Within Reason - #27 Philip Goff - Is Everything Conscious?

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

Philip Goff is an Associate Professor at Durham University whose research focuses on philosophy of mind and consciousness. He is one of the world's most prominent proponents of "panpsychism", the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous property of the universe. Buy Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (affiliate link, which supports my work): https://amzn.to/3MTfKnu To support the Within Reason Podcast financially, please visit support.withinreasonpodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Within Reason. My name is Alex O'Connor, and did you know that you can get early access to these podcast episodes by supporting the podcast on Patreon? Simply go to support. Dot within reasonpodcast.com. This is also the best way that you can help this podcast to continue to grow. My guest today is Dr. Philip Goff.

Philip Goff is an associate professor at Durham University and a researcher in the philosophy of mind and consciousness. He's also perhaps the most well-known proponent of a rather radical view known as pan-psychism. Typically, there are thought to be two camps in the philosophy of consciousness. You're either a materialist who believes that consciousness is just or is just the result of material occurrences within the brain. Or you're a dualist.

Jewelists believe in the material world, but they also believe in the existence of a non-material entity, usually called a mind or perhaps a soul. Pan-psychism purports to offer a quite revolutionary third option. According to the panpsychist, many more things than just human and animal minds have consciousness. Indeed, consciousness is thought to be the fundamental property of the universe and a ubiquitous feature of it. Of course, this view does take some considerable explanation, and that's why you're about to listen to what I think is the longest episode of the Within Reason podcast ever produced, coming in at just over two hours, which is about double the length of a usual episode. So, hey, today you're getting two for the price of one.

If you're interested in learning more about pan-psychism, then Philip Goff's popular level book, Galileo's Error, makes the case for it, and also forms the basis of the discussion that you're about to listen to. We spoke, of course, about consciousness and materialism and panpsychism, but we also spoke at some length about the limits of the physical sciences. Can physics tell us anything about the nature of the physical universe? That is not just what it does, but what it actually is. Spoiler alert, Philip Goff thinks that it can't, and I actually tend to agree with him. This was a fascinating conversation, and I do hope that you enjoy listening to it. Philip Goff, thank you so much for being here. No worries. I'm looking forward to the conversation, Alex.

consciousness is not a mystery nothing is more familiar you wrote this sentence in galileo's era near the end what do you mean by this a lot of people think that consciousness is perhaps one of the biggest mysteries currently present in philosophy and science but you seem to speak of it here as if that's not the case well there certainly is a deep mystery in the vicinity here but i don't think we We capture the mystery by saying we don't know what consciousness is. Consciousness is just what it's like to be you, your feelings, your thoughts, your experiences. And as you said in that quote of me, nothing is more familiar. You know what pain is when you feel pain. You know, pain is just a feeling and you know what a feeling is when you feel it. The mystery is not

so much, I think, what consciousness is, but rather how it fits in with our more general theory of reality. Where does consciousness come from? How does it come to be in the first place? How does it fit in? As soon as we start to ask those questions, that's where we start to get into trouble. So I would say, you know, nothing is more evident and undeniable than the reality of one's own feelings and experiences, and yet how to fit them into our standard scientific story of the universe is really one of the deepest puzzles in contemporary philosophy. So why is it that when we talk about consciousness, it's usually framed in terms of the problem of consciousness, the hard or soft problem of consciousness. What's the problem?

Well, we've spent many decades now trying to explain how consciousness could arise from electrochemical signaling in the brain. This is what David Chalmers famously called the hard problem of consciousness. And I would argue we've got precisely nowhere with that project. There's lots of, don't get me wrong, there's lots of important developments in our scientific understanding of the brain, for example. But on that very specific project of how an inner world of colors and sounds and smells and tastes could arise from the electrochemical signaling of the brain, nobody has come up with even the beginnings of an explanation to that. And I think also there are good philosophical reasons to think that simply can't be done. So it's not a surprise,

really, that we haven't managed to do it. So there is at least the start of the mystery, our lack of progress in this particular problem. So we have these sort of mysterious qualities that appear to exist. And like you say, these are perhaps the most undeniable things that we have any kind of access to, the redness of an apple or something like this.

And the difficulty is what trying to sort of explain where that arises from and how it can be accounted for in our general picture of the universe. Yeah, so there are a couple of different ways at getting at the problem. Perhaps the most vivid way, as you say, is to think about the qualities you find in conscious experience, the redness of a red experience, the smell of coffee, the taste of mint. I'm inclined to think you can't even articulate these qualities in the purely quantitative. language of neuroscience. And one way to make that clear, I talk a lot in my book about the colorblind neuroscientist or color scientist, Nut Nordby, who is one of the world's leading experts

on color, but he has cones missing in his eyes. And so he's never experienced any color apart from black, white and shades of gray. and he's interested in the philosophical debates actually and he talks quite vividly about despite all his knowledge of how the brain processes the brain processes that underlie colour experience he could never fully understand

the redness of a red experience I mean there's lots he can understand there's lots you can map out in quantitative terms if you think about colour experience we can map it in terms of the three dimensions of hue, saturation, and lightness, and we can sort of map out of colour space. But Nutt Norby will never fully grasp the qualities that fill out that quantitative structure.

And so if you can't even articulate those qualities in the language of neuroscience, I don't think you could ever hope to explain. them in those terms because if you wanted to explain the phenomenon, you'd first have to articulate it and then show how it can be explicated in terms of patterns of neural firings. If you can't even articulate it, then I think it's hopeless to explain it. So that's one way of putting the case, the philosophical case that this is sort of, when you think carefully about it, not really a coherent explanatory project. But if you don't buy that argument, just more generally,

we can, I think it's broadly agreed that there just hasn't been explanatory progress on explaining why consciousness is associated with brain activity at all. We've made lots of progress on what kinds of brain activity go along with which kinds of experience, and perhaps more systematically, what more generally, what kinds of physical activity and brains are necessary and sufficient for consciousness, although there's huge disagreement on that matter. But we haven't really made progress on the why question. Why? Why do certain kinds of brain activity go along with consciousness at all?

Why shouldn't all this chemical electrochemical activity just go on, as it were, in the dark? No one really has an answer to that. Yeah, I mean, we have sort of matter and interactions and physical things occurring and sort of, you know, in rocks flying about in space. And there isn't this mystery of this added element, this added thing that seems to exist that is something like redness. Like you say, the interesting example of a neuroscientist who can only see in black and white is that they're about the closest you can get to a real-life Mary, from the Mary's Room experiment,

which of course you talk about in the book and is quite a famous thought of imagining somebody in a room who can't see any color. There's only black and white things in this room. And they learn everything there is to know about colour experience. They learn about the brain states. They learn about the electromagnetic waves

that make up different colors. They learn all of the information that can be put down into words about what color is and the way in which it's experienced. And the question is that upon exiting that room and finally seeing something blue for the first time,

do they learn something new? You seem to suggest in the book that they would do. So would you not say, what would you say to somebody who object that the reason why it seems so impossible for us, this is something that Daniel Dennett seems to suggest, for example. The reason it seems so impossible for us to imagine that somebody could come to know what blueness is just by having it explained to them is actually just because we haven't found the language yet.

It's because our understanding of colours isn't developed enough. Our understanding of the brain is woefully inadequate to describe these things. But once we manage to do that, once our scientific language evolves and our vocabulary increases, We will be able to explain to Mary, or indeed this neuroscientist, what it's like to experience blueness, and they may be able to actually do so on the basis of that. Yeah, that's an interesting challenge. So I think one thing we can point to is the very different kinds of concept we find in the one hand in physical science and on the other hand, when we describe our own consciousness. So physical science works with this purely quantitative vocabulary. And actually, that's sort of something we take for granted now. But this was, as I talk about in my book, quite a radical decision in the 17th century of the father of modern science, Galileo.

Hence Galileo's era, the title of book, which of course will be available in the description. In all good bookshops. So Galileo made this radical decision, right, from now on, our fundamental science, what he called natural philosophy, what we now call physical science, is going to work with this purely quantitative vocabulary. But I think Galileo appreciated that you can't capture the qualities we find in our experience in these terms, the redness. of a red experience, the taste of paprika, the spicy taste. We can't capture these in an equation. An equation couldn't capture that deep red you experience as you watch the setting sun. So Galileo said effectively, right, if we want science to be purely mathematical,

we have to take consciousness outside of the domain of science so that we can capture everything else in mathematics. Now, that was a great move. That was the start of mathematical physics, which has gone really well and produced extraordinary technology. I think we're now in a period of history where people think,

oh, it's gone so well, this is the whole truth. This is the whole story of reality. But no, the irony is it's gone so well precisely because it wasn't supposed to be a complete description. in reality, what Galileo was effectively doing was limiting the scope of science, saying, no, just focus on what we can capture in mathematics. I have an analogy in the book. If you're a lecturer or professor in UK academia, you have three jobs, essentially, teaching, writing and

researching, and administration. You also have to play a role in running the department. In my first year as a, as a lecturer, my head of department kindly let me off administration for the first term. And I did the job very well. When I just had to focus on teaching and writing, I did pretty well. Now, that doesn't mean I'm going to be good at administration. And sadly, when that was brought back in, I wasn't too hot. But I think I've got better. I'm conscientious, if disorganized. Similarly, Galileo says, you know, just see what you could, just focus. on what you can capture in mathematics, put consciousness outside of the domain of inquiry. The fact that we've done so well since and arguably because we put consciousness on one side

doesn't mean we're going to do as well once we bring consciousness back into the story. And so I think if we want to bring consciousness into the story of science, we need to rethink that picture of reality bequeathed to us by Galileo. It doesn't mean doing things differently or telling physicists how to do their jobs. It rather means we move to a more expansive conception of what science is all about that we're trying to capture not just the quantitative facts we get from the observations and experiments of physical science, but also the subjective qualitative reality that we know from our immediate acquaintance with our own feelings and experience.

Well, we often hear that mathematics is the language of the universe, and I think there's a subtle implication there made by some that maths describes everything. Mathematical descriptions and physical laws and this kind of thing is the way that we come to know what the universe is all about. But like you say, it seems difficult to capture in mathematical terms something like the redness of an apple, but you make a slightly more radical point in the book. which is that physics, it seems, doesn't actually tell us anything about what things are.

And this is quite strange upon first hearing when you hear somebody say, if you had a complete physics, you had all the laws of physics worked out, you would have no better knowledge of the stuff that you're talking about than before you started. And, you know, I must say I resonate with this view

because you point out that physics seems to describe what things do not what things are. And if that's the case, then when we're looking to a question like, what is consciousness? It's not the kind of question that physics could even answer.

