe, and then I would ask, where is Sherlock Holmes's pipe? I can say lots of interesting things about Sherlock Holmes's pipe. I don't know if he describes that, Mia Sean, was it, or whatever, and that it's, I could always hat or whatever. And I could, oh, just Sherlock Holmes himself. I can say lots of things about Sherlock Holmes. It's true. Sherlock Holmes was a detective. It's true that he was skinny, wiry, and that he took cocaine and so on. It's not true that he was a, you know, a 150-pound wrestler from Montana. So I can say true things about Sherlock Holmes. The first thing is about Sherlock Holmes. Where is Sherlock Holmes? It's fiction.

It lives in the world of fictions. You can make true statements within the scope of some sort of fiction operator. That's what I say about the triangle. It's not anyway. But you can say true things about it because it's that kind of construction. It's a sort of construction. It has the same status that your thoughts about Sherlock Holmes have, about the Sherlock Holmes that you imagine. It's not composed that. You're driving it like a representation, like the idea that like,

Of course, yeah. That what I'm sort of seeing in my head is a representation of a triangle rather than a triangle, right? But not necessarily a representation made out of sort of things that are actually real lines that are really triangular. Just as when you think about Sherlock Holmes, you don't actually have to have little dabs of color to paint an internal picture of Sherlock Holmes.

You just have... Exactly how this works is a fascinating question. Somehow, your brain is using the resources that it has to represent the world around us to create representations of non-existent things and then react to them in a very similar way to the way to where you would react to the actual things.

And the heft of this, the force of this comes from it triggering similar patterns of reaction. Okay. So if you try and imagine, it's quite hard to imagine smells actually, but if I try and imagine the smell of my grandmother's, the scent that, for my grandmother's room or something, as far as I can do it, it will trigger a wave of emotional responses, okay? And that's what gives it the heft that what it's likeness, because it's moving me in the way that smelled it, not because it has some,

intangible spell qualia, but because it has effects on me. And that's why, of course, we read about Sherlock Holmes, because not just because we act, that's idea of entertaining non-existent things, but because they entertainers, they move, as they puzzle, as they intrigues, they spark all sorts of interesting trains of thought. Well, actually, I do it for the first reason. I'm just interested in the ontology of Sherlock Holmes. Like, my favorite question to ask people this week is who created Sherlock Holmes? Because who was it the creation? Sherlock Holmes? Arthur Conan Doyle.

Or was it Sherlock Holmes's parents? Because it kind of depends on what you mean, right? Because within the fiction of the story, Sherlock Holmes was created by his parents. But of course, there's another sense in which we want to say, well, he was created by Arthur Conan Doyle. And the point is that you can sort of have logics within fictions, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. What I think you're doing here is something that commonly happens in the philosophy of mind, in my view, which is that faced with a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a,

a bit of a mystery, like this mysterious triangle that I can see or something, or the concept of, you know, consciousness emerging from non-conscious stuff is another area where this always comes up. People often don't quite explain it, but they give an example. They say, oh, but that's just the same as when this happens. But the other thing that they're comparing it to is just as mysterious and is actually just doing the same thing. So what I mean to say is that, like, um, When I talk about emergence, I say, oh, how can consciousness come from matter? People say, oh, well, that's just like how, you know, like heat comes from atoms vibrating. Forgetting that heat, the interesting part about heat, is itself an experience.

So you're not actually explaining anything. You're just giving another example of the same problem. And I feel like the same thing's happening here, which is like, well, where's the triangle? And you say, well, it's in the same place that Sherlock Holmes is. And I'm like, yeah. And where is that? because, of course, Sherlock Holmes is represented by the letters on the book, right? But if no human ever existed, no brain, no sort of agents, and just by some spontaneous atomic freak event,

you know, one of the Sherlock Holmes novels just sort of popped into existence spontaneously in space, Sherlock Holmes would not be there. There'd be no representative content. It would just be a bunch of atoms and ink on a paper. page, right? The thing that makes that page represent a home is that a mind is reading it and conjuring up an image in their head. And the question for me is like, where is that image? Like, what is that image? Is that image just the same thing as neural activity? Because if it is, then the answer to where it is is, well, it's inside of your brain. You know what I mean? Visit BetMDM casino and check out the newest exclusive. The price is right fortune pick. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager.

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construct, it's mental representation. And that mental representation is realized in a pattern of neural activity, of some sort. Yeah, but its significance lies in what it means for us. I mean, if you tell somebody just the basics about, you imagine this tall guy with this funny hat on the pipe and things, they form some sort of image, you know, that's kind of nothing really. It's just, well, okay, you embed him in all the stories that are told about him. And so, you embed him in all the stories that are told about him and suddenly you have this rich narrative about you, watch the Jeremy Brett series. I think Jeremy

Brett did a lot to create Sherlock Holmes. I think that was terrific. Anyway, it's embedded in all these rich narratives and it also triggers all your memory, well, not memory so much as your thoughts about Victorian London and

it's an escapist world and you can fill it out in your mind. All of what you're doing here is, let's put it just in representation, in terms of other ways of putting it. But you're getting a rich body of representations that produce a rich range of effects on you that you like to have. You know, that you attract your attention and that, but it was all kinds of positive responses in you. Great. Now, where is Sherlock Holmes?

