Within Reason - #47 Josh Rasmussen - Why is Consciousness a Philosophical Problem?

Episode Date: December 9, 2023

Josh Rasmussen is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Azusa Pacific University, with an expertise in analytic metaphysics. He is author of several books, including Defending the Correspondence Theory of Truth, Necessary Existence, How Reason Can Lead to God, and Is God the Best Explanation of Things . He is also the founder of the Worldview Design YouTube channel, which helps people use reason to address the big questions of life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Within Reason. My name is Alex O'Connor. Josh Rasmussen is an associate professor of philosophy at Azusa Pacific University, with an expertise in analytic metaphysics. He's the author of a number of books, including How Reason Can Lead to God and Who Are You Really, a Philosopher's Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Persons. He's also the founder of the Worldview Design YouTube Channel, which, according to his website, helps people to use reason to address the big questions of life. Josh joined me today to talk about consciousness.

What are some of the problems with supposing that the universe is fundamentally mindless? What are some of the problems with assuming the opposite? How might consciousness emerge from the purely material? And if it can't, does this mean that the question of consciousness is immune to scientific inquiry? And does this have any implications as to whether we should be theists? To explain and discuss these important questions, along with many others, I give you Josh Rasmussen. Josh Rasmussen, thanks for being here.

Thank you. Appreciate being with you, Alex. What is it about consciousness that provides such a unique mystery in philosophy? That is, if I look at the world around me, there are many things which astound me. I mean, Emmanuel Kant famously said that he was most amazed by the starry night above and the moral law within. I'm amazed by the existence of all kinds of things. I mean, thinking about a star, for example, I was thinking about this earlier today. this sort of nuclear factory just floating about in space. That to me is absolutely fascinating,

the existence of mountains and water and planets and laws like gravity. But for some reason, this one thing that exists in the universe, consciousness, seems to be of particular interest to philosophers in a way that it's thought of us having this unique mystery, this unique attractiveness to thinking about where it might have come from. Why is that? What's special about consciousness? Well, it's so interesting to me, Alex, like when I think about consciousness, I'm thinking about what you might describe as like a window into the reality of the things you just described. Like everything that we know about the world, we know it through our own window of consciousness. And this window of consciousness is so familiar that

we kind of take it for granted very easily. You know, so like if I'm conscious of having certain feelings, I might be focused on those feelings, but I'm not usually also focused. focused on my consciousness of those feelings. That's another kind of a thing. Or if I'm looking out and I see trees out there, or right now I'm seeing pixels that represent you in some respect. And as I'm seeing those pixels, I'm not also usually paying attention to the consciousness of those of those pixels. So consciousness is like this very familiar window into reality. And because it's so familiar, it's kind of easy to take it for granted. But there is a kind of profound mystery about, like, well, what is this? What is this window into reality? How does it

arise? How do you make consciousness? Can you take particles and smash them together into a certain way? And then by smashing them together in that way, those particles form the window of consciousness to now be aware of things, including perhaps even those same particles. That, I would say, is a mystery that I think about, but there's another way, Alex, in which consciousness is like the least mysterious thing because it's the most immediate. It's like the most familiar, the familiar experience of just being aware of things. We wake up with that experience. It's like it's the most known, you might say, on some level, because it's the most immediate. For example, I don't need to sort of speculate about whether I am conscious by first figuring,

out, okay, what have the scientists revealed about my brain? Have they discovered that Josh Rasmussen is conscious? Well, scientists aren't really doing peer-reviewed research on Josh Rasmussen, you know, last I checked, because I'm a specific kind of a, I'm a specific being. I don't mean that I'm a specific kind of a being, maybe that too, but just that I'm an individual being. I'm a specific being. And so that individuality is something that allows me to be, let's say, directly in contact with or directly accessing what I am. So it's kind of that familiarity, but then there's the mystery, which is like, well, what is this really, and how did it come to be?

In our modern scientific age, people tend to have an assumption, I think, that where there are mysteries and our knowledge, and maybe it's not true of all the things that we wish to know, but something like consciousness seems to be maybe something about the brain seems to, if you imagine people researching consciousness, you're kind of imagining like a neuroscientist, maybe you're talking about philosophers too, but you like to think that they're being informed by the latest scientific developments. And there's this idea that science, that the consciousness is like the next thing for science. And that although we don't really understand it now, one day we're pretty confident, given the track history of things that people

have claimed are completely immune to scientific, empirical, exhaustive explanation, and yet then go want to be explained that at some point we're going to get the scientific explanation of consciousness that is an account of what consciousness is that explains it in terms of the purely material that is the stuff of science in terms of physics or chemistry do you think that that is the case and if so or if not why I love this question because my initial answer is it might be the case but the question points to the nature of science itself and what I've been in my research, both in the field of philosophy, reading various developments in the conceptual analysis of consciousness and thinking through the implications of these things, as well as

neuroscientists in the field and physicists, what it looks to me like is happening is there's also an expansion in our understanding what science itself is. So if you think of science broadly as an inquiry into reality. You talked about matter. There's a further question about what matter is. So let's say science is an inquiry into whatever this real world is out there using a kind of scientific method where we come up with hypotheses and then we try to test those hypotheses with real concrete observations of the world.

So we're not just having untethered webs of reason that have no context. with reality. And if we think of science in this broad way, then I actually do have a kind of optimism that we can answer some of these questions about where consciousness comes from. Even if we say in terms of the material world, as long as we leave open what we mean by the material world, so that it is whatever it is, that's the real stuff out of which things are made. Now, some people listening to this, they might reply to this and they might say, well, no, we have a concept the matter that's more restricted than that so that we can actually talk about the prospect of things being beyond matter. But what I've been seeing is that if we broaden our understanding

of science to include the wide range of observations, including observations through introspection, the power to witness our thoughts and feelings from within, then I think that there is more hope that we could get a fuller story. But I really think that we need the philosophers and scientists kind of working together on this and not seeing each other, not having these kind of turf wars where we're trying to kind of protect a previous way of thinking about this. It seems to me that there are developments both in the field of philosophy and in the fields of empirical science that are pointing into some interesting common directions, I would say, but that these common directions are often unseen or not understood because of the way

they get translated in our time. So I want to suggest almost like a yes and no answer. answer to your question. Like, yes, I do think if we broaden our notion of science to include any kind of testing where we make observations using all of our powers to observe, including introspection, including the tools of reason to trace out the implications of our observations and analysis, then I have some optimism there. But if we have an overly restricted view of science, well, then, I mean, no, I don't think that we can understand the window by which we look into the by using only the empirical senses of tasting, touching, seeing here. I've even been talking about this in my classes about how the only way you can even know

you have those empirical senses is by using another sense of introspection to be aware of your sense. Yeah. It's kind of like the science trying to establish itself. I mean, the scientific method of inquiry relies peering through this window. Whenever we make an observation, we're doing something that we're becoming conscious of. And so to use science to try to explain the window itself is like trying to see the window through the window in a sense. Yeah. Unless we broaden our notion of science so that the window

is included within science, more broadly speaking. Yeah, but I mean, even if we consider the window to be part of science, it seems almost like a category error to do so, I guess is what I'm saying, because it's like looking through this window at a world of amazing things. And when somebody starts asking about the window itself, you say, well, it's up to us whether we consider the window as part of what we see through the window. Well, no, it's not. This is the mechanism by which we look at the world. You can't look at the thing through which you see everything through that thing.