I remember, because I was reading your book in preparation for this discussion, and I was trying to explain this point to a friend, or we were just talking about it, and we said, okay, well, well, maybe, you know, I mean, physics can tell you what certain things are made of. You can look at water

and you can figure out that it's made of H2O, And sure that doesn't answer all of your questions Maybe at least part of what we're trying to get out When we want to know what is water What actually is it It's just what its constituents are I remember we were This was at the River Jordan

The baptismal site of Jesus And here we were talking about Galileo's era On this trip to Jerusalem as on recently And so we were looking at this river And I said well okay imagine we say We want to know what is this water That's in front of us What is it?

We say okay Well water is H2O, it's hydrogen and oxygen. If you don't know what those things are, that hasn't really given you much information, hasn't really helped. So you say, well, okay, what is hydrogen? Well, hydrogen is a chemical element that's made up of how many neutrons and protons and electrons.

Okay, sure, what's an electron then? And you say, well, an electron, I'm not quite sure how you define an electron, but once you get down to the subatomic particles, as you point out, you start having to say that what these things are, or these things are described, in terms of what they do.

You know, you're talking about mass and you're talking about charge. And these things are defined in terms of what they do. I don't know the specificities here, but I think if you try to define mass, I don't know. How would a physicist define mass? Well, very roughly,

and I think you're explaining the point very well, Alex. Mass and charge are defined in terms of behavior, right? Charge, opposite charges attract, like charges repel. mass is defined in terms of gravitational attraction and resistance to acceleration. So the more massive something is that the harder it is to accelerate it, to get it to speed up or to slow down. Now, of course, when we get into the Higgs boson, we have a more fundamental explanation of mass.

But still, when you get to the standard model that the Higgs boson is a part of, ultimately we're just talking about behavior. We're talking about, we're trying to formulate mathematical equations that accurately predict what stuff is going to do. So I sometimes say physics is like playing chess when you don't care

what the pieces are made of. When you're playing chess, you don't care, you just want to know what moves you can make. You might be playing with wooden pieces, plastic pieces. You might be playing online. It doesn't matter. The rules of chess sort of abstract away. And that's essentially what physics does. It doesn't tell us what an electron is. It tells us what an electron does. And of course, that is incredibly useful. The more you can accurately know how matter will behave, the more you can manipulate it. And we have extraordinary technology. And so that

leads people to think, oh my God, this is incredible. We're getting a complete story of reality. No, we're getting a more and more accurate tool for predicting the behavior of matter, but none of this is shedding any light at all on what matter essentially is, what the chess pieces of reality are. Yeah, it's, I think people need to sort of let it sink in, how radical the claim that you're making is, but how also seemingly obvious it is when you really think about it, if our fundamental understanding of physics, which seems to be the basis of everything, you know, you can say that all other areas of inquiry ultimately sort of break down to physics. I know that some people disagree with that, but if we return to that question, what is water,

by explaining that water is H2O, and then explaining what hydrogen is in terms of its atomic makeup, but then explaining the atomic makeup in terms of what it does, you haven't got a description of what water is. And so you could have a complete scientific picture of water, but you wouldn't know what the stuff actually is. Now, this, of course, means that on the question of what consciousness is, we're sort of led into a bit of trouble here trying to describe it scientifically. You might be able to describe what consciousness does,

or the kind of brain states that it's correlated with, but what the actual redness is, for example, wouldn't be a question that's answered there. But this isn't something that's peculiar to consciousness, right? I mean, this is any quality of the universe. I mean, are you talking in the book in terms of materialism being inadequate to describe consciousness,

to give us an account of what consciousness is? And that may be true, but isn't this sort of true of anything if physics doesn't tell us what things are, it only tells us what things do? That's a good point. And, I mean, just to dwell on the, the point at a moment longer. There's this great line from Stephen Hawking in the last page of a

brief history of time where he says, even our final theory of physics, this grand unified theory would still just be a bunch of equations and wouldn't tell us what he put it this way, wouldn't tell us what breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe. So as you say, Alex, yeah, this is a quite general thesis that, that physics, for all its virtues, isn't really telling us. I mean, I think in the public mind, it's on its way to giving us this complete story of the nature of space and time and matter. But actually, when you sort of reflect carefully in the way philosophers are trained to do,

you see, actually, it's not really telling us what any of this stuff is. But, yeah, so why is this particularly interesting for consciousness? But what I think this opens up is a radically new approach to dealing with consciousness. And here we draw on the inspiration of some very important work from the 1920s by the philosopher Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell and also by the scientist Arthur Eddington, who was incidentally the first scientist to experimentally confirm, Einstein's theory of general relativity. But I'm inclined to think we should think of Russell as the Darwin of consciousness. I think he sort of resolved all the mysteries here. But unfortunately, for various historical reasons, it was kind of neglected for a long time. He's a hugely well-known

philosopher, more for his logical linguistic work. But his stuff on consciousness was sort of a bit neglected. In the last decade or so, it's been rediscovered, which has led to this new wave of Russell-inspired panpsychists that I've kind of become a part of. So really, I think, really I think what Russell did was to turn the problem of consciousness on its head. our conversation started with this project of trying to start with physics or the brain or physical science, neuroscience, and try and explain the emergence of consciousness in terms of physical processes in the brain. I suggest that project has had zero success. What Russell does is turn that on its head. Instead of starting with physics and trying to get consciousness

out, we start with consciousness and try and get physics out. And it turns out for precisely the reasons we've been touching on, that's actually really easy to do. The reason it's easy to do is that physics is purely mathematical. And so because it's purely mathematical, It's not really telling us what fundamental reality is. It's just describing its mathematical structure. And that's not to disparage the scientific method. Because, I mean, people, scientists will often be the first people to press that what science is really good at is making predictions.

Absolutely. It's what science is for. It makes predictions about what things will do. And that allows us to manipulate the physical world to produce wonderful technologies. But the question of what they are, I think the chess analogy is a useful. one. You can know everything about the rules of chess without knowing what a castle is, what it looks

like, what it's made of, you know? It would be very strange. I mean, you can imagine somebody saying, well, what's a porn in chess? You know, you say, well, a porn is, is a piece that can seemingly, you observe a chess game. You say, well, it looks like what a porn is, is a piece that can move forward one space. Okay. But then somebody really clever comes along and sees that sometimes it moves two spaces. And so we think, oh gosh, you know, our scientific picture needs to expand and so you have a bunch people researching and then they realize that actually a porn can move two spaces if it hasn't moved before, then it can move one space. And our knowledge of what a porn is has increased or has it. So we still don't know what the porn is. We don't know what it's made of. We don't

know what it looks like. And maybe then someone discovers, you know, on person, you can do this really weird thing at the other end of the chessboard, you know, where the porn can seemingly take another pawn without having to move diagonally and, or without having to actually take the piece. And again, our knowledge expands and we think, oh, we know so much more about what a porn is. If somebody asks, what's the porn made of? Is it made of, you know, wood, is it made of plastic? Imagine somebody were to say, well, we don't know yet, but look at the progress we've made.

Look at how we've gone from just thinking a porn can move one place. So now knowing it can do all these different things. You know, our scientific picture is increasing so much that I'm sure one day we'll get there. But the kind of investigations that we're doing are just not subject to uncovering what the porn is actually made of. And this, I suppose, is what you're suggesting physics is like writ large. Yeah, that's the point.

So many people, I've debated a lot with the neuroscientist, Anselsteth, and so many people think, well, look at the success of science. Of course, it's going to solve this problem eventually. But I think what we've got to appreciate here is that this isn't a purely scientific problem. It's the goal of physical science is, as you say, mapping behavior. It does that very well. I'm not here to have. go, physicists, or to tell them to do their job properly, I'm just saying that what their job

is about is telling us what stuff does, not what stuff is. And then some physicists get annoyed by that and think, oh, if you can't settle it with an experiment, you know, it's a load of rubbish or something. But I think the correct response is to say, no, it's physics does very well with what it does. It's not the task of philosophy, sorry, it's not the task of physicists to tell us what matter is to tell us the ultimate nature of reality. Rather, it's the task of philosophers taking what we know about from physics, taking what we know about from other sources such as the reality of conscious experience. Maybe there are other data to input here, maybe mathematical entities, maybe facts about value, if you believe in value. And to, I see the task of philosophy is about

synthesis, taking all of the things we know about in different ways and synthesizing them together into a single unified theory of reality. But just to jump back to how Russell envisaged this. So because physics is purely mathematical, as we've discussed, it's not really telling us what fundamental reality is. The only constraint is, the only constraint is, it's giving is that fundamental reality must have a certain mathematical structure. So fundamental reality, as far as physics concerned, it could turn out to be anything. As long as it has the right mathematical structure, you can get physics out of that. And much like the porn can be made out of anything, it will still, as long as it follows the rules, it can actually,

the nature of the thing could be anything. Absolutely. We're getting a lot out of this chess analogy, isn't it? It's working very well. So contemporary panpsychists have tried to exploit this. So the idea is what we have at the fundamental level of reality are networks of very simple conscious entities, interacting in very simple, predictable ways because they have very simple experiences. Through their interactions, they form certain patterns, certain mathematical structures. And then the thought is those mathematical structures just are what we call physics. So we kind of get physics out of underlying facts about consciousness. So I would argue we can't get consciousness out of physics, but we can get physics out of

consciousness. And so this seems to me the more productive possible approach to dealing with consciousness. Yeah, so we've used the word, I think, sort of twice now, this idea of pan-psychism. I want to talk about how we end up there, what it is, exactly how many tabs of acid it takes for a person to come to the same view intently. It seems almost ludicrous. Well, it seems ludicrous on the surface of it when somebody first hears of this idea of pan-psychism, because it correct me if I'm getting this wrong, but pan-psychism, which is the view that you, you hold to, suggests essentially that at least many more things than just minds are conscious.

It's not necessarily that everything is conscious. It doesn't mean that this book is conscious, but certainly the stuff that this book is made of is conscious. Is that an accurate description of panpsychism? Yeah. Yeah. So the basic commitment is that the fundamental building blocks of the physical universe have incredibly simple forms of experience. So that might be fundamental particles, although many theoretical physicists are inclined to think, actually, our universe is not really made up of particles, but universe-wide fields. And particles are just sort of local excitations in fields. But sticking with particles for the sake of simplicity, as you say, it doesn't literally mean everything is conscious.