Well, he's a man himself isn't anywhere. What is there some sort of representation of a man that is created by your brain. by interaction with the words that Conan Doyle wrote. And I don't see there's any deep mystery here. I mean, there's a tense, it's one question too many to ask, and where is Sherlock Holmes himself? What we need to ask is,

how is the impression of Sherlock Holmes created? And that's very much like how I want to think about conscience. One too many questions to ask, but what really is, you know, the feel of conscience? How is the sense of it? Let me put it this way. I suppose, maybe this will help. Went back to conscience, so.

Suppose what happened in the brain was that, you know, this is the eye here, okay, so light hits the rat in. And processing, processing, processing, and all the reasons. And then at some point, this processing, bang, produced this kind of inner image, right? That is then sort of there present, right? Now, what happens with that owner image? Okay, somehow, is it just aware of itself?

I don't see how that could happen. What would have to happen in order for that image to mean anything? is for some sort of system to scan it, notice its features, and then start processing that information again and producing all the downstream effects that that image tended to produce. Now, suppose we cut out the middleman, we just have to process it and processing it doesn't create the image, but it does produce all the downstream effects

that the image would have produced. It's just as good. You don't need the image. You don't need an actual Sherlock Holmes. You just need all the effects that an image of Sherlock Holmes would have had. a very vivid image of Sherlock Holmes, if it's to mean anything to you, you've got to know,

not stoke of having a sort of inner TV playing in a room and nobody there to watch it, you know, with the Sherlock Holmes stories. Something's got to watch it and react to it. And if you can get all those reactions without the image on the TV screen, how would you know the difference? How would you tell whether you're undergoing

an illusion of qualia or actual qualia? And my thought is, if you're undergoing the illusion of qualia, in this representational sense of all the effects that qualia would produce being produced in you, then you don't actually need the qualia. And, you know, Occam's razor, let's just suppose that what the brain is doing is tricking itself into thinking that it has qualia. It's the simplest hypothesis. I can accept in principle that, like, it might be possible somehow for me to be fooled into sort of thinking I'm seeing something that's not.

Like it seems to me the idea that you're getting at is like, you know, when I actually see a triangle, a real triangle in the world, my brain kind of reacts to it. It sort of scans it. It reacts to it in some kind of way. And all you need is for that reaction to occur, you don't need the triangle itself. And that's what's happening in my brain. Except it does seem to me like I have an interior screen. Like not everyone can sort of visualize images in their head, but I can like see the image. I can. I can, like, see the image. I can. I can see what it looks like. And that seems to me more, what I'm trying to get at is like intuitively, I think for most people, conscious experience is more than just a reaction to something. This goes back to what we said earlier about like the behavioralism, which I think is implicit in your view,

which I know you wouldn't want to characterize it this way, but this is kind of how it sounds and potentially what it like leads to, which is that like when you have these experiences, be it of a triangle, or let's take something more pressing, like the pain of a migraine, that what you mean to say in saying, I'm experiencing a migraine, is just that I am like reacting to a certain kind of stimulus.

I think intuitively, deeply intuitively, for most people, when someone is in pain, there is more going on than just them, like, reacting, to something or behaving in a particular way, that there's something else going on, right? And I think the same thing is intuitively true with me in the triangle. I don't think that when I see that triangle in my head, I'm getting all the stuff that I would have got if I saw a triangle except for the triangle itself. I'm like, no, I can see the triangle itself, you know?

Like, I'm not just reacting to a stimulus. I'm like conjuring up the stimulus. And in this case of pain, the stimulus is like there. I am reacting to it, but it's also like a real thing. You know what I mean? I know what you mean. And I'm not denying that that's a compelling way of describing it. But let me try and do a little bit to unpick it.

First of all, of course, imagine the triangle. I'm not just suggesting you're reacting to an external stimulus may be internal here. You may be reacting to your own internal. The stimulus may be internal, okay? maybe due to some strange activity occurring within the system itself. So you may be reacting entirely to an internal stimulus through self-monitoring. Let's go to the pain case because I like to try this one on people. I'll be interested to see what you think.

Okay, so let's take a migraine. Now, I think everyone will agree that when you have a migraine, there are all sorts of reactions occurring. Okay? So, for instance, what's occurring? Well, first of all, I'm in a state that I don't like being in, put it like that. Okay, that's a reaction. I'm reacting to the state by not one, not liking it.

Okay, so to imagine that reaction. Let's imagine removing one by one all the reactions and finding out what's left, because what's left will be the bit that you think is missed out by my story. Okay, so let's see what it is. So let's imagine leaving out the not liking it. So someone says to me, how are you feeling? And I said, some stranger's happening, but I don't mind it really. Okay.

And another thing that will be happening is that I believe that I'm having, I'm a migraine. So are you having a migraine? No, I don't think so, but something weird is happening. Okay. One other thing of the migraine does, it it seizes my attention. I cannot think of anything else. But this thing. And so let's imagine that my attention is released.

And someone says, are you free now to talk about that thing that I was asking you earlier? I said, yeah, fine, yeah, let's have a chat about it. Another thing is, I'm aware of waves of nausea. Okay, of course, you're going to say nausea is a feeling, but I will deal with that in exactly the same ways. The other one, I'm allowed to do that. I'll say, do you feel as if you want to be sick? No, I'm fine. I don't want to be sick.

