Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind

00:00:00.000 | I believe our official scientific worldview is incompatible with the reality of consciousness.

00:00:05.200 | Do you think we're living in a simulation?

00:00:06.920 | We could be in the Matrix, this could be a very vivid dream.

00:00:09.800 | There's going to be a few people that are now visualizing a pink elephant.

00:00:12.600 | A hamster has consciousness.

00:00:14.400 | Except for cats, who are evil automatons that are void of consciousness.

00:00:19.640 | Consciousness is the basis of moral value, moral concern.

00:00:24.000 | Do you think there will be a time in like 20, 30, 50 years when we're not morally okay

00:00:30.240 | turning off the power to a robot?

00:00:36.480 | The following is a conversation with Philip Goff, philosopher specializing in the philosophy

00:00:41.140 | of mind and consciousness.

00:00:43.760 | He is a panpsychist, which means he believes that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous

00:00:49.860 | feature of physical reality, of all matter in the universe.

00:00:54.360 | He is the author of Galileo's Error, Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, and is

00:00:59.720 | the host of an excellent podcast called Mind Chat.

00:01:05.040 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:01:06.800 | To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:01:10.080 | And now, here's my conversation with Philip Goff.

00:01:14.520 | I opened my second podcast conversation with Elon Musk with a question about consciousness

00:01:21.080 | and panpsychism.

00:01:22.620 | The question was, "Does consciousness permeate all matter?"

00:01:27.120 | I don't know why I opened the conversation this way.

00:01:29.520 | He looked at me like, "What the hell is this guy talking about?"

00:01:32.120 | So he said no, because we wouldn't be able to tell if it did or not.

00:01:37.240 | So it's outside the realm of the scientific method.

00:01:40.120 | Do you agree or disagree with Elon Musk's answer?

00:01:44.600 | I disagree.

00:01:46.360 | I guess I do think consciousness pervades matter.

00:01:50.240 | In fact, I think consciousness is the ultimate nature of matter.

00:01:56.800 | So as for whether it's outside of the scientific method, I think there's a fundamental challenge

00:02:06.400 | at the heart of the science of consciousness that we need to face up to, which is that

00:02:12.160 | consciousness is not publicly observable.

00:02:15.560 | I can't look inside your head and see your feelings and experiences.

00:02:21.400 | We know about consciousness not from doing experiments or public observation.

00:02:27.760 | We just know about it from our immediate awareness of our feelings and experiences.

00:02:33.880 | So-

00:02:34.880 | It's qualitative, not quantitative.

00:02:35.880 | That's what you talk about.

00:02:37.440 | Yeah, that's another aspect of it.

00:02:39.160 | So there are a couple of reasons consciousness I think is not susceptible to the standard

00:02:46.440 | or not fully susceptible to the standard scientific approach.

00:02:50.600 | One reason you've just raised is that it's qualitative rather than quantitative.

00:02:55.280 | Another reason is it's not publicly observable.

00:02:58.040 | So I mean, science is used to dealing with unobservables, right?

00:03:03.640 | Particle particles, quantum wave functions, other universes, none of these things are

00:03:07.920 | observable.

00:03:10.400 | But there's an important difference.

00:03:12.680 | With all these things, we postulate unobservables in order to explain what we can observe, right?

00:03:20.920 | In the whole of science, that's how it works.

00:03:25.460 | In the case of consciousness, in the unique case of consciousness, the thing we are trying

00:03:31.160 | to explain is not publicly observable.

00:03:35.240 | And that is utterly unique.

00:03:37.240 | If we want to fully bring science into consciousness, we need a more expansive conception of the

00:03:42.560 | scientific method.

00:03:43.560 | So it doesn't mean we can't explain consciousness scientifically, but we need to rethink what

00:03:48.400 | science is.

00:03:49.400 | What do you mean publicly?

00:03:50.560 | The word publicly observable?

00:03:52.260 | Is there something interesting to be said about the word publicly?

00:03:55.480 | I suppose versus privately?

00:03:57.520 | Yeah, it's tricky to define, but I suppose the data of physics are available to anybody.

00:04:07.640 | If there were aliens who visited us from another planet, maybe they'd have very different sense

00:04:12.040 | organs, maybe they'd struggle to understand our art or our music.

00:04:17.720 | But if they were intelligent enough to do mathematics, they could understand our physics,

00:04:23.100 | they could look at the data of our experiments, they could run the experiments themselves.

00:04:28.560 | Whereas consciousness, is it observable?

00:04:31.200 | Is it not observable?

00:04:32.200 | In a sense, it's observable.

00:04:33.200 | As you say, we could say it's privately observable.

00:04:37.240 | I am directly aware of my own feelings and experiences.

00:04:41.640 | If I'm in pain, it's just right there for me.

00:04:45.800 | My pain is just totally directly evident to me.

00:04:49.920 | But you from the outside cannot directly access my pain.

00:04:54.760 | You can access my pain behavior, or you can ask me, but you can't access my pain in the

00:05:02.960 | way that I can access my pain.

00:05:06.360 | So I think that's a distinction.

