Within Reason - #160 Every Theory of Consciousness - Robert Lawrence Kuhn

Episode Date: July 2, 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.Robert Lawrence Kuhn is an American public intellectual and investment banker. He is also an author, television producer, columnist and commentator, especially on topics related to China. Kuhn is the creator of the PBS series  @CloserToTruthTV .View the Landscape of Consciousness Map here. TIMESTAMPS:0:00 - The Landscape of Consciousness Map16:32 - Materialism26:58 - What Counts As Materialism?45:12 - The Difference Between Panpsychism and Materialism49:36 - What’s the Difference Between Panpsychism and Idealism?58:12 - Idealism and Monism01:03:51 - Do All These “Theories” Really Differ?01:08:40 - Dualism and Property Dualism01:20:30 - Are Psychedelic Experiences Significant?01:32:02 - The “Challenge” Category01:42:36 - Quantum Theories of Consciousness01:47:57 - Integrated Information Theory02:01:53 - Theological Approaches to Consciousness02:15:33 - How Theory of Mind Brings Us TogetherCONNECT:My Website: https://www.alexoconnor.comTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/cosmicskepticFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/cosmicskepticInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/cosmicskepticTikTok: @CosmicSkepticCONTACT:Business email: [e-mail] enquiries: [e-mail]

Robert Lawrence Cune, thanks for coming on the show. Pleasure to be here. Nice to be on the other side. Yeah, I know. You've been producing a show which I've been watching for years now, closest to truth. I see the clips on YouTube. And they've been so helpful in preparing for my own podcast because it seems like any time I've got an interesting guest on, especially to talk about consciousness, they've already done your show. So thanks for the work that you've been putting in and the content you've been putting out. Great. Well, as you, it's a life passion. And I really appreciate the work you've done over

the last few years. I've followed it and I look forward to our interactions. Well, thank you. I'm excited about this. You have produced one of the most extraordinary pieces of media I think I've ever seen, which is the landscape of consciousness map. I've spent a lot of time on this show now talking about all kinds of different views about consciousness. And there are so many, it can be incredibly confusing. There's idealisms and panpsychisms and materialisms and monism and dualism and all this stuff. And you have quite helpfully, at least attempted and I think quite successfully to take as many of these theories as you practically can and categorize them into a very neat sort of table or map. And so I thought that today it would be interesting to have a bit of a

sort of meta discussion about these different theories of consciousness and how exactly they differ from each other. So what sort of prompts this? Why do you sit and think this needs to be put into categorized form? Well, it's a great question. And consciousness to me has been a life passion. truly when I was deciding what I wanted to be when I grew up as a teenager and planning for college, I wanted to understand ultimate reality, as you do as a small fraction of humanity may want to do, we're part of that passionate group. And I thought of physics and philosophy, maybe physics and philosophy. And then one evening, I really remember this as a, I don't know, 16 years old, wherever, I had the realization that anything we can think about,

philosophy, whatever, comes from our brain. And maybe if I can understand the brain, then it would be kind of an orthogonal or different way to approach the nature of reality. And that started a long quest in terms of my doctorate in neuroscience, cerebral cortex, electrophysiology, et cetera, et cetera. And then doing closer to truth, beginning in really 30 years ago, 1996, but it didn't, We didn't start broadcasting until 1999 and 2000. I really began to focus on consciousness as one of the main themes.

We had originally three themes, cosmos, dealing with cosmology, physics, mathematics, consciousness, which is all mind-body problem, free will, personal identity, different kinds of intelligences. And then the third was meaning, basically philosophy of religion from a non-sectarian, a philosophical point of view. And this has been my passion, and I have followed it with Closer to Truth. By the way, I should say that the versions of Closer Truth you've seen or co-created by Peter Getzels, who was the producer and director of during much of that time. And I just loved exploring consciousness, and I did it with anybody I thought who had something interesting to say. I didn't necessarily have to agree with it or not agree with it, but anybody who had an idea that I hadn't had in one way or another,

as long as it had some rationality to it, I explored. And we built up this large corpus of things, and I never thought of organizing it. And then one of the viewers who happened to be on the editorial board of the Journal of Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology said that they were going to do a special issue on quantum consciousness and asked me to write the introductory article. And I refused. I said, I can't do it.

It's too complicated. and they were doing about five or eight thousand word basic introduction to consciousness. And I said that because I knew that if I did that, it's an enormous burden. It's one thing to interview somebody on consciousness, you read their books, you explain it, we talk verbally, the words we don't particularly care, but you put something in writing, it's permanent and you worry about every word. It's a very, very different experience, and I knew what that would take. And I said no, and he pursued me, make a long story short after,

about six months, I realized that this is something I should do in my life. I want to do it my life. If I'm not going to do it now, I'm never going to do it. So I took the challenge. And honestly, this is not an exaggeration, the work that it required was at least, I was very worried how much time it would take, but it was at least 20-fold, maybe 50-fold more than I had expected. And in this process, at first gathering all the theories together, I began to realize this was a jumble and I needed to have some sort of an organizational structure in order to make sense of it. And I enjoy doing that. I've done that for other things like different kinds of cosmogenesis and cosmos and different levels of nothing, which I pursued on closer to truth.

But I wanted to do that for conscience. I thought the best way to do that would be to have a rough linear spectrum from the most physicalist, materialist kinds of theories to the most non-physicalist kinds of theories, which would be pure non-physical stuff, which we call idealism now. And so that would be the basic spine of the organizational structure. And then as I started categorizing theories within this, I realized a couple things. First of all, the number of theories under materialism, which was the first category, were vastly more than any of the other categories. And in fact, in the end result, almost 50% of all the theories were materialistic theories.

It's very interesting to explore why that's the case because I actually, I have a good idea why that is the case. So I realized that under materialism, this is this vast collection, and that needed to have subcategories. So then I developed materialism and then a series of subcategories under that because there were so many.

And then we had this linear spectrum and the way I had it. And then this is not given by God or anything. It was just my way of doing it for my own kind of organizational structure. and it's changed a little bit over time, is to start with materialism, again, this will have lots of subcategories.

And then what's the next thing? Well, non-reductive physicalism. It's still physicalism, 100% physicalism, but it has a very different kind of feel. And then I developed it further. The next one would be quantum theories, which are physical in, obviously it's part of the physical world.

People can take it beyond that. Dimensional theories. These are kind of quasi-physical, but it went further. Then the next one was information, where information is fundamental. Now, complex, making a little more complicated, information, computational functionalism, computation is a subcategory under materialism, and we can discuss that in depth. That's a very popular theory, obviously.

But when information becomes my fourth big category, it's information of a different kind. It's information where information is fundamental in some sense, independent. Then we went into panpsychism and then monism. There's a lot of overlap between them, dualism and idealism. So that's eight. And then I began to realize there were theories that I could put in those categories, but there was something odd about them, that there were many theories that were founded on a different principle

than the fundamental philosophy, the fundamental ontology. They were founded on some experiential idea. And examples are near-death experiences, out-of-the-body experiences, ESP, parapsychological motivations, meditation, psychedelics. All of these mechanisms are ways of, they're not theories themselves, but they are, they inform these people's theories much more so than the philosophy. So I built a ninth category called anomalous and altered states. Again, those are not theories.

We had our linear approach from materialism to idealism, but this is a separate category. The theories and each of the modalities like psychedelics or, you know, meditative states or near-death experiences, I have particular theories that people who have those things then have theories beyond that. And then finally, I saw there were some things that didn't fit in any of those categories, basically challenges to the nature of the question, or that the human brain is not evolved to even understand this question, or it doesn't make sense, or different kind of theoretical approaches to the whole subject.

And then I had a final section called Challenge. So that's the organizational structure. Materialism, non-reductive physicalism, quantum and dimensional theories, information theories, panpsychisms, monisms, dualisms, then anomalous and altered states, and then finally challenge. Idealisms as well. You've got about idealisms. Okay, can't forget idealism. So panpsychisms, dualisms, idealisms, alted states, anomalous and altered states. and then challenges. So that's the 10. Then again, under materialism, we can talk. I now have 12 separate subcategories under materialism. Yeah. We'll put this in the description and just now I'll show on screen. It's not just that, I mean, it would be helpful enough if you'd produced a map

that categorized all these different ideas. And as you can see, many of the sort of individual entries are names of people, people like Dennett or Chomsky or Putnam or Roger Penrose, and that's because these particular theories are associated with particular people. But if you click on any one of these, it gives you an entire overview of the theory of consciousness. This isn't just a map. Each of those individual members has all of the information about that particular theory of consciousness. So, as I said, I think this is an absolutely extraordinary resource. Yeah, thank you. And what we did was after the paper was published, many people said I should

write a book. And I spent almost a week putting a proposal together. And I realized as soon as I did that, I had a lot of feedback to so many people that the paper after a week was almost then a bit archaic because new people were giving me critique and I forgot this and forgot that. You should include this. And I realized that doing a book would just be, you know, by the time we'd be published, it would be so obsolete, it would be embarrassing. And it would take a huge amount of time. And so we converted it to do a website, which is interactive, which is current. We spent a long time, almost a year developing it, and now it's launched. And that's what is now really clickable in a very strong way. And the number of theories, complicated how you may count it, but has increased greatly. I should give some credit in some sense.

First of all, the beautiful map that was done was created by Alex Gomez-Murin, who when he saw, we were friends and I sent him some early drafts of the whole paper with the organizational structure, and he put it into this one nice map, which was great. And another point I really should make, you know, how do I, how did I know all the original paper had maybe 225 theories. The website now was, I did a count last night. I knew we were going to be talking how many theories on the current website. And the numbers, honestly, what came out was 4-4-4-44.

Now, that's going to change because there's more. And there's nothing magical about four. You know, I'm not going to start a new religion based on getting 4-4s. But I realized that in Chinese, 4-4 is the worst number you can have because it's a homophone for death, so 4-44-4-4 is death, death, death in Chinese. So I'm going to be changing and adding a few more. But I calculate it as I have some backlog. Does people write to me and tell me what I forgot?

And most of the time it's, you know, kind of over beyond the boundary of what I would consider a theory. But a lot of times it isn't. When I did the original paper, it's a very interesting point. I went through multiple versions, went through peer review. At peer review, it had 55,000 words. Remember, originally it was supposed to be like eight. When peer review 55,000, eventually after three or four more peer reviews and increasing

it, I was just obsessed with it. It was published at 175,000 words. And what happened was one of the earlier peer reviews when it passed, I think it was the third peer review, when it was about, I don't know, 130,000 words. they published it immediately on Science Direct. I mean, that's their policy, particularly in science, as soon as it's peer-reviewed,

it immediately goes on the website, even if it won't be in the journal for another eight months or so. And I absolutely panicked. I said, take it down, because I really wasn't finished yet. It was incomplete. I had theories that were not there.

They said they can't do that. Anyway, I begged them. And finally, after two weeks, they said, look, if we take it down, the only time we take it down is when we suspect plagiarism or some fraud. I said, I don't care. Take it down.