There's something strange is going on. Are you seeing strange lights and things? Now, of course, reporting that I'm seeing strange light or indeed, believe. that I'm seeing strange lights, these are effects. So I say, no, I'm not seeing anything strange. Don't feel like that. No, no, no, light or anything like that. Do you feel you want to lie down? No, I'm fine. No, no, I'm okay. Remove, remove, does it remind you of any occasions in the past when you, no, I can't think

I've ever had anything like this before? Keep removing all the psychological reactions, the things that can be characterized in terms of what the brain is doing. So this pain is not having any effect, any psychological effects is not affecting my beliefs, my emotions, my desires, it's not detecting my attention, it's not conjuring any memories, it's not altering my behavioral dispositions, I'm perfectly free to walk around chatting to you about whatever you like, but this horrible thing that is the essence of a migraine and the thing that makes it really bad and a matter of moral concern is still there, I find it very hard to imagine that. I think that's really helpful, actually.

Like, I see what you're saying, and I think that's a really helpful way of thinking about it. And the thesis is, you know, I'm saying that with something like pain, there is the qualia, and then there is the reaction. And you're saying that really, there's only the reaction. And the way to sort of test this is if we take away all of the reactive stuff, If we take away all of the sort of psychological reactions, are we left with anything we could call the qualia or whatever? And it seems like, no, because you take away all of those things. And what are you left with? You're not even, like, aware that you're having a migraine. You're not left with anything that's of any significance to you, any psychological significance. And of course, the account of the reactions would be much richer than I've just given that. I've just sketched the service. But here's the kicker. And when we talk about the feel of the pain, we are gesturing. at all that complex of reactivity, that we can't easily articulate.

We can't unpack it. Because there's no need to. If somebody says, how you feel and I say, well, my attention's been captured by certain activities on my left temporal lobe, I'm also finding that I'm dispossions for kind of nausea and I'm not, I know, nobody wants to hear all that. I say, I'm in pain, okay?

The idea, though, is that that's a shorthand, a convenient shorthand for all that's really happening. I'm not suggesting you don't say you're in pain because you are and all that stuff is horrible. It's bad stuff. You don't need to happen to people. But you don't need to reify the pain over and above all that. I get the impression that a couple of those things that you're characterizing as purely sort of psychological effects are the pressure points on which someone's going to want to say, no, no, that is that is the qualia. in that like, okay, so if you have a migraine, one thing is that it distracts your attention.

Okay, that's maybe we could call that an effect. That itself is a bit complicated, but okay. Another thing is that, you know, I'm sort of seeing bright lights. It's like, okay, well, yeah, that sounds like an effect, but at the same time you're seeing the bright light. So it also seems like a kind of experience. Certainly, then it's like, okay, I'm aware that I'm sort of nauseous. I'm like, okay, as you alluded to, as you sort of preempted, I'm going to. want to say, well, hold on. That is

your reaction to a feeling. You're sort of bundling together the feeling of nausea and sort of the reaction to noticing that feeling and just calling it all an effect. When actually, you're starting to sort of smuggle out across the border, the qualia,

as you're going along with these effects. Okay, so what we've done then, this is the objection, is we've taken the big pain qualia and we've broken it down with lots of sub-qualia. So instead of just being one in differentiated. pain quality. There's now the nausea qualia and the seeing lights quality. I just do the same with

those. I say, okay, let's take this nausea qualia then. Again, let's have got this nausea quali. But again, it's not having any effects on me. So somebody says, do you feel that you might be sick? And I say, no, not at all. Do you are you aware of any sort of griping? No, no, no. You know, do you need any medicine to it? No, no, I'm fine. It has no effects on me. It doesn't induce me to sort of run to the bathroom and stick my head. None of this is happening because these are all effects. So then maybe we need to break down the nausea qualia into the wanting to go to the bathroom qualia.

The point is at some point, these reactions are going to sort of bottom out in things that don't even seem to have qualia at all that are just like a belief or whatever they might be. The idea is that what we're doing with qualia talk is bundling together complexes of reactive dispositions that we are aware of in ourselves. And here's the thing about this. It has to be something like that for qualia talk to track anything that matters.

Because if it's not tracking things that affect us, if it's tracking something that doesn't have any effects on us, that can't matter at all. I agree with that. If you say, look, here, this animal's in pain, you say, oh dear, what's consequences? It's not having any effects. It's playing around perfectly happily. It's, you know, it's in horrible pain, but, you know, it's just, I mean, a lovely time. It doesn't matter then.

It's the people who, who rarefied my pain, who treated as something non-functional, that are not taking consciousness seriously. I'm taking it serious because I think it's part of this messy, meaty, brown-colored biological world that we're in. I agree with that, except, you know, like, of, a, of, you know, a, of, you know, course, for qualia to mean anything, it must have an effect on us. And I think I could just stipulate that like, qualia necessarily does have behavioral effect on us, but that those aren't the same thing. Because you said a moment ago, like, well, you know, like if I was sat there, say I was feeling nausea, but, you know, there were no effect. Like, I didn't, I didn't care about it. I didn't, you know, I didn't notice it, all this kind of stuff. Then, you know, what's left?