So maybe your socks or the rocks or the book there are not conscious, but the smallest constituents that the book or the socks are made up of have incredibly simple forms of experience. Now, to ask you a question that you were asked probably 150 times by Joe Rogan, why on earth would a person think this? Why, what considerations would lead a person to? I mean, I understand that what we've talked about so far maybe tells us that materialism can't account for what consciousness is.

But indeed, you know, it just means that physics can't really account for what anything is. But this view that subatomic particles have rudimentary forms of experience, what possible line of thought or consideration could lead to this view? So as I said a moment earlier, this, what we've got to appreciate that is that this is not a purely scientific. problem. I would argue that this is at core a philosophical problem. What is traditionally known as the mind-body problem, the ancient challenge of trying to work out how consciousness and the physical world connect up. And there are a few different options. Maybe the physical world is fundamental and consciousness arises from physical processes in the brain. Maybe consciousness

is fundamental and the physical world arises from more fundamental facts about mind or consciousness or maybe both. Maybe both consciousness and the physical world are equally fundamental but radically different. This is the sort of dualist position. Maybe the consciousness is in the soul and that's different from the body and the brain. But the reason this is not a scientific problem is that all of these theories are empirically equivalent in the sense that you couldn't decide between them with an experiment. For any empirical data you might have, each of these different theories,

the materialist option, the panpsychist option, the duelist option, each of them will just interpret that data in their own terms. So we have to just, we can't just do a, experiment to settle this. We have to just consider the different philosophical options on their own terms and try and evaluate them and maybe in terms of more general theoretical virtues and vices and try and work out which looks most plausible. In terms of materialism, as I say, I think in terms of its central explanatory project of how we make sense of consciousness

emerging from purely physical processes, we've got absolutely nowhere, we've got good arguments to think it can't be done. But in terms of the panpsychist approach of doing it the other way round, of putting consciousness first and then making sense of the physical world emerging from underlying facts about consciousness, we know that can be done. The mystery is solved. So we just need to, we contrast these two explanatory projects, the materialist one which has got precisely nowhere, and the panpsychist one, which has essentially solved all the mysteries, then it's sort of a no-brainer.

Okay, I mean, people who haven't come across your work or across panpsychism before will be listening to what you're saying, but just be sort of hold on, wait, rewind a moment. Did you say subatomic particles are conscious? It seems so wildly out of step with our understanding of what consciousness is.

I mean, I imagine a conscious agent like a mind, And, you know, my knowledge of things around me, my awareness is the things I can hear, the things I can see or taste or touch. And maybe we can imagine animals sort of experiencing similar things. But like a particle, a particle doesn't have, you know, eyes to see, ears to hear. It doesn't have seemingly the capability for what we would generally recognize as consciousness. Like what are we talking about here? I mean, to sort of Thomas Nagel famously asked,

what is it like to be a bat and concluded that we'll never be able to fully understand. I guess what I'm asking here is, what does it like to be a subatomic particle? Yeah, it's a good question. So I think in the context of panpsychism, we have to be very careful not to think of consciousness as modeled on the consciousness

of human beings. Our consciousness is incredibly, complex the result of millions of years of evolution. But if you think about, say, a sheep, maybe has slightly simpler consciousness, or maybe a fly, if flies a conscious, if there's something that it's like to be a fly, they will maybe have much simpler consciousness again, a bedbug. Is there something that it's like to be a bed bug? And as we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of subjective experience. And there doesn't seem to be any conceptual limits on how simple experience could be. So for the panpsychis, this just continues

right down to the fundamental building blocks of matter, which on the panpsychist view have incredibly rudimentary forms of experience to reflect their incredibly simple physical nature. So it doesn't mean like that the electrons sitting there thinking feeling existential angst or wondering if it's Tuesday yet you know it's just has a very simple form of experience to reflect its it's radically simple nature that would be the idea i think people will be able to see why this might help solve some of our problems on a materialist picture of the universe uh in which there is only material out of which consciousness somehow either emerges or or appears or as made up. If subatomic particles have no experience whatsoever, but the entire universe is made

up of these things, then you have a bit of a composition problem where you have these basic particles that are just stuff. And this stuff gets put together and maybe forms a gas, maybe forms a solid or a rock or even a plant. And we're still just sort of talking about material, just atoms sort of colliding and whatnot. And then somewhere along this picture between the subatomic particle and the human brain, there just begins to exist this absolutely extraordinarily unique feature of the universe, which is something like redness. And again, when we say redness, we're not talking about the wavelength of red light. We're not talking about the neurons firing when somebody envisions red. I mean, I want to think for a moment or really reflect on what

it would mean for materialism to be true in this instance. If all there is, is, is the material. All there is are the atoms bumping around and consciousness just somehow is that. Then all of the conscious phenomena that we experience is just matter. What that means is that when somebody looks at an object and sees redness, if you were to open up their brain, which is the center of their consciousness, you wouldn't just find in their brain the neurons firing that are correlated with the red experience. You wouldn't just find, you know, atoms which seemingly put together give someone a conscious experience of redness, you would find redness inside the brain. You would find red if you cut open someone's brain and looked at it while they were staring

upon a red apple. But the idea that you would, again, really depress this, not just find like the kind of neural activity that is correlated or causes red experience, but actual redness itself in the brain just seems ludicrous. But we know that redness exists. And we know that redness exists, perhaps more than we know that the sun exists. Perhaps more than we know that evolution occurred or that gravity is a thing, because it's so immediately undeniable. It's a bit like a Cartesian project of trying to deny that you exist. You can't be fooled into perceiving redness.

Even if the red apple isn't really there and you're just sort of being stimulated or whatever and there's no like real red apple, it's still undeniable that you are experiencing this thing called redness, even if it's created by a matrix or whatever. there is this redness there. The materialist has to believe that that redness is just matter and that if consciousness is located in the brain or that experience is located in the brain,

then you would find redness itself inside someone's brain, which just doesn't seem right. Yeah. And actually, for what it's worth, in academic philosophy, I would say that the majority of materialists have given

up on this idea that we can give some intelligible explanation of consciousness in terms of physical processes. Because there just seem very radically different concepts at play here. You know, you look at the story from physics and physical science. It's all just about behavior and purely quantitative interactions. But when you think about consciousness, as you say, like a red experience, we find these suburbable. objective qualities that suddenly pop up if you're a materialist. And that just seems like a radically different kind of property. So most academic materialists these days argue they try to show, actually, we don't need

to give an explanation for some reason, or like the co-host of my podcast, Mind Chat, give a quick plug there. Also available in the description. Not find pistoles everywhere, but certainly in the links down below. Absolutely. Who thinks that consciousness in the way philosophers tend to think about it just doesn't exist at all. This kind of irreducibly subjective, qualitative, this qualitative stuff that can't be captured in the quantitative language of physical science. It just doesn't exist. It's like magic or furries, you know, the onward march of science has shown. and it doesn't really exist.

So, and there's actually an interesting mismatch here, I think, with how scientists and the general public think about this. I think, oh, no, we, for materialism to be true, we do need to provide these intelligible explanations of how consciousness emerges in the brain. We need to solve the hard problem. I did a debate in Liverpool recently with, which was hosted by Unbelievable podcast,

with the scientists, analyst Annal Seth and the philosopher Laura Gow and Rowan Williams. And it was interesting that Laura Gow was giving this the standard line in philosophy. You know, we don't, material as materials, we don't need to give explanations. Whereas I think Annal Seth was really in the mindset that's more of scientists in the public. Yeah, we need to be building these explanatory bridges. But because there's such radically different kind of concepts here, I think most philosophers have concluded, that's really not an intelligible project that there could be

explanatory bridges. And I mean, I think so, so if we could somehow combine the view of the general public and scientists that for materialism to be true, you do need an intelligible explanation of how consciousness emerges and the view of the vast majority of academic philosophers that it makes no coherent sense for there to be such an explanation. If you join them together, then you rule out materialism. But just finally, I mean, it's just important to emphasize again. I think the reason materialism continues to dominate, and actually, I should say only just people might be interested in checking out the Phil Papers survey that was done a few years ago of anglophone philosophers' opinions on, you know,

do you think God exists? Do you believe in free will? Absolutely fascinating results of professional philosophers in English-speaking universities throughout the world. And on consciousness, 52% inclined towards materialism, 32% oppose materialism. So they think we can't account for consciousness in the terms of physical science. And then the rest are sort of agnostic or don't think it's a good question or something. So it's not quite the Brexit split, but there's a very healthy minority, 32%. But I think in my view, the reason, the reason, materialism continues to dominate is people think it's the scientific option. But no, the, you know, this is all, the scientific data is compatible, is just neutral on all these

options, materialism, panpsychism, dualism. It's a philosophical question, which of these is correct. Just like it's, you know, think about abortion ethics or something. You know, there's no experiment that's going to tell you whether the pro-life or the pro-choice position is the correct one, because this is a philosophical, not an experimental question. Well, the confusion that might be made there, I think, would be that it seems like, yeah, no, science can tell us something about the abortion debate. It can tell us about the sort of brain states of a fetus, or it can tell us about embryonic development or this kind of thing.

But your point is that, yes, that's true. We can get all this information related to this problem about what the sort of physical matter is doing, what's going on. But in terms of the actual fundamental question of, like, the ethics, the ethical point, that's not something that observation can inform, but it won't be able to sort of solve that question. Yeah, and by analogy, don't get me wrong, physical science is absolutely crucial

and crucial for making progress on consciousness. We love physics. We're very grateful to the physicists of the world, despite how it may sound. I wanted to be a physicist when I was little, actually, and a quick anecdote, I said to my grandmother, I wanted to be a physicist, and she said, oh, you can do my feet?

And I said, no, no, no, I said, I said, oh, sorry, I thought you said psychiatrist. But anyway, sorry, you can cut that out. She was thinking charipotidist. Anyway, yeah, I, you know, I was always into black holes and cosmology and thought I, thought I wanted to be physicist, but then gradually realized I thought, you know, the questions I'm interested in are more of a philosophical nature. But yeah, but even when it comes to consciousness, we're not going to make progress without science. But primarily what neuroscience has to contribute to the mind-body

problem is helping us work out which kinds of brain activity go along with which kinds of conscious experience. And it's very difficult because conscious experience is not publicly accessible. I can't look in your brain and see your feelings and experiences. But if you're a human being, I can ask you what you're feeling and experiencing. And if I do that, well, I scan your brain. I can start to work out which kinds of experience go along with which kinds of brain activity. And that's really important data. But that's not a complete theory of consciousness, because what we ultimately want to know is, why? Why does brain activity go along with consciousness when it seems like the whole story we get from neuroscience doesn't mention

consciousness at all, at least the neuroscientific story of the brain. And that's where we just have to turn to the philosophy. Is it consciousness that's first and physical world arises from that? Or is it the physical world that's first and consciousness arises from that? Or are they both fundamental but different? And experiments are not going to answer that question, unfortunately. So imagining that we had a complete neurological picture of the brain and we knew that every single experience a human being could experience. We knew exactly what was happening in their brain when those experiences were being felt.