You can explain it later. So they did. And then six months later, it was published in final form. But what happened was when it was published online for two or three weeks, I got dozens of emails from people I didn't know, many of whom were professionals in the field or philosophers or devotees of different theories. angry with me that I left out a certain theory. And I realized that some of these, some of these I hadn't heard of before. And I looked at them. These were good, solid theories, not very well known, but they were good, solid theories. And others, I had rejected because I didn't pass my level of acceptance. But I saw then this kind of groundswell of people saying, I want to hear that theory. I mean,

some things like philosophy or Steiner's thinking, things that I might have rejected. And so I included those as well. And I credit people when they tell me, and this is continue to happen. So a lot of the theories that have come in have been sort of self-generated in a positive feedback virtuous circle where it's not me coming out with, you know, my brilliance finding all these theories, but because we had this core, people writing in. So it's really a, a wonderful collective effort. And I sort of had the vision of trying to be the repository of the best thinking of humanity at this time, reflecting historical, a lot of historical, not everything, but reflecting the theories currently that are best expressive of the totality of humanity. I mean,

that's my goal, is to really have that place to have it easily understandable and searchable, and that's what the website does. With the map, there are different kinds of maps that we have. There's lists. There are a lot of ways to discern each of these theories. Yeah. I am impressed by it, and I think even if you are just a sort of compiler of these ideas, it also means that you're quite well placed to discuss them and how they interact. And specifically, like I say, this sort of meta consideration of how they differ and how they can be categorized. And so I thought we could kind of go through this map and use, sort of use this conversation as a bit of an introductory resource for people to get a feel for the current landscape of views about consciousness. Because, as you say, there's a lot out there.

And the most interesting thing is that the majority, or almost the majority, depending on how you count it as well, of the theories that you consider fall under this broad category of materialism. Now, people have heard of materialism or physicalism. It's the idea that the universe is made out of matter. And in consciousness, this means that consciousness is somehow just made out of matter. But how would you best define materialism with a philosophical hat on, given that it surely requires some understanding of what matter is? Let me go back to a kind of a foundational idea, which I feel strongly about. and I know you do too, and I think it's really important. And that is the nature of consciousness

is the single most important clue or resource or window, whatever you want the metaphor to be, to see ultimate reality. Because if consciousness is entirely physical in some sense, that would be a very strong indication to me, not a proof and not 100%, but a strong indication that ultimate reality is ultimately only physical. On the other hand, if materialism has any sort, any sort of non-physical aspect,

component, property, whatever, and we can go into all these subtle differences, then that's a hint in the other direction, that if we're looking at ultimate reality, that the physical world does not exhaust ultimate reality. It doesn't prove God, it doesn't prove consciousness, but it says in some sense. So that's a fundamental idea that we start with. And then the second choice is we really have two words. You mentioned the materialism and physicalism. And they are, we use them synonymously and rightly so, but there is a subtle difference. Materialism has a more of a historical context and deals with sort of the ontology, what is the stuff made of. Physicalism is a

broader concept. It's a superset, I think, of materialism in a slightly way, that says that it can also deal with properties. It's also epistemological physicalism in terms of our methodologies. So physical is a broader term that is used. So I went with the materialism because the idea of this map of consciousness and this landscape of consciousness, which is the way I approach it, is is purely ontological. What is it at its ultimate reality? It's not epistemological. It's not developmental.

All those things are important, and we deal with a lot of those things. But at the core, it's ontological. What is consciousness? So therefore, materialism. By the way, I should note that the word landscape, I took from Leonard Susskins a book, The Cosmic Landscape,

I think he published it in 2007 or eight, that talked about the string theory landscape and anthropic ways of thinking about the universe. So that's the concept to deal with the entirety of all possibilities that consciousness could be. So materialism is the word that people sort of reject now because we know things are not matter. They are quantum fields and with all sorts of. you know, weirdness with entanglements and superpositions and various things that people can misinterpret. Merrigal Mann famously said that he called these quantum extrapolations a flap-doodle when people write all these things. So, but nonetheless, there's other stuff there. But still

materialism to me, you know, made this point stronger. And again, it has the historical context. So materialism I'm using in an ontological sense that it's made of physical stuff. And that, you know, can certainly be quantum fields with all its complexities or whatever lies below that. That's fine. We deal with a lot of those theories. One of the most interesting observations, and I start the paper, original paper, with this idea, that when you're thinking about consciousness, it is so broad in its hierarchical positioning. So there are theories from the most fundamental stuff below quantum physics to every level that you can think about.

So below the quantum level, the quantum level, the cellular level, the cellular level, the cellular components, microtubules in the Penrose-Hamerovurov version. And so it's within cells, and then it's the neuron itself, and then it's the connections between the neurons, and then it's the broader connections in the brain, and then it's the electromagnetic fields over the whole brain, and then some go to an extended brain theory, so consciousness is beyond the brain or inactive, where it has to involve the environment, and then you go all the way up, of course, to panpsychisms and idealisms, where consciousness is, you know, cosmocycism, where it's the whole of the universe is there,

it's a division of panpsychism, and then panproto-psychism, where it's, you know, little proto-consciousness is then, you know, distributed widely. And so you have this vast hierarchy of being of where the key moments. And I try to plot that in later papers that I did, where each aspect of these theories, where on that hierarchical line is the key moment that is the

critical for consciousness. Another point I really want to stress, and that is building this map and building the theories and organizing it is the first big foundational idea I had. The second one, and I really stress this, is that all theories that have to do with sentience in any way whatsoever, the nature. of free will, is their life after death, is virtual immortality possible in a real sense? AI consciousness now, personal identity, alien intelligence, all these kinds of questions are directly related to your theory of consciousness. And very few people, of any,

address that. Everybody has their own theory about free will or personal identity or AI consciousness now, but nobody talks about what theory is that based on? Because based on any one of these theories, that is a major determinant of what the reality of that subject is. And I've tried to plot that because nothing's absolute, but between certainty and impossibility, I have six different categories in a paper I did, in which you go from certainty, almost certainty, likely, possible, unlikely, almost impossible, and impossible. And so if you take, if you plot any of these big ideas, life after death, free will, AI consciousness, against theories of consciousness, you can plot it as, you know, unlikely or

almost impossible or, you know, likely, etc. And so the importance of our map is not just some kind of intellectual exercise, but I think it directly affects a lot of the questions that we do. deal with in many other aspects of life, such as, you know, the whole public policy issue of AI consciousness today. And people don't realize that there are many people who are assuming one theory of consciousness, computational functionalism, which is one theory under a subcategory under material. So it's a third level theory in my landscape. And there are all these, you know, almost 500 other theories that are there. I'm not saying they're all weighted the same. I'm certainly not saying.

that, but I am saying that people are not appreciative of the importance of the theory of consciousness to discuss these big issues. We'll get back to the show in just a moment, but first, where do you get your information? If you're like me, and most people, the majority of it comes from the internet, which is, of course, a wonderful resource, but obviously not without its problems. And one of its biggest problems is media bias. It can be difficult these days to even know where your news is coming from, let alone the bias that might have influenced the way it's being presented to you. But that is exactly where today's

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of what's really going on in the world by going to ground. Dot News forward slash AlexoC, or by scanning the QR code that's on your screen. Use my link to get 40% off their unlimited access, plan. And with that said, let's get back to the show. So tell me what materialist theories have in common. There are a lot of them here. You've sort of grouped them under one big headline of

materialism. And how, in the simplest possible terms, would you determine what your parameters were for what counts as materialist? Okay. Two ways to approach the question. Let me start with a second, because that's a little harder, because some of my categories, my big category, these 10 big categories, some of the categories like non-reductive physicalism, quantum theories, even information, can be thought of also as material. And even panpsychism, Gailen Strasson famously says that, you know, the real materialism is basically panpsychism. Yeah. And that's not a, a frivolous point of view. I mean, it's a view that it's a view that some people say that anything that's real is materialism or physicalism. And if you want to bring something in that you didn't

expect like, you know, cardal consciousness or something, all right, that's the new materialism. You want to bring something else in? Quantum theories, dimensional, that's physicalism. So you can get caught in that trap, which would then put everything under materialism. I try not to do that. I try to distinguish the category, the big categories. as something that is sufficiently different in the way of understanding. So non-reductive physicalism says there is something that is non-reductive. And to me, that's a huge difference, a huge difference. So everything in materialism that I would have...

Sorry, what does non-reductive mean for those listening? Yeah, non-reductive means that it's impossible in principle to be able to explain a behavior. or actions at a higher level of the physical world by the activities of the lower level. And so reduction says that ultimately we can describe everything at the fundamental levels of physics. A classical example is the wetness of water. You take an H2O molecule. It's not wet. You know, you can describe it, et cetera. And you take a zillion of them and you have wetness. So where does wetness, how does wetness develop?

And that seems so radically different. It's an emergent phenomenon when you have zillions of these molecules. But you can calculate how, why it feels wet by the bonding angles between the hydrogen and the oxygen, how these work together under different temperatures. And you can then predict, it's hard and complicated, that something like wetness could occur. So that's reductive. That to me is not a non-reductive. That would be strictly part of materialism.

Sometimes we call that weak emergence. But non-reductive physicalism say it's impossible in principle. Another term is strong emergence. That no matter how much we learn, it will be impossible in principle to be able to ever explain mental states by the actions of the lower, the most fundamental aspects of physics, whatever. maybe string theory, quantum loop gravity, it doesn't matter. Whatever it is, it's impossible to ever go down to that. But non-reductive physicalism is still physicalism. It's not claiming anything other than something in the physical world that just has this impassable barrier in terms of explanations. And so anything I have in materialism can ultimately be reduced to its lower

level. Now, the theories themselves constitute activities on much higher levels, everything from subcellular to whole brains or extended beyond brains. And it was a massive task to organize this and all these materialist theories. As I said, almost half of all the theories are materialist. I reflected why that's the case. And it's the case because if you have a non-materialist theory or a non-physical theory in some sense, you can describe it, and we have hundreds of those, but you can't make much progress beyond that. Because by saying it's non-physical, it's then not subject in the same way or even at all to the scientific method. So you can't make much progress.

On the other hand, if your theory is materialistic, it's all physical, then you can make progress. You may not be right, but you can use the scientific method. And so therefore, people have done that on various scales, and therefore there's a proliferation of theories that are materialists because you can make progress. You can imagine how things can happen to get down to be able to reduce it. but each one has the locus of where consciousness makes its big impact at different levels. I can give you some of these categories that we've worked on. The first I call philosophical, which deals with kind of the basic ideas like emergence, identity

theory, functionalism. I can do this really quickly. Second category is eliminative materialism or illusionism, where in some sense, not in a comic book sense that consciousness doesn't exist. That sounds self-contradictory. People make fun of it. But you really understand it. It's a serious, it's a serious idea. And I give Dave Chalmers. I originally had illusionism, limited materialism, as a subset under philosophical. And Dave, when you saw the paper, it said, you know, that would be better in its own subcategory. And so on the website, it's its own subcategory. That was a really important decision. Then we go

into neurobiological theories, which are, you know, biological naturalism, you know, that John Searle had, or Gerald Edelman's neural circuitry and Darwinian, which is an older neurobiological theory, which I had heard of, but I hadn't studied. But when I did study it, I was actually pretty impressed with what that did. So that, to me, typifies a neurobiological theory. Then a new area that has been developing recently is electromagnetic field theories. And there are a very interesting group of theories that have developed, Boston Jones, Tam Hunt and Jonathan Schuler, each have general residence theory. Earl Miller and MIT has a kind of an analog brainwave theory, which I think is very strong as well. And there are a number of other.

theories, Susan Pluckett, et cetera, McFadden, each one have their own electromagnetic theories. Then, you know, computational and functionalism was very famous. Hillary Putnam started that. Lenore and Emmanuel and Avram Blum have a very elaborate explanation of this. There are many different kinds of computational functionalism in that category. Then quickly beyond that, I have a... have homeostatic and effective theories, which are basically emotion. Antonio DiMazio famously has done that, where emotion is the generator of conscience.