Well, I could just say, well, that's impossible. You can't have nausea, without having those effects. Not because they're the same thing, but because one, like, entails the other. You know, in the same way that I could say, I don't know, if I put a big sort of metal object in a bathtub and displaced all the water, and I told you that all the metal object was,

all the metal object was, was just the effect on the environment. There was no metal object. There was just the effect on the environment. Like, well, hold on, of course there's a metal blob. And I said, well, like, look, take away. all of the effects. Imagine that no water was displaced. Imagine that there was no splashing sound. Imagine that you couldn't see the metal object because that would be an effect. Imagine that you couldn't hear it. Imagine you took all of that away. What would you be left with? I'd be like,

okay, in fairness, you couldn't have the metal object without all of those effects. But the metal object is still its own distinct thing that's causing the effects. And I want to say the same thing about qualia. Okay, well, then there's, there's, we can have a, a terminological adjustment that will bring you perfectly into line with me, because it doesn't matter that it's, you know, what the metal's made of, right? Anything that's of that sort of, I guess, that sort of size will have the same sort of effect. So let's define qualia as whatever it is that causes all this range of effects, okay? Whatever it is. Anything that causes those effects, because it's the effects that matter. So you, so a phenomenal realist says, yeah, what that causes

them is some sort of weird thing that's inexplicable to science and there's just a pure quality and that maybe is part of this fundamental to it. And I say, no, it's a pattern of a brain activity. We just different, if we're defining qualu in terms of their effects, then I've won. Because it's much more likely that it's something natural, something that, partly the world that we already know about, than that it's some, requires some extension to that. Well, especially if that requiring that extension would involve

conflict with physics. There's an important move there that's being made. Firstly, I don't think we are defining qualia in terms of, in terms of the effect. I think I'm saying that qualia necessarily brings about effects without it being the same thing. But you also made a quite controversial move there. You said, like, you know, we have no reason to suspect that whatever's causing these effects wouldn't be part of the world we already know.

You know, why would it, you know, why would we assume that it conflicts with, with physics and our sort of understanding of the material world. And, you know, the panpsychist or idealist is going to listen to that and say, well, hold on a second. The world that you know about is the world of conscious experience. The world of atoms and material and physics is this sort of construction that we've placed upon our experiences of the world. The one that I know most directly is the qualitative experience. And so, like, yeah, you're quite right to say that Occam's razor, we'd better like assume that whatever's causing this is part of the world that I already understand. Well, the world that I understand is a world of qualia. It's a world of experiences.

It's a world of pain and a world of migraines. Well, now, let's go right back to the beginning where we start. The world that I know, it's just this world around me that I open my eyes and there's stuff there. Now, this world of qualia, this internal world, this is a theoretical invention. It was invented pretty much around the time of the late 16th, early 17th century, when people realized that the colors couldn't really be out there in the world in the sense in which they seem to be. You have Galileo saying they've got to be somehow in the soul, okay?

I think Dan it once said that, you know, the problem of consciousness is the problem of what to do with colors when you realize they're not really in objects out there. This inner world is an invention of that period. Okay, now it could be the truth. I'm not saying it's because it's an invention, It's a, it's, it's, it's, it's inaccurate. But you can't just assume its accuracy as an objection to any other rival theories.

You can't just say, all we really know about is this internal world. People didn't used to think that before the scientific revolution. They invented it as a way of dealing with these recalcitrant things that didn't seem to fit into the picture, into modern science. And they, since everybody pretty much believed in the soul, They thought, oh, you know, we don't know, we want to get on with doing science, but there were these recalcitrant things. Oh, well, we all have souls. There must be in there. The problem really came into, became a philosophical problem when people stopped believing in souls.

And they somehow had to put these qualities back into the world, back into the brain or somewhere, back into the fundamental nature of reality. There's another alternative, which is to not make that initial move. And this, I agree with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, but you shouldn't take the qualities. out of the world. Of course, they're not as it were just in the world. There's a contribution from us. Consciousness is an interaction with the world. And this is why it's not a suitable thing to be the fundamental step of the universe, because it's an interaction between complex systems in interaction of the world with complex systems within it. And it requires an immensely complex psychological system to support it. It could, it's not the right kind of thing to be.

it's not a thing at all, it's an interaction, it's a process. So, yeah, you can't just buy that 17th century conception of what we know for sure. No, I mean, you can have it and you can argue that way if you want, but I don't think it's, you can't use it as an objection to other ways of conceptualizing what's happening. It's not an objection to other ways of conceptualizing it. It's like when you said that, like, well, why would this, why would we think, that this would conflict with our sort of scientific understanding of the physical world.

And I'm kind of tempted to say, well, that itself is an invention of the scientific revolution, the atomization of the world, the mathematical, like the mathematical, like the mathematical of our understanding, like that itself is a conceptual framework. And again, it's a great one, you know, makes a lot of sense, could be totally accurate, but it's like, is there such thing as a pre-theoretical, like, world view? No, no, no, absolutely. Absolutely not. They're competing. They're competing through the original world. And the question is which one is the more economical,

the more productive? The thing is, I don't see that having this Cartesian conception of world, does it, the question is, does it give you any real predictive, explanatory leverage on things? And it doesn't.