Like to the absolute minutia, you know, we know exactly what happens in the brain when I see a glass with water in it, why it looks the way it does, what the sensations are correlated with everything that's going on in the brain. But the question here is why is it that those physical goings on

in the brain are correlated with that kind of experience because they can't be the same thing. Well, this is what the materialist will claim is that they are just the same thing. It's not that the experience of red is correlated with brain activity, but that it just is brain activity. That's why I'm trying to press that when we're talking about redness, we're talking about that thing that we all sort of know when I say redness, the experience of redness. That doesn't seem to be present in the atoms. So, okay, we have this problem of saying, well, if we say that there's only material

and we start sort of building things up, then we have to just posit that there's a point at which this strange thing called consciousness just appears or emerges or something like that, which seems very strange. Now, that problem might be solved by saying that, well, okay, if we take those fundamental building blocks and we say that the fundamental building blocks have consciousness, there's no problem now because we can just sort of build up these fundamentally conscious things. and yeah, we get more complicated, conscious things. There's no problem anymore.

Fine. In the way that we could look at a really large object and say it's absolutely massive, it's got tons of complexity and lots of mass. But as long as the subatomic particles that's made out of have mass, then we can put it all together and explain why we have lots of mass.

So as long as the fundamental matter of the universe is consciousness, the fundamental thing, I should say, if the universe is consciousness, then, sure, we put, lots of that together, and we get conscious beings. But are you positing that subatomic particles are conscious because there's some good reason to think this, or is it just because it seems like not doing so runs into problems?

It seems like, you know, assuming materialism, we just have all these sort of mysteries about how consciousness would emerge, where would it come from, you know, why would it start to crop up? Is it just those considerations that they make you say, well, I guess we'll just say that the subatomic particles are conscious. Or is there some other, like, independent reason to think that, you know, mass or charge or these fundamental things of the universe

are best thought of as consciousness? Because also I should specify that you're not saying that the fundamental particles or the fundamental stuff of the universe like mass or charge have consciousness. You're saying that they are consciousness. It's not like you have this fundamental stuff of the universe, you have like a sub-atomic particle which has its material properties, it has its mass, it has its charge, but it also has this thing called consciousness.

You're saying that mass is described in terms of what it does, but if you ask what actually is mass, it just is consciousness. But is there, I mean, what reason do we have to think that? Yeah. Yeah, just before I answer your question, the way you describe materialism that reminded me that actually pretty early after Darwin many philosophers and psychologists

like William James noted a close fit between panpsychism and the Darwinian idea because if you're a materialist on the Darwinian picture we've got this purely physical matter evolving into more and more complex forms and then suddenly at some point

A miracle happens and consciousness pops up. Whereas if you're a panpsychist, we start with very simple forms of experience and their natural selection moulds them over millions of years into more complex forms of consciousness. But yeah, and also you made a very important clarification of the position. I'm not dodging your question. I'm going to come to the question. But I think you made an important clarification there

because so many people interpret fan-psychism dualistically. They think that the idea is that the electron has its physical properties like mass spin and charge. And then also these magical consciousness properties. The theoretical physicist Sabine Hosenfelder, who's a very interesting public intellectual. I don't agree with her philosophical views, but she makes a really good case for them. she had a blog post a few years ago arguing against panpsychism

saying well look if particles had these extra weird consciousness properties that would show up in our physics right because the standard model of particle physics is just based its basis its predictions on the physical properties of particles like mass spin and charge so if they had these other consciousness properties they behave differently and the standard model would be refuted

but that's just a misunderstanding of the theory, right? The theory is that there is a layer of reality underneath physics, underneath the mathematical structures of physics. So it's not like at the level of physics we're adding these extra properties. No, at the level of the standard model of physics, there's just the physical properties that physicists talk about. But those properties are undergirded by underlying facts about consciousness. So it's a little bit like you might have a cellular biologist who hears physicists talking about the quantum wave function. And the cellular biologist says, well, I know all about the cellular structure of animals. And I don't find a quantum wave function. So I don't think it exists. Well, no, you wouldn't do because the quantum

wave function is at a deeper level than cellular biology. And similarly for the panpsychic. is this fundamental consciousness we're talking at, is it a deeper level, at least in the sense that it underlies the mathematical structures of physics. But to come to your question, yeah, why should we believe this? Well, look, the question I get most often is, how do you test for this? Well, look, you can't do an experiment to see whether an electron is conscious because consciousness is not a publicly observable phenomenon. just as I can't look in your brain to see your feelings and experiences.

Similarly, I can't look in an electron to check if it has any experience. As I said, this is not primarily a scientific question. It's not something that can be settled experimentally. So you might say, oh, well, panpsychism is a load of rubbish because there's no experimental support for it. But likewise, there's no experimental support for materialism or for dualism. any kind of empirical data is just neutral on all of these options. I mean, one option you could have is to just be agnostic.

My colleague, Peter Vickers at Durham here, who's a philosopher of science, he says, yeah, you can't settle this question with science, so you should just be agnostic. So, of course, note that that's not to go for the materialist position. That's what I was about to ask. I mean, people would probably think to themselves, well, I mean you said there's no evidence for materialism I'm not quite sure what you mean by that

I mean we sort of have interactions with and we can observe physical material and maybe we don't fully understand what it is what it's sort of constituent parts are made of but we know that material stuff exists and we know that if we break it down to an atom we're kind of looking at the same kind of thing we know for instance that if I take a table

and I cut it in half and I cut it in half again and I cut it in half again that whatever I'm left with is the same kind of thing it's material it has mass it has gravitational attraction on other things but it's not clear to me that if I take something conscious

like a human brain cut it in half and half and half and half and half and half that similarly I'll end up with something that just is obviously of the same kind I mean I could sort of rip out a part of a brain and cut it up into a really small piece that doesn't seem to have any activity going on anymore

and say it's not obvious to me that this thing is conscious in the way that taking a material object and breaking it down and down and down, it seems like it doesn't matter how small I get, it's obvious that we're still dealing with something that has mass, that has gravitational attraction. And so doesn't that lead us to think that materialism offers a, or has a sort of more intuitively neutral, or is the more intuitively neutral position to take here? Because that is kind of our

evidence in favor of materialism? Well, I agree, of course, that we know that matter exists. and I think we know, I mean, one of the most interesting discoveries of modern science is that the universe living and non-living things are fundamentally made out of the same kind of stuff. We used to think there were these four fundamental elements, earth, water, what are they, fire and air. But it's a fascinating discovery, you know, that we're all basically made up of a very small number of fundamental particles. and maybe they're just excitations in a small number of fields. So that's fine, but panpsychists or dualists won't disagree with any of that. So that's not where the disagreement lies.

When I talk about materialism, I'm talking about the view that the physical world, as revealed by physics, is the complete fundamental story of reality, and that consciousness, if it exists at all, emerges from that fundamental story, in contrast to the panpsychist view that, no, facts about consciousness make up the fundamental story of reality and physics emerges from those underlying facts about consciousness. Those two philosophical theories, I'm saying we cannot decide with an experiment all the things you said about matter, all the correlations, neuroscience,

uncovers between the brain and consciousness, both of those theories can accommodate quite nicely. Well, insofar as materialism can accommodate consciousness at all, which I don't think it can, they can accommodate quite nicely. So there's no, the empirical data is just neutral. So how do we decide it? But I think the way to decide,

I think fortunately, When you just look at these projects, these explanatory projects on their own terms, I would argue it's a no-brainer because the materialist project has had absolutely no success. The panpsychist project has essentially completed its central explanatory task. So you've got one project never made any progress on its central expanse task. Another project has already completed its central expanse task. It's a no-brainer. That's how I think of it. It just seems to me as if you're offering just an assertion here.

In the same way that I could say, look, this quality of blueness is mysterious to me. I don't know what blueness is made up of. I don't know what the experience is. And so I say, well, it would seem weird to me if materialism is true. Because if I cut up something blue and get it smaller and smaller, traditionally we think that an atom is not blue. But atoms put together can make things that are blue. But this seems to be a problem with materialism,

because how do we get this blueness just sort of emerge from atoms, if no singular atom can be blue. And so I just say, well, I guess atoms just sort of are blueness. You know, an electron or charge or mass or whatever. These things just are color, let's say. They're just color. And you say, well, why do you think that? And I'm like, well, because if I don't say that,

I'm left with this problem of materialism, how can things that are not colorful, you know, when you put them together and you stick them together, suddenly just become colorful? There seems to be no way to explain this. Unless we just, let's just posit that the fund, fundamental building blocks of the universe just are color. There we go, problem solved.

Materialism makes no progress on telling us, you know, how we get to, how we get to color. But this view, you know, pan-colorism or whatever, it answers the question easily. Well, we get colorful things because the fundamental substance of the universe is color. Of course, it's not a perfect analogy because there are still other things left to explain. If the fundamental element of the universe is color, then, well, how do you explain size and shape and direction. But similarly, you know, the fundamental stuff

of the universe is consciousness still seems to be other things that are sort of left to explain. It's just that you explain them in terms of consciousness. But you see what I'm saying? That it seems as though, yeah, there's a sense

in which it makes sense to say that, you know, non-blue things don't create blue things. But it would seem, I don't know what the word is. And, you know, I'm trying not to sound insulting as well. But it seems... You don't worry.

You go for it. I can take it. You know, it seems... Should we say rash for me to say, therefore, I think the fundamental element, like, that color is primary out of which we describe material objects, rather than materialism being primary out of which we describe color. You probably think that view is a bit ridiculous. You'd probably ridicule me if I took that seriously. But isn't that something like what's going on here with consciousness, with your view of consciousness, with panpsychism? I mean, I guess I would resist that it's merely an assertion.