It's not something that, you know, is a product of consciousness, maybe that too now, but it was in the original generator and cause of consciousness. So those are theories which put this homeostatic approach as a very strong one. Carl Fristin with a free energy and active interference. are all in that category. Next category is under, still under materialism, is embodied and in activism. This is where you need a body in some sense. An activism, you need to have this interaction between the, the body and the environment. You can't have, you can't have consciousness without that interaction with the environment. Neuro phenomenology, Varela's original posting. Evan Thompson has developed this well.

And then some philosophical categories, relationalism, where interesting people like Hofstadter's Strange Loops or a new Japanese researcher, Neo-Sutura has relations between qualia. Nicholas Humphrey has his work. And then there's a first order representationalism where the representation of the initial sense, is the scene of conscience. And then higher order representationalism where you have to have a thought about the thought. So it's a second level, like a second derivative or something. The second level.

So you have the tension there. And then the second to last category, I had language. And language is an interesting one because I rejected language as a category in my original paper. I knew about it. And Tromsky's and other people's work. and how it would affect it. But it didn't seem to me to have any real cause of consciousness. You could have consciousness without language. And so I didn't have it. But the peer reviewer,

who was anonymous, who was very helpful in terms of his analysis, or her, I don't know who the person was, obviously, said that I should have a language category. And so because I had rejected it mildly, I put it back, and I'm happy I did, and dealt with theories that people use that where language is really instrumental in the nature of consciousness. as certainly human consciousness. It's a weaker category in terms of the fundamental ontology of consciousness, but it is important and certainly important in human consciousness. The final category was phylogenetic or evolutionary where everything is evolutionary in some sense, but the final category puts evolution where it is, you can sort of see it happening in the

mechanisms are an evolutionary process. So those are 12 subcategories under materialism, and each one has, you know, 10 to 20 different individual theories in them. And there's a lot of, you know, there's a million interesting ways how you can analyze them together. One of my favorites, is I said to plot where each works in the hierarchy of being at what level each one is making that critical point. That's one way to kind of compare them. So you answered my second question of how you decided, roughly speaking, like sort of what goes in there. But the first question remains, which is, we've been talking about all these different categories and names and people, but what is materialism? Like, what actually is it if you had to just define it in

simple terms? It is that there, I can define it apathetically, as we say, in the negative. I can say it, materialism is a worldview. in which there is nothing non-physical. Now, that sounds tautological or circular, but I think it's, I think it's not. It says, is there anything beyond the physical world? As we know it, as we can know it, and it's, there's a fuzzy boundary.

As I said, panpsychism, you can describe as materialist. If you define materialism as anything that's real, And a strict materialist or a philosophically committed materialist would say that, just like in alternative medicine. Many, you know, kind of quackbusters say there is no such thing as alternative medicine. If something proves to have some legitimacy, say like acupuncture, then it's part of medicine. There is no alternative medicine. And so there is no alternative to materialism. It's whatever is real.

That's not the definition I took, not the definition. I take the definition that says the material world, as we know it today, down to the quantum field level or below, is the structure of the world. And that anything that requires something other than that, in principle, irrevocably, no matter how advanced our science gets, say we can live a billion years and our science continues to improve, no matter how it does, it will never be able to. bridge that gap. So anything that is of that nature would be outside of materialism. Anything that could be explained within the scientific method, I would say, is part of materialism. So it's not a simple answer. A simple answer would just say, you know, it's quantum fields and anything that explains a quantum field theory, and however that, that's generated, and whatever the implications developed from that, through evolution or whatever, that's materialism.

As I said, that's not quite the way I would do it. I would have this approach of excluding something that's non-physical. I always ask someone, if they say that they're a materialist, what is material? Like, what is the thing that you think the universe is made out of? Because it's fair enough to say something like, look, we don't really know, or, you know, I'm not sure. or I can kind of only answer that on like a surface level, like I can talk in terms of atoms and molecules and stuff. And that's totally fine.

But if you're sort of positing a metaphysical theory of reality, and oftentimes I think quite confidently, no, I'm quite sure that everything will ultimately be reducible to matter. I think you probably need something a bit more than just telling me what matter is not. And, you know, I'm not saying that of you. I'm saying that of the materialist, which is to say that it's one of those weird things. that everyone kind of just seems to kind of know what we're talking about and we start getting

on with things. But realistically, foundationally, like matter is an impossible thing to define. Even for a physicist who says, well, we don't know if it's strings or if it's, you know, quantum wave or whatever, even then, it's not entirely clear what those things, even if one of them were correct, what they would be, what their essence would be. And so I kind of struggle to get off the ground with materialism. Now, sometimes, when I say this, people say positing consciousness doesn't really help there because you've still got the question of what is consciousness. And I typically think, well, I know what consciousness is because I'm experiencing it directly. You know, one of the most important philosophical threads

from Emanuel Kant through Schopenhauer up until today that this idea is quite influential on me is that, you know, you only know the world as it appears to you in your phenomenology. You only know the phenomena. You don't know the numin. You don't know the world as it is. The thing in itself as Camp might have had it. And so, yeah, the world might be an illusion and whatnot, but the thing that I do know directly is the nature of experience. And so I actually do think you get off the ground by, like if you have some good reason to think the consciousness is foundational, you've kind of got a starting point because you have this direct access, you have this starting point, this touch point to know the kind of thing we're talking about. But with materialism,

because anything material will necessarily present itself to us through our phenomenon, and we won't ever know the thing in itself. When we posit that as like the basis of our metaphysics, I find it really difficult to even know what we're, to like know what we're talking about, you know? And that's why consciousness is so probative of ultimate reality because it forces you to think that way. And I think that's terrific.

Now, it is explainable. I mean, we can take an evolutionary approach to the nature of our sense-state and phenomenology. And people abuse this and abused it, you know, against materialism because, you know, our brains evolved to escape jaguars and leopards or whatever on the plains of Africa not to solve differential equations or create string theory. And so our brains can be missing something. We have a lot of those theories under challenge in the landscape. but I'm not an advocate of our brains are not able to understand. I think what we understand in terms of getting back to what,

the first 10 to the minus 36th or 39 second in the Big Bang or prior to the Big Bang with inflationary theory, and we're able to understand pretty certainly how heavy, elements are made in stars, how the universe is structured, it's really remarkable how much that we know. So I'm not so willing to push off what science can discern about materialism. And that's a separate question from, is materialism all there is? And can you explain consciousness with materialism? Because I skew, no, I skew that there would be some kind of non-physical element if you asked me my, you know, ultimate thoughts myself, not that that's

very important. I always say when people ask me, I say, what I think is really not important, it's to understand all of these theories and how they work. That's important at this stage in human history. We shouldn't be excluding any access to reasonable theories about consciousness, because it's so important to understand ourselves in reality. So tell me what is the meaningful difference in your view as somebody who has spoken to all of these different people and had them sort of throw their world view at them, at you in the way that they best understand it, tell me what the difference is between, say, the physicalist or materialist who says, okay, I know there's this thing called consciousness, but really it's just the same thing as

this physical matter swirling around in your brain and saying that the material is sort of primary. versus the person who is a pan-psychist or an idealist, who are seen by materialists often as like woo-woo, you know, crazy people, who essentially say, yeah, there's this thing called consciousness. And look, it's essentially the same as what we call physical matter. You know, what we call physical matter is just the same thing as this conscious stuff. At least the conscious stuff at the brain at the very least, it's kind of the same thing as the experiential states. It seems to a lot of people, I think, that if you push particularly pan-psychism, which says that, you know, the smallest components of reality are essentially consciousness or conscious or made out of conscious consciousness. And you get panpsychists who talk about, as you mentioned earlier, proto-conscious properties. It's like, okay, maybe an electron isn't conscious, but it has the proto-conscious properties, which, if put together in the right way, produces what we call conscious experience. And I feel like the materialist begins to look at that and goes, well, yeah, that's kind of what I'm saying too, right?

just that I think that's a physical property. As you say, Galen Straussen says, yeah, like, I'm a physicalist. I just think that material and matter is sort of made out of consciousness. But it begins to look a little bit like these different theories, so to speak, maybe just sort of semantic differences or kind of differences in like the imagery being used or the way someone's thinking about it rather than like anything about the ontological claim about the nature of reality. Yeah, look, I think that's entirely valid, and the conversation is extremely probative, not just about consciousness and all these things that are derivative from consciousness, like is their life after death or is AI conscious, but the nature of ultimate reality itself. So I think it's extremely important. But the difference is, the difference to me, though, is discernible? And that is, again, in the negative, is there something that we would classify as non-physical. that needs to be part of the story. And something that's non-physical, I would define further.

Maybe this is not permanent or not right in some sense, but I think it is. And that is anything non-physical I define is something that's not 100% subject to the scientific method. Non-physical things are subject to logic and ways of organization, et cetera. But they're not subject to the physical, to the methodological approach of naturalism and physicalism,

which is the scientific method of experimentation, observation, repetition, repetition, falsification, all the basic properties of the scientific method. So that's the distinction I would make, that it does the theory have any element that is ultimately not susceptible to the scientific method If it does, if it has elements that are not in principle subject to the scientific method, it's outside of materialism. If it says that all these weird things, but ultimately science can discern them through the scientific process, then it is materialism.

So if somebody were to convince me or us that the panpsychist view, that, you know, the real materialism is panpsychism because every element has, as in addition to the four fundamental forces or whatever is below them, an element of proto-consciousness, if that idea is subject to the scientific method in some ultimate science, then I would classify it under materialism. But frankly, I don't think it is. It may be. But therefore, I would keep panpsychism and others as a separate theory that's non-materialist, because there is an element to it that's not subject to the scientific method. Can you tell me, I guess I have a number of questions which are often thrown at me and I feel like I can answer them to the best of my ability, but I feel like you're so well placed to answer these that I want to workshop them with you. People have heard me talk about panpsychism. People have heard me talk about idealism. Both of them seem to be some kind of view that says that consciousness is metaphysically foundational or primary. But what's the difference between them? I think there's overlap, and I'm always fascinated by the fights, the intellectual fights between theories that are closest to one another.

This is a human tendency. As I put it in geopolitics, Peru and Thailand never had a problem together because they're not close to each other. If you look at the history of, I don't know, any religion, Christianity, you look at the different sects and how they fight with each other, and you look at the different or the ideological, difference. I mean, you can sometimes hardly discern the difference, but they fight and they have wars. We see the same thing in consciousness studies with the human trade. Whenever we're close to something, but slightly disagree, we have these intense battle. I agree with you. I think that panpsychism and idealism have a lot of similarities together, and even dualism in some ways have similarities to each of them. But yet they are, they have a distinction to them. I mean, the simple distinction Panpsychism basically has the physical world as equally real, and that consciousness and

as part of this physical, of the, of the, I don't want to use physical in this sense, but is part of the, of all reality. So a proto-consciousness element is part of all reality, as well as the fundamental forces, whatever they are. We know four fundamental forces today, but, you know, clearly it's not a final theory with particle physics, a standard model. There has to be something significantly below that, but that's still a physical theory. And so this is, you know, a critical distinction. Idealism says that consciousness, in some sense, is everything and everything other than consciousness is either derivative of consciousness or an illusion.

So a derivative of conscience means somehow instead of consciousness being the product of matter, that matter is the product of consciousness. Now, how that occurs and everybody has a different theory and we can talk about a lot of them and they're all fun to listen to. As I put it one time, people ask me which is my favorite theories and I said, you know, I'm in love with the last girl I kissed. So when I'm working on these theories, I totally immerse myself. I pretend and get to fool myself for a day or two that this is my theory and I want the world to know it.