You know, it doesn't seem to work. And so there, I have this, I have an understanding of this thought that's quite popular, I think, that, no, consciousness is immune from, from scientific inquiry in more ways than one. Because there's the sense in which it's thought to be sort of immaterial. You know, consciousness is, is not just the brain and science only deals with the material. That's quite a popular view. But there seems to be this other view that I'm, that I'm just sort of thinking about. I haven't really thought about this before, that whether it's material or not, it's sort of. of you know it becomes a bit circular trying to explain consciousness through a method whose first

necessary element is the use of consciousness I'm totally with you here that there's a kind of circularity and seeing the window through that same window right there's a kind of self-reference problem and this problem that you're pointing to gets at foundations not just of science but of epistemology theories of knowledge and philosophy in general I mean there's this general question about how you can know anything, including even the knowledge of your own window of awareness. How do you know that you have a window of awareness into reality? Don't you have to use awareness to be aware of your awareness? And isn't that circular? Is that kind of a problem that you're pointing to? I mean, this isn't just a problem for limiting things through the window

of science, understood empirically, but just understanding how we could know anything without circularity and yeah so can I answer this puzzle of how we know anything I would love you to your viewers can be aware of how they know anything at all that would be helpful I think so I find I knew I knew I got you on here for a reason I knew I got you on here for a reason everything happens for a reason Alex and it's to help us to know how we could possibly know because otherwise I think there is this worry about skepticism that there's this pit of skepticism we fall into when we start thinking about how we can justify the foundations of our knowledge. If we know something, let's say I know that my hand is moving, and I know this by awareness, how do I know that I'm

aware that my hand is moving? And if I give you an answer to that, then somebody can come along and they can say, well, how do you know that that answer is the correct answer? And this questioning can go on to infinity. One thing that I found super helpful with respect to this kind of puzzle about how knowledge gets started. And this is related to what consciousness is, which is one kind of level of the mystery. And then we'll maybe talk a bit about how consciousness could come to be. But, you know, what is consciousness? And in my view, you can use conscious awareness without being aware of your conscious awareness. So I can use conscious awareness to be aware with my eyes of shapes and colors without using my conscious awareness to

also be aware of my consciousness of shapes and colors. So that's the first observation. The second observation is that there's nothing circular in me also having a power to use conscious awareness to be aware of my first order conscious awareness of the shapes and colors. So this would be kind of like taking a second window and then pointing it on the first window to seeing that that what that first window is. So the second window is conscious awareness of conscious awareness of shapes and colors. That's visual experience. And I don't think that's circular. That's just using a power to be aware of my awareness. And I think for a lot of people, once they get to that meta level of awareness of their awareness, that's when lights go on and they realize, oh, there's something

about consciousness that I know. It has a qualitative aspect. to it or it's hard to even really describe it. You just know it. And you could never know it. And this, I think, goes to your point. You could never know it just by looking at the molecular motions of particles and brains using your empirical senses. Because those empirical senses aren't windows of awareness on the awareness itself. So that's part of my solution to this kind of circularity problem. It's to say that this power of introspection is a power that you can use to be aware of that same power. And there's not a circularity because you're just using it a second time to be aware of the first iteration. Have we potentially there sort of exchanged

this problem of circularity for a problem of infinite regress? This is all getting a bit, you know, philosophical, but that's that's what we like to do here. It's interesting. And I'm I'm thinking of like meditation, for example, when people, everybody breathes all the time. You're constantly breathing and meditation usually begins with this task of becoming aware of your breathing. And there does seem to be this difference between doing something and being aware that you're doing it. And sure, that can apply to consciousness too. It's like maybe when a child first comes into the world and sees a big red block or something, it's aware of the big red block. but would that child be aware that it's aware of the red block?

It seems kind of odd to say that the child would have that level of meta-analysis. Now, it might be the case that they, even though they wouldn't put it in those terms or really be able to verbalize it, that they must be aware that they're aware of it in some sense. Maybe not. But the problem I see with this is that, I don't know, like, it doesn't this problem sort of keep getting pushed back where, so you can be aware of the red block, but then you could be aware that you're aware of the red block. But then with this conversation here,

we're really becoming aware that we're aware that we're aware of the red block, you know? And now because I've started this chain, somebody's going to start thinking, you know what, I'm aware of that too. And do we just sort of get this, this endless spiral of how far we could push back this potential awareness? We just get like an infinite series of windows all in front of each other? I think you would only if we assume that you have to be aware of. in order, you have to be aware of your awareness in order to have the first order awareness. Right.

So like your example of the child who sees a block, if they have to be aware of their awareness of the block, to be aware of the block, that leads to the infinite regress. That's the very assumption that I'm challenging here. I'm suggesting that you can be aware of your awareness. And this gives you knowledge of your awareness by being aware of your awareness. But you don't have to have knowledge of your awareness to have knowledge. through the window of awareness if that makes sense so and because if you if you did then you'd run into this problem right if you had to be aware of your awareness of the block to be aware of the block you'd

run into this problem where you know how far back do you push that it goes on forever and if there's no place at which that terminates there's no awareness to be had in the first place in order to escape that infinite regress you need to say that i can be aware of my hand in front of me without being aware that i'm aware of my hand in front of me yes it's basic awareness foundational awareness right that's not virtue of second order awareness and this is actually really key i think i would say it's a discovery of philosophical reflection um all knowledge all theories of knowledge divide into four possibilities first there is no knowledge second there is knowledge but it's derived through an infinite chain of knowledge third there is knowledge but it's derived

in a circular way and then fourth there is knowledge and this is because some knowledge is basic you just have basic powers of awareness and i would say that the problems with those first three through reflection and analysis lead to an argument for number four, which is that you have a power of awareness. And it's not, again, it's not an empirical sense of seeing with your eyes or hearing with your ears. It's kind of prior to all of your senses in a way or comes in through all of your senses. We could put it that way. But it's a basic power by which you can be just have knowledge of anything. Do you think it's a special kind of sense?

I mean, typically there are five famous senses, but it's fairly well known that there are, in fact, more than those. For instance, your sense of balance is a sense other than the famous five. And maybe we've got this thing called the sense of like introspection or something like the intuition of deduction, you know, if I produce a syllogism. It's just a, I can't remember who wrote that short story. about the animals debating modus ponens that it's sort of if p then q p therefore q and one of the

animals is trying to prove to the other it might have been lewis carroll or someone trying to prove to the other animal that well look at this deduction and the the other animal asks sort of well why is it that if p then q and p then q then q you sort of create this new statement you know if if p then q P, brackets, therefore, you know, Q, and it's that process of deduction that gets questioned. And you can keep sort of extrapolating. And it just seems to be based on this intuition. If I say that like all men are mortals and Socrates is a man, it just follows that Socrates is mortal. But that seems to just be sort of an intuition.

I mean, that feels like it might be some kind of sense as well in the way that if I, if I touch something, it just presents this static feeling. Like, I don't consent to it. It just happens. I just feel it. In a similar sense, I guess an analogous sense to how when I see two and two, I just feel that it's for. I just recognize it as such. Introspection might work similarly.

I'm just like aware of certain things that are happening in my mind and inside of me. Do you think these kinds of mental awarenesses, that is things like the intuition of deduction and the process of introspection? Are they examples of senses like touch and sight and hearing? or are they sort of more special and more fundamental? Yeah, so the way that I've been thinking about this is that each of your senses are powers of awareness. And so awareness is kind of what they all have in common. And then introspection is the power to be aware of your senses.

So that's kind of the special power that gives you the knowledge of your knowledge, the basic knowledge, knowledge of your awareness. I like how you put that in terms of reason itself is also kind of a sense. and I was using this example of modus ponens in my class just the other week because I asked my students, how do you know that if A is true and A's truth implies B's truth, that therefore B is true rather than false? Like, how do you know that? That's a really hard question for anybody to answer because there's no further argument you can give for that. You just know that inference, I think, in sort of a direct way. It's sort of like asked me.

how do you know that you're thinking of something right now, you know, or how do you know that you're having an experience of seeing something right now? These are the foundational points of knowledge, I think, and I totally agree with you that we have more than five senses. I put on the board for my classes at least 10 senses, and I kind of leave it an open question. I think sometimes we limit ourselves, we limit our powers to get the treasures of truth because we get really good at some of our senses, but we don't realize we've got these other powers as well that we can utilize to investigate reality. And I would say that what all the senses have in common just is this basic act of conscious awareness. Each sense gives us a power to be aware of different aspects

of reality. So vision gives us a power to be aware of shapes and colors. And so further question whether those shapes and colors exist in a mind independent world or in a mind dependent world. That's a that's a different question. It's an interesting question. But I don't think we have to resolve the question about the nature of the contents we see to recognize that we're seeing things of that category, that we're actually having conscious awareness of shapes and colors through vision. Through hearing, we get consciousness of sounds, right? Through the sense of reason, we get consciousness of logical deductions, like modus ponens or modus tollens. So I think we have all these different powers. And consciousness is kind of

of the root of all those powers. This goes to the significance of consciousness. This is why consciousness is our window into reality, because consciousness is kind of this power in all of the windows, in all of the powers to see, in my view. I suppose one thing that people might want to point out is that the physical senses are just that. They're physical. And I guess awareness itself, all of the other senses seem to go through this thing called awareness. And so if it is an example of a sense. It seems to be the foundational one. It seems to be, you know, not so much the guardian at the gate, but the gate itself, like you say, a window. But there's also this feeling that there's something a bit more immaterial about the stuff that's going on

in the mind. But like I say, we live in a fairly scientific and I should say materialistic age in which people assume that materialism, if it doesn't explain most things, probably will at some point explain most things. And it does seem like consciousness has something to do with the brain, right? Like you don't get consciousness as far as we know without a brain. And it seems as though in order to affect my conscious experience, something about my physical brain needs to change. And similarly, I seem to be able to change people's conscious experiences by prodding their brain. Not, I don't know that from experience. I just know that from, so I've been told in a scientific paper. I've never actually done that myself.