I mean, you can make... Pan-psychism of the gaps, if you like. Right, pan-psychism, the gaps. That's... I guess you can think of it as an inference to the best explanation, perhaps. I mean, even with empirical inquiry, I think people sometimes have an oversimplistic idea of it,

like we just, you know, do the experiment and find the data and that's it. I mean, maybe a somewhat helpful analogy might be ancient history. because obviously ancient history it's dead and gone we can't sort of just go and observe ancient Greece

or whatever so we have to work with the evidence we have and we look at the different hypotheses and we do a kind of inference to the best explanation you know the human epistemological situation is sadly very frail it's you know it's nice if you don't

again I love science it's nice if we can settle something with an experiment but um we do the best with what we have and i would suggest there are um two different explanations so it's not it's not that the the the panpsychist is offering an explanation here it is it is reductively explaining the physical world in terms of underlying facts about consciousness it's giving us an explanation. I mean, the materialist hopes to give an explanation just the other way around. And people don't tend to think, like, suppose the materialist were one day able to give a totally satisfactory, intelligible explanation of consciousness in terms of electrochemical

signaling in the brain. I think we'd say, wow, I'd become a materialist. I'd say, uh, that's brilliant. You've given us an explanation. And that would be strong reason to adopt materialism. the panpsychist is just doing it the other way around. And I would say they, through this Bertrand Russell inspiration, I would say they have shown how that can be done. And I think the fact that we can give that explanation, which is the sort of mirror image, so I suppose I will put back to you,

well, if the materialist explanation, the success of that would give a strong reason to adopt materialism, why doesn't the panpsychist's successful explanation, unless you can give me a reason why it's not successful, which is just the mirror image, doesn't also give a strong reason to accept panpsychism. I don't see how it is successful in that, okay, we can't explain consciousness in terms of material.

I grant you that. And you say, but we can explain material in terms of consciousness. Yeah. Can we? I mean, if we reflect on what we understand consciousness to be, it's something about experience, it's something about sensation, It's something about desire or these very sort of non-material, ethereal qualities.

And then we think about this pen. It's like tactile. It's stuff. It interacts with other stuff, you know. Like, you seem to be suggesting that actually we have an account of how we get this, this stuff, out of like this stuff. The people just listening can't see that I'm saying this stuff. Flicking the pen for the benefit of the tape. out of this stuff

and I'm sort of throwing my handle around the air, the ethereal, strange sort of immaterial, experiential stuff like how on earth do we take this experiential consciousness stuff to stick it together somehow and get a pen? Has panpsychism successfully accounted for that?

I think it's important to note that I think you're giving a slightly different objection now. So your earlier objection was oh this is just an assertion, this is you know we haven't been given a reason to accept this. And then I'm replying and saying, no, no, no, this is giving us an explanation that accounts for the physical world in terms of unlying facts about consciousness. I think, if I'm understanding you rightly, what you're now doing is raising objections to whether that

explanation does actually work. And, you know, to be fair, of course, there are important challenges in the academic literature to whether this explanation does. work. But, yeah, I would argue, I would argue that it does work. Again, because physics, physical science is all about mathematical structures, behavior, whatever we postulate at the fundamental level, as long as it's behaving in the right way, as long as it's realizing the right patterns and structures, then you get, it logically entails you'll get physics. Philosophers sometimes talk about the, you know, the causal role of, say, the electron, like the role it plays in physics.

So if there's some kind of fundamental conscious entity that's playing that role, that's enough for it to be an electron. So I think, yeah, because physics is purely mathematical, I think we can account for physics in terms of underlying facts about consciousness, as long as they're real. realize they're doing the right stuff, realizing the right patterns and structures. But do you understand the problem that I'm having here in thinking of like consciousness seems to be something immaterial, experience, desire, blueness, these seem to be almost definitionally immaterial things. And so for you to say, well, we have an explanation of

how material emerges from consciousness, because as long as we know what the fundamental stuff of the universe is, as long as that stuff follows the rules of physics, we just get physics. Yeah. We might get physics in the sense that we might get mathematical descriptions of this immaterial thing called consciousness. But if this thing, consciousness, as we currently understand it, seems to be something, as I say, like almost definitionally immaterial. So if you to say, but we have an explanation of how from this immaterial starting point we get material things like pens, I don't see it. I see how we might get sort of a bunch of immaterial consciousness stuff that starts to follow mathematical law. or mathematical rules, and we can describe what it does in this immaterial, ethereal realm.

But to get the tactile stuff out of it seems like as big of a gap. I mean, it's like a two-way street here, sure. Like how on earth do material building blocks get consciousness? But how do non-material consciousness building blocks get material? It just seems an unbridgeable divide either way. Well, I think this brings us back to where we started our conversation, that physics doesn't tell you what matter is. And I think to the extent that people have the intuitions that you're referring to,

it's because they have this idea that physics is telling us what matter is. And once you have that sense, then you can see it's radically different to anything mental or consciousness involving. Once you fully absorb this idea that, no, physics is not telling us the stuff. of the world. It's not telling us what stuff is. It's just telling us what it does. Then I think if one properly takes that in, then any such intuitions will disappear. Because, you know, I mean, to put it in another way, you know, physicists quite rightly don't care what matter is. They just care about what it does. Yeah, that's kind of Sean Carroll's position when he's argued

with you a few times where you say, well, you know, we get these mathematical, physical laws and they don't tell us what the stuff is they tell us what it does and he's like yeah but that's that's it that's all there is it's just what stuff does it's sort of a a stopping point for for him and any others okay good so yeah so sean and i have that if anyone's interested we've there's six hours of us debating on my podcast mind chat with a quick plug there we're actually going to debate in person for the first time in in new york in september as part of this i want some money to spend three years trying to work out if the universe is conscious and this is one of the things it's going to fund

oh there's going to be some essay competitions actually you can win a thousand pounds for writing an essay on conscious universe related well ladies and gentlemen if this inspires you might get something more out of it than just a good podcast episode there you go yeah we should

I should if we get the link together in time I forgot what we're talking about now oh yeah so that's my fault well well I think it's important to flag up again I think we're moving to a slightly different objection, which is to challenge this idea that there's something missing. And actually, many of, you've mentioned Sean Carroll, but many of my colleagues here at Durham

would say, yeah, physics just tells us what an electron does. So that's, that's all there is to an electron. It's just, once you know what it does, you know what it is. Electrons are not so much beings, but doings. They are pure act, like the philosophers say, of God. Pure act. I'm not sure what it means in that context either, to be honest with you. It's a bit like, I mean, I understand it.

Like, I understand that it's, you've got to really reshape the way you think. But it's like how classical theologians talk about God. They say, you know, God is pure act or something like that, or pure being itself. And I'm like, I'm sure there's a way of making sense. of that but you know you have to understand to our listeners that to say something like I mean saying like our consciousness is fundamental or consciousness is primary it's not out of accord with what a lot of people report you know mystics and their religious experiences through meditation people who take psychedelic drugs often report the dissolution of the ego you

know there is no me there's just sort of I am at one with the universe so whatever I am which seems to be something to do with consciousness and experience if I'm one with the universe, yeah, everything must in some sense be conscious. Like this kind of thought does seem to crop up. It's not totally unheard of. But in the context of trying to sort of produce a sober, philosophical, scientific picture of the universe, it just seems so radical. I think one point that did, that I did consider is perhaps, I don't know if it's quite evidence in favor, but it was a consideration which impressed upon me, which, which which was you said in the book at some point

that when we're talking about the intrinsic nature of stuff, that is not what stuff does, but what stuff is, the only thing we really have access to is our conscious experience. Even when I'm talking about a physical cup or something, I can only see and touch and feel it through my conscious experience. Like the only thing that I really know what it is is my conscious experience because I have direct access to it.

the the scientific picture of the universe only sort of tells us tells us what things do right the physical descriptions of the universe tell us what things do and so I think at one point you described it like this and you can correct me if I'm wrong that our scientific picture of the universe has at its basis this this big gap we we don't know what the intrinsic stuff of the universe is we don't know what the intrinsic what water for example like we said earlier actually is just this big gap. Yeah. And then we have this other consideration that the only thing that we have direct intrinsic knowledge of, or direct knowledge of what the intrinsic thing is, is consciousness. And so the remedy is plug the hole with the consciousness. Because we have, we have an awareness

of what consciousness is intrinsically, unlike anything else in the universe. And our physical descriptions of the world, they describe perfectly what things do, but have this gap of what the intrinsic stuff is. Yeah. And so if we put these two considerations together, maybe we sort of get an intuitive sense in which, yeah, maybe it makes sense to say that the intrinsic matter of the universe is consciousness. But as far as I could tell, that was about the only consideration that made me think,

okay, maybe panpsychism can make sense that wasn't just appealing to the flaws of other ways of thinking about the universe. That is a reason to think panpsychism is true rather than reasons to think that materialism or dualism are false yeah i think that was quite nicely put alex i mean here's a slightly different way of making the same point the only the only thing we really know to exist um is our own consciousness that's the thing we're immediately acquainted with everything else is at one remove you know i know about the world around me insofar as it's mediated through my conscious experience. Even when you're doing science, you have to consciously experience the result of

your experiments. So that's the fundamental thing we know to exist. If we can account for everything else we have reason to believe in, including the facts of natural science, in terms of consciousness, then that's the most parsimonious view we can go for. So, yeah, I mean, it's just the imperative, the theoretical imperative, of philosophy, as with science, is to find the most parsimonious theory compatible with the data, I think we can account for everything, because physics is purely mathematical, we can account for physics and the reality of our own consciousness, just in terms of, by postulating simple forms of consciousness, if that's the most parsimonious theory available,

then that's the one we should. I mean, you'll never know anything for sure, but that's the thing we have most reason to believe. Just coming back to the show and Carol objection briefly. So he says, well, why can't there be nothing more to an electron than what it does? And then there are some arguments going back to Bertrand Russell, actually, that that view doesn't end up being coherent because everything ends up being defined.

in terms of something else, because if you're thinking about what stuff does, you're thinking about its impacts on something else. But then if that's also defined by what it does, then you're defining it in terms of its impact on something else and so on ad infinitum. So Russell thought we'd get in a sort of vicious explanatory circle. I don't know whether that argument quite were.

I am inclined to think it does, but it's a bit... Yeah, but I mean, say that it does, and we say, okay, you can't just define things in terms of what they do. You need to give an account of its intrinsic nature. Yeah. Fine, but it doesn't follow from that alone that the intrinsic nature must be consciousness, right? I could say that, look, yeah, physics doesn't tell us what things are. It doesn't tell us what water is fundamentally.

And you suggest, well, okay, maybe it's consciousness, maybe, but maybe not. Maybe it's something else that maybe physics can never tell us what the intrinsic nature of stuff is. And maybe our experience of consciousness is something unrelated and separate. And we will just never know the intrinsic nature of matter. That doesn't seem like a good reason to, again, do a panpsychism of the gap and just and just say, well, we may as well believe it's consciousness, which it seems like that's kind of what you have to do if these are the considerations that are leading you to panpsychism.