00:05:09.700 | It might be difficult to totally pin it down how we define those things, but I think there's

00:05:14.760 | a fairly clear and very important difference there.

00:05:17.720 | - So you think there's a kind of direct observation that you're able to do of your pain that I'm

00:05:23.400 | not.

00:05:24.400 | So my observation, all the ways in which I can sneak up to observing your pain is indirect

00:05:30.800 | versus yours is direct.

00:05:33.240 | Can you play devil's advocate?

00:05:34.680 | Is it possible for me to get closer and closer and closer to being able to observe your pain,

00:05:42.920 | like all the subjective experiences, yours in the way that you do?

00:05:49.280 | - Yeah.

00:05:50.280 | I mean, so of course it's not that we observe behavior and then we make an inference.

00:05:56.640 | We are hardwired to instinctively interpret smiles as happiness, crying as sadness.

00:06:06.480 | And as we get to know someone, we find it very easy to adopt their perspective, get

00:06:11.600 | into their shoes.

00:06:14.000 | But strictly speaking, all we have perceptual access to is someone's behavior.

00:06:21.280 | And if you were just, strictly speaking, if you were trying to explain someone's behavior,

00:06:29.080 | those aspects that are publicly observable, I don't think you'd ever have recourse to

00:06:33.580 | attribute consciousness.

00:06:34.580 | You could just postulate some kind of mechanism if you were just trying to explain the behavior.

00:06:39.840 | So someone like Daniel Dennett is very consistent on this.

00:06:44.240 | So I think for most people, what science is in the business of is explaining the data

00:06:53.320 | of public observation experiment.

00:06:55.360 | If you religiously followed that, you would not postulate consciousness because it's not

00:07:02.440 | a datum that's known about in that way.

00:07:04.520 | And Daniel Dennett is really consistent on this.

00:07:06.440 | He thinks my consciousness cannot be empirically verified and therefore it doesn't exist.

00:07:13.480 | Dennett is consistent on this.

00:07:14.800 | I think I'm consistent on this, but I think a lot of people have a slightly confused middleway

00:07:21.680 | position on this.

00:07:23.000 | On the one hand, they think the business of science is just to account for public observation

00:07:31.000 | experiment, but on the other hand, they also believe in consciousness without appreciating,

00:07:38.080 | I think, that that implies that there is another datum over and above the data of public observation

00:07:45.200 | experiments, namely just the reality of feelings and experiences.

00:07:49.180 | As we walk along this conversation, you keep opening doors that I want to walk into and

00:07:53.280 | I will, but I want to try to stay kind of focused.

00:07:56.360 | So you mentioned Daniel Dennett, let's lay it out since he sticks to his story, a pun

00:08:02.000 | unintended, and then you stick to yours.

00:08:05.680 | What is your story?

00:08:06.840 | What is your theory of consciousness versus his?

00:08:09.440 | Can you clarify his position?

00:08:13.120 | - So my view, I defend the view known as panpsychism, which is the view that consciousness is a

00:08:20.640 | fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.

00:08:25.000 | So it doesn't literally mean that everything is conscious despite the meaning of the word

00:08:30.640 | pan, everything, psyche, mind.

00:08:33.160 | So literally that means everything has mind.

00:08:36.560 | But the typical commitment of the panpsychist is that the fundamental building blocks of

00:08:42.760 | reality, maybe fundamental particles like electrons and quarks, have incredibly simple

00:08:50.760 | forms of experience and that the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is

00:08:57.920 | somehow rooted in or derived from this much more simple consciousness at the level of

00:09:03.680 | fundamental physics.

00:09:05.960 | So that's a theory that I would justify on the grounds that it can account for this datum

00:09:14.760 | of consciousness that we are immediately aware of in our experience in a way that I don't

00:09:20.640 | think other theories can.

00:09:21.920 | If you asked me to contrast that to Daniel Dennett, I think he would just say there is

00:09:25.560 | no such datum.

00:09:26.560 | Dennett says the data for science of consciousness is what he calls hetero phenomenology, which

00:09:32.520 | is specifically defined as what we can access from the third person perspective, including

00:09:39.240 | what people say.

00:09:41.160 | But crucially, we're not treating what they say.

00:09:43.520 | We're not relying on their testimony as evidence for some unobservable realm of feelings and

00:09:50.620 | experiences.

00:09:51.620 | We're just treating what they say as a datum of public observation experiments that we

00:09:58.240 | can account for in terms of underlying mechanisms.

00:10:00.760 | - But I feel like there's a deeper view of what consciousness is.

00:10:04.760 | So you have a very clear, and we'll talk quite a bit about panpsychism, but you have a clear

00:10:09.560 | view of what, almost like a physics view of consciousness.

00:10:14.640 | He, I think, has a kind of view that consciousness is almost a side effect of this massively

00:10:23.960 | parallel computation system going on in our brain.

00:10:29.200 | The brain has a model of the world and it's taking in perceptions and it's constantly

00:10:35.200 | weaving multiple stories about that world that's integrating the new perceptions.