This is the grand mystery, I think, in the opposite direction. I mean, the mystery for the materialist is why we have this thing called redness, which doesn't seem to be present in the brain. If redness is just in your head, then why is it that I can't open up your head and find redness itself? Not just the neural activity correlated with redness. The materialist says, well, no, redness is just, it's obviously not in the object or in the air, because these are just electromagnetic waves. It's processed by your eyes.

It's sort of in your brain somewhere. well redness isn't just brain activity that's correlated with the experience of redness if redness itself existed in the brain i'd be able to cut open your brain and find redness but it's not there um so where does it come from that's the mystery for the materialist but for the person who just says well that's because consciousness is immaterial of course redness exists sort of immaterially it's a it's a it's a thought it's part of your mind yeah for them the mystery is then why is it that i can't have this redness, this red experience, without there needing to, well, seemingly needing to be correlative brain activity. So which of these mysteries do you think is more problematic in which

direction? And how might we go about sort of, you know, I suppose trying to answer these? I'm plagued by both of the mysteries deeply. So on one side, you describe the kind of interaction problem of how a kind of conscious experience of thoughts and of colors of smells can interact causally with neurological activity in a brain. So that's a deep and vexing question. And then there's another mystery that you're pointing to, which is like, well, how does neurological activity and brains give rise to the consciousness in the first place? And it's so interesting, Alex, because I think these two problems, one problem you could describe this as the kind of interaction problem of how does mind and body go together. And the other problem you might call

this, Chalmers calls us famously the hard problem of consciousness. How can you explain the kind of qualitative, introspective aspects of consciousness that you know when the first person experience, the smell of coffee, the taste of chocolate, out of purely, let's say, third person spatial aspects within a brain that are complex, they're moving in certain ways. And I sort of thought of these two different problems, the interaction problem, the heart problem, as very far apart in my mind. And I was thinking, yeah, the hard problem kind of presses against certain materialist views. Not all materialist views, because you can broaden your notion of matter itself. Galen Strassen, for example, would call himself a materialist,

but he understands matter to include these qualitative aspects of consciousness. I know you talked with Philip Goff on your show, and he also would include these aspects of consciousness within matter itself, sort of in the intrinsic nature of the material world. So there are broader forms of materialism that can maybe address the hard problem. But here, what I discovered in my own work is that these two different problems are kind of maybe two wings of the same problem. So the interaction problem kind of is a problem about like how can these different kinds of things, spatial aspects of brain matter and experiential aspects of conscious thinking and feeling, how can those things interact? Sometimes people say, well,

you know, the heart problem shows that you can't get consciousness out of mindless brain matter. That's what the hard problem seems to give us that you can't explain the mind out of the the mindless matter. But if that's right, then how can you explain the interaction between the two? I mean, there's kind of a two sides of the same, I think, deep problem, which I've been calling it a materials problem because you need sort of the right materials to be conscious. So my short answer is I'm really vexed by both and both problems have led me on a journey to kind of re-conceptualize and rethink my starting points. I think I've been here. inherited some concepts through culture that have guided me to view the world in a certain way.

But as I re-examine those concepts, I'm coming to a view that kind of allows me to use different words, if that makes sense, to kind of re-describe what we might be and how we might fit into the world. I hesitate to even use the word material world because that word material is so variable in its meaning. But I want to just say, you know, all of us thinking about this face a question, how can us, the kinds of beings we are who apparently can think and feel and reflect and understand the question, who have a window of awareness into the world, how can we fit into the world by any means? And I have in my notes a series of problems that we might get into seven different construction problems that philosophers are worried about, not just philosophers,

of course, but people looking into the nature of consciousness are thinking about how can we fit into the world, whatever it is, whether the world is immaterial or material, whatever its nature, how did beings like us fit into that? Because no matter what your view is, I think you're going to have problems. There's seven different problems I have in my notes that everybody faces. It's not just, you know, the classic materialists, you know, everybody faces these problems. And I think thinking about these problems can help everybody from every perspective get a clear vision of what's at stake in explaining this profound mystery. of consciousness

and not just consciousness beings who can be conscious the being that has the consciousness also has to be explained yeah I've seen you speak on a few podcasts just about reflecting on this idea that I mean we all like to

if we're sort of into philosophy we like to think we've considered why there's something rather than nothing that's in a sense the foundational philosophical question but like really reflecting on the fact that there's no rule of the universe that we can discover that necessitates that any of this was here. I think I heard you on one podcast talking about the idea

that the universe could have just been full of green balls and nothing else. Like there's no, and that would be really weird. It'd be really weird if they just existed this thing called the universe with these sort of physical green balls inside of them. But like, is it any more weird that we find ourselves in the universe with, like I say, sort of nuclear factories floating in the sky there were little rocks going around them.

And on that little rock, you've got these kind of atoms that bump into each other in such a way as to produce, you know, first person conscious experience. Any one of those things seems to be sort of entirely contingent, right? And there seems something particularly odd about how easily this universe seemingly could have existed without any first person experiences at all. It's full of rocks. It's full of bits and bobs. It's full of, you know, rain, water and calcium and helium and all kinds of things. And we don't generally, unless you're Philip Goff, I suppose, think that these things have first-person consciousness. It's like, this is one of the most fascinating questions of philosophy.

Why does this completely unnecessary thing exist? So you're right. Like, there is a lot at stake here. We're talking about a foundational question. So why don't we jump into this? Why don't we go through these seven problems and see how far we might get? So each of these problems I call a construction problem. And each one, we could take a whole semester's worth of philosophy of mind and focus in on just one of them.

In fact, I even took a course with Michael Toole on perception that just focused on one of these problems of explaining how it is that we have consciousness. experience to see things out in the world. And I want to just kind of frame these problems before our conversation together, you suggested that maybe we could even think about how consciousness points to a vision of reality that includes some kind of like theistic foundation. And I was suggesting to you that for the sake of kind of neutrality and maybe broadening, kind of bringing more perspectives on the table, I wanted to even think about this in terms of two different visions of reality, either reality is mindless at the foundations or there's some

form of consciousness or mentality at the foundations. And philosophers coming from a variety of perspectives, including non-theistic perspectives, have followed some interesting pathways to what I'm calling a mind-first theory of reality. Now, a mindless first theory of reality, where everything kind of unfolds from mindless particles or fields or whatever is a very important vision of reality to explore and to navigate. But that vision of reality is going to have different resources for dealing with these particular problems. And so one way I was thinking about sort of framing the problems is in terms of maybe a general

argument for a mind-first vision of reality, kind of an outline argument. and then looking at the problems as maybe motivations for a certain step in the argument. And so if I kind of just sense. And it's worth just emphasizing, I think, what you said about the difference between fundamental mind and something like theism, right? There are atheistic, at least secular theories of, I suppose, implications of consciousness that, yes, there is mind at the fundamental position in the universe, but that doesn't necessarily. entail something like traditional theism. I mean, Philip Goff would be a good example of somebody who thinks that consciousness is fundamental, that you don't get conscious emerging out of non-conscious, but that doesn't, I think it's just often implied when we have this kind of conversation at a popular

level that somebody who's trying to say, yes, there's mind at the basis of reality is some kind of religious apologists trying to establish the existence of God, but that's not necessarily the case. Yeah, I mean, Paul Draper, for example, sent me an email where he said that he's finding this kind of mind-first view of reality to be a live option in his mind. David Chalmers, he thinks of some kind of mentality, maybe it's, you call it proto mentality or some kind of qualitative aspect of mind as being foundational. Castrop, he's a philosopher who calls himself a naturalist who's followed a pathway, not to support religious views.