So I'm really struggling to explain it and show how it works in every sense. And there's this truth in that. And so when you take that approach to idealism, then you see, as I said, the physical world is secondary in some sense. If the physical world is an illusion, as, you know, Vedic and Hindu others have said, then that's a complete answer to your question. If it's an illusion, it's illusion. But more interesting, if the physical world is real in some sense, but is derivative of consciousness, you know, how that occurs and what would that mean?

And then there's a subsets of what consciousness is, is it a non-personal cosmic consciousness that somehow is programmed or, you know, from time immemorial to generate consciousness or generate complexities, there's a theory that there's this movement towards higher complexity that's built into reality, or is there something like a God that would be kind of, in one sense, a subset of consciousness or a sub-theory, although people who, you know, believe in the Abraham God would have God as preeminent and independent in God sort of creating consciousness. So that's a separate kind of philosophical issue. But the distinction is that idealism would have the physical world as derivative

or illusion, whereas panpsychism would have the physical world at an equal level of ontological reality with consciousness. And do you think that it's also got anything to do with, like, I sometimes think of panpsychism and idealism as zooming in versus zooming out, as if for the panpsychists, they kind of dig into the table or the chair. It's always the table and the chair, isn't it? Because there's always a table or a chair. They sort of dig downwards into the atom, into the electron,

and sort of find consciousness down there somewhere, very simple and sort of rudimentary. Whereas for the idealists, they sort of put the table and the chair together, and then they put the room together, and they put all of ourselves together, and they put everything together and sort of zoom out, and there's one great big thing that you're left with, it's the big sort of conscious mind in which everything arises,

which is why idealism is more associated with, religious ideas or spinosa or people like this because it's the sort of one great big mind whereas the panpsychist retains the atomism of the scientific revolution and just sort of places consciousness down there. So I don't know how much you see this in your investigation of both worldviews, but to me they're often kind of getting it the same thing, but the key difference is do they, as I sometimes say, do they account for the crumbs in terms of the cake or the cake in terms of the crumbs? Yeah, look, I think that's absolutely right, and it's very similar, but I think there is this distinction

that in panpsychism, the elements of the of the crumbs would have, the physical properties of that would have an equal ontological status as the proto-consciousness. So in the crumb, it would be that. In idealism, you wouldn't need that at all, because idealism is completely comprehensive. in, I don't use of quantum analogy, a wave function of the universe, that you have this one big wave function. And that's this. Now, under panpsychism, you have, you know, cosmocychism, which sort of says the main property is the, you know, so between cosmocycism, which is sort of a subset of panpsychism and idealism,

those are really, you know, a challenge. Cosmosychism. Sorry? It's like a, but it's like a version of pancycism, right? this cosmos psychism. I've heard people talk about this, but I've always, so, I've never quite been clear on what exactly it is. Yeah, well, that's because you understand it too well. I mean, it sounds like idealism, surely. Yeah, it's very close to idealism. And again, we're putting linguistic categories on ideas. And so it's very, very natural. But this is one of the

most interesting elements of really digging into consciousness to look at theories and compare them cosmicism versus idealism is one another one that's i find fascinating is non-reductive physicalism versus property dualism uh that that's that's also a really interesting way to understand how one thinks these are kind of epistemological is more than ontological i'll describe what that means but, you know, it's a fascinating subject. Yet there is a difference, whether it's a, you know, a distinction without a difference or a distinction with a difference. I think it's a distinction with a difference, although it's challenging with cosmocycism.

It still has, in cosmocycism, it still has the whole universe as the primary conscious element. So it's not the proto-consciousness on a tiny thing. the consciousness of the big thing, but it still has the material world with equal ontological status. And that's the key difference, I think. Whereas idealism would not have the physical world, it would have it as derivative or illusion. Cosmysychism would have the physical world with equal ontological status. That's the difference. Sometimes when I talk about consciousness, I say you've kind of got three options when you look at the fact that consciousness exists and the fact that there seems to be this world of stuff that isn't conscious.

And those three options are this. First is to say there are two types of stuff and this is dualism. There's mind stuff and there's body stuff or physical stuff and they're just different kinds of things that somehow interact with each other. Option two is to say there's only one type of stuff and that stuff is the physical stuff and we call that materialism or physicalism. option three is to say there is one type of stuff, but that the one type of stuff that there is is conscious or mental, and that is where you get idealism or panpsychism. And yet, looking at your map, you've got the header of like idealism, for example, and idealism says that sort of everything is made out of mind or emerges in mind. And as a separate category, you've got monism, and monism is the view that there's one type of thing. So I kind of want to say that like idealism is maybe a form of monism.

Indeed, materialism is a kind of monism. So why does monism have its own column here? Very, very good question. And I can give you feedback I've had for many theorists who see their classification. And everybody wants, I'm exaggerating, everybody wants to be a monist. Yeah, right. It has sort of a characterism. And there's a very large overlapping,

through panpsychism and monism and the different kinds of monism. But I made a category of monism to highlight the point that you just made, that there is the idea that's one kind of stuff and it has two expressions. But I tried to be extremely strict on who I allowed into that category. And people, you know, rustling monism is the classic one. And then there are very people, particular theories that are that are based on it. Donald Davidson, that's a very interesting approach. He called his kind of, what was it, a not reflexive, but anomalous monism. So Donald

Davidson called anomalous monism. So he had, he had three premises, axiomatic ideas. Number one, mental events cause physical events, okay? That's a, that's, we give you that, as a possibility. Second, causation requires laws. There has to be a process by which things are work. And third, there are no psychophysical laws. And that was, those are his three premises. Now, you look at those, that's contradictory.

It seems like that's a null set. There's no way you can, you can articulate those together. And he- Psychophysical laws, meaning like laws relating the interaction between the physical and mental. Right, right. So it seems contradictory. You need, the mental causes the physical. On the first premise, second principle, you need a causation law. It's not just going to happen a random thing.

And third, there are no such laws. And the only solution to that, logically, is that the mental and the physical are the same. So it's a radical identity theory. David Pappenhow also has the radical identity theory where the mental and the physical are exactly the same in the strong sense that the morning star and the evening star are both Venus.

You take away one, you automatically take away the other. Sure. Superman and Clark Kent or Marilyn Monroe and Norma Jean Mortensen, whatever her name was, original name, that you can't separate. one from the other. They are exactly the same expression. And to me, there is a strong logic to that, whether it's satisfactory or not. That's a different story. To me, it's not satisfactory, but at least it has a logical coherence to it. So there are monisms that are super focused on that

one point. And so I try to highlight that. But, you know, the critique is valid. I mean, this is a two-dimensional toy model, if you will, of what reality is supposed to be. So there are many different facets. As I said, non-reductive physicalism versus property dualism. They both say that there are irreducible mental states that can't be explained by anything in the physical world, but there is only one kind of stuff, and that stuff is physical. It's not a dual aspect. It's a pure physical stuff, the physical stuff that we know.

And so how are they different? Well, they're different in an epistemological sense in terms of property dualism. saying that the mental property itself has ontological status, that it's real, whereas non-reductive physicalism would take the process of emergence, again, and if it's in a strong sense, it can't be reduced, but emergence is the way that it uses top-down causation. So by comparing different theories that we use, you begin to really

luxuriate in the problem of consciousness. You understand all of these aspects, which is why I love it, and I'm not disturbed that I don't have an answer, a final answer, because I just love the process. You know, I've heard you say before that you attempted as best you could

to respect what people said about their own views. Like if someone comes along and says, I'm a materialist, even if they sound very non-materialist to you, you try to respect that and count it in materialism, right? And so there must be some extent to which you are granting people divisions and distinctions that maybe you don't think are necessarily sensible, but you're sort of going with what they say.

I just wonder, you said there are 444 different theories of consciousness here. As of today, as of today, yeah. If you had to kind of take a guess at it, like in your view, in the way that I think a lot of these views kind of collapse into each other, they're kind of saying the same thing, maybe just using different terminology. Like, do you, do you suspect that there are really that many different theories of consciousness? Or, like, if we really were able to, like, nail down a precise dictionary where everyone was using the same terms and meant the same thing by them, like, how many theories of consciousness do you think there would actually be? Because, yeah, I think there's a good argument to say that, you know, there would only be, you know, maybe three or five or ten, you know, but we have hundreds of them because we have. people just can't agree on their terms.

Yeah, look, I think that's entirely valid. I come out of from a different perspective because I'm not trying to solve the problem. I'm trying to unpack the problem and to tease it apart, to see the workings of it. And each of these theories, by emphasizing something different, helps us. Certainly in the materialist theories, that they are very different from each other under the materialist rubric or category. And so they have very different, you know, ways of working. I mean, just to take an example in quantum theories, you have the Penrose-Hameroff,

where it's the collapse of the wave function within microtubules. And then Helmut Nevin has the view that it's the formation of the wave function. So one has the collapse, one has the formation. Now, if that's the right theory, one or the other is probably correct. I mean, I don't see how it, you know, each one is making a different claim. They're both very, you know, confident that it's a quantum process, which is obviously a minority view in general, but where it occurs.

And if you go to each one of these, it's really important. I mean, electromagnetic field theories make a very specific point that consciousness is this electromagnetic field in some sense. I mean, that's very different than a neurobiological theory. that would have neuronal circuitry in Darwinian, as I said, Gerald Edelman's approach to it. There are many other neurobiological theories, or the theories that emotionists, Antonio DiMasio and others have generated. So these are very different kinds of theories. So it depends, you know, the granularity by which we want to look at it.

Certainly there are commonalities. I think between panpsychas and idealism is an excellent one to explore that, that you could probably reduce the number of theories. But again, I'm not looking at theories in some sense that these are mutually exclusive, but are different ways of exposing the problem and of deeply understanding the problem. So it's an epistemological approach to understanding it in terms of, you know, If I really had to go through these and then reduce it down to some different categories, again, under materialism, there are very different explanations because they occur at different

levels of the hierarchy or different expressions of how things work in the brain, and they are very different from each other. So there is some mutual exclusivity, more mutual exclusivity within materialism, if that's what your view is, versus panpsychism or motorism. or idealism, even dualisms, those have a lot of similarities. And that's natural because there's on each one some kind of non-physical component, which is my favorite term to use because it's very, very neutral, non-physical aspect or component to it. And when you have that, there are natural commonalities that kind of blend together. So that's why this conversation is really so

informative to understand because I, you know, one of my missions, if you will, is to make people realize that these big questions we ask, AI consciousness, life after death, nature of free will, personal identity are dependent upon your theory of consciousness. And if you don't think so, you're doing it anyway. You just don't know what you're doing. Can you tell me, I mean, I gave these sort of three options and we spent a long time talking about monism. So we've spoken about what if everything's sort of made out of consciousness, what if everything's just made out of matter. But there is this third option, which weirdly, it feels like it doesn't get much philosophical attention. because most philosophers and physicists have kind of largely abandoned this view.

But in like the sort of popular understanding, dualism, the view that there are just these two different things that interact with each other is quite popular really, even just in like common parlance, the way we talk about having a body. I would say like, you know, my body is hurting as if there's a me and there's a body and they're like separate or my brain. Like there's a me and there's a brain, even though I'm kind of the same thing as my brain. And I'm, Okay, so Descartes in the Western tradition kicks this off by kind of saying like, you know, I can conceive of my mind without a body and my body without mind. So there are probably two different kinds of substances. But you mentioned earlier this thing called property dualism, which is another kind of dualism that's a bit more specific. Could you just tell me what the difference between those two is? Yeah, there's a radical difference between property dualism and what they call substance dualism, which also has this different categories. And basically what you said, the dualism has two different kinds of stuff that is ontologically primitive.