00:10:41.000 | And the multiple stories are somehow, it's like a Google Doc, collaborative editing.

00:10:46.240 | And that collaborative editing is the actual experience of what we think of as consciousness.

00:10:54.400 | Somehow, the editing is consciousness of this story.

00:10:59.800 | I mean, that's a theory of consciousness, isn't it?

00:11:03.660 | The narrative theory of consciousness, or the multiple versions, editing, collaborative

00:11:09.300 | editing of a narrative theory of consciousness.

00:11:11.880 | - Yeah, he calls it the multiple drafts model.

00:11:14.440 | Incidentally, there's a very interesting paper just come out by very good philosopher, Luke

00:11:19.120 | Roloff, defending a panpsychist version of Dennett's multiple drafts model.

00:11:26.400 | - Like a deep turtle that that turtle is stacked on top of.

00:11:29.040 | - Just the difference being that, this is Luke Roloff's view, all of the drafts are

00:11:33.480 | conscious.

00:11:34.480 | I guess for Dennett, there's sort of no fact of the matter about which of these drafts

00:11:42.040 | is the correct one.

00:11:44.920 | On Roloff's view, maybe there's no fact of the matter about which of these drafts is

00:11:48.600 | my consciousness, but nonetheless, all the drafts correspond to some consciousness.

00:11:55.200 | And I mean, it's just kind of funny.

00:11:57.040 | I guess I think he calls it Dennettian panpsychism, but Luke is one of the most rigorous and serious

00:12:04.460 | philosophers alive at the moment, I think.

00:12:07.240 | I hate having Luke Roloff in an audience if I'm giving a talk, because he always cuts

00:12:11.440 | straight to the weakness in your position that you hadn't thought of.

00:12:15.760 | So it's nice, panpsychism is sometimes associated with fluffy thinking, but contemporary panpsychists

00:12:22.000 | have come out of this tradition we call analytic philosophy, which is rooted in detailed, rigorous

00:12:28.720 | argumentation and it is defended in that manner.

00:12:33.640 | Yeah, those analytic philosophers are sticklers for terminology.

00:12:37.840 | It's very fun, very fun group to talk shit with over speakers.

00:12:40.920 | Yeah, well, I mean, it gets boring if you just start and end defining words, right?

00:12:45.800 | Yeah.

00:12:46.800 | I think starting with defining words is good.

00:12:48.240 | Actually, the philosopher Derek Parfit said when he first was thinking about philosophy,

00:12:53.360 | he went to a talk in analytic philosophy and he went to a talk in continental philosophy

00:12:59.040 | and he decided that the problem with the continental philosophy, if it was really unrigorous, really

00:13:03.360 | imprecise, the problem with the analytic philosophy is it was just not about anything important.

00:13:09.520 | And he thought there was more chance of working within analytic philosophy and asking some

00:13:14.600 | more meaningful, some more profound questions than there was in working continental philosophy

00:13:18.920 | and making it more rigorous.

00:13:20.520 | Now they're both horrific stereotypes and I don't want to get nasty emails from either

00:13:25.200 | of these groups, but there's something to what he was saying there.

00:13:28.880 | I think just a tiny tangent on terminology, I do think that there's a lot of deep insight

00:13:36.640 | to be discovered by just asking questions.

00:13:39.040 | What do we mean by this word?

00:13:40.240 | I remember I was taking a course on algorithms and data structures in computer science and

00:13:46.120 | the instructor, shout out to him, Ali Shekhafande, amazing professor.

00:13:50.480 | I remember he asked some basic questions like, what is an algorithm?

00:13:55.600 | The pressure of pushing students to answer, to think deeply.

00:13:59.640 | You just woke up, hung over in college or whatever, and you're tasked with answering

00:14:03.960 | some deep philosophical question about what is an algorithm, these basic questions.

00:14:08.480 | And they sound very simple, but they're actually very difficult.

00:14:11.800 | And one of the things I really value in conversation is asking these dumb, simple questions of

00:14:17.280 | like, what is intelligence?

00:14:21.120 | And just continually asking that question over and over of some of the biggest researchers

00:14:28.200 | in the artificial intelligence computer science space.

00:14:30.960 | It's actually very useful.

00:14:32.320 | At the same time, it should start at terminology and then progress where you kind of say, ah,

00:14:38.720 | fuck it.

00:14:39.720 | We'll just assume we know what we mean by that.

00:14:42.880 | Otherwise you get the Bill Clinton situation where it's like, what is the meaning of his

00:14:48.680 | whatever he said?

00:14:49.680 | It's like, hey man, did you do the sex stuff or not?

00:14:52.880 | - Yeah.

00:14:53.880 | - So you have to both be able to talk about the sex stuff and the meaning of the word

00:15:00.920 | is.

00:15:01.920 | With consciousness, because we don't currently understand very much, terminology discussions

00:15:09.840 | are very important.

00:15:10.840 | 'Cause it's like, you're almost trying to sneak up to some deep insight by just discussing

00:15:17.960 | some basic terminology, like what is consciousness or even defining the different aspects of

00:15:26.000 | panpsychism is fascinating.