He wasn't coming at this from a religious perspective. He still calls himself a naturalist, but has arrived at a kind of mind first. vision of reality. My dialogue partner, Felipe Leon, he goes by the screen name ex-apologist. Okay, so he's not a religious apologist, it's ex-apologist, and we had a nice dialogue on the existence of God. In the name of the book, our book together was, is God the best explanation of things? And what was so interesting in our dialogue was that he also was finding a certain pathway to thinking that the foundational layer of reality includes some kind of powers of mind. about natural teleology, the sort of an arrow of aiming for things or some kind of

qualitative aspect of consciousness, kind of leaving open different theories of how that might look. So I think it's very interesting because I think there's a certain impression in the popular culture about the nature of the debates where it's kind of like there's the physicalists and then the dualists who are arguing for their religion. That's kind of like, I would say, simplified popular impression. And then what I find behind the sort of doors of actually, calls are non-theistic physicalist philosophers who are just curious to understand how we could exist by any beings. And so it's these physicalist philosophers who are spearheading these problems, these challenges, these construction challenges of seeing how we could fit into the world. So we can go

through the list. We'll see how far we go in this list. But I think that just to kind of outline my argument here, I have two forms of an argument for mind being first, and then we'll look at the problems. One is a kind of deductive argument, which starts with the premise, conscious beings exist. So beings who can be aware and who can think and feel, those are real. Second premise, if mind is not fundamental, if there's no sort of foundational mentality, then conscious beings would not exist. And you might think that's the premise to question. The hard problems of explaining how we could exist are the pointers that support this premise. In fact, it's very interesting because a number of philosophers who have been persuaded that if mind is not fundamental,

then conscious beings couldn't exist. They're a limitivist philosophers. So they would deny the first premise that conscious beings exist. I met a few philosophers in the flesh who told me that they were skeptical that there are real conscious beings, as we might know them through the first person because one of them said very explicitly they didn't think that that could be explained in terms of the physics. So there's some motivation. We'll get into these motivations. But this is just kind of an outline of an argument that therefore some kind of mind is fundamental. Then I have a gentler probabilistic version of the argument that starts with the same premise. There are conscious beings. And this is a gentler argument because it just says the probability of conscious beings

is higher if consciousness is fundamental than if you start with just mindless stuff like fields or whatever. You don't get the same expectation of there being forms of consciousness. And so then that gives us a more modest conclusion that we have some evidence for a mind being fundamental. And even if at the end of the day you think,

you know, that mind is not fundamental, you could still think that there's some evidence on the other side. Is there something, I mean, we've got these seven problems specifically about consciousness and I guess like the interaction between the physical and the mental, but to say that the mind is fundamental, if we say that material is fundamental and that mind kind of emerges from material, it's a mystery, but we're sort of imagining something like atoms in the right organization produces a thing called consciousness.

But to say that mind is fundamental, does that mean something sort of like the reverse of that whereby somehow material actually comes about from mind in a like like is that what you're sort of talking about here that like in the way that materialists think that the mind is either emergent from material things or it's just an arrangement of material things that somehow like material stuff is just a particular arrangement of mind or is emergent from mind is that what you're talking about so I love this question because I want to clarify two two different things so one thing has to do with the meaning of material. I'm kind of happy with a broad notion of material,

like the notion that Galen Strausson uses, where it's just the stuff that physicists are studying, but we're not going to fill in what is the nature of that stuff. And if we understand material in that broad way, then you can be a mind-first theorist and think that this stuff, this material stuff, has a fundamental mental aspect. Maybe it has other fundamental aspects as well.

but it doesn't give rise to mind later down the scene. It's just this material stuff includes mentality within it, if that makes sense. So that's the first thing I wanted to clarify is that you can be a kind of materialist in a broad sense and still think that mind is sort of deeply in matter all the way to the foundation of matter. That's the first thing. And then the second thing I want to clarify here is that a mind first theorist has certain resources for explaining various aspects of matter.

maybe the spatial aspects of matter. So, for example, Carlo Ravelli in his book, Reality is Not What It Seems. He's a pioneer in quantum field theory, and he talks about the spatial aspects of matter emerging out of more fundamental aspects of matter that's not itself spatial. And so this kind of leaves open the possibility for theorists to come along and fill in how mental aspects could cause or motivate or give rise to other kinds of aspects if you're a mind-first theorist. For example, Donald Hoffman has an article called Objects of Consciousness where he spells out in some kind of technical detail, how he thinks that we might be able to

analyze some of the fundamental aspects of physics in terms of prior, more fundamental aspects of mentality. And so he would make the argument that there's not actually an explanatory gap between having a mind at the foundation of reality and then getting various material aspects that we observe in physics that in our laws of physics because we actually have the vocabulary and the logical analysis. In fact, we've done that to an extent. We can actually show how to analyze mental aspects in terms of more fundamental aspects in mentality. I offer in kind of a broad way, a strategy for doing this as well in my own work in my book on consciousness.

So those are my two clarifications. First, that you can actually be a mind-first theorist and also be a materialist and think that matters a foundational stuff that has foundational mental aspects. And then second, there are ways that theorists are working out. And there's a whole research here that's kind of open for people to explore, but to see how you could then analyze the physical aspects in terms of mental aspects. And then that's going in the other direction because I like what you said about the mere image. You know, people have this idea that, well, the mental aspects arise out of the prior

mindless material aspects, flip that around. I have this picture of an airplane. So you're flying the airplane upside down and you're flying over an ocean. The ocean is reflecting the clouds. So it looks like sky as you're looking in an upside-down airplane. And it's hard to know which way you're flying. I've heard that in the past some pilots got into trouble for this reason as their plane got upside down, but they thought they were right-side-up.

And so they're, yeah, and then they would end up crashing the plane to try to kind of pull up to get higher in the sky and they end up pulling down into the ground. And so this has happened. And so I have this picture of the airplane that you can have an upside-down airplane and there's a lot of symmetry, and so it's hard to see if your airplane is upside down, if it is upside down.

And so the way that I think about this is like either a mind-first theory is the upside-down view or a mindless first theory is the upside-down view. And there's a lot of interesting symmetries between them. And so, yeah, I like how you put that,

I think there's almost an assumption that if mind is first, you sort of think of matters, maybe from a religious perspective, originating out of God's powers or something, and you can hardly see it any other way. Like, how could the beauty of the mountains or whatever emerge just from mindless stuff, right? It's hard to see it any other way. But then if you come at it from a kind of mindless first perspective, similarly, it can be hard to see it any other way.

If you think, well, matter is fundamental. And, of course, we can see how mind emerges from matter. It's like, what are you saying that it's the other way? That sounds like crazy talk. And so I have a friend who said that like every view in philosophy of mine sort of seems crazy to somebody else. We're all sort of in the same boat in that respect. Certainly. Yeah.

Yeah, it's an interesting analogy. It's not one that I've come across before and one that I think I'll get a lot of use out of in the future. So thanks for that. But yeah, let's do it. Let's do these seven problems. I think we, and these are problems for consciousness. I think we begin with something we've already mentioned, which is the hard problem of consciousness. Yeah.

I want to touch on this one briefly because I think this one is already going to be the most familiar to people. And this is basically the problem that Chalmers talks about of explaining how you can have these kind of first person experiential aspects of having a thought, feeling love, how those things can arise purely. out of a description or an interaction of mindless physical bits of matter. And so this is kind of a hard problem because the idea is that there's no way of just merely describing a rearrangement of things in space that's going to include within it a qualitative aspect of consciousness. And I find that examples kind of draw this out. So here I have a little circular toy that I got from my kids.