Good. Thanks, Alex. So note where we're up to now, right, or at least the position you're hypothetically entertaining. We know consciousness exists. That's the only intrinsic nature we know about. And so we've got two options, right? we have to postulate an intrinsic nature at the level of physics

do we postulate the one intrinsic nature we know to exist or do we postulate some totally unknown and unknowable unknowable in different kind of intrinsic nature

that would still leave the question of consciousness to then be explained and I appreciate look I appreciate that is a possibility and we can never totally pin these things down. But I think all you ever do in science or philosophy is go for the most simple, elegant, unified theory. And I think the most simple, elegant, unified approach

is to postulate an intrinsic nature of the same kind as the only one we know about. This was very much Eddington's defense of panpsychism, actually, which I draw on and find quite compelling. So, as I say, the human epistemological situation is sadly very frail. I mean, look, I defend panpsychism. You know, philosophers don't tend to say, you know, if you ask a philosopher what you believe, they won't tend to say, oh, I believe this, they'll say, you know, well, I have,

they talk about credence, which is sort of degrees of belief. So you might say, well, I've got 30% credence in free will, I don't know, 20% credence in something else. So, you know, I'd say maybe, I would be prepared to say, panpsychism on current evidence is more likely to be true than false because I think it's the most simple, parsimonious, elegant account of the data we have. So, but, you know, maybe kind of 60% or something, you know, I'm still very open to the possibility. Yeah, very open, particularly to the possibility that particles do have some totally unknown intrinsic nature that's different

to consciousness. And, yeah, when my academic book was reviewed, people are interested in Notre Dame philosophy press is the main place online that you can get reviews of academic reviews of academic philosophy books. And that was the main point pressing me, not that there was anything wrong with a critique of materialism or so on, but just saying, how do you know?

How do you know it's not some different kind of intrinsic nature? Well, it could be. just like when you're doing normal science, you know, it could be that the laws of physics we now know about obtain everywhere we've observed in the universe, but maybe they don't obtain in some galaxy we haven't observed yet. Well, that's possible. But until we find that out, we go for the simpler option that the laws of physics apply everywhere. So similarly, in the absence of any argument of the contrary, I would say panpsychism is the most simple, elegant account of the data. That's because consciousness is the one thing we have an intrinsic, direct knowledge of,

everything else. Everything else we know is, as you say, one step removed. It goes through our conscious experience. The only thing that we have the direct knowledge of what it actually is, is what it is to be conscious. And so if that's the only thing that we have a knowledge of the intrinsic nature of, then when we were left with this big question of what is the intrinsic nature of fundamental physics, well, maybe we've got a sort of puzzle piece and a gap in the puzzle here. yeah and because we can account for physics in terms of by postulating consciousness so it's not just i would i guess i'd resist the idea that's just sticking it in the gap it's playing an explanatory role where grounding physics in these underlying facts about consciousness but you're

quite right we could do that we could also ground them in some totally unknown intrinsic nature that's doing the same stuff um so it's the appeal to simplicity and parsimony that that to my mind means We should go for consciousness intrinsic natures rather than something else. But still, it's not just sticking it in the gap. It's playing an explanatory role, I would say. Well, I think there's obviously a lot more to, it's not like we settled it here, and I've got a lot more objections. Well, it's up to the listeners to decide,

and I'm sure they'll let us know what they think in the comments. And of course, you're not going to be able to get a full picture of this view. To the listener who isn't familiar with this, this is still just going to seem like we're talking about something. something so radical and weird and strange. And I would recommend, for that reason, reading Galileo's era, to give you sort of the introduction to the view

and then maybe revisiting this conversation, it will seem a little bit more sensible. Because I'm putting objections to you and I'm trying to put myself in the mindset of somebody who's hearing these ideas for the first time, but it's difficult to explain the experience of coming across us for the first time and just thinking, what on earth am I walking into here?

This is such a unique way of viewing the world. So if anybody is feeling a bit bemused, I'd recommend reading the book first. But there's a problem for panpsychism, which you discussed in the book, known as the combination problem. Now, suppose we just grant that, okay, the fundamental stuff of the universe is consciousness. Subatomic particles, electrons, mass charge, whatever it is, consciousness. Okay, so they each have their rudimentary individual experiences. And somehow by adding these things together, we get something like the human mind, which collectively has one conscious experience.

How does this happen and how can this happen? You and I are both conscious, presumably, unless you're a philosophical zombie, but assuming we're both conscious agents, I don't see a way of me sort of taking our two minds, sort of shoving them together and getting one conscious experience out of those. these will remain two distinct centers of consciousness. If that's true of our minds, why is it not true of the subatomic particles that are consciousness?

How is it that by putting them together, you get one conscious mind or many conscious minds and not just a bunch of very rudimentarily rudimentarily conscious atoms stuck together? Good. It's a very important question. I mean, I guess this is seen, as the biggest challenge to panpsychism. And it's certainly where the most energy

is focused in the contemporary panpsychist research program. It's hard to get into without getting technical very quickly. But so I guess broadly speaking, there are two different approaches. One is a very reductionist approach, which kind of says, you know, really there are just conscious particles and what we call Alex's mind is just a very complicated combination of conscious particles. So that's one approach. Or there is a sort of non-reduction approach which says, no, actually what the conscious particles do is they bring into existence

Alex's mind, but Alex's mind, once it comes into existence, is something novel and irreducible. Maybe by analogy the way my parents brought me into existence, but I'm obviously different from and independent of my parents. So I mean, I spent a lot of time pursuing the more reductionist approach. I think because I was thinking that science was presenting us with a reductionist picture of the universe. And I think I thought that because I spent most of my time talking to philosophers or theoretical physicists like Sean Carroll, they tend to make that assumption. But actually, the more I've talked to different kinds of scientists, I've been inclined to think actually less and less that that's the picture we're getting from science.

So, for example, I mean, talking more to neuroscientists, I think we really don't know enough about the brain to know whether it's all reducible to underlying chemistry and physics, the behavior of the brain. You know, I think in terms of neuroscience, I think we know, we sort of know a lot about the top and the bottom. We know a lot about the basic chemistry, how neurotransmitters work, how neurotransmitters work, how neurons fire, so that's the bottom. We know a fair bit about large-scale functions in the brain, what big bits of the brain do, so that's the kind of top. What we're almost clueless about is the stuff in the middle, how these large-scale functions are realized at the cellular level, how the brain works. And I think we need to know a lot more about that before we can say it's

all reducible to, you know, that in principle the basic equations of physics could, in principle, tell you everything that's going to happen in the brain. I think that's an assumption of many theoretical physicists, but I don't think we know enough about the brain to know whether that's true. And another interesting case I came across is if you ever talk to, if you ever have the pleasure talking to condensed matter physicists, many of them, including a couple of Nobel prize winners are actually persuaded that their research shows that certain phenomena in condensed matter physics are just not reducible to the basic equations of physics, you know, never mind living systems. So, so I don't know, I wonder whether certain theoretic, certain philosophers and

theoretical physicists are just sort of working too abstractly from that nitty gritty of certain very specific scientific tasks. Okay, so, so what, Once you lose that pressure to think, oh, everything has to be reducible to the basic equations of physics, I think that frees you up to go for the more non-reductionist form of panpsychism. So I would just say that particles have basic combinatorial capacities, which dispose them in certain circumstances to combine into conscious systems which have their own unified conscious experience and that is just a basic capacity they have. And then it's going to be a scientific task, not a task for philosophers that in armchairs when particles combine in that way to make

a unified conscious system. So again, we take what neuroscience tells us about which systems are conscious, the materialist will explain that data in their way, that the due list will explain it in their way. For my kind of panpsychist, we would explain that in terms of the basic combinatorial capacities of conscious particles. Just one more thing before you come back on this. I mean, another thing I've explored actually in my most recent paper, how exactly does panpsychism explain consciousness, which you can look at on my website. The links are piling up in the description box. Lots of little plugs.

This is more of an academic paper coming out in the journal of consciousness studies. But there I try to give a sort of hybrid of the two approaches. So the idea that the...

I'll carry on talking about you. Alex's mind is a sort of fundamentally irreducible thing but the streams of consciousness that sort of fill it out come from the level of fundamental physics are sort of already there.

and I explore the possibilities of a sort of hybrid approach. But generally speaking, I would be more on the non-reductionist side because I'm less and less convinced empirical science pressures us to a reductionist picture and that frees us up. And once you don't have that reductionist picture, I kind of think the problem goes away because you can just say there's these basic combinatorial capacities of conscious particles. Well, it seems like you're saying there, well, this problem of how do,

conscious particles combine to produce new conscious agents and you're saying well they they just combine they just have combinatorial properties it seems like another way saying we don't really know it's like saying well they just do it's just like what how on earth do we get sort of combined individual consciousnesses creating a singular conscious experience and it's just well they just they just do is that sort of what we're saying here because there's nothing wrong with saying, strictly speaking, you know, well, we don't know how this happens. Like, I mean, this is an objection in the sense

that it's a thing that it might be difficult for panpsychism to explain. Maybe it's just one of those things that, hey, we have good grounds to be panpsychist, but here's a problem we need to solve. But would you say it's a case of just, we just sort of don't know how it happens, we just have to accept that it does?

I wouldn't say we don't know. I mean, so I guess I'm not too sympathetic these days to the very reductionist approach. But there are very good panpsychist philosophers, Luke Roloff's being a key figure here, who are really trying to make sense of that very reductionist approach, give an intelligible explanation of how conscious particles could combine to form Alex's mind. I mean, he's not just talking about your mind, just to be clear. That's just an example. So there are people really trying to make that work.