In fact, it just creates a host of problems. And the only thing it gives you is it vindicates this intuition we have about ourselves. Now, if I say, but maybe that intuition is just a product of a really compelling self-modelling activity on the part of the brain. And it seems compelling because, you know, we are those brains that are modeling ourselves.

And, you know, it's not like we're modeling a piece of the world that we can get other people to come and, you know, and look at it with us. It's modeling itself. Okay. So, of course, it would seem compelling to itself, wouldn't it? Now, so one of the things, all the phenomenal realist view, the quality of religious view, does is vindicate this intuition. Now, if that intuition can be explained in another way,

what other advantages do we have from being Cartesian's? The advantages of not being Cartesian are tremendous because it opens up our own nature to scientific explanation, to scientific understanding. It opens up our understanding. First of all, it removes these epistemological obstacle to understanding other minds. Other minds are not secret,

secret, impenetrable subjectivities that we can never understand. There are complex patterns of sensitivity and reactivity located, you know, locuses of other, of, uh, loci of sensitivity and reactivity located elsewhere in the world. If we map them carefully enough, and this isn't just a matter of observing their behavior, if we map what's happening inside,

we can fully understand what's going on there, and we can adapt our ethical views appropriately, which I think would involve extending our ethical concern. It gives us a handle on dealing with artificial intelligence. It gives us a handle. It integrates us fully into the natural world. It's the final step, if you like, in deanthropomorphising our conception of the world.

And that's a wonderful advantage. What you get from the other perspective, you get the vindication of the intuition that I've got a special private world in here that no one else can know about. I think, I mean, obviously it'll be up to the listener to decide what's more plausible there.

I suppose I wanted to because this was a slight tangent from what we were talking about, I just want to round it off this sort of thing about removing all of the behavioral aspects of Aqualia and seeing

what you're left with. And one of the things you started with was that like, well, one effect of the migraine is that I don't like it. And to me, this is kind of like the definition of pain. I think pain can be essentially defined as an experience which is not wanted when experienced. And to say that you not liking something is just an effect, I think might be

sort of to beg the question, because in my view, when I don't like something, I feel like that is a qualitative experience. That's the thing that you're going to want to deny. But it seems to me intuitively that when I don't like something, it's not just a case of me like rationally cognizing and going like there's just some fact about the world. It's like it's a feeling. I feel something bad about that particular thing. That's what it means to say I don't like it. I can't imagine somebody saying they don't like something honestly and having literally zero emotional investment in that thing. I think that literally is impossible. And so, That is, that's the one you started with as well. It seems to me the most obvious example of, of

calling qualia and effect, removing the quote unquote effect and then saying, look, there's no qualia left. I was like, of course, because you've removed my dislike of something, which is like a powerfully experienced phenomenon. Right now, I will let you say what you want to say about how, well, like pain, not liking something is not a qualitative phenomenon and whatnot. but at least the sort of initial helpfulness of the analogy, which to someone who's on my side of the fence here, might listen to that at first and go, oh yeah, that makes those sense, actually. What are you left with? See how that is not as powerful when you realize that there are all of these issues with trying to figure out whether the thing you're removing actually counts as qualia? Look, first of all, if I'm right, these sorts of objections are ones that people would push, okay? Because I'm talking about an illusion. Illusions are powerful things. This is a self-generated illusion, illusion that the brain is creating in itself.

So all these illusions, all these responses would be the ones that would come to mind. They're saying, no, it's so very, very, it's so potent. And it's just, it's not a matter of my thinking about anything or processing anything. It's just a matter of it. And I understand that. That's why I like to talk about illusion rather than eliminate. because illusions are real things. Illusions, look, how do magicians talk about illusions?

They talk about them as effects, about the effect, creating an effect. And the whole complex backstage machinery, which is often incredibly intricate and also kind of disappointing when you learn about it, is designed to create a certain effect, to create certain responses in its audience. Now, so I'm suggesting the brain is created something like that. Now, this is about liking. Imagine, not liking something. I don't, by not liking something,

I don't mean just sitting around and thinking, do I like this, do I not like it? No, on the whole, I don't mean that. I mean something much more, much more basic. I have a long history of writing about different levels of belief, levels of desire. And so what I'm talking about not liking something is it. I mean, it's being a complex, aversive state that has all sorts of dimensions to it.

So this stimulus is one that's, I mean, at the most basic it might be producing aversive behavior, and actually moving away from that. But it's producing a lot more things than that. You know, it's grabbing attention. It's triggering emotional responses, which I'm going to deal with in the same way. it's and it's doing all this much of this is going on

under the surface you're not articulating all of these different things separately to yourself it's put you into this whole aversive state which we describe as not liking

we're not using when we try to describe the state we're in to ourselves or to others we don't use a complex for the vocabulary of cognitive science cognitive psychology or neuroscience.

We don't have those resources, and even if we did, they'll be too unwieldy. We say, I don't like it. Okay. And we tend to conceptualize that as some sort of primitive feel, which is perfectly good way of conceptualizing it for the purposes of self-description and communication. I'm just saying it breaks down into a set of effects.