I don't know which kid I'm taking this from but it's one of them and it's kind of bluish it's got a certain shape right so Alex do you think this object here is conscious presumably no presumably no

and not even Philip Goff thinks this object is conscious okay hmm I'd say here's a common ground because Goff thinks consciousness is deeper in right right yeah I think a common ground among all the different theorists is that There are some constraints on what it takes to be conscious. And I think that we sort of intuitively and maybe even empirically recognize that things like this aren't just conscious, probably not conscious.

Right. Now, would it become conscious if I changed its shape? Well, one way which you could answer this, and I want to be careful here because my method to get to truth, something that I like to use, is to try to focus on. simple examples that are the most clear to my mind because I have a hard time thinking of too much complexity. So I like to simplify it so I can get clarity and then build from clear starting points to get into more advanced territory. But if I do that, I don't want to come across like I'm being patronizing or that, you know, I'm focusing on these simple examples and I'm oversimplifying

the situation. It's just a method for me to like get some clarity. And so when I look at this object here, I think one thing that seems clear to me is that a feel of love is not the same thing as this particular circular shape. And I think I can tell you how I know this, actually. I know this by direct acquaintance with shape and direct acquaintance with the experience of love, the qualitative aspect of feeling love. I've had that feeling and I've been able to use that power of introspection to be aware of that qualitative aspect.

I've been with my eyes acquainted with shape. And if I'm directly acquainted, this is an awareness that's not based on inferences from other things I'm aware of. This is that basic awareness. If I'm aware in that basic way of two things, I can directly compare them and see if they're the same thing. So I call this the direct comparison test that I think you can use to get knowledge, that this circular shape is not the same thing as a qualitative aspect of love. Now, I think that's kind of a clear point, but it's a very important point because now we can build from there. We can begin to think about whether changing the shape would then change it into a feeling of love. And I would argue that by direct comparison,

you can also see that these differences in shape are not relevant to be a difference with respect to the qualitative aspect of love. Same for colors. So here's a green one. This one was blue. We moved to green. And I don't think people are going to say, well, now we know it's conscious because it's green. I think we all understand actually by reason. I think it's actually by reason we can see that the difference between blue and green is not a difference in being in a state of love. It's not the kind of difference that would affect its consciousness or how closely it begins to approximate something like a subjective feeling like that of love. That's right. Now, I want to be careful, there could be some kind of law, like a psychosomatic law, a mind-body law.

that says that once things are in a certain configuration, then there's consciousness associated with this configuration. This is related to the interaction problem of why neurons in a brain, once they get to that configuration, then there's consciousness correlated with that. So there's definitely correlation. So I want to be careful. I'm not arguing against correlation.

I'm just arguing so far that the mere shape is not the same thing as the qualitative aspect of consciousness. and this leads to what's called an explanatory gap. The gap is between describing things purely in terms of their spatial geometric properties and describing things in terms of their phenomenological experiential properties. And this explanatory gap has led some philosophers to think that we can actually simplify our view of the world if we don't bridge that gap. So instead of saying that we go from the mindless quantum,

quantitative spatial aspects of the mental aspect, we just eliminate that gap by suggesting that mind is fundamental. Let's say there's two arguments from the hard problem. One argument is from this kind of simplification procedure. And then the other argument is from a kind of in principle explanatory problem that if you can't explain it, then it can't just emerge. I want to kind of leave open the possibility for emergence. And this is why the hard problem by itself isn't the problem that I found to be the most, let's say, persuasive, though I think it is a chip in a set of considerations. Sure. Okay, so we said we'd get through that one quickly because it is going to be the most familiar here. What's number two? The second one I have in my list is causal exclusion,

and this is popularized by a philosopher named Jaguarine Kim. I took a course with him in graduate school when I was at Notre Dame, and he went through this particular argument. And at that time, he had written a book called physicalism or something near enough. And there's a reason why he says something near enough, because he would call himself a physicalist. But Jaguan Kim thinks that there are aspects to consciousness that are qualitative that are not going to be explained in terms of sort of mindless motions of matter or functions of material systems. But he does think that you have a power in your mind to make a difference to the material world. This leads to the causal exclusion problem. The problem basically is to see how you could make a difference

in the material world through intentions. Like if you intend to raise your hand and then your hand goes up, how does that actually work if everything that happens is fundamentally happening at the mindless level? So the basic layer of reality is mindless. It's composed, let's say just for simplicity particle of particles. These particles are smashing into each other. I understand that's not really how it is, but just to kind of give us a visual, these particles are smashing into each other and that this leads to everything that we think and feel. The question then is, how is it that are thinking and feeling can make a difference to the motions of matter, if the motions of matter are already determined by prior motions of matter together with the laws of physics. And even if

these laws are probabilistic and not deterministic, the point is, is that these laws are, are describing the foundational layer, which is mindless, and this mindless layer then pulls the strings on all the behavior of the mental beings and sort of causally exclude the power of the mind. A reason why I think this is a problem is that there's a lot of scientific evidence, I think, for the power of mind to make a difference. In the psychology literature, for example, there's all sorts of techniques. My sister, I have a sister who's a therapist. she talks about techniques that you can do in your mind to affect your body and this is i think evidence of a kind of mental causation in the world so there's an open question or challenge as to how

you count for mental causation if the world is fundamentally mindless and there are various possible solutions to this challenge how you can account for mental causation if the world is fundamentally mindless? That's it, yeah. If the mindless bits of reality are pulling the strings and all of your thoughts and feelings, then how can an intention to raise your hand

make a difference to the world if everything that happens is fundamentally explained in terms of the physics? There's a kind of causal closure, causal closure of the physical domain that's kind of working in the wings here, that everything that happens in the physical world

is fundamentally already determined by something else that's happening. in the physical world, how can the mind enter in? These are problems that exist if we, presumably only really if we assume that consciousness or that the mind is something immaterial, right? Because if the mind just is some kind of arrangement of material or something like this, this problem goes away, right?

So maybe we could say, well, of course this problem arises if you're going to be some kind of dualist. But the reason, in fact, this provides good reason for thinking that consciousness is just matter in motion because it seems as though our minds allow us to do stuff. My intention to raise my hand can cause my physical hand to move. This interaction problem goes away. If I say that's just because consciousness in my brain,

the intention to raise my hand is just a physical movement of atoms. And so, you know, they bang into each other in the right way and then the hand goes up. It's like pressing the pedal on a car and the wheels turning. So is this not a reason to think that consciousness is material? Yeah, it could very well be. So one solution, this is a perceptive point you're making here, one solution to this causal exclusion problem is to reduce the consciousness to the material. If you're thinking about the material is a different kind of thing.

So we're not allowing here that the material world could also be fundamentally mindless. We're stipulating that the material world is fundamentally, let's say, mindless. Sorry, did I say that wrong? We're not saying that mind seeps to the bottom of the material world here. We're saying that the mind reduces and is explainable in terms of mindless motions, fundamentally. This is very interesting to me because Frank Jackson, who's very famous for arguing for a kind of dualism, the mind doesn't reduce to matter. Later in his career ends up being kind of plagued by this causal exclusion problem. I mean, earlier in his career, he ended up actually just saying that the mental states don't

make a difference, that there's no mental causation. Then later in his career, he was more convinced that there is mental causation. And this led him to the solution that you just proposed, a kind of reduction. And this also is why Jaguan Kim, in his book, Physicalism or Something Near Enough, uses that near enough because he thinks there's something about consciousness that's not reducible, but in order for there to be mental causation, he thinks there's something else about consciousness that is reducible. So he ends up reducing the part of consciousness that is causally effective. And so this is one of the live possibilities in response to causal exclusion. For my part, I don't think, well, I actually kind of have two problems with the

reductive solution. First, I don't think reductionism is true. And I think because of that direct comparison test, I think it's possible to just know through direct awareness of conscious qualities from the inside, the first person aspects of consciousness, and compare them with various candidates aspects in physics and see that they're not the same thing. Unless we loosen our understanding of the physics vocabulary, the physics vocabulary is describing consciousness sort of from the outside, in which case, then you could have a kind of reduction, but this could point to a mind-first reduction where mind is sort of an intrinsic aspect of matter that's doing the causal work.