That's dualism. And I should say that, you know, I've always had a soft spot in my brain for dualism, even though it's extremely unpopular among physicists and certainly scientists, the interaction problem is a problem. Everybody has a problem. You know, panpsychism has the combination problem. How do these little proto-consciousism make a big consciousness? Idealism has the decombination problem. You have this giant, you know, world consciousness, cosmic consciousness. How does some little piece kind of bubble off or squeeze off? And I have my conscience and you have yours. And we don't find them, you know, intermixing at all. I've never had an intermixing with anybody. My, you know, closest family, wife, et cetera, I've never had this, that feeling. So, you know, how does that

happen? So every theory has its problem. There's no question. And dualism has the interaction problem, which has to do with the closure of the physical world, that the physical world has a closure, every effect has a cause. How do you get in there to, at the joints, so to speak, to have a non-physical response. It's a valid point. You know, I'm not totally, I don't find that to be a knockout argument. I think it's a strong argument, but just like the others. So, as I said, I've had a soft spot in dualism.

I should tell you a story if you can give me two minutes that's kind of important to me because people ask me all the time what I believe. And I always say, it doesn't matter what I believe. I want each theory to live on its own. and then say, oh, you got to tell us what you believe anyway or what you think. And so I, and this happened in the paper, the original paper. And I

didn't have my view. And when it came out in accidentally, people said, I looked through the whole paper and I didn't see what you believe. And I said, you didn't see it because I didn't put it. It doesn't matter what I believe. And I don't want it, what I

believe is minimally confident that I am in it. I don't want that to color these theories. I really put my life into each theory as if it were my own. I want each theory to live on its own without colored by my view. And they said, but people then said, oh, yeah, but then it looks like you have a hidden agenda, that you're just subtly trying to maneuver it. So I, you know, rocking a hard place. So what I did in the paper is I put in 33 words of my own opinion and then a footnote that had another 39 words. So 72 words out of 175,000. And I said, that's the confidence level I put in my own theory. And it was basically the first level with some

kind of a dualism that there is some non-physical component that you do need. But then I had a footnote where I said, if that's not true, I might go to some kind of quantum theory, which I had for many years, on Closer to Truth, rejected and not made fun of, but really thought it was not right, but having studied all these different quantum theories, I actually changed my mind on that in writing the paper that I gave more credit to that. And then finally, the third, to be totally seemingly contradictory if non-physical or dualism is not right, and if quantum theory is not right, maybe I would go to some sort of illusionism with representational or neurobiological. So, you know, my my smorgasbord of ideas were very fluid but here's the story I want to tell you because when

physicalists change their mind and become non-physicalists and there are very you know some a lot of examples some are well-known many individuals when you when I talk to them the reason in every almost every case maybe in every case that I can recall is because they had some kind of experience it might have been an out-of-body experience, which some very sophisticated scientists have told me they have had a near-death experience, and that changed their view. Psychedelics have created that in some people. I certainly believe that psychedelics give you a different image, but I don't put any ontological foundational reality into what comes out of that. But other people do, and I respect that. religious experience. I've had very distinguished scientists tell me of their religious

experiences, mainly, you know, from Christian perspective, that they've had these experiences, and therefore that's their foundational belief. And I understand that. Now, I, too, have had an experience, but it's an experience that has moved me more towards materialism than towards dualism. Now, how is that possible? How can you have an experience that makes you more physicalist? I didn't say totally physical. I said, just move me slightly. And I'll tell you the story quickly. And my daughter, Daniela, has given me permission to tell the story. She got married late at 45. Her husband was significantly younger, tried to have a baby, and they got pregnant, which was kind of a minor miracle,

but it had severe genetic problems and had to have an abortion. So that was very traumatic. And couldn't try again, but she had frozen her eggs when she was 34, roughly 10 years before. And so they defrosted the eggs. They tested them,

and two were what they call mosaics in which that has a chance of being good, but they're a chance to be, but not sure. But that was their only choice. Her husband, they were in New York. My husband flew to New York, fertilized it in vitro, and it took, and it grew to what they call a blastula, 128 cells, and they tested it, didn't seem to have any defect at that point. So then they refroze the

blastula for another two years while my daughter wanted to carry the baby herself. She didn't want to surrogate for her body at age of 48 at that time to carry the baby herself. And her body had to be prepared. You know, my wife and I were not happy with that, because she because of the hormonal treatments. But she did. There was her body and her decision. And, you know, the bottom line of all of this is that six years later, my grandson, Louis, is bilingual, plays a ping pong, chess, and the piano, and is extremely social. Now, for all I know about biology and my doctor's in, you know, biology and neuroscience, I am still flabagasted that that, that,

I lived through that process literally every day for years and to see that happen. And it made me realize the latent strength in the physical world beyond that we appreciate. It's an emotional, it's an emotional thing. As I said, this has moved me a few percentage points, if you will, you know, back towards materialism because of the latent potential in the world. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting story because I think I can understand. why that would be the case, because of course, like, it's an extremely sort of physical, scientific procedure. And although materialism is very difficult to define, it's sometimes

defined as something like, all that exists is that which science can study, or something like that. That which physics can make sense of. I like that. Yeah. And so you've got this extremely scientific process, and it's to do with the sort of genesis of a new consciousness. And so I can understand why that would be. be the case. But then at the same time, I mean, it strikes me as just a sort of really slow version of what happens anyway, which the idealist or the panpsychist will say that, you know, during conception, no new consciousness is exactly created in the same way that a physicist will say that there's no new matter exactly, or no new energy. It's sort of, you know, energy from,

energy and matter from the parents, from the mother, once the baby is born, from the food that it eats, and the sunlight that it gets and all that kind of stuff that all sort of amalgamates into this new physical being. And so the panpsychist, for example, would say the same thing about consciousness. There's no new conscious matter. It's just a new complex arrangement. And the fact that those sort of,

like conscious building blocks were frozen for some time and then unfrozen is no more mysterious for idealism or panpsychism as the fact that you could put me under general anaesthesia. and my sense of consciousness would disappear for a time, but the idealists would just say, yeah, that's because the thing that's disappeared is this particular arrangement of conscious activity or something like that.

So what was it about this experience that, and I know you've said before, that if it shifted you any way towards materialism, it's from like 98% to 92% non-physicalism. So, you know, it's not like you've been washed over by this. I'd say from, you know, maybe, that's right, but I would have different numbers.

I'd be maybe, you know, 65% to 61%, something like that. Sure. Toward materialism. Look, the point I'm making, it's entirely emotional. It's entirely an emotional reaction. But it is no different in a sense than people who've had an emotional reaction in the other direction. With a near-death experience, out of body, or psychedelics or whatever. I don't, you know, I would put them in the same.

category. That's not to dismiss it because I don't dismiss my own. I'm really telling you the truth. I really had that feeling that there's more in the physical world latent possibilities than I had appreciated. And it's purely emotional. But I certainly, you know, that certainly doesn't turn me over. I still believe that consciousness does have some non-physical component. And I'm not comfortable going more specific than that and that would assume dualism panpsychism um idealism uh for sure so you said a second ago that you don't think i mean in the opposite direction when people have other kinds of experiences when people take psychedelic drugs and they experience you know ego death and consciousness and being everywhere and all this kind of stuff you said something like

you don't give sort of any ontological significance to those experiences exactly. Whereas I think that I do because I think at the very least it shows us that the way that we perceive the world is not the way that it has to be perceived. And so if we've mapped on a metaphysics based on how we perceive the world, then maybe our metaphysics could be utterly wrong because that's not the only way to see the world. For many people, this is one of the most profound things. And they don't just say it's emotional in the sense of like, you know, I just had such a powerful experience. I can't really put it into words. So I guess there's something weird going on. But quite specifically, like, no, I felt like I was part of the universe.

I felt like myself was an illusion. And I began to really just experience that directly. So given that, why not give it any significance? I say this because, you know, Philip Goff recently said at the Royal Institution on a panel with William Lane Craig, he started talking about. his recent experience taking a kind of toad venom derived psychedelic drug. And the look on William Lane Craig's face was hysterical because he's talking about this experience he had. And the panel and the audience were all basically saying to him, look, man, that the experiences that you had were under the influence of a psychedelic drug. And Philip Goff was like, okay, yeah, but the drug doesn't give my

brain anything that isn't already there. If anything, it reduces particular activities that seem relevant to our present discussion. And if I can look at my hand right now, as GE more did, and say, look, I can't prove that there's no, that there's an external world or anything, but like I just so strongly perceive my hand in front of me that I'm just going to believe that it's really there. And most people are totally fine doing that. When I had this experience, I experienced consciousness as foundational, whatever it was the experience. So like, why can't I trust that just because my brain is in a different state to what it normally is? So, a long-winded question, but to sort of inform the question, I wanted to ask you why it is that you said a

second ago you don't give any sort of ontological credence to psychedelic experiences. A very valid point, and I have been criticized, you know, most of the time politely by many people, that for exactly this reason. I don't claim to be a consciousness practitioner. I don't, I've now taken psychedelics. I've, I don't meditate. I've not had a religious or out of body or near or near or any kind of experience. I joke that I said I play intense table tennis and that sort of gives me an emotional high, but my critics say that doesn't count. But in all seriousness, this, I said in the paper when I have the section on psychedelics that I gave the arguments why I think that this is very important for treatment of PTSD or whatever different depression.

I mean, a lot of great research being done and I support that entirely, but I don't give it ontological status. I mean, what's the difference between, you know, to be crude, to get, you, you know, hit your eye on the refrigerator and you see stars. It's a physical insult to your optical system and psychedelics, which is doing something more complicated with the neurochemistry there. I don't know that. Look, in doing the paper, in the past, I was 98% sure that there's no ontological status to psychedelics. Having done the paper and I've read the people who believe that, very substantial people, you know, I put some comment that it has put a hairline fracture in my bone strength rejection of ontological status of psychedelic experiences. So, you know, I've been moved

a little off a kind of a hardcore physicalist approach to psychedelics. But, Not much. There are some studies that show these are preliminary that under near-death experience, for example, there's a flowing of extra flowing of serotonin or neurotransmitter that, a very high percentage. I don't know how scientifically reproducible that has been, because you can't do that in humans, obviously, but in animals. it, you know, it's a neurochemical reaction.

And if when people tell me to take psychedelics or I should have an religious experience, my reaction is, if I did and if I would, I wouldn't trust it. Why would I trust that? You know, in my present state, I wouldn't. That so many people do and have had, and have made the comments similar to what you've said, I deeply respect. And again, I've kind of, you know, shifted my view from being, you know, really hard-nosed about it to being a little bit softer-nosed. Yeah. No, it's not impossible, but, you know, I'm still, I'm still not a fan that

psychedelics gives us a window into a deeper reality. Yeah, I think, you know, I never really like to, I speak to people about consciousness, and a lot of them say, look, I've never taken psychedelics. And I don't like to say things like, well, do you think you have a word or maybe you should? Because, you know, it's like it's an intense thing. Not everybody wants to do it, fair enough. And so I never like to say that. But at the same time, when I hear you say, if I were to do it, I wouldn't trust it.

I understand that. But at the same time, I think people might want to say like, well, try saying that afterwards. Only because, you know, I have a vivid dream, right? And after I wake up, even though during the dream, I was totally swept up by it, afterwards, I'm quite aware that what I just experienced was like a hallucination, essentially, that it did not really happen, that it is not a part of the reality I'm currently inhabiting. Whereas I think with the psychedelic experience, it's not so much that reality changes in front of you, but rather that reality just begins to reveal itself how it really is.