00:15:28.360 | But just to linger on the Daniel Dennett thing, what do you think about narrative?

00:15:38.040 | Sort of the mind constructing narratives for ourselves.

00:15:41.840 | So there's nothing special about consciousness deeply.

00:15:45.960 | It is some property of the human mind that's just is able to tell these pretty stories

00:15:54.200 | that we experience as consciousness and that it's unique perhaps to the human mind, which

00:15:59.760 | is I suppose what Daniel Dennett would argue, that it's either deeply unique or mostly unique

00:16:07.520 | to the human mind.

00:16:08.520 | - It's just on the question of terminology before.

00:16:11.640 | Yes, I think it used to be the fashion among philosophers that we had to come up with utterly

00:16:18.720 | precise necessary and sufficient conditions for each word.

00:16:23.480 | And then I think this has gone out of fashion a bit, partly because it's just been such

00:16:29.440 | a failure.

00:16:30.920 | The word knowledge in particular, people used to define knowledge as true justified belief.

00:16:36.000 | And then this guy, Gettier, had this very short paper where he just produced some pretty

00:16:40.840 | conclusive counter examples to that.

00:16:42.600 | I think he wrote very few papers, but this is just, you have to teach this on an undergraduate

00:16:48.360 | philosophy course.

00:16:49.360 | And then after that, you had a huge literature of people trying to address this and propose

00:16:55.240 | a new definition, but then someone else would come out with counter examples.

00:16:58.760 | And then you get a new definition of knowledge and counter examples, and it just went on

00:17:01.840 | and on and never seemed to get anywhere.

00:17:03.600 | So I think the thought now is, let's work out how precise we need to be for what we're

00:17:08.840 | trying to do.

00:17:09.840 | And I think that's a healthier attitude.

00:17:11.400 | So precision is important, but you just need to work out how precise do we need to be for

00:17:16.040 | these purposes.

00:17:18.360 | Coming to Dennett and narrative theories, I think narrative theories are a plausible

00:17:26.920 | contender for a theory of the self, theory of my identity over time, what makes me the

00:17:35.280 | same person in some sense today as I was 20 years ago, given that I've changed so much

00:17:41.600 | physically and psychologically.

00:17:45.000 | One running contender is something connected to the kind of stories we tell about ourselves,

00:17:51.400 | or maybe some story about the psychological, the chains of psychological continuity.

00:17:56.520 | I'm not saying I accept such a theory, but it's plausible.

00:17:59.960 | I don't think these theories are good as theories of consciousness, at least if we're taking

00:18:06.160 | consciousness just to be subjective experience, pleasure, pain, seeing color, hearing sound.

00:18:14.960 | I think a hamster has consciousness in that sense.

00:18:19.800 | There's something that it's like to be a hamster.

00:18:22.120 | It feels pain if you stand on it, if you're cruel enough to do it.

00:18:26.360 | I don't know why I gave that.

00:18:27.360 | Stan.

00:18:28.360 | I don't know, philosophers give these very violent examples to get the cross consciousness

00:18:33.360 | and it's, yeah, I don't know why that's coming up.

00:18:35.240 | But anyway.

00:18:36.240 | You say mean things to the hamster.

00:18:37.240 | Let's back up.

00:18:38.240 | It experiences pain, it experiences pleasure, joy.

00:18:45.800 | But there's some limits to that experience of a hamster, but there is nevertheless the

00:18:49.900 | presence of a subjective experience.

00:18:51.920 | Yeah.

00:18:52.920 | Consciousness is just something, I mean, it's a very ambiguous word, but if we're just using

00:18:56.920 | it to mean some kind of experience, some kind of inner life, that is pretty widespread in

00:19:02.520 | the animal kingdom.

00:19:03.520 | A bit difficult to say where it stops, where it starts, but you certainly don't need something

00:19:09.800 | as sophisticated as the capacity to self-consciously tell stories about yourself to just have experience.

00:19:17.360 | Except for cats who are evil automatons that are void of consciousness.

00:19:23.480 | They're the fingertips of the devil.

00:19:25.080 | Oh, absolutely.

00:19:26.080 | Yeah.

00:19:27.080 | I was taking that as read.

00:19:28.080 | I mean, Descartes thought animals were mechanisms.

00:19:31.240 | And humans are unique.

00:19:32.600 | So, animals are robots, essentially, in the formulation of Descartes and humans are unique.

00:19:39.080 | So in which way would you say humans are unique versus even our closest ancestors?

00:19:49.040 | Is there something special about humans?

00:19:52.800 | What is, in your view, under the panpsychism, I guess we're walking backwards because we'll

00:19:58.160 | have the big picture conversation about what is panpsychism, but given your kind of broad

00:20:03.360 | theory of consciousness, what's unique about humans, do you think?

00:20:07.400 | As a panpsychist, there is a great continuity between humans and the rest of the universe.

00:20:16.240 | There's nothing that special about human consciousness.

00:20:19.400 | It's just a highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe.

00:20:25.240 | So we're very much continuous with the rest of the physical universe.

00:20:29.760 | What is unique about human beings?