Without that comparison test of like sort of, you know, the circular shape of a toy versus the feeling of love or something, and if we change the shape of the toy, it doesn't seem to more closely approximate love. But, I mean, we had this caveat that maybe there is some arrangement. Maybe if I took enough of those toys and put them in the right kind of arrangement that sort of mimicked what atoms do at the subatomic level, that there would emerge this sort of massive conscious Asian. Now, that would be very weird to me. That seems like a very strange way to get consciousness, but it doesn't seem like something I can just apprehend as a priori

impossible in the way that I seem to just be able to apprehend that changing the shape of the toy doesn't turn it into love. It doesn't seem as obvious to me that there isn't some arrangement of physical material that would just produce consciousness. Yeah, so I think that the hard problem of consciousness sort of leaves open this possibility of kind of a basic power to cause things to emerge. Hasker in his book, The Emergent Self, talks about this idea that maybe there's certain physical systems that once they enter certain states, the conscious being just emerges. And so that's kind of left open, I think, in terms of some problems.

But I think the causal exclusion problem kind of raises an additional problem that, like, even if it does emerge, there's still a question about how it makes a difference in the world if the fundamental makers and movers of everything, the stuff that pulls the strings, is mindless. And there you could go with reduction. I was just going to add one other problem that I have with the reduction solution is, I don't think it really solves a problem at the myriological level, which is the problem of parts and holes. Because even if you can reduce conscious states to material states, there's still a question

about whether the particles that make up those material states are themselves pulling all the strings. And if those particles are governed by laws of physics and you don't have control over laws of physics and the particles are pulling the strings and everything you do, then there's another kind of argument that you still become a puppet even on some forms of reduction. So I wanted to offer that there and I want to acknowledge that, yeah, I mean, one problem by itself, I think, is going to kind of leave open some possibilities, but it's sort of all seven problems together. Maybe if we move on to the third problem. I was just thinking on what you just said, I'm imagining like consciousness being

analogous to something like a blue LED. I mean, there's, you know, there'll be a blue LED just down to my side here. You can see the walls a bit blue behind me and I've just given away how I do it. And we're sort of trying to, and it's complicated because the perception of blueness is itself an awareness it seems to require consciousness but let's just talk about the electromagnetic wave or something that seems to exist even if no minds exist and we're trying to figure out where this comes from where does this weird quality come from this this wave that produces this color experience um and i sort of say it's got something to do with a bunch of wires and this like remote control and this thing called a plug socket and then like

electrons sort of bumping into each other in a particular way so as to produce a current that lights up a particular thing and and it would seem very weird to say what so so this this blue light is reducible essentially to electrons bumping into each other and it's like well in a way yes you say well look think about an electron think about this I think about this bit of copper wire how do we get the blue light from you know a copper wire do I just bend it in a particular way, and then it's blue all of a sudden, of course. And of course, that seems ludicrous. But it still remains the case that if you put the wire in the right arrangement

with other wires and you turn things near a magnet or whatever, that you do just produce this blue LED. And blueness just comes about, even though it seems really strange, that if I rotate, you know, metal near a magnet in the right way, that's what's going to produce it ultimately. That just seems strange, but it is true. And similarly, of course, like just taking little bits of meat and plopping them together in different ways, it seems very strange that consciousness could somehow emerge. But if we do it properly, then why not?

So one thing I love about this question is that it points to different concepts of emergence. And I talk about three different concepts of emergence. There's what's called weak emergence, strong emergence, and then what I'm going to call incongruent emergence. So weak emergence would be emergence where, let's say, you can derive that there's a traffic jam that has emerged from all the cars being crowded on a freeway. You can actually derive that there's a traffic jam by knowing the information about the positions of all the different cars, and you can logically deduce that the traffic jam has emerged.

That's weak emergence because you can use logic to derive the emergent phenomenon. on, just from a description of all the entities in play. Strong emergence is kind of, I think, what you're pointing to there, Alex, where there's something that might seem weird that happens, that you can't just sort of deduce using logic, but it does happen. You know, like there's colors that get displayed because of colorless things. And it's like, well, how do you go from the colorless to the colorful? Exactly, yeah.

Yes, and this also plagues me. It's like, that's very mysterious. But that doesn't mean it's impossible, right? And so I don't want to make an argument from ignorance where it's like, well, I don't understand how this works, so therefore it doesn't work or couldn't work. I think this is part of the value of empirical science. Let's pay attention to what comes from what, where logic, we're sort of in the dark, you know, that the light of logic doesn't let us see what things could possibly emerge

here and there. So this is strong emergence. Strong emergence is where something novel comes. up where you can't just predict that's going to come up, and empirical science can help us to find examples of strong emergence. Then what we have is called, I call it incongruent emergence. That's where I think you can actually see an impossibility of the one thing coming from another. So, for example, I think it's possible to see, well, let me just ask you, Alex, do you think that a pine cone could emerge from the number four, the abstract number four?

Okay. A point taken. I can, I can, it's the first time I've been confronted with that question, funnily enough. But on the face of it, yeah, of course not, of course. And no, no playing around with four in my head, no like adding multiple fours together or sort of halving them or is, is ever going to get me to a pine cone. Yeah. Maybe we could take a more complicated number. You know, maybe four is too simple, right? We need more complexity, more mathematical. complexity. I think we can sort of see by an insight, a rational insight into the nature of the items in question that the one is not congruent with the other. Now, when it comes to consciousness, this is so tricky because there are many different parts of consciousness. There's different contents of consciousness. There's thoughts, there's feelings, there's intentions. There's all these different things. We could talk about the binding problem where you have different aspects that come together and bound together into a single field of experience.

And my experience is that from a distance, some of these aspects of consciousness, I can't really see clearly. I feel like I'm in the dark about whether they could emerge out of dirt or atoms configured like a brain in a spatial way. I'm just in the dark. And so that leaves me open to the possibility that they could emerge and a strong emergence sort of way.

But I just have to say that as I've gone deeper into the specific details of different parts of consciousness, what it is to be about something, what it is to intend something, and then focus more carefully on certain characterizations of matter, leaving open the idea that we can have a broader characterization of matter, where consciousness fits into matter and this broad sense. That I've come to a place where I think that it is possible to see a certain kind of construction incongruence. But this doesn't happen sort of from the armchair in abstracta. I think it helps to consider examples to focus on actual objects, to focus on specific aspects of consciousness, not just consciousness in general, but the unification of consciousness, maybe the

aboutness of consciousness, and to slow down your concentration. And my sense is that you can see maybe with various degrees of clarity, this is sort of how it's been for me, that there is a kind of incongruence between certain materials and certain effects, that there are certain things, like if you just take sand and you just throw it into the wind, that's the wrong material to become itself conscious. Now, maybe it can affect consciousness that's already there. So one of the principles for constructing consciousness, I think, is that if something affects consciousness, there's got to already be something capable of having consciousness. This is why I think that if you have a brain that acts in a certain

way, it can affect the consciousness of a being that's there. I think there's ways of explaining that. But I do think they're a deep congruence problem. So it's interesting, this idea of throwing out sand to the wind, is it ever going to become conscious? Well, okay, intuitively not, but it doesn't seem obvious to me that, you know, the stuff that sand is made out of, that is subatomic particles, potentially waves, strings, whatever it is at the base is the meriological simple. It doesn't seem obvious to me that that can't produce consciousness, even if I have no idea how that would actually occur. The example you gave a moment ago, you know, could you get a pine cone from the number four? I think is a clever one, but it might, a fault with it,

I suppose, might be that it's debatable whether numbers exist, right? We sort of have to assume that numbers really do exist to talk about getting a pine cone from the number four, but most I think there's a strong philosophical objection to that idea. A lot of people think that numbers don't exist. I'd imagine that most viewers of this channel are probably inclined to think that numbers don't exist. They're sort of instantiated in objects. You know, like people have discussed this ad nauseum.

I'm wondering if there's another example. Yeah, there's other example. But something that doesn't involve something whose, you know, existence ontologically is so dubious as numbers. Yeah, maybe turning a mental image into a pine cone or into a conscious being or, you know, maybe the mental images of your dreams. If you can get those images in the right way, then they become conscious beings with their own brains.