But I guess I'm more inclined to think there are good reasons to think probably we can't tell that totally reduction of story. But, you know, look, as I like, you know, I often give this line from Wittgenstein. Explanation has to end somewhere, right? If you think about Maxwell

when he came along in the 19th century with his theory of electromagnetism, he didn't explain electricity and magnetism in terms of the mechanistic properties and laws science already believed in. He postulated new electromagnetic properties and laws and explained on that basis. But people didn't say to him, oh, well, you haven't explained it because you haven't explained it in terms of stuff we already knew about? Well, sometimes you can't do that. Sometimes you have to just postulate that this is basically a new fundamental feature reality. And I think probably that's what you have to do with the combination problem. And then you might say, well, what's the point of being a panpsychist in that

case? You could just be a kind of duelist who thinks particles have special powers to make conscious entities in certain circumstances. And then I would come back, to respond to that, I would come back to this point that I think panpsychism earns its keep, as it were, with, by explaining the physical world in terms of consciousness, that's really the explanatory power of it. If it can also explain biological consciousness in terms of particle consciousness, I'd wholly or partially. So I've explored this sort of partial hybrid possibility. That's a bonus, right? But even if it can't do that, even if, as you say, it just has to say, like, particles

just have these basic commentorial capacities, it's still earned its keep by reducing, explaining the physical world in terms of underlying facts about consciousness. And because of that, I would say it's superior to dualism. Just to be clear, because we haven't defined dualism. yet. So for anybody who doesn't know what dualism is? Yeah. So duelists believe that both consciousness and physical matter

are both fundamental and radically different. Very closely intertwined, but different things. So perhaps the most well-known contemporary proponent of dualism is David Chalmers, the Australian philosopher who coined this term

the hard problem of consciousness. And although he thinks consciousness is non-physical, he really wants to bring it into the domain of science. He calls himself a naturalistic duelist. And he postulates these psychophysical laws, he calls them, over and above the laws of physics, which connect up consciousness to the physical world in both directions. So they make sure that when certain things happen in the brain, certain things happen with consciousness and vice versa. When consciousness does certain stuff, changes happen in the brain.

So he wants to bring it in as a law-governed phenomenon. So, I mean, basically, of these three options, I think materialism fails in its central expanse project. Jewelism, I would say, is an option, is a possibility. I've changed my mind on this. I used to think we had scientific reason to doubt dualism. and now think we don't know enough about the brain to know that. But I would say panpsychism is just more simple and elegant and parsimonious. As scientists and philosophers, we try to go

for the most simple parsimonious theory of reality that postulates the fewest number of things. Why believe in two kinds of things like the due list does rather than believe in just one kind of thing? So panpsychism is more successful in this expanse project than materialism and more parsimonious than dualism. Yeah, I had wished that we would have some time to talk about dualism, but it seems like the least important things, the least important thing of the things I wanted to talk about. Because traditionally you had this view that you've got materialism, which is the view that there is matter and consciousness basically just is matter. but you also have this view called dualism that you've got matter but you also have this separate thing

called consciousness that somehow you know is correlated with matter in various ways and these are like the two views you know take your pick and panpsychism at least the way you paint it is this sort of third way that's a little bit

like the liberal Democrats yeah for our American the Green Party that's a bit cool for American listeners who don't know about well lucky you I suppose the liberal Democrats it's actually in terms of yeah because when i when i studied philosophy we were told they were the only two options no one taught me about panpsychism it just wasn't on the map yeah i ended up just

radically disillusioned and i wrote my end of degree dissertation saying you can't solve the problem and left academia and try to do something different but it really has from being this position that was ridiculed insofar as it was thought of at all it has and you know you can look at the stats on fill papers, it's become this third option, this still very much a minority position, but a very well-respected minority. So maybe not quite like the Liberal Democrats

in terms of respect. But yeah, so, and just, it sounds crazy, but when I discovered it, it just seems to me, solve all the problems. Except the combination problem, in that to suggest that, Okay, these fundamentally conscious things have these combinatorial properties, which is a great word, by the way. Is that the right word, combinatorial?

It sounds good, doesn't it? I mean, if it's not, then it is now. I mean, it's a beautiful phrase. Combinatorial properties. Okay, cool. And so we have these individual centers of consciousness that somehow just come together to create a new one. firstly there's a question as to whether if those individual consciousnesses

come together to produce a new consciousness is the consciousness of the individual parts does that disappear does it maintain is it like I'm a conscious agent but so are the particles that make up my brain that seems like a weird thing but also it would be analogous to saying that somehow we could take my brain

and your brain or my mind in your mind our consciousnesses and somehow put them together and produce a new consciousness Now, people talk sort of colloquially about collective consciousnesses. You know, we could get a bunch of people in a room together or like a political party or a religious group and we can say that you take all of these people, all of their minds, you put them together and you emerge this community or there's like a collective viewpoint or something.

You could say the viewpoint of Christians, you know, as if Christianity or the set of Christians has its own viewpoint. But this is usually almost sort of poetic in the way that what we're talking about is the average view of each individual. But it would be like saying, no, no, you can actually take a bunch of, you take every Christian that exists. And when you consider their minds together, and you don't even need to put them together because minds are immaterial, so they don't need to be material in the same place. Every single Christian mind right now just currently is producing this thing called, you know, the Christian mind, which is the cumulative. of all of these individual centers of consciousness and somehow develops its own consciousness

that's the kind of thing that we'd be talking about happening just on a smaller scale with the consciousness of atoms being put together to produce the consciousness of a human being or a dog or a sheep. It seems bizarre at least. Now, again, it's not to say there isn't a solution

to this problem, but do you see it as troubling to the position of panpsychism that you have to explain this extraordinary phenomenon? I think it's a really good way of putting it. And in fact, it's reminiscent of the way William James put it. A lot of the inspiration for the combination problem is traced back to the great 19th century philosopher and psychologist William James, who was really sympathetic to panpsychism, but he really wrestled with these worries. I think he eventually decided you have to give up logic to solve it, which seems a bit of a radical

step but i'm not sure that's correct but yeah one way he put it quite vividly which sounds like a little bit like what you're saying he thought you know if you have a group of people each saying each thinking one word of a sentence you don't have a mind thinking the whole sentence or he said as as you just said uh we talk about the spirit of the age but we don't literally think there's a mind there but i mean i mean just to come back to the science I'm quite sympathetic to the integrated information theory, which is one of the dominant proposals for which kinds of physical activity go along with consciousness. We don't have to get into all the details, but they say that you get consciousness at the level

at which you get most integrated information, and they give a mathematically precise definition of what they mean by integrated information. information. Because one of the distinctive things about the brain is that the way it stores information is highly dependent on interconnections. You know, there's tens of thousands of connections. And in contrast to computers, in fact, if you remove a few transistors from a computer, you don't necessarily lose too much information. But if you remove small bits of the brain, You lose a lot of information because of the way it's highly dependent on connectivity. So this is the proposal.

Now, it would take a lot, but if we started connecting up our heads and integrating our behavior and maybe we could set up kind of radio control devices to send signals between our brains, or maybe we could open up bits of our brains and fuse them. together. If we eventually managed to make a system of the unity of our two brains that had more integrated information in the whole than the parts, well, according to the integrated information theory, there would then cease to be Philip's mind and Alex's mind, and there would just be a fusion of the two. So maybe that just kind of could happen, is what you're saying. I think, I mean, I think it must be possible, unless you're a due list, unless you believe in the soul, there's something

about the physical connectivity or integration or something about the brain that renders it a conscious system. So in principle, you could create such a system by fusing our brains together. And the question to solve would be why it is that sometimes two conscious entities combine, and other times they don't. Yeah. So some panpsychists think we can tell a reductive story about that and that will be great

and I'm interested in the panpsychists who are trying to do that. Others say, no, we can't, we have to add a little bit more. Like Maxwell added a little bit more with electromagnetism, we have to add a little bit more. We have to add these combinatorial capacities.

Even if we do that, though, I still think panpsychism is preferable to the other options for the reasons I gave. Now, suppose, again, we grant it all, panpsychism is true. Oh, you're not persuaded yet, Alex. Well, you know, I like to remain agnostic on such questions, but I'm sure that swaths of our listeners have suddenly dropped their materialistic inclinations. Let's hope so. What effect is this going to have on their view of the world?

or what can we expect somebody who adopts panpsychism or let's say, you know, a society that accepts panpsychism because you end the book with a chapter, I think you call it consciousness and the meaning of life quite dramatically, as if to say that our view about consciousness here can have a quite profound effect on the way that societies work and the way that we or what our worldviews end up becoming. How so? Why does simply changing our understanding

of what makes consciousness or what material objects are making, made of, how can this have an effect on, you know, the meaning of life or our worldview? So I tend to do this in, as you say, in Galileo's era and in my forthcoming book coming out in November on the purpose of the universe. Sorry, too many plugs I'm giving in this interview. So I tend to, most of the book is the cold-blooded scientific philosophical case for the truth of the view. But the final chapter, I think it is interesting to think about the implications for human existence. So I always say, fundamentally, we should be interested not in the view we'd like to be true, but in the view that's most likely to be true. The great thing about panpsychism,

I think not only is there a good reason to think it's more likely to be true than the other alternatives. But I think it is also maybe a little bit better for our mental and spiritual health. So, I mean, I think these aren't just abstract puzzles. I think consciousness is at the root of human identity. I think fundamentally we relate to each other as beings with feelings and experiences. Consciousness is arguably the root of everything that matters, you know, from deep emotions, subtle thoughts, beautiful sensory experiences. And yet I'm inclined to think, obviously this is controversial, but I'm inclined to think our current materialist worldview

is just incompatible with the reality of consciousness. If it were true, consciousness wouldn't exist. And so we're at a funny period of history where our official worldview is incompatible with what is most, evident and with what gives life meaning and value. And I think people do feel this in an intuitive way, even if they can't fully articulate it, when people say, I don't know, love isn't just chemicals in the brain. I think that's a very simplistic way of expressing an intuition that I think can ultimately be supported with rigorous arguments. And I think this is part of what Max Weber

called the disenchantment of nature, this sense that we don't fit into the world, the story that science is giving us. And I do think this can lead to a deep sense of alienation. So what panpsychism offers us is a world view that can accommodate both the truths of science, the truths of observation experiments, but also, as it were, the human truth, the evident reality of our feelings and experiences. So I think it's a world that we can feel a little more comfortable in our own skin, a world where we can understand how we fit into reality. I also think potentially it leads to a better relationship with the environment. If you think it, if you're a materialist and a tree is just a mechanism, then it really only has value in terms of indefinitely.

directly in terms of what it can do for us in terms of looking pretty or more importantly sustaining our existence. But if you think a tree is a conscious organism, albeit a very alien kind, then a tree has moral status in its own right. If you think about, you know, the horrible forest fires we saw in Brazil under Bolsonaro, if you see that as the burning of conscious organisms, that's a whole extra moral dimension. So I think it potentially leads to a more productive, helpful world view for dealing with our current environmental crisis. The only problem is I'm not sure we've got enough time to persuade everyone that panpsychism is true before the world. That's perhaps the most indirect way to try and solve the environmental crisis would be to first convince everybody of panpsychism.

But hey, I mean, it hasn't been tried. Might work. Maybe that's what we should do. Do you think we can make sense of consciousness without pain, let's say, because you can imagine trees being burned down, being conscious agents. But I think most people want to say that they're not experiencing pain. They don't have pain receptors or the kind of things

that are associated with human pain. I mean, I dread to think the implications that this kind of view might have on our environmental practices, on the ethics of veganism and this kind of thing, which is a bit of a hot topic for me at the moment. When you say we're sort of dealing with a rudimentary consciousness here, I mean, there's a really interesting, you mentioned an interesting study in the book about plants potentially being conscious in that, I can't remember what kind of plant it was with the, with the Y-shaped tube. The pea plants that can be subject to conditioned Pavlovian learning. Conditioned extraordinary.