00:20:31.120 | I suppose the capacity to reflect on our conscious experience, plan for the future, the capacity,

00:20:42.080 | I would say, to respond to reasons as well.

00:20:47.080 | I mean, animals in some sense have motivations, but when a human being makes a decision, they're

00:20:54.400 | responding to what philosophers call normative considerations.

00:20:59.040 | You know, if you think, "Should I take this job in the US?"

00:21:02.320 | You weigh it up, you say, "Well, I'll get more money, I'll have maybe a better quality

00:21:06.000 | of life, but if I stay in the UK, I'll be closer to family," and you weigh up these

00:21:11.040 | considerations.

00:21:13.760 | I'm not sure any non-human animals quite respond to considerations of value in that way.

00:21:21.760 | I mean, I might be reflecting here that I'm something of an objectivist about value.

00:21:25.560 | I think there are objective facts about what we have reason to do and what we have reason

00:21:32.720 | to believe.

00:21:33.720 | And humans have access to those facts.

00:21:34.720 | And humans have access to them and can respond to them.

00:21:36.800 | That's a controversial claim.

00:21:39.840 | Many of my panpsychist brethren might not...

00:21:41.760 | They would say the hamster too can look up to the stars and ponder theoretical physics.

00:21:48.760 | Maybe not, but I think it depends what you think about value.

00:21:52.400 | If you have a more Humean picture of value, by which I mean relating to the philosopher

00:21:58.640 | David Hume, who said, "Reason is the slave of the passions."

00:22:03.320 | Really, we just have motivations and what we have reason to do arises from our motivations.

00:22:09.840 | I'm not a Humean, I think there are objective facts about what we have a reason to do.

00:22:15.480 | And I think we have access to them.

00:22:17.160 | I don't think any non-human animal has access to objective facts about what they have reason

00:22:24.080 | to do, what they have reason to believe.

00:22:26.120 | They don't weigh up evidence.

00:22:28.640 | Reason is a slave of the passions.

00:22:31.180 | That was David Hume's view, yeah.

00:22:33.080 | I mean, yeah, do you want to know my problem with Hume's?

00:22:36.000 | I had a radical conversion.

00:22:37.760 | This might not be connected, it's not connected to panpsychism, but I had a radical conversion.

00:22:42.160 | I used to have a more Humean view when I was a graduate student, but I was persuaded by

00:22:49.760 | some professors at the University of Reading where I was that if you have the Humean view,

00:22:54.080 | you have to say any basic life goals are equal, equally valid.

00:23:03.360 | So for example, let's take someone whose basic goal in life is counting blades of grass,

00:23:09.680 | right?

00:23:10.680 | And crucially, they don't enjoy it, right?

00:23:13.200 | This is the crucial point.

00:23:14.200 | They get no pleasure from it.

00:23:15.840 | That's just their basic goal, to spend their life counting as many blades of grass as possible.

00:23:21.680 | Not for some greater goal, that's just their basic goal.

00:23:25.960 | I want to say that that is objectively stupid.

00:23:29.720 | That is objectively pointless.

00:23:30.920 | I shouldn't say stupid.

00:23:32.480 | It's objectively pointless in a way that pursuing pleasure or pursuing someone else's pleasure

00:23:40.080 | or pursuing scientific inquiry is not pointless.

00:23:43.320 | As soon as you make that admission, you're not a follower of David Hume anymore.

00:23:47.200 | You think there are objective facts about what goals are worth pursuing.

00:23:54.420 | Is it possible to have a goal without pleasure?

00:23:57.120 | So this kind of idea that you disjoint the two.

00:24:01.520 | So the David Foster Wallace idea of the key to life is to be unboreable.

00:24:07.240 | Isn't it possible to discover the pleasure in everything in life?

00:24:12.560 | The counting of the blades of grass, once you see the mastery, the skill of it, you

00:24:18.200 | can discover the pleasure.

00:24:20.000 | Therefore, I guess what I'm asking is why and when and how did you lose the romance

00:24:26.760 | in grad school of life?

00:24:29.160 | Is that what you're trying to say?

00:24:31.040 | I think it may or may not be true that it's possible to find pleasure in everything.

00:24:37.680 | But I think it's also true that people don't act solely for pleasure, and they certainly

00:24:43.080 | don't act solely for their own pleasure.

00:24:45.440 | People will suffer for things they think are worthwhile.

00:24:49.320 | I might suffer for some scientific cause, for finding out a cure for the pandemic, and

00:25:00.320 | in terms of my own pleasure, I might have less pleasure in doing that, but I think it's

00:25:05.080 | worthwhile.

00:25:06.080 | It's a worthwhile thing to do.

00:25:08.240 | I just don't think it's the case that everything we do is rooted in maximizing our own pleasure.

00:25:14.880 | I don't think that's even psychologically plausible.

00:25:17.160 | But pleasure, then that's a narrow kind of view of pleasure.

00:25:19.640 | That's like a short-term pleasure, but you can see pleasure is a kind of ability to hear

00:25:26.160 | the music in the distance.