It's like it's the wrong category, you know, or taking thoughts in your mind, putting them together in a certain way, and then they turn into conscious beings. The thoughts do, right? Yeah, well, I guess we're talking, I mean, with numbers as well, like when I think of a number, I imagine it as existing essentially in my head. I think of it as an abstraction. I don't think numbers actually exist out there in the platonic realm or whatever. Similarly, a dream or an idea, a mental picture, we're sort of just restating the same problem, because the thing that we're trying to find an analogy for is this discord between matter and mind. I'm saying, well, you know, I know it seems really strange that mind can kind of.

from matter, but how might we know that that's just not the kind of thing that can happen? And you say, well, there are some examples where we intuitively know that you can't get one thing from another. And you say, pine cone from a number. That is, as far as I understand it, physical thing from like mental thing. And then you say, well, what about a mental image producing a real conscious being? That is a sort of mental thing producing a physical thing. That is, this isn't so much an analogy anymore for the problem.

It's just restating the problem and seems to maybe be begging the question if what I'm asking you is how can we how can we know that there might be something like consciousness that we can just know can't be made up of physical stuff i don't know if we can come up with an example of this kind of thing that doesn't just involve restating the the very thing we're trying to prove yeah i appreciate the question and one of the challenges for me is that i don't feel like i have a firm enough grasp of what it means to be physical in general or you know the semantic range of the term physical. This is why I'm sort of open to the idea that you can have states of consciousness that emerge from a physical stuff or physical substance. What seems clear to me is that there are

certain states that are the wrong states for being the ingredients for a conscious being. I like the example of visual images because if you have a dream where you're having visual imagery in your dream, you can notice within that imagery what you might call spatial kind. There's extension. There's maybe vertices. You can apprehend those in your dream. This is why you could talk about your dream and describe its various aspects. And whether that dream represents something that's in the outer world or not, it's kind of beside the point. The point is it's kind of part of the mental imagery to have these kind of spatial aspects. And it seems evident to me that, and as this isn't just a easy intuition, I want to say that this is kind of grown on me from thinking

about this topic from different angles, but it seems evident to me that there is a certain challenge with taking these spatial aspects within the images and organizing them to produce not just a representation of a conscious being, but an actual real conscious being. And so it seems to me that if the basic stuff of existence, call it matter, call it energy, call it whatever you want, if that basic stuff includes some spatial states, My view is that those spatial states aren't the ground ingredients for making conscious beings. That conscious beings are in a significant sense prior to the emergence of these spatial states. These spatial states can't on their own do it.

That does leave open the idea that conscious beings could arise out of maybe some other kind of of a stuff. I don't want to multiply entities beyond necessity, so I do have a kind of simplicity motivation to think that there's a kind of stuff of consciousness that doesn't have to come from another category of stuff that's unconscious. But I'm happy to say that this is physical or material in some broad sense. It's when we get very specific and we focus on particular aspects of like shape or color that it seems evident to me.

And this, again, is just one particular line that kind of points to the idea that there's a construction problem of building us out of those states, leaving open the idea. And I think it's good to leave open the idea that maybe there's a broader concept of matter, according to which we are rooted into a material world, but it's just not limited to spatial categories, if that makes sense. Well, as you pointed out, there's seminars and book length debates that can be about every single one of these subjects, but why don't we move on to number three while we still have the time to do so?

Yeah, let's do it. And I don't anticipate we'll get to all of these, but I'm glad that we can at least get to the ones we've talked about because I think causal exclusion is a very important one that is kind of less known. And number three, what I want to talk about is, well, I have on my notes the problem of intentionality, which has to do with aboutness.

But what I wanted to skip to is the number three in my mind, which is about the combination problem or the binding problem. So let me just kind of illustrate this. This is the problem of seeing how you can take different things. and put them together into a single conscious being with a single field of awareness. So I have some objects here and imagine that you give me of this mission, Alex, to turn these into a conscious being, okay? Not just a robot that acts like it's conscious, but it's something that actually has a first person experience of consciousness. So that's my mission.

So because I'm not, you know, able to just do this on my own, I hire some different teams. and I get one team to work on this red piece and they're going to figure out how to get this piece to be able to have the feelings. So this is the feeling piece. And then this blue piece over here, so I have different pieces with different colors. The blue piece is going to do the thinking

and then this green piece will do the mental images of dragons. So the imaginary piece, imagination piece. So the teams get to work and let's just imagine they succeed. They overcome the hard problem of consciousness. they overcome even the causal exclusion problem because they create the thinking piece so that the thoughts can now have causal power over its motions so by thinking it'll move in certain ways so they solve that causal exclusion problem and we now have all the different pieces of consciousness but now we have another problem which is how do we bind these together into a single being

that has its own first person experiences there are two units of consciousness here There's the unity of the experience that binds together many different, like I can have an image of a dragon while you're thinking about pizza, but there's no being that has both the image of the dragon and the thought about pizza. Merely having me thinking, having the image and you having the thought doesn't have a single awareness that has both. Yeah, there's two senses of consciousness there. Yes.

And then the second unity is the unity of the being itself. So one being can have different perspectives over time. So there's the unity of the perspective and then the unity of the being. And both of these need to be built to succeed and turning these into a single being that has all of this at once. Yes. And so we've succeeded in producing feeling. We've succeeded separately in producing thought. We've succeeded separately in producing imagination and maybe particularly good at imagining dragons.

But they're still separate. So I guess the question we're asking here is like, you know, you say, you've got a picture of a pizza, I've got a picture of a dragon in my head. What's the difference between that state of affairs in the universe and me having a thought of a pizza and also having a thought of a dragon at the same time? What's the difference between those thoughts occurring to me and one occurring to me and one occurring to you? it seems this suggests to me upon sort of first rudimentary thinking out loud that consciousness is not so much the feelings like what we think of as you know our conscious awareness is not the thoughts and the feelings and the mental images it seems to be more like something that those things happen to there seems to be a more fundamental thing that we might call the self and maybe it's the self that's the real mystery here that's what we're trying to explain and everything else, like the thoughts, the feelings, because they're not necessarily unified, they become unified in the sense that they both happen to the same person. In the same way that, like, you could get hit by a car, or I could get hit by a car, you know,

if these physical things just both happen to me, if it's like one of us gets hit by a train, one of us gets hit by a car, that's separate. Well, what's the difference between that and me getting hit by both the train and the car? Well, it's that this physical, these two physical things happened to me rather than to you. And so if we produce feelings and thoughts, it doesn't seem like we've produced the person that they're going to happen to. In other words, even if your team succeeded in producing thoughts and feelings and mental images, if they hadn't simultaneously produced the kind of thing that they can be given to or instantiated in, maybe you wouldn't actually get consciousness, so to speak, at all.

That's beautifully point. That is so well put. Yes. So there is this question about what unifies the different. elements within consciousness. And I like what you said about the self. Maybe there's a unifying being, which is the self. I call it a conscious substance in my work.

It's the kind of thing that's able to unify different things into a single field of conscious awareness. And it's the kind of thing that can be the same thing, even as its own perspective changes from thinking about lions to thinking about sandwiches, right? So it's changing its own perspective, the perspective unity, but it's still the same being. And this is actually a way of solving the combination problem in terms of a conscious being. So in fact, actually, this is kind of my own solution, is I think that a conscious being provides the ingredients for unifying the different contents of consciousness into a single

field that is as it appears from the first person perspective. That's not all it is, but it's at least that. and it's unified by that being. So now the question is, are there other ways of accounting for this? Because let me just draw this out a bit. If it takes a conscious being to explain the unity of consciousness, then you run into a kind of circularity problem if you're trying to build a conscious being from disparate pieces of reality.

Because now it sounds like you need a conscious being to already exist to unify those pieces of reality, in which case, in order to build that conscious being, you need to have a conscious being already there to build the conscious being. And that's a kind of circularity problem. That's, I think, a deep, deep, deep problem. But there are other possible solutions. And I think the depth of the problem comes into my own light more clearly as I run through the different solutions.