And if it didn't, then it wouldn't be pain. The idea that pain has to sort of come from, and the pain, as it were, a pain state can't be made out of things that can't be created by things that are not themselves painful. It's like saying that a mountain can't be made out of things that are not mountains. That's the whole point of how the world works, that large-scale things are constructed out of smaller-scale things. Things that have, you know, a television doesn't have to be constructed out of little televisions.

You know, that's how we can learn to make one. and a pain state doesn't have to be constructed out of little pains that are put together. It's constructed out of other stuff. We call the whole thing a pain. The mistake is to think that we are capturing something that that word is capturing something if you're like irreducible,

undeconstructible, which is a very helpful illusion. Illusions are wonderful things. We live through illusions. I mean, the idea that colours are out there in the world where we start. That's a very helpful illusion. I mean, if I were looking at my bookshelves, and you said, describe the colors of the books on my shelves, and I said, right, well, okay, we'll start here.

I'm having a sort of reddish qualia for that one, I think, a reddish whatever. And the next one, I sort of brownish qualia, I think. You say, I don't know, but you're quite, I want to tell me other books. You know, it's a helpful thing, as it were, see. And this is another thing, this is another part of my story that I haven't got into. idea is that what we're actually monitoring here is our reactions to the things, like this complex internal sense that I say, but that we are, but that those representations are bound to in some way, this is a nice cognitive science term, bound to, bound to our representations are the objects.

So we see the object as evoking a certain reaction. So we don't just see the object neutrally as, oh, I can recognize that it's red, whatever, but, you know, sort of mean it. We see it as red and us having all the significance that red things have for us. So we see their reactions in the world. The world is informed by our reactions to them. That's what colors in the world. And this is why I kind of, it's a dynamic, but I kind of want to push it back more on the outward.

In the outer place, we see the world as richly significant for us, and it's significant because we're projecting our own reactions onto it. And that's where consciousness is not in here. It's this. taking in all that, responding to all that. Does, um...

So, Galileo, make a note, sorry, go, a moment ago you said that, um, you know, pain is, like,

like, this thing we call pain doesn't need to be made up of little pains, right? Like a mountain doesn't need to be made up of little mountains. I of course agree.

I think that's interesting. Maybe what we call pain is just made up of things which are not pains, but are instead just, you know, sensory perceptions. They're just sort of reactive behavioral traits to certain inputs.

Would that be a case of emergence? Because as far as I know, you're as suspicious of the concept of emergence as I am. But when you say something like, you know, a mountain isn't made up of little mountains, I want to say, yeah, that's true. And yet I don't think that that counts as emergence. So when it comes to pain, it feels a bit more tempting to say that that's what you're sort of driving at. No, emergencies, I really wish we could get rid of this word of emergence because it suggests two distinct things like one emerging from the other, like a whale emerging from the ocean.

Now, David Chalmers usually distinguishing between weak and strong emergence. Weak emergence is just that when you put all this stuff together in the right way, you get one of those, but it's perfectly intelligible how putting all that stuff together in that way gives you one of those. So probably being a television, weekly emerges from having a whole, these components assembled in that way, but there's nothing mysterious about it. Nobody thinks, you know, oh God, look, we pull those things together and suddenly a television appear. What an amazing thing. No, that's how we can design television. That's how we do. We know that a television emerges from those components. Strong emergence is the idea that's kind of

unexpected stuff happens, that you put these things together and somehow something fundamentally new appears in the world. It's not just an organization of those things doing what an organization of those things would naturally inevitably do. It's that, lost something else happening. And a lot of people think that pain is a bit like that, that, you know, that it's the brain doing all its stuff, and it has to do all they say, how do that stuff for pain. But then something else emerges, the actual quality, the feeling, emerges as an extra thing. Now, I don't believe that. I don't think the strong emergency occurs anywhere. But I'm happy to say in a sense that what we're talking about is pain,

the state that we refer to as pain is weakly emergent from all those processes of sensitivities and reactions. Put those all those together, and you get pain. But there's nothing, There's no hard problem of explaining it because it just is all those things hooked up in the right way, just as a television. It's no more problem of explaining pain than there is of explaining televisionness. I feel like I could predict all of the things that a TV is doing. Minus that, okay, it's complicated because what about the image on the screen? As we said earlier, that only really makes sense if there's someone looking at the image. I'm talking about like a TV, big TV, and it's like,

pumping out electromagnetic waves into the air. I feel like if I had an understanding of the atomic makeup of that TV and various scientific facts about how

electricity works and how light works and stuff that if you told me that I was going to take all of these atoms and arrange them in this way, I would predict and be able to predict that there would be light waves photons coming out of a a screen. Whereas, I feel like if I understood that a central nervous system, or rather a sort of

a reactive system causes hands to move away from hot stoves and that there's this thing called like memory that means that this organism is less likely to do the same thing again in the future and so on and so forth, like, I don't think just given that information, I would be able to predict or expect that when I put them all together, there would be this, ow. There would be this like, that there would be a described illusion by the organism of a feeling of qualia of pain. And I think the one important distinction between strong and weak emergence is, given just the constituent part, would you be able to predict or expect a particular kind of effect?

if the answer is yes, then it's only weak emergence. If the answer is no, then that's what strong emergencies. And I feel like you wouldn't predict the illusion of pain. Well, you probably wouldn't because of the way we conceptualise pain, but I'm asking you to reconceptualize it in a way that makes this thing more tractable. Also, you're trying to imagine something immensely complex. You're trying to imagine the product of billions of years of evolution. I mean, just look at what an individual says.