Learning, because you have a pea plant, which, and pea plants grow towards UV light. Yes. And so you've got a Y-shaped chew, well, kind of a split. then the plant can grow in one direction or the other. And one side has the UV radiation and the plant always grows towards the UV radiation. And the researchers were able to associate the UV rays with the noise of a computer fan.

So where the UV light was, they also played the noise of a computer fan. And after doing that, you could take away the UV light and like Pavlov's dogs with the bells, the plants would grow towards the same. sound of the computer fan as if they learned something as if they'd been conditioned into doing so now i don't know if this is if it's appropriate to describe this as consciousness but something

very strange is going on there um what like what do you think that is when we talk about you know maybe these plants having some rudimentary form of consciousness what are we talking about are we talking about like desire are we talking about some kind of unaware consciousness or some kind of I don't know, some kind of almost mimicking the idea of Aristotle. Before we knew about gravity, Aristotle said that objects just sort of yearn to be at the center of the world. It's just like their natural place. I don't think he imagined that objects had a conscious desire to be on the ground.

But there was a sense in which that's just where they sort of wanted to be in a very sort of loose sense of one. Like, what do you think is going on there? Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. And, I mean, also what I talk about is the, what we've learned about the life of trees under the ground, which is really where all the business goes on. Stuff, research that was once,

I've heard the scientists talking about saying, you know, people thought it was just hippie nonsense and they, you know, found it hard to get the funding. But, you know, what we have discovered about how trees exchange nutrients across species, a kind of quid pro quo that, let me get this the right way around. In the winter, the evergreen trees give some nutrients to the deciduous trees and are nuts repaid during the summer. The trees in some sense favor their kin. That trees pass on information to future generations. So really, there is a sort of bull

community under the ground when we're walking through the forest. And often, I mean, if you look at these videos of sort of plants sped up, it really does start to look more like something you would want to ascribe some kind of consciousness and intentions to. So it could be that this, if there is conscious life in trees or plants, it's sort of a more slowed down kind to our own conscious experience. But I mean, when we talk about, you know, like the position is often ridiculed the idea that, you know, plants feel pain. Because people hear these stories about trees communicating with each other or how plants kind of chemically scream when they're, you know, cut apart or something.

And people like to use this sometimes to say, well, there you have it. Plants feel pain and veganism is debunked. I mean, it seems to me that even with that information of you like that is still pretty untenable. I just wanted if you agree on that front. Yeah, it's a good question. even if so it's one question are plants conscious it's another question do they have anything like the consciousness we have in particular do they do they suffer so luke roloffs who i mentioned earlier who is a vegan argues that plants are conscious but they don't feel pain

to be honest i haven't looked too much into his arguments there um for various reasons to do with that I get into, one thing I focus on in my new book is actually trying to make sense of why consciousness evolved, which is mysterious in its own right because natural selection just cares about behavior. That's all that matters for survival. So if you could have a non-conscious mechanism that does the relevant behavior, why wouldn't that just be good enough for evolution? part of my answer to that and it would take a few steps to get there do incline me to think

that the plants do suffer in some way although they will have a very different kind of mental life to our own and perhaps for that reason I do have real difficulties with animal ethics because people often think I'm going to be vegan but I mean if you think plants are not conscious

then you've got a nice moral dividing line. You've got a nice simple moral principle. You can say, I'm just, I'm not going to eat anything that's conscious. But if like me, you're inclined to think plants and trees are conscious, you've got to eat something. And so where I've ended up is, I call it humanitarianism. I just very strictly do not consume any animal products that have been factory farmed. And I mean, I think a, I think a lot of people do this with when they buy meat, say. But very few people do it when they go to a restaurant, when they get invited to someone's house for dinner, when you're looking at, you know, chocolate or pizza. I, you know, I think

if my speculation is if more people did this very strictly, it would really influence the market. And so now my vegan friends tell me, well, they're still suffering when it's not factory farming. And I'm sure that's right. It could still be, though, that if more people very strictly refuse to buy animal products, consume animal products where there's factory farming, the effect of that would have on the market in minimizing, maybe even eliminating factory farming, would be better for animal welfare, would reduce animal suffering more than the equivalent number of people being. being vegan. I'm totally open to being persuaded. I'm wrong on that. But that's where I'm

It would require adopting a sort of utilitarian approach to the problem of animal suffering and saying that the goal here is reduction overall of the amount of animal suffering that human beings are responsible for as opposed to saying that there's some deontological right that animals have that you can't violate. So I guess in explaining your position there, you've exposed yourself as something of a utilitarian in that position. I wonder, is this position you take informed by panpsychism? Do you think you would still have the same practices

if you weren't a panpsychist? To an extent in that if you, as I say, if you don't think plants and trees are conscious, then you could just say, look, I'm just going to play it safe. I'm not going to think anything that's conscious. but you can't adopt that principle

if you think plants and tree is a conscious so I have to do something different and know so I'm going to have to kill something that I think is conscious I think if you chop a tree down you're killing a conscious entity so what I'm going to

you know this is just the world we live in I'm going to focus on minimizing the suffering of conscious creatures of course it's worth you know bearing in mind that at least in the case with industrial farming even if you think that plants are conscious and even if you think they feel pain,

you're still going to be responsible for a lot less plant death by eating the plants directly than growing even more plants, feeding those plants to livestock, killing the livestock, eating the livestock. So even if plants are conscious, at the very least, and potentially even feel pain, it would still be fairly straightforward that given the choice between those two options,

eating the plants is going to be responsible for less conscious destruction. And that's before we even add in the consideration that the kind of consciousness that a plant might have if it has it is going to be infinitely more rudimentary than the kind that a pig or a cow might have. But it's interesting to think how shifting our view just of what the intrinsic nature of an electron is might change our relationship to cutting down trees or eating animal products. yeah yeah i mean so they're all good points i mean i suppose what i'm most concerned about rightly or wrongly is the suffering of um pigs and cows and chickens and um but i guess my hunches that in the imperfect world we live in if everyone was vegan tomorrow obviously they're like we could have uh less suffering for such creatures but in the imperfect like in the imperfect world

we live in my hunches if if more people strictly don't buy products connected to factory farming that would reduce the suffering more than being vegan but i may be wrong about that but yeah But you're right, these seemingly abstract questions can have these weird practical implications. I mean, I often say, you know, philosophy is useless, but most of the stuff that's worth doing in life is useless. You know, if we're just going to judge everything on whether it has practical contribution to the economy, then we're going to be a very drab and unpleasant kind of society. But actually, the thing with philosophy, it does often have the, you know, peculiar, weird spin-offs unexpected. I mean, Bayes theorem, which was crucial in the

pandemic, tracking the virus and defines a whole paradigm in neuroscience and is basically our mathematical way of understanding evidence. That was thought up by Thomas Bayes, who was irked by Hume's arguments against miracles and was trying to come up with a way of thinking about probability to respond to that. Just another quick example. You know, the, uh, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead and Frager in the early 20th century, late 19th century, this very abstract project of trying to reduce mathematics to logic developed modern predicate logic, which is so crucial in computer science. So, you know, part, you never know, were blue sky thinking that's not aimed at any utilitarian advantage will have some really, really important pragmatic implications.

It's been an interesting detour that we've made into talking about veganism. And although, of course, there's a large discussion to be had about the ethics of veganism and whether or not your view, which is essentially a utilitarian one, is going to be the correct one. And whether a rights-based approach might be more appropriate, that would be true of of human beings too. I'm not sure how much our view of consciousness would inform something like the truth

of a metarethical world view. So I know that the people listening will probably have objections to the way that you framed the animal ethics thing there, but I think the point we're discussing here is the interesting case of how something seemingly unrelated

like the nature of an electron can have, as you sort of go up the scale of resolution of thought, sort of the tentacles, extend really, really far in terms of how it might influence the way that we think about our world views. Do you think you'd be a different person if you weren't a panpsychist?

I think it certainly changed me. I mean, philosophy isn't just for me some kind of abstract thing. It is something I live out. And this stuff drove me mad. And I, yeah, I mean, for a long time, as I say, I left academia, I tried to do something else and tried to just focus on on science that was more tractable.

It was shortly after we discovered that the universe was accelerating in its expansion. So just sort of focus on science that seemed more workable. And so, yeah, but just discovering this position that seemed to accommodate both the scientific truth and the evident reality of my own experience did give me a sort of real sense of intellectual peace, a picture of the world in which everything fitted together. I didn't have to deny anything that seems evident,

which I briefly did have a phase of when I was so, before I had heard of panpsychism, and I didn't see what the alternatives were, and I was persuaded materialism and dualism were not adequate, I did have a brief period of denying the reality of my own conscious experience and sort of trying to live that out, and that was ultimately unworkable. And so, and I think after that I was a kind of closet duelist. I was sort of probably unfairly connected dualism to my religious upbringing

that I'd rejected at that point. and so I think I'd say I think I'd probably be a less integrated person if I hadn't discovered panpsychism I'd either be living in the bad faith of denying the existence of my own consciousness or I'd be a closet duelist sort of embarrassed by this dueless position that I thought was the only workable option so so yeah in some way it's It's changed my world, but probably in fundamental ways, I'd probably the same kind of person. I don't think I'd...

Maybe I'd have stopped doing philosophy. Actually, I probably would have stopped doing philosophy because it was only discovering panpsychism that gave me the motivation to think, actually, there's some work to be done here. And I subsequently found out the only philosophy department in the country at the time who had a panpsychist, University of Reading,

Professor Galen Strausson. who was a big inspiration for me. And, you know, at that point, I mean, even when I finished my PhD, actually, panpsychism was a bit of a taboo. And I had well-meaning professors say, you know, when you're looking for jobs, maybe don't mention the panpsychism stuff. So it's incredible the way it's transformed and it has become such a respected position. And I now get, you know, graduate students from all over the world coming to work with me.

And so, yeah, maybe I would have, maybe I would have. gone into politics or something if uh if i hadn't thought no there's there's something i believe in here and i want to try and persuade the world this is the way forward well we're glad to have you here in in the philosophical world and uh on podcasts like these thank you very much philip goff it's been a pleasure thanks for coming on thanks alex that was a really stimulating enjoyable conversation thank you Thank you.