We don't need to go through them all here, but just to kind of illustrate, if you have these different pieces, one idea is that, I mean, this is kind of a rudimentary. idea is that, well, maybe the way you bring them into a single field of awareness is by bringing them closer together. We're sort of unified into the same brain, right? You just get them closer together. If they're close enough, then they're thereby part of the same experience. Right. This is kind of like, let's say you have a mental image of some sky and then I have a mental image of an ocean and maybe a beach. And then we want there to be a mental image of some sky, above some ocean. So what we do is we put your head on top of my head. Does that generate the

mental image of both together? No, you just have two beings with two images. You don't have a unification, merely putting them closer together. You know, we could take my brain and get it integrated into your brain. So another idea is that, well, maybe there needs to be some kind of causal or functional integration. If you can have causal or functional integration, then you can solve this binding problem, then you can have all these elements bound together. But I end up making the argument that for every way that you spell out that functional integration, you can imagine a scenario where you have the functional integration, but you don't have the experiential integration. Or you do have the experiential integration,

but you don't have the functional integration for various reasons. So that the functional integration is not neither necessary nor even sufficient for the integration. And I'm not saying, I don't want to kind of put an exclamation point on this, maybe just put a question mark on this. I think there's good research to be done and how we might explain this. But this does point to another kind of problem that just because you can build, even if you can build the conscious ingredients, there's a further question about how you unify them.

I think that what you said about a self as a kind of unification for the consciousness is, exactly on the right track. I mean, that, that I think does solve the problem. I think that does explain how you can have the unity of consciousness. Yeah. Well, I don't know if, but because you know, we've been talking for a while now and there are still quite a few more of these problems, I don't know if there is any particular one that you think really needs to be aired that's, like you say, some of them are less well known than the others. I want to make sure that you've got the opportunity to put in anything extra here that you think needs to. to be heard? I think just I'll point to one that grows out of my own work. I'm not going to go

into it, but there's this kind of counting argument that comes from analyzing the nature of thoughts and aboutness. And it's a very technical argument, but I make this argument that through a mathematical analysis of the kind of abstract landscape of different kinds of thoughts, one can derive some interesting theorems. I have a counting, a mindful thoughts theorem that provides constraints about how thoughts could possibly arise. And sort of one version of the result of this is that thoughts cannot even in principle be made out of mindless ingredients given some of these principles.

So I have some articles are very technical on this. Is it too technical to give a sort of overview of the argument here and now? I can do that. Yeah. And maybe we can even provide a link to a video presentation I give of one version of this. But just to use my props here again, if these are bits of reality, and let's just stipulate that these are mindless bits of reality that I'm holding up. There's a red bit and an orange bit.

And then there's this question about, okay, how are mental states related to these bits of reality? and one idea is that for any bit of mindless reality, one could define without contradiction or incoherence a possible or a logically possible mental state of thinking about these bits of reality. And if that's right, then what you can get here is the result that there's at least as many types of mental states as types of mindless states. Because for any type of mindless state, you can define a logically possible mental type in terms of that mindless state. And then we can use cantor's theorem to take subsets of the mental states and define additional mental states in terms of those subsets to derive a higher ordered infinity. I'm thinking about,

okay, how much detail do I go into you? This is difficult. You can maybe help me with this. but let me just do my best so cantor show that there are different sizes of infinity and so even if you have an infinite set of even numbers the set of all the decimal numbers is a larger infinite and one way to think about this is that if you have an infinite set then you can create a power set which is the set of all the subsets of that original set and that power set is going to have more total members than the original set. And there's a technical way of deriving. Yes, like within, within, if you take all even numbers, the set of all even numbers,

and then you've separately got the set of all numbers. Within the set of all numbers, you can create sets within that set, such as the set of all odd numbers, or the set of all numbers under 10, or the set of all numbers under 100, or something like that. And there'll be more of those subsets in the set of all numbers or the set of all decimal numbers, then there will be in the set of all even numbers. For example, you couldn't have the set of all the numbers ending in 0.5 in the set of all even numbers, which wouldn't exist.

But that does exist in the other set, and so there are more of these subsets. Yeah, and it's so tricky, too, because apparently the cardinality of the set of all the natural numbers is the same as the cardinality of the set of just the even numbers, which doesn't include odd numbers because there's a mapping one-to-one. So then once you find that out, then you think, Well, then all the infinities are the same, but then you find out that there are

infinities where you can't get the mapping, and so then there are actually higher infinities. So I use Cantor's theorem then to derive that if you can have a logically possible thought about any of these subsets of thoughts about mindless states, then by Cantor's theorem, you get a higher infinity of possible thoughts than possible mindless states. That's like a first stage or a first result. And let me just add here that the way that I motivate this is, you see, I don't think any of this can happen without using introspection to witness aspects of your thoughts. You need introspection to be aware that if you're thinking about zebras, if you're thinking

that zebras are running wild, then that thought that zebras are running wild has a kind of aboutness to it. And then you need introspection to witness what I call logical links between thoughts so that you can see that your thought about the zebras or your thought about the giraffes can be joined together to form a more complex thought, the thought that either the zebras are running wild or the giraffes are piling on top of each other. Okay. So you can build these more complex thoughts using logical links without contradiction. And this is this is so important. I mean, because you're using that introspective power to witness these very familiar aspects within your own mind, to then be able to deduce this result that through Cantor's theorem, that there are more

logical possible constructions of thoughts than mindless states. And first of all, this implies some problems with reducing the mind in terms of the mindless. So this challenges a certain kind of reductive theory where you're reducing the mind in terms of mindless atoms in certain arrangements. So thoughts can't just be the same thing as certain atom. and mindless arrangements, that reduction will fail by this argument. Second, there's also a problem of deriving the thoughts out of our mindless. There's a problem with even grounding the thoughts in terms of the mindless. And I draw this out in my book where I make the argument first for there's too many logical,

possible thoughts. And then the question people have is, how does all this stuff about what's possible anchor to what's actual. There's this kind of where, you know, the philosophers are out there and the possible again. How do you anchor this to what's actual? And there, I use some deductions to show that given this, the sort of uniformity of the thoughts, the thoughts are of the same category. And that's going to imply something about our actual thoughts. Like if you're actually thinking about zebras, that's of the same category of being a thought. And it's going to challenge both the reduction and the grounding of the thoughts in terms of the mindless states. And so this would be

an independent avenue towards a mind-first vision of reality, that our consideration. Well, I am glad that we left that till the end because that is, I see what you're saying about the technicality of the argument now. We can link further discussion. I think you've done a, I think you've done a stellar job considering just how technical an argument that is. But, but I imagine that there will be some dedicated listeners still here who are following everything you're saying. I mean, I'm getting a bit lost. I must say. But then you did warn me that this is something that's difficult to try to summarize in a few minutes at the end of a podcast. So I'll make sure that's linked in the description, a further explanation.

But it's fascinating, I guess, the different number of, or the number of different ways that we can arrive at this same kind of question or conclusion about mindlessness or mindfulness at the basis of reality. there are lots of ways in it's not just a sort of straightforward which side of the argument are you on it's which side of these 20 different considerations are you on and what might that imply about the nature of reality so it's it's always fascinating to talk about i think yeah i totally agree with that yeah and it's sort of surprising in a way how many different mind fields there are to understand this basic question of how could consciousness fit into reality by any means yeah well i'll be interested to see what viewers of this episode make of the, I don't know how many we covered. I think we did three or four of the problems, but before that we had a quite extensive

discussion about the nature of consciousness more broadly, and I'm really interested to hear what people have to say. So thank you for taking the time, and thank you for sharing your information with us. It's been, it's been, yeah, a pretty big one, a pretty heavy one, I think. Yeah, well, thank you, Alex. I've really appreciated your work. I feel like, you have impact, positive impact, I think, probably beyond what you would normally see because I think it goes beyond your, kind of your main audience. I think it ripples out in ways that I appreciate so much. And one of the things that I see coming out of your work is kind of lifting people to a bigger vision of kind of what the world is than maybe certain packages that would

sort of limit our vision of reality. I feel like it's even sort of in your your tagline of cosmic skeptic. I love that. There's a kind of healthy questioning of various paradigms, and I think that helps all of us get closer to truth. So I'm just so glad we could have this conversation about one of these big questions. Well, yeah, that's obviously very kind of you to say, and I'm glad that's the case. I, well, this podcast, I think we're on episode, this will be episode 40 something of the podcast, but I only really relaunched it properly at like episode 20 something. So it's still quite a new pursuit for me. So it's always nice to hear that, you know, at least somebody thinks that it's going well. So, so thanks for the kind

words. And like I say, thanks for, thanks for being here, man.