And to me, it's profoundly interesting that after years of philosophizing and being led down this sort of path of like, maybe we just have to accept in a way that I can't quite understand or say, the consciousness is foundational. I don't know what that would mean. Electron, conscious, I've got no idea, but philosophically I've just been led there. And then you take this psychedelic drug and suddenly it's like, oh,

you know, it like fills in that experiential gap. It's like Mary stepping outside the room for the first time and seeing blue. Because a moment ago when you said, you know, it's just a neural chemical sort of process. That's how a materialist sometimes describes consciousness. They say, you know, it's just like neurons firing. And the idealist or someone goes, yeah, but isn't that, like, weird?

So for me, I think I see it as like, in the same way that Aldous Huxley did, that the brain is a tool for focusing the mind, a kind of like valve that organizes consciousness in a particular way. It might be artificial the way that you can change the way that that valve works. But if I had like some water that was slowly dripping through a gap in a pipe, and that's all I knew of the nature of water. So all I knew of water was that it was sort of unified into droplets and that it was quite weak and quite small and didn't have very much all that kind of stuff. And then I could artificially just grab like some pliers and rip open a hole and suddenly this this torrent of water starts pouring and suddenly water is strong and intense and I experience it. Like I see it in front of me. I'm like, wow, this is a property of water I didn't know existed. And then I plug up the gap.

And somebody said, yeah, but you know, you only think that about water because you've like, artificially change the structure of how you're interacting with it. And I'm like, yeah, but even though that's true, I've experienced something undeniable about the nature of the thing. You know what I mean? I think that's how I've experienced psychedelics in my view. I'm not sure if that's sort of common across psychedelic experiences that people have had, but it's something a bit like that. It does seem at least, let me put it this way, at least as informative about the nature of reality as my current experience of the world, which I have. haven't had to take a drug to experience, but I have had to eat food and get sunlight and,

you know, maneuver about the world in a particular way. And I'm not sure if I have any more reason to trust it, you know? Look, it was a very valid point. Many people make it. I appreciate it. As I said, I appreciated more now than me. I did originally. My same daughter just told me that She did a psychedelics the first time in her life recently and had some similar things. And she's giving me advice that maybe I should do it too. And so I appreciate it. I appreciate the view. You know, I still, you know, really don't put a lot of foundational value in it.

And again, even if I did it myself, you know, I would be kind of a a fun experience, but I don't see it as given anything. Maybe I'll do it. Maybe I'll come back and tell you, you know, Alex, you were right. I have a whole new view of the world and, you know, throw out all this material, take out the whole first category, you know, no more materialist, get rid of half the theories. I don't know, maybe. You know, it's funny though, because at the same time, like, most of the time I spend talking about psychedelics is with people in this context. But, like, you know, when I was at university, I know people who took psychedelics essentially as party drugs. And I don't think, I don't think these guys, like, have ever, like, sort of been even interested in the nature of fundamental reality or metaphysics or whatever.

They just took this drug, went to a club and were like, well, you know, the colors are kind of cool and then just got on with their lives, right? So there is a sense in which also we might be, like, you know, imposing our own expectations of an experience onto the experience. But the reason why psychedelics are so profound for these consciousness researchers is because they go in almost like expecting to find it there. Whereas if you just, if you're like the Beatles who were first given psychedelics, they were spiked. They were given tea without being told. And they just sort of got in the elevator and thought that it was on fire. There's this really funny story of them having no clue what was happening to them. And for them, it was just like, well, this is pretty cool.

And they wrote some great music. I'm not sure if they, maybe George Harrison did. But, you know, I don't know if they suddenly were like, wow, what a profound insight into the fundamental nature. of what electrons are made out of, you know? So I also sort of share your skepticism that it necessarily has to be this window into the nature of reality. I just think it can provide it, and I think perhaps validly so. But, you know, I'm interested in, you mentioned at the beginning, we were going through these categories. We've sort of taken a look at materialism and idealism and monism and anarchism. This one at the end, challenge. You mentioned it earlier,

but what does that mean? What is that category? There's a category that, uh, classifies approaches to consciousness that take a radically different and an orthogonal view to this linear, this linearity between materialism to idealism, these eight categories that we had. And it could start with Colin McGinn's famous Mysterianism, where it is fundamentally, you know, I think you wrote in the 1980s very early. that said, you know, isn't a time we give up trying to solve consciousness because we're never going to be able to do it? And that approach said that for some reason we're not, we're not capable of doing it. Not that there isn't an answer. He wasn't advocating some

non-physical stuff at all. That's not his worldview at all. But it would say, you're just not capable. Now, many have told me that perhaps the human brain did not evolve in order to understand understand consciousness. It evolved to, you know, survive on the plains of Africa, escape, making, you know, group tribes to hunt animals, whatever it did. That's what drove the nature of our brains. And just like we have a craving for sweets and fats today, which are built because of prior pressures during ice ages or whatever that today maybe is counterproductive in terms of of our health, but then was absolutely necessary for survival. So we have different pressures on us that caused, and our brain was made in a certain kind

of pressure by these evolutionary factors. That's the view that says we're, you know, we're not capable of doing that. You know, I am not in favor of that view. I mean, it's possible, but it would have to be a pretty fine line where we can understand quantum field theory and what happened at the, you know, 10 to the minus 36, 309 seconds, as they've said, at the Big Bang, we can stay, and all of these things with pretty high confidence levels, some of this, and yet not able to understand conscious. It's possible. It possibly could be that, you know, excluded part of the Venn diagram where we can understand everything, all these things,

but not conscious, because if consciousness is indeed part of the physical world, then it should be susceptible to these same sort of methods. And that's why, you know, I classify the distinction of this non-physical aspect that is something not susceptible to the scientific method. If that's the case, then science will never be able to understand consciousness, and therefore it has to be some other kind of element, some non-physical component of some kind. You know, that's the, that's as far as I can really feel confident in, in going in terms of the distinction. So it's that these are not so much, like, theories of consciousness.

They're more sort of just like ideas pertaining to the unintelligible of consciousness or its nature or its relation to that. That's, that there is, it's a recognition that all of the approaches that we took, the materialism, the idealist, the panse, all of that is just not satisfactory. And all of them have problems. And so what's the answer to that? The answer to that is maybe there's something systemic that we're not capable in our current brain development through evolution of understanding that piece of reality, whatever it may be. We're just not. That's one part of the challenge.

And there are different, lots of different expressions of that. David Eagleman has possibility of some, where each possibility has its own kind of ontological status, and we can't

make a distinction between them. So, I mean, there are different approaches here that are, that are, that are, that at the problem in different ways. Let me tell you one interesting one that I really like, and it reflects two of my intellectual heroes, actually, that are Raymond Talas and Peter Van Inwagon. Raymond Talas is, you know, starters of neurologists and great participant in the health system and became a, you know, a humanist philosopher, just wonderful thinker, and really one of my favorite

think is Peter Van Inouagan is a Christian philosopher, perhaps the leading metaphysician in the world under some classifications and a Christian philosopher. And let me tell you each one's theory and why I have Raymond classified in challenge. Ray is a absolute atheist, does not believe in God in any sense whatsoever, a firm atheist. But yet he is a non-reduction about consciousness. He calls reductionist theories of consciousness a neuromania

as opposed to neurophilosophy that Pat Fershlin would coined. But Ray is neuromania that an attempt to reduce consciousness to material is just impossible. So Ray is an atheist

about the nature of reality, no God, but a a realist about consciousness in terms of being non-material, non-reductive. Peter Van Inwagon is a Christian philosopher, so deeply believes in God, a very specific kind of God, but he is a materialist about consciousness. So he believes that consciousness is entirely physical. You know, then he has a different problem because he believes in God,

he believes in a resurrection. So if the person is physical, how do you get a resurrection? It's a completely separate issue, which an interesting one, which I have classified under non-reductive physicalism. There are Christian philosophers like Peter Van Inwagon or Nancy Murphy who believe in a purely physicalist explanation for the person, for consciousness, but yet believe in non-physical realities. So, you know, this is the kind of nuances we see with very sophisticated people who,

take, you know, contradictory eyes on both sides. If you compare Ray, an atheist, but a non-reductionist materialist, Peter Van N-Wagon, a strong theist who's a materialist about the body. And the arguments of each one are deeply probative, and I just love them. And yet it shows different ways of thinking. That's why Ray is classified under challenge theory, because he's, He's very clear that he's not saying what consciousness is, but he's saying what consciousness is not, and it's not reducible to the physical world. Cannot be explained neurologically.

Famously, Ralph Nader's Nader's. view, Tom Nagel's view of consciousness is, you know, famously, what does it like to be about? But he has taken that further that there is something about the world. And Tom is equally a very strong atheist. I think his famous quote is, it's not that I don't believe in God, is that I hope there is no God. A world where the God would be a terrible place. And yet he is a non-materialist about the nature of consciousness. And so we have the, and so those are the kinds of people who are thoughtful within the challenge category,

or challenging our, either our capacity through the kind of brains that we have, or that there is something that we can't even know what it is. But I'm very confident in my feeling that, you know, there is, that the reductionist approach is not going to work. but I have no confidence in what it actually is. And then there are teleological explanations. Paul Davies famously, and he's also one of my intellectual heroes in terms of his approach where, you know,

his approach is that explaining the universe by some externality like God is, you know, it doesn't work. But claiming consciousness is, all material and is kind of a late accidental development is also wrong. He takes consciousness seriously. And the way he develops this is that through quantum histories of the universe, in some sense, sounds like retrocausation, but it's not. It deals with quantum histories based on John Wheeler, that because consciousness will emerge at some point, it then can back choose the quantum histories in some sense that have brought about the consciousness. So Paul, Paul,

Again, an atheist, an atheist, but believes that consciousness is fundamental and is somehow brought about by a selection of quantum histories by what will happen at a later development. And so these are unclassifiable ideas, and therefore they're in challenge category. So that's the second time. And perhaps lastly, this is. That's the second time that you've mentioned the quantum. you've mentioned it in the context there of a challenge sort of category. You also mentioned earlier when we were talking about materialism and saying,

well, you know, different people have different ideas of what counts as material. Some say it's a quantum wave function or something. And so, okay, that makes sense. But then you also have this category of like quantum, well, quantum and dimensions. But let's isolate the quantum bit. Like famously Roger Penrose, who I saw walking down the street of Oxford the other day, You think he was 20 years younger He was just sort of

Walking along with his coffee And I was able to shake his hand And I've heard him once say That I heard him once at some point say I'm sure he said something like About how once he started talking about consciousness It's all anybody wanted to ask about And he almost regretted it

So I held my tongue I managed not to ask him anything about it But you know famously has this idea That consciousness resides in the quantum Twofold question here One is that why is it its own category? Isn't quantum just a theory of what matter is fundamentally? And secondly, you said a moment ago that you used to kind of not take it seriously, almost ridicule it, and then you

change your mind. What accounted for that? Okay. Well, I said the first question that a quantum certainly can be considered materialism in its sense, because it is part of the material world. Likewise, non-reductive physicalism and panpsychism, all of these kind of information theories, which we haven't talked about, where information is fundamental, integrated information theory, Giulio Tinooni, Christopher Koch. These are very important theories that put some foundational ontology into the nature of information. Now, that also can be part of the physical world. but I separated them out, non-physical reductionism, quantum theories, and information,

because they are dealing with each in such a sufficiently different way than the traditional materialism theories that were used to, which are both neurobiological or electromagnetic or philosophical approaches to theories. There are, you know, I'd be totally happy with different organizational structures, but I broke those out, even though they can be considered materialism in some larger superset, because they are sufficiently different and sufficiently strong in terms of the feelings of its advocates, sufficiently different than the traditional materialistic theory. So it's just kind of an organizational approach.