00:25:27.920 | It's like, yes, it's difficult now, it's suffering now, but there's some greater thing beyond

00:25:35.680 | the mountain that will be joy.

00:25:38.280 | I mean, that's kind of a, even if it's not in this life, well, you know, the warriors

00:25:44.180 | will meet in Valhalla, right?

00:25:46.560 | The feeling that gives meaning and fulfillment to life is not necessarily grounded in pleasure

00:25:52.760 | of like the counting of the grass.

00:25:55.360 | It's something else.

00:25:56.840 | I don't know.

00:25:58.240 | The struggle is a source of deep fulfillment.

00:26:02.520 | So I think pleasure needs to be kind of thought of as a little bit more broadly.

00:26:08.760 | It just kind of gives you this sense.

00:26:14.320 | It for a moment allows you to forget the terror of the fact that you're going to die.

00:26:22.040 | That's pleasure.

00:26:23.400 | That's the broader view of pleasure, that you get to kind of play in the little illusion

00:26:31.080 | that all of this has deep meaning.

00:26:34.080 | That's pleasure.

00:26:35.080 | - Yeah, well, but I mean, you know, people sacrifice their lives.

00:26:41.440 | Atheists may sacrifice their lives for the sake of someone else or for the sake of something

00:26:46.440 | important enough.

00:26:47.720 | And clearly in that case, they're not doing it for the sake of their own pleasure.

00:26:53.560 | That's a rather dramatic example, but there can be just trivial examples where, you know,

00:26:58.960 | I choose to be honest rather than lie about something.

00:27:03.920 | Can I lose out a bit and I have a bit less pleasure, but I thought it was worth doing

00:27:09.280 | the honest thing or something.

00:27:10.280 | I mean, I just think so that's a, I mean, maybe you can use the word pleasure so broadly

00:27:14.600 | that you're just essentially meaning something worthwhile, but then I think the word pleasure

00:27:20.040 | maybe loses its meaning.

00:27:21.840 | - Sure.

00:27:22.840 | - Well, but what do you think about the blades of grass case?

00:27:25.720 | What do you think about someone who spends their life cutting blades of grass and doesn't

00:27:29.120 | enjoy it?

00:27:30.120 | - So I think, I personally think it's impossible, or maybe I'm not understanding even like the

00:27:36.960 | philosophical formulation, but I think it's impossible to have a goal and not draw pleasure

00:27:41.120 | from it.

00:27:42.120 | So make it worthwhile, forget the word pleasure.

00:27:45.240 | I think the word goal loses meaning.

00:27:48.560 | If I say I'm going to count the number of pens on this table, if I'm actively involved

00:27:53.440 | in the task, I will find joy in it.

00:27:57.600 | I will find, like, I think there's a lot of meaning and joy to be discovered in the skill

00:28:05.980 | of a task, in mastering of a skill and taking pride in doing it well.

00:28:12.680 | I mean, that's, I don't know what it is about the human mind, but there's some joy to be

00:28:19.560 | discovered in the mastery of a skill.

00:28:21.800 | So I think it's just impossible to count blades of grass and not sort of have the Girodreams

00:28:26.720 | of sushi compelling, like draws you into the mastery of the simple task.

00:28:32.920 | Yeah, I suppose, I mean, in a way you might think it's just hard to imagine someone who

00:28:42.120 | would spend their lives doing that, but then maybe that's just because it's so evident

00:28:48.520 | that that is a pointless task.

00:28:51.200 | Whereas if we take this David Hume view seriously, it ought to be, you know, a totally possible

00:28:57.900 | life goal.

00:28:58.900 | Because I mean, yeah, I guess I just find it hard to shake the idea that some ways of,

00:29:07.640 | some life goals are more worthwhile than others.

00:29:10.960 | And it doesn't mean, you know, that there's one single way you should lead your life,

00:29:14.720 | but pursuing knowledge, helping people, pursuing your own pleasure to an extent are worthwhile

00:29:22.360 | things to do in a way that, you know, for example, I have, I'm a little bit OCD.

00:29:28.040 | I still feel inclined to walk on cracks in the pavement or do it symmetrically.

00:29:33.080 | Like if I step on a crack with my left foot, I feel the need to do it with my right foot.

00:29:39.520 | I think that's kind of pointless.

00:29:41.000 | It's something I feel the urge to do, but it's pointless.

00:29:43.760 | Whereas other things I choose to do, I think it's worth doing.

00:29:48.680 | And it's hard to make sense of metaphysically, what could possibly ground that?

00:29:53.760 | How could we know about these facts?

00:29:55.160 | But that's the starting point for me.

00:29:58.320 | I don't know.

00:29:59.320 | I think you walking on the sidewalk in a way that's symmetrical brings order to the world.

00:30:07.360 | Like if you weren't doing that, the world might fall apart.

00:30:11.080 | And you-

00:30:12.080 | It feels like that.

00:30:13.080 | And I think there's meaning in that.

00:30:17.280 | Like you embracing the full experience of that, you living the richness of that as if

00:30:25.840 | it has meaning, will give meaning to it.