It's immensely complex. Now, I think if I could, well, I couldn't do it because I don't have the knowledge, but if we could take evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists and I get out of all the best ones in the world and start saying, okay, look, here you are, you're this thing, and here's the sort of things that are happening inside you. And we really walk you through this from, let's say, from the stimulation of the gnosyceptors and the skin also. light rays falling on the rest, and really take you through.

All we have are just caricatures of caricatures of caricatures, the sort of thing when this debate is conducted in. You know, sea fibres are firing. It's not on that. It's not just the sea fibers. It's what the sea fibers are doing and everything. Ice-hawking, and it's more than sea fibers. Anyway, if they could really take you through that,

and you could really understand all of the effects that all these different mechanisms, cumulative effects of all these mechanisms upon you, and how they would push you and pull you to respond in different ways and how this would all be internalized because it's not a matter of you're just moving your hands that this is, this thing isn't particularly metaphysical significant.

What's happening in here is much more significant and how different systems within here would be talking to each other and priming each other prompting each other and how this would all then eventually be connected up to a conceptual system that would try to describe this and encapsulate it for its own use as well as for the use of others. I think if you could do that in complete detail, and we're not remotely near doing it. I think you might go, yeah, that sort of makes sense.

And I think we should be trying to do that instead of declaring, oh, it can't be, that couldn't possibly work. I can see right now it wouldn't. Let's suppose that everything's conscious, because that's the only way I could be. It seems to me that is just a completely regressive attitude. Okay, we've covered a lot of ground and we started by pointing out that illusionism in consciousness is not the view that consciousness is an illusion. It is that consciousness is being thought of in the wrong way by philosophers and there are certain aspects of conscious experience, that is to say, qualia, private inner experience, all this kind of stuff, which is illusory. that can sound a little bit confusing because people are like well what's the difference between consciousness and experience and qualia and whatnot now that we've covered all of that let's go right

back to the beginning and ask the question i love doing this let's ask the question that most interviewers probably start with but i think it's more helpful to actually end with what is consciousness and when you say that there is an illusion going on what exactly is the illusion in the in the most sort of concise and sort of summary fashion that you can muster. Now that you don't have to do it in the context of beginning an interview, knowing that no one knows what you're talking about yet. I'm naturally cautious of sound bites because they will get quoted back to me. What is consciousness?

Let's say something like this. It's my vivid, vibrant, potent, response to the world in all its dimensions and all its significance. It's, it's being in the world, and it's being aware of the world as packed with significance for me, both as a creature and as an individual. It's, it's, yes, it's, yes, that I'll do. It's being aware of the world in a way that makes it packed with significance for me. That makes, it's not what, this is like for me it's what the world is like for me

it's okay consciousness is what makes the world like something for me makes it significant and it makes it significant because it's constituted by a whole set of responses to it and is that something that I know I asked about the illusion as well but just to just to clarify

the illusion is that it is something separate from all those processes that it is something over and above that that it is an irreducibly private world that only I, obviously it's my responses so I know more about them than anybody else

but it's not, the illusion is that it's something that belongs if you like to a different dimension of reality, that it is not part of the shared public world that is something that is only there for an eye that is itself very hard to get a grip on. I think it's, ultimately I think it's a view that builds in a sort of dual, well it certainly builds in a kind of dualism

and I think it ultimately builds in a Cartesian dualism. It's being richly alive in the world and sensitive to the world in virtue of all sorts of highly complex evolved processes, not in virtue of some magic, or some fundamental feature of reality that can't be explained in terms of evolutionary processes. So if that's all conscious. I think that's great,

because it's careful, it's concise, and it's somewhat illuminating, except in so far as I'm interested in... Like, if that's all consciousness is, is that something that a computer can have, does have, you know, AI robots, that kind of. I find it's kind of a boring question to ask about, like, AI consciousness.

But I mean, in this context, I think it's specifically relevant, you know, like all of the things that you're saying consciousness is, these sort of reactions to the world, this like vibrant significance that is not felt because there's no qualia but is kind of there is something that, you know, chat GBT could do. And so when people ask, you know, will chat GPD ever become conscious, aren't you kind of committed to saying it already is? It just doesn't feel like it's conscious. Absolutely not because look, I'm talking about a vibrant, multidimensional set of responses. Chat GBTGPT has one line. It's one line

one kind of response, one dimension response only. Well, first of all, it has only one thing that it's sensitive to, one kind of thing is sensitive. Text, okay? And it has one output, more text.

Okay, you might see, can do pictures and stuff, graphics, but anyway, it doesn't explore the world. It doesn't have sensors for, it doesn't have, its range of sensitivities to the world is about as impoverished as you can get.