And if we dig down, yeah, I mean, I could say they're materialism in some sense. if you say everything that is real as material. And so this is just giving scope to a set of theories that are based on quantum theories in radically different ways. And I don't know how many I have under quantum theories, but at least 20 or 25, and they're radically different of where the quantum effect occurs.

You know, as I said, in the microtubule, the formation of the wave structure. Some people say in the cell, some people say in a larger, a kind of entanglement in the brain, all different theories of quantum. So when we say that, I think it's important to recognize within that quantum world, there's lots of different kinds of theories that are largely seemingly mutually exclusive in terms of where it works.

There's also a dimensionality that there are different dimensions of consciousness. Bernard Carr has some theories along those lines built on some, some theories some credibility of parapsychological things so there are these are physicalists

could be physicalists in some sense but so different than the traditional materialism I wanted to have them in a separate category as to why I gave it more credibility that as I looked at each of these theories and just began to

understand that in terms of the quantum field aspect to it there's sufficiently interesting possibilities there in terms of, and as quantum computing has developed, and we see the quantum supremacy being able to uncertain kinds of questions, factoring of large numbers, where you can achieve in minutes or hours, something that would take regular computers,

lifetime of the universe or more to do, that there are certain capabilities in quantum, that are radically different than the neuronal impulses or the philosophical maneuvers in the brain with representationalism or relationalism or something else, sufficiently radically different that it deserved its own category.

And as I said, as opposed to, you know, I hope I never ridiculed it, but taking it much less serious, I would take it more seriously today than before I started the study. I know I said, finally, but just because you mentioned it, under information is one of the most, I think,

like maybe one of the most commonly cited ideas about consciousness in recent years, which is IIT or integrated information theory. What is that and why is it suddenly so popular? So this is a very probative question into the current status of consciousness studies, because integrated information theory originally formulated by Julia Tannone, who was a sleep researcher, neuroscientists, a very good in sleep research and psychiatry, et cetera,

and supported strongly by Christoph Koch, who famously developed the neuronal correlative consciousness, assisting Francis Crick in 1990, which really opened the whole field. So these are very strong people. And it's a radically different approach. It takes consciousness,

fundamental. I shouldn't say fundamental. I take it in a serious way, starting with consciousness and then explaining it. And basically, it is a structural analysis of consciousness that is not based on specific neurobiology, but it's based on conceptual ideas about consciousness. And it becomes, and they have a test called Phi, which is the amount of consciousness, and then a kind of a structural approach. It's a little vague. They're often accused of being panpsychic, a panpsychism, which they reject, but their criticism say that they're a panpsychist theory.

Famously, 124 philosopher-scientists called IIT a pseudoscience. This was a scandal in the field. some say because to call it pseudoscience is the worst thing I can say about somebody. I mean, there's nothing worse. I can say you're ugly and you're stupid.

Say pseudoscience is worse than that. So why did they think it was pseudoscience? Because as you say, that's quite a big deal, like over 100 professionals. Not just that they thought that, but that they felt the need to publicly affirm it, right? And we can deal with it.

We can tease this apart very well. Why they felt the need was because IIT was getting such very substantial prominence, and there was a so-called adversarial collaboration between different theories of consciousness, famously IIT versus global workspace theory, which, I mean, is kind of a neurobiological theory, that competed against each other with a very well-funded program with independent testing, you know, extremely interesting process and results. And it, you know, some things favored

one, some things favored the other. IIT predicts that the consciousness would come because of integrated information in the back of the brain, global workspace, they should occur in the front of the brain. And so this was tested. It seemed to favor IIT a little bit, but not totally. There were some of the favored global workspace.

But anyway, this became a public matter, and it was covered nature or science. I mean, the major publications were looking at this. And a group of people felt this was a, I wouldn't say a publicity stunt. It wasn't a stunt, but it was excessive publicity and gave the impression that IIT was the leading theory. And then they were, you know, others that were strong, two or three others. When there was this huge number of other theories. And many people had different theories, particularly higher.

higher order representationalism under materialism, and people were felt that the public was being misled because of the prominence of this theory, because of the prominence of this adversarial collaboration, and the prominence of the individuals. It was giving a misleading view of the field. So that was the approach. My approach to it was different.

I did not like the label of pseudoscience. I've seen this very similar kind of accusations against string theory, against the multiverse, which are either, you know, 20 orders of magnitude with string theory able to be subject to experimental testing or impossible in theory in the multiverse to even get access. Although there are some possibilities of interacting brains, but, you know, those also have been accused of pseudoscience, and I think that's unfair.

That science, because of the nature of it, is dealing with so many different orders of magnitude of level, that if things have a coherence to them, that have explanatory powers to it, we should listen to all of that. Certainly, I'm one who, you know, accepts a lot of different possible theories to include. So I was against the pseudoscience accusation. However, I also made the point that if you compared IIT with global workspace theory, each had a prediction, that the prediction of IIT was, again, the prior to the back of the brain and the global works at the front of the brain. But from my point of view, that prediction was not an indication of its fundamental ontology of each theory. In global workspace theory, it was sort of, as then it might put it, fame in the brain. and which circuitry becomes the most prominent

and that recruits others to be part of it. Whereas IIT has consciousness as some sort of a structural element, maybe in some sort of end dimensional space, some kind of equivalent of Hilbert space where a quantum academy, maybe there's some kind of a consciousness space where there's these different structures that occur in some dimensional sense that are part of the,

IIT, that's the fundamental ontology of each theory. One is a brain circuitry and the other is an ontological structure. And where it predicts something, you could reverse them and say, oh, the global wake space theory predicts the front of the brain, the back of the brain, and IIT predicts the front of the brain. And it wouldn't change the fundamental ontology of each one. So I didn't feel comfortable that that adversarial collaboration would, no matter what it said, would yield a fundamental result. Maybe a fundamental result

is in principle, not possible through scientific explanations. But you would think, these two could be subject to the scientific method. Neither one is posing anything directly non-physical, although IIT

may be on the fuzzy border between something non-physical and physical. Yeah, I find it funny that on the Wikipedia page for IIT, under the criticism section, it says that John Searle has criticized, has given a critique of the theory saying the theory implies panpsychism. And it's like, I can kind of understand where that's coming from. A lot of people will think that it sort of implies this sort of crazy view about consciousness, but as someone who's quite comfortable with panpsychism, it just doesn't sound like much of a critique.

but it seems like the main criticism was that it was either it was sort of outside of the proper remit of science rather than being like false it just wasn't properly scientific thing is for me the reason why I don't have a problem with IIT but I kind of don't find it very interesting that began when I realized that it's not so much a theory of consciousness and that it doesn't try to explain like where experience comes from

or something like that it just begins with a certain set of axiomatic assumptions, and like the zeroth assumption is that experience exists. It assumes that experience consciousness exists and then tries to talk about its like structure, I suppose. And that's great, that's interesting, that's cool. But for me, it's always been a little bit outside of what I'm interested in, because I'm interested in what consciousness is, where it comes from, what accounts for it? And so, I don't know, to what extent do you think that IIT can be called a theory of consciousness if it begins with the assumption that, well, consciousness is just a thing that exists? Good. Well, I like the structure where they have

their premises and then they have deductions in scientific, but I want to tease apart two elements of it. One is the scientific approach to the presence of consciousness where they use this a phi test. And that's a very innovative and important idea. It has clinical applications in terms of coma patients. I mean, there are serious elements to it, and they've been developing it. So as part of IIT, the phi explanation of the presence of consciousness, how do you judge it in terms of the integration and how you assess it through brain waves, et cetera, that's very scientific and very, very useful. The other part about what consciousness is has this, I said, this different dimensional structure to it. So, and that's, that's, that's, they're very, very cautious about that or cagey, because it's,

that's sort of not part of the physical. So they do have an explanation. But by blending those together, I think does each, each part a disservice. I think the, the, the work on FI in terms of the presence of consciousness, using the idea of integrated information and how that works, is a very legitimate scientific approach to the nature of consciousness, again, with great clinical applications. But as to what consciousness is as a result of it, this structure a way where every conscious precept may be some kind of a unique structure in this other kind of reality, that's a, that is what they say is, is an inference from their, from their basic axioms. But I radically distinguish that between their work on phi, which is scientifically,

from their concept of this structure, which can look like a panpsychism. It can look that way that they would reject that. I guess the assumption of consciousness is a starting point for many. Like, it kind of depends what you mean in that, like, I could say that, well, idealism or panpsychism starts with the assumption that consciousness exists because you have to. Like, it's there. It's real. And then the next question is, well, what's it made out of?

What's its structure? So I think I sort of always saw IIT as sort of unduly beginning with the assumption that it seemingly would be interesting to try and prove. but I guess it's quite valid to just begin with the fact of consciousness and then start looking at its nature. But I've also just found it so difficult to understand, I guess because I'm not as perhaps scientifically minded as I'd like to be or something like that. I've never quite managed to fully wrap my head around exactly what was going on. So I was just interested in your take and to what extent you see it as a theory of consciousness, you know? Yeah, again, distinguishing between their presence of consciousness. consciousness, this phi element to it, versus what consciousness is, which is a product of it. So you're

absolutely right in terms of it starts with consciousness, just like panpsychism and idealism would. And then it takes a very different approach. It looks at systems and the nature of information and how it's integrated and, you know, they're ridiculed, like, you know, can a thermometer then be conscious because it has some kind of information. By the way, John Searle's classic remark about panpsychism is that it's like a thin layer of jam over the whole universe. I mean, that was his metaphor that he liked to

use. Wait, why a thin layer of jam over the whole universe? That was just John's way of describing panpsychism. I think I literally don't understand what he means. Well, I mean... It's because you have consciousness being part of everything that it's this adding something to the physical world. John was a materialist, biological naturalism, and, you know, he was a realist about consciousness in terms of its ontological status, which to me, you know, never quite, I could argue with that. But he was a realist about consciousness, but a hardcore physicalist, that biological naturalism, I mean,

that, you know, consciousness is the product of the brain, like urine is the product of the kidney, is not something that he would issue. I mean, that would be something that he would use. It's obviously much more, would be much more complicated. But his approach to panpsychism was that if every little part of the universe has, as consciousness to it, it would be like this thin layer of jam over the, over the universe. Because it's part of every little thing, so you have to have it. And, you know, it's a small part of everything.

So it's why it's thin and jammed. makes it funny. Yeah, I think perhaps a slightly unfair characterization, but I see what he was driving at. You know, we've done so much here, and it hasn't been in order exactly, but we've talked about materialism and all of the sort of almost ridiculous number

of subcategories that exist within there. We did talk a bit about non-reductive physicalism, which, you know, like call it a kind of physicalism if you like, but it's importantly different in that it cannot be reduced to the purely physical, or at least it sort of seems that way. We talked about the quantum stuff. We did a bit of information on IAT, panpsychism, monisms, dualisms, idealisms,

some of the altered state stuff with psychedelics and challenge. I think we have not covered everything, of course, but we've given some kind of overview of at least one of the important parts of every single one of the categories that you've put together on your map. And I think, at the very least, people should be able to see from this. It's a lot. You know, it's complicated. And to be honest, I, when you said at the beginning of this, you said, you know, when I started putting this together, I realized it was going to be a lot more work than I expected.