00:30:28.440 | And then whatever genius comes of that as you as one little intelligent ant will make

00:30:34.040 | a better life for everybody else.

00:30:36.120 | Perhaps I'm defending the blades of grass example, because I can literally imagine myself

00:30:40.360 | enjoying this task as somebody who's OCD in a certain kind of way and quantitative.

00:30:45.260 | But now you're ruining the example because you imagine someone enjoying it.

00:30:47.280 | I'm imagining someone who doesn't enjoy it.

00:30:49.200 | We don't want a life that's just full of pleasure.

00:30:53.580 | Like we just sit there, having a big sugar high all the time.

00:30:58.200 | We want a life where we do things that are worthwhile.

00:31:01.560 | If for something to be worthwhile just is for it to be a basic life goal, then that

00:31:11.440 | mode of reflection doesn't really make sense.

00:31:13.400 | We can't really think.

00:31:14.400 | We can't really do things worthwhile.

00:31:16.140 | On the David Hume type picture, all it is for something to be worthwhile is it was a

00:31:21.280 | basic goal of yours or derived from a basic goal.

00:31:24.240 | - Yeah, I mean, I think goal and worthwhile aren't, I think goal is a boring word.

00:31:31.120 | I'm more sort of existentialist.

00:31:32.720 | It's like, did you ride the roller coaster of life?

00:31:35.600 | Did you fully experience life?

00:31:39.720 | And in that sense, I mean, the blaze of grass is something that could be deeply joyful.

00:31:45.000 | And that's in that way, I think suffering could be joyful in the full context of life.

00:31:49.960 | It's the roller coaster of life.

00:31:51.560 | Without suffering, without struggle, without pain, without depression or sadness, there's

00:31:57.160 | not the highs.

00:31:58.160 | I mean, that's the fucked up thing about life is that the lows really make the highs that

00:32:07.800 | much richer and deeper and taste better.

00:32:13.560 | I tweeted this, I couldn't sleep and I was late at night.

00:32:21.960 | I know it's an obvious statement, but every love story eventually ends in loss, in tragedy.

00:32:36.320 | So this feeling of love, at the end, there's always going to be tragedy.

00:32:44.200 | Even if it's the most amazing lifelong love with another human being, one of you is going

00:32:50.840 | to die.

00:32:51.840 | And I don't know which is worse, but both are not going to be pretty.

00:32:57.960 | And so the sense that it's finite, the sense that it's going to end in a low, that gives

00:33:06.080 | richness to those kind of evenings when you realize this fucking thing ends.

00:33:12.240 | This thing ends.

00:33:14.120 | The feeling that it ends, that bad taste, that bad feeling that it ends gives meaning,

00:33:22.200 | gives joy, gives pleasure.

00:33:23.200 | I don't know, pleasure is this loaded word, but gives some kind of a deep pleasure to

00:33:29.840 | the experience when it's good.

00:33:33.760 | And that's the blades of grass, they have that to me.

00:33:40.240 | But you're perhaps right that it's like reducing it to a set of goals or something like that

00:33:47.080 | is kind of removing the magic of life.

00:33:51.160 | Because I think what makes counting the blades of grass joyful is just because it's life.

00:33:58.240 | Okay, so it sounds like you reject the David Hume type picture anyway, because you're saying

00:34:05.560 | just because you have it as a goal, that's what it is to be worthwhile.

00:34:08.800 | But you're saying no, it's because it's engaging with life, riding the roller coaster.

00:34:14.180 | So that does sound like in some sense, there are facts independent of our personal goal

00:34:19.520 | choices about what it means to live a good life.

00:34:22.920 | I mean, coming back full circle to the start of this was what makes us different to animals.

00:34:28.200 | I don't think at the end of a hamster's life, it thinks, "Did I ride the roller coaster?

00:34:32.840 | Did I really live life to the full?"

00:34:34.880 | That is not a mode of reflection that's available to non-human animals.

00:34:39.360 | So what do you think is the role of death in all of this?

00:34:46.320 | The fear of death?

00:34:47.920 | Does that interplay with consciousness?

00:34:50.160 | Does this self-reflection?

00:34:53.500 | Do you think there's some deep connection between this ability to contemplate the fact

00:35:00.640 | that our flame of consciousness eventually goes out?

00:35:07.320 | Yeah, I don't think unfortunately, panpsychism helps particularly with life after death,

00:35:15.100 | because for the panpsychist, there's nothing supernatural, there's nothing beyond the physical.

00:35:22.960 | All there is really is ultimately particles and fields.

00:35:26.460 | It's just that we think the ultimate nature of particles and fields is consciousness.

00:35:31.260 | But I guess when the matter in my brain ceases to be ordered in a way that sustains the particular

00:35:42.620 | kind of consciousness I enjoy in waking life, then in some sense, I will cease to be.

00:35:51.260 | Although I do, the final chapter of my book, Galileo's Error, is more experimental.

00:35:57.340 | So the first four chapters are the cold-blooded case for the panpsychist view is the best

00:36:02.960 | solution to the hard problem of consciousness.