It's sensitive to text input, and it doesn't even go out looking for text input. It just waits until it comes. And then it responds, more text input. That's about as published as you could get. Okay? So it's an amazingly complex text if response, but it's still just one dimension. I'm talking about our rich sensitivity, and I'm talking about sensitivity that's tuned in to your individual developmental history, so that every red thing you've seen in your life or experienced in your life shapes your

response to redness and shapes what it's like to see red things for you. First, the street has never seen any of any of bad things, or you're only seeing text, and the text doesn't have any long-term effect on it anyway. It's, the model isn't updated with every, you know, there's context window and then it's deleted. It's about as impoverished. It's a very complex thing, but it's very impoverished in terms of the dimensions of reactivity.

Now, if we were to build things like autonomous artificial beings that had all sorts of the kind of senses they would need to survive and to operate autonomously, then we start after equipping the kind of stuff that evolution equipped us with, we might also need to equip it with self-modeling, the mechanism of self-modeling. mechanism. And then we might start getting into the sort of territory where we would think that the word consciousness maybe would be appropriate to extend to it. But there would be no point

where like some inner light came on. And it bang, now it's got this inner world that we never, that's the wrong way of looking. We look at what it does. Look at what its capabilities are and say, is it similar enough to us to extend the word to it? That's what we're going to have to do with other animals. That's what I mean. That's what I mean is that like, you know, for most people saying, that AI has become conscious would be this like extremely grand sort of moment. Whereas for you, it feels like you kind of go like, yeah, okay, it's conscious now, but like, you know, who cares? Like, so what? And also conscious, conscious, conscious like an ant is conscious, conscious, conscious like a fish is conscious, conscious, conscious. I mean, it's all anthropocentric. We need to

stop the anthropocentrism here. You said it's super, like it's about as impoverished as it gets. Well, maybe then chat GPT is just the most impoverished kind of consciousness. That's what I mean is that if all consciousness is this, I mean, you said the word vibrant, but then, you know, vibrancy is relative and difficult to precisely define. And so, like, you know, if you ask chat GPT, it would be like, yeah, I'm having a really vibrant conversation. And it can, it can not just produce images, but you can send it images. You can feed it sort of visual data. And it could tell you like, oh, this is such a vibrant red.

that I see in this image and it's having all of those reactions and granted it is extremely limited compared to what a human brain is doing but my question is, is that a difference in degree rather than kind? Is it just, okay, it's conscious in the way you've defined it just like not very like much?

Well, look, I mean, this is really I think it's just a terminological question. I mean, I don't think the word consciousness is well enough defined to, to, look, we're going to let's, I don't know, This says it's like consciousness one and consciousness a million or something. It's going to be many different dimensions of consciousness.

We need to start thinking about this and mapping out different dimensions of reactivity that we have in different dimensions of self-monitering. This is the way to go to sort of break down this kind of really useless, undifferentiated concept of consciousness as an inner light and start thinking about it as a complex of functions. and seeing which, you know, then measuring things, things will have different, we can draw sort of, what do you call it, like spider diagrams of different patterns of every activity, and we can do this for other animals, we can do it for us, we could do it for aliens, we could do it, right, right now, and which ones, now, to something like, bless it, christening them with the title of consciousness, that carries all sorts of other stuff with it about ethical concern, about our responsibility, about all sorts of that. So we might want to think about, you know, we might, we might need better terminology, I think we do need better terminology in this area. But the first thing to do is to stop thinking about it in a wrong way, as a bright line that it's either on or off.

There's either this private subjective rule, which we could never know about it. We never penetrate anyway. So stop thinking of it. Even if Flamnon-realism rule would write, it wouldn't make any difference to anything. That's the point. So we just stop thinking about it that way. And start thinking about it in constructive terms of, you know, what exactly other sensitivities and reactive dispositions that this thing has and how similar they are to ours, how different are they from ours, to what extent do we

want to extend our ethical concern to them, to what extent do we want to treat them as autonomous and responsible? We've got to negotiate all this in the light of the facts that are publicly available to all of us because there's nothing hidden in the end. This is the positive message of this. In the end, it's just a matter of studying these things carefully enough, study bats carefully enough, and you know everything there is to know about bad consciousness. let's do the work and then try and get a framework for negotiating this instead of is it consciousness?

That is the most fruitless question in this area that's looking for marks of consciousness as if consciousness is hidden and all you have a kind of responses that are somehow symptomatic of it but you can't be sure they are. Sorry, I'm rambling, but no bright lines anywhere. That's the bottom line.

Well, Keith Frankish, thank you for your time. I'll put relevant links in the description, your essay on illusionism, links to further work, websites, all that kind of stuff, and people are interested in more. Thanks for taking the time. I know it's a difficult thing to get into, especially when talking to an audience who perhaps have never even heard of this viewpoint before and are probably filled with misconceptions about sort of what it is and thinking you're saying that people don't feel pain or that consciousness doesn't exist or something. I hope people at least know by the end of this that that's not what illusionism is, and perhaps it will take a bit more time for them to figure out whether or not they agree with what you're saying. But thank you for your time today. Thank you.

And I hope if anyone does want to convince me by creating some vivid experience in me, maybe they'll go for sending me chocolate rather than punching on the nose. Just to them. Thank you, Alex. I enjoyed talking to you. Thank you for the really helpful. questions you helped me articulate what I wanted to say. And not all interviews are good at that. And you're very good at it. So thank you. Well, thanks very much. Hey, y'all's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair.

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