I don't know what you were expecting, to be honest, because this is always an infinitely deep and complex topic. So I can only say that I'm grateful that you didn't give up once you realized how complicated it was going to be. Well, it's the old story that if I knew ahead of time what I would have to do, I never would have started. but each step was one step at a time, one theory at a time, and that I can do. So looking back, I'm happy I did it, but I, you know, I never, having done it and recognized what it was. I mean, it's been a huge amount of work, and mostly at night because of other responsibilities. But it's been a great, a great personal gift to be able to explore these things. and I give credit to the people who've developed all these theories,

because that's the richness of what the human mind has developed. You know, what we haven't touched on, which I'll just mention, is theological approaches to consciousness, which are very, which are part of the human experience, maybe more historically than they are today, certainly believed by a lot of people today, but even historically by very important thinkers, and they're very diverse.

And it was very important for me to include it. So I included Hinduism where consciousness is, you know, very significant in the original Vedic scriptures and Buddhism, the Tao Zhajing. And Hinduism has many, many different expressions. We have maybe five or six, and there are literally hundreds, but I picked five or six very specific ones in Kashmirian and Shaveism and Sri Arobando and Sri Ramanah.

These are all expressions of the core idea, but each one very different in their very interesting ways. And then the Abrahamic religions, Judaism of Christianity and Islam, each one has a different aspect to the nature of the soul in some sense. And whether you believe these things or not, they are part of the human desire to know, and to me were very important. And again, a short story. when I submitted my first draft

to the Journal of Progressive Biophysics and Molecular Biology, the reviewer, again, I appreciate very much, made some very important suggestions that helped the paper enormously, said that, look, the scientific theories you have are great, we want to, you know, we accept it, we want to do it, but you have these, you know, philosophical and theological theories, and, you know, the readers of progress and biophysical, molecular, I'm really not interested in that.

So, you know, why don't you just take those out and add some of these other categories? I said he suggested language that are important for our readers. And I wrote back and I said, appreciate everything that you've telling me and I agree, make changes. Thank you. And I said, if I were you, if I were in your place, I would have already rejected the paper because it has these extraneous theories, you know, panproto-psychism to, you know, immortal soul theories. And I said, but as it happened, you know, I wasn't planning to do this. I've now put a lot of effort into it.

And I realized I'm going to do this one time in my life. And I have to do it where it satisfies my own sense of what the totality of human thought is on the nature of consciousness. And so I have to include the philosophical and indeed theological theories. I have, you know, folk religion theories of consciousness from Africa and China, because that's part of the human experience. We may not agree with that. It may seem pre-scientific, but it's part of the human understanding. And people today believe many of these things as well.

And I said, so I have to do this. And if you don't want to publish it, I completely understand. As I said, I would reject it if I were in your position and asked to review it for that reason. But I have to do this, and if you don't want to publish it, I can understand. I'll try someplace else or worst case publish it myself in some way. And to their credit, they said, you know, we'll allow any, you know, all of it in. So I really give them credit for allowing me to do that. And there are some very interesting theories.

Like under dualism, we haven't mentioned, there's something called emergent dualism. And that's the theory that says that everything is physical, but when there's a certain level of complexity, like in brains, it's somehow due to some meta-psychophysical laws of the universe, produces a non-physical element, sort of pops out. Some sort of a non-physical pops out when you have a certain degree of complexity. So that's a very different kind of dualism. Richard Swinburne, who's a obviously very well-known Christian philosopher and has dealt with this and has dealt with substance dualism independent of his religious views. And as very, you know, it's one of the major defenders of a classical substance dualism would be, you know, believes because of his religious training in the traditional soul or whatever.

But he said he would not, if he were wrong, he would not be rejecting an emergent dualism. He believes strongly that even from a non-religious point of view, dualism is a proper explanation for consciousness. But if it turned out to be an emergent kind where there was no immortal soul, no God, but it kind of emerged out of complexity, that would satisfy his non-theological arguments for dualism. And so that's a variant of dualism. and I think it's a very interesting category. We say dualism, we generally think very simple, or interaction in physical and non-physical, rejected by the scientific community.

I think, you know, certainly less than 10% of philosophers would believe in dualism is probably 5% or less. But the richness of the different kinds of theories of dualism, both theologically, philosophically, are to me one of the most interesting categories, It's not generally appreciated the sophistication and the different ways of thinking about dualism. It's usually characterized overly simplistically and either accepted or rejected on that when it has all this richness to it. Yeah, and I appreciate you including those religious dimensions. I mean, like a lot of the time the worldview that a religious system takes on,

as pertains one aspect of reality like consciousness, can be dependent. defended independently. Like you say with Richard Twinburne, you can be a dualist and a Christian and not be one because of the other, but sort of encompass one into the world with the other. But also there are things that we call religious philosophies, like, you know, Advaita Vedanta is a tradition within Hinduism, which is a religion, but Advita Vedanta is kind of a philosophical system rather than a religious one. You know, you don't need to talk about the pantheon of gods and the scriptural tradition exactly you know it's sort of

revealed through the Upanishads and whatnot but in terms of like the narratives and the characters and so that's kind of not so relevant to the philosophical stream so it can all kind of be separated out and gets a little bit sort of complicated but as you say like Wertha mentioned that for most of history philosophising has been

predominantly done in the context of religious worldview in the context of like filling in the understanding where faith kind of leaves off. And in the modern era, especially since the scientific revolution, we've kind of separated those out. But your map isn't an attempt to say, here are all of the views that I take seriously, or here are all of the views that I think are plausible, but just to say, here are all of the views that I know of that people, in fact,

believe. And to leave those out, I think, would have been quite the blind spot and quite the gaping hole, even if not everybody noticed it at first. I'm sure the religious would have noticed it, but maybe not everyone else. I completely agree with what you said, and I have grown to, as I said, appreciate the sophistication of the various religious communities over the years in dealing with philosophical approaches to consciousness in its richness.

I've learned a lot from that, and I think there's some very, very, very strong thinking. People make fun of the philosophical approaches during the Middle Ages and in, Christian philosophy or Islamic Judaism. It was really an interesting, a flourishing time when the very sophisticated thinkers were dealing with consciousness

and as the only thing that they could do in the pre-science world. And there are ideas that are worth contemplating. Oh yeah, a great depth of thought. And as I say, if people want more information on these views, visit the map. It's in the description. It's free.

I should have mentioned that at the beginning. This sounds like, you know, we're selling some super duper expensive, crazy thing. You could probably charge hundreds of pounds. It's not. It's just on the internet. It's free. Truth is the universal possession of mankind, as whoever it was that said that said. And you can just click on it and check it out and at least use it as a springboard to go and find.

Even if you already have a theory of consciousness that you like, that you're on board with, just go on like that there's like one of the visualizations is like a kind of, It's like a literal map where everything's kind of connected with different wires and stuff. Like go and look at the different theories that are like in orbit around your present theory because you might discover something new. You might discover something that you like even better or sort of better reasons to stick with what you've got. So I'll leave it in the description. And yeah, I can only thank you again so much for putting it together and, of course, for taking the time to come on my show today and talk us through it. It's been a pleasure.

Landscape of Consciousness. It's LOC.com, but landscape of consciousness, you can find it very quickly. And it's a collective project. I said many large percentage of theories have come from people who have suggested theories, either their own or something I left out that they're very passionate about. So it's really trying to make a collective effort. It's more than a personal one. Yeah.

And of course, to Alex Germas Marri. Is it Marin? Is that how you say? The last part of his last name? Yeah, yeah, Alex Comistair. He's great. I met him once and had a fascinating conversation with him at philosophy festival. It was amazing.

I actually walked into his talk by mistake. I think I was trying to find a different one, and we went into this tent. And I was sat with, I think I was sat with Annel Seth and some of my friends. And Phil Halper, who's, yeah, he's like a proper, proper physicalist as well. And on comes Alex, and he gives this incredible talk about the weirdness of consciousness and altered psychedelic states and how consciousness is everywhere. And I was there the whole time just like, that was absolutely fantastic.

I turned to my left to Anil and turned to my right and film. And I don't think they were quite so convinced, but it was almost sort of comical the way that this room of people at a philosophy conference were kind of listening to him with this sort of furrowed brows and raised eyebrows. But there was something about them all which, which they really enjoyed it. They were sort of like, yeah, okay. You know what? You know what?

Fair enough. I thought he was great. So the role that he played in putting this together as well, I thank him for. But yeah, it's been fun. And of course, your other project is closer to truth. One of the other great things about this is that a quite significant percentage of the names on this map, you have sat down and interviewed in person and got to ask every question that you wanted to ask them. So chances are that if there's someone on this list who's still alive and,

you're interested in that, you know, you probably interviewed them. So go and check that out as well. I'll link closer to truth in the description too. But yeah, thanks for the work you do. And thanks for, thanks for the conversation today, man. Really a pleasure, Alex. A great, you're making an important contribution to the world. And I follow it. We all should follow it. And it's, you know, let me just end with one, one idea, which had nothing to do with my original desire to do closer to truth. or the landscape of consciousness, is that over the last five or so years,

really since the pandemic, COVID, we've seen more and more people from diverse parts of the world writing into us with their ideas and suggestions or praise or criticisms. And they come from real diverse kinds of peoples and countries. When we started, we were 100% American because we were driven by public broadcasting,

where our television show was. And now we're less than 40% U.S., 60% from other parts of the world. And we've noticed that from the Islamic world, from the Hindu world, there are very many people. And oftentimes we'll have people writing to us who from different regions, nations, religions, races, ethnicities that are in conflict in what I'd call the superficiality part of humanity that we read about in the news every day. But on the questions of consciousness and raw existence in the universe, everybody is united in terms of the people who write in. They self-select because they're interested in these things, and their personal superficial affiliations

disappear. And everybody is saying the same kinds of questions that you and I are talking about. And to me, that is now kind of an exciting thing that maybe if more people would really explore the depth of what human beings are in terms of the nature of reality or the nature of consciousness, there'd be less concerns about our superficial differences. We really see that in terms of people writing in. You probably have the same experience. Oh, yeah, for sure. I think so.

it's fascinating how sort of similar the questions are that crop up throughout history and around the world the fact that every sort of new discovery of a area of philosophical interest that we discover in the West is preempted by Indian philosophy in particular has recently sort of astounded me

and I found that incredibly fulfilling to look at because it's like the same problem in a different language and because so much of philosophy is about linguistic dispute in my view. So much of it is often about language, and you can confuse that for metaphysical conflict. Having literally a different independent corpus of thought on essentially the same question is incredibly useful

to really getting down to the nub of what we're like really talking about. You know, Gertes said of language, he who knows one knows none. And I think the same is true of a philosophical tradition because you literally cannot recognize the air that you're breathing, if you don't know what it's like to, you know, breathe something else for a change. And I feel like that's often the case, like that the assumptions that go into Western philosophy, because they're assumptions, you don't even notice that they're there.

So it's also incredibly informative to realize that the same questions are being asked, even if the language is, I mean, literally the language, but also the conceptual language is quite different. So I've definitely found the same thing too, yeah. Great. Well, as I said, it's been a wonderful journey, and I appreciate everyone who has written in and given ideas and have participated in the process. What I try to do on the landscape of consciousness is for each theory, for those who are still alive, I sent it to the theorists themselves after I put it together and asked them to critique it or edit it. And so it's not a large percentage, but the The original paper maybe 25, 30 percent had been edited or given feedback by the theorists themselves. And then so on the website we put where it's been verified by the individual. We put a note on that because it's important. And most of the time the corrections are small.

There were a few where I had big corrections. And I said, oh, I'm sorry, I got the theory wrong. He said, no, that was what I thought five years ago. Those were the papers you read. Here's what I think today. So the website is currently designed to be constantly updated. When people have a new reference or have a new idea, they can add that. It's not a wiki where people can do it.

We have to curate it. So people are not making random changes and to keep it relatively consistent. But it's been a collective process, and I appreciate it.