00:36:05.420 | The last chapter, we talk about meaning.

00:36:07.100 | Yeah, I talk about meaning, I talk about free will, and I talk about mystical experiences.

00:36:11.720 | So I always want to emphasize that panpsychism is not necessarily connected to anything spiritual.

00:36:19.620 | A lot of people defending this view, like David Chalmers or Luke Roloff, are just total

00:36:25.960 | atheist secularists.

00:36:27.440 | They don't believe in any kind of transcendent reality, they just believe in feelings, mundane

00:36:34.340 | consciousness and think that needs explaining and our conventional scientific approach can't

00:36:38.600 | cut it.

00:36:40.040 | But if for independent reasons, you are motivated to some spiritual picture of reality, then

00:36:48.540 | maybe a panpsychist view is more consonant with that.

00:36:51.660 | So if you have a mystical experience where it seems to you in this experience that there

00:36:59.760 | is this higher form of consciousness at the root of all things, if you're a materialist,

00:37:07.260 | you've got to think that's a delusion.

00:37:08.740 | There's just something in your brain making you think that it's not real.

00:37:12.380 | But if you're a panpsychist and you already think the fundamental nature of reality is

00:37:17.940 | constituted of consciousness, it's not that much of a leap to think that this higher form

00:37:25.620 | of consciousness you seem to apprehend in the mystical experience is part of that underlying

00:37:30.500 | reality.

00:37:31.500 | And in many different cultures, experienced meditators have claimed to have experiences

00:37:39.980 | in which it becomes apparent to them that there is an element of consciousness that

00:37:46.380 | is universal.

00:37:47.780 | So this is sometimes called universal consciousness.

00:37:50.620 | So on this view, your mind and my mind are not totally distinct.

00:37:58.540 | Each of our individual conscious minds is built upon the foundations of universal consciousness.

00:38:03.660 | And universal consciousness as it exists in me is one and the same thing as universal

00:38:08.940 | consciousness as it exists in you.

00:38:12.300 | So I've never had one of these experiences.

00:38:16.260 | But if one is a panpsychist, I think one is more open to that possibility.

00:38:21.620 | I don't see why it shouldn't be the case that that is part of the nature of consciousness

00:38:27.140 | and maybe something that is apparent in certain deep states of meditation.

00:38:31.420 | And so what I explore in the experimental final chapter of my book is that could allow

00:38:36.180 | for a kind of impersonal life after death.

00:38:41.580 | Because if that view is true, then even when the particular aspects of my conscious experience

00:38:48.420 | fall away, that element of universal consciousness at the core of my identity would continue

00:38:55.640 | to exist.

00:38:57.120 | So I'd sort of be, as it were, absorbed into universal consciousness.

00:39:00.380 | So Buddhists and Hindu mystics try to meditate to get rid of all the bad karma to be absorbed

00:39:10.060 | into universal consciousness.

00:39:12.020 | It could be that if there's no karma, if there's no reverb, maybe everyone gets enlightened

00:39:17.100 | when they die.

00:39:18.100 | Maybe you just sink back into universal consciousness.

00:39:22.420 | So I also, coming back to morality, suggest this could provide some kind of basis for

00:39:29.940 | altruism or non-egotism.

00:39:32.660 | Because if you think egotism implicitly assumes that we are utterly distinct individuals,

00:39:40.060 | whereas on this view, we overlap to an extent that something at the core of our being is...

00:39:46.340 | Even in this life, we overlap.

00:39:49.040 | - That would be this view that some experienced meditators claim becomes apparent to them,

00:39:54.220 | that there is something at the core of my identity that is one and the same as the thing

00:40:01.140 | at the core of your identity, this universal consciousness.

00:40:06.180 | - There is something very...

00:40:09.100 | You and I in this conversation, there's a few people listening to this, all of us are

00:40:13.820 | in a kind of single mind together.

00:40:19.140 | There's some small aspect of that, or maybe a big aspect.

00:40:24.420 | But us humans, so certainly in the space of ideas, we kind of meld together for time,

00:40:31.940 | at least, in a conversation, and kind of play with that idea.

00:40:35.740 | And then we're clearly all thinking, like if I say pink elephant, there's going to be

00:40:40.220 | a few people that are now visualizing a pink elephant.

00:40:43.140 | We're all thinking about that pink elephant together.

00:40:46.460 | We're all in the room together thinking about this pink elephant.

00:40:49.740 | We're rotating it in our minds together.

00:40:55.540 | What is that?

00:40:56.540 | That pink elephant, is there a different instantiation of that pink elephant in everybody's mind,

00:41:02.020 | or is it the same elephant, and we have the same mind exploring that elephant?

00:41:06.500 | Now if we in our mind start petting that elephant, like touching it, that experience that we're

00:41:11.780 | now thinking what that would feel like, what's that?

00:41:15.380 | Is that all of us experiencing that together, or is that separate?

00:41:18.660 | So there's some aspect of the togetherness that almost seems fundamental to civilization,

00:41:23.500 | to society.

00:41:24.500 | Hopefully that's not too strong, but to some of the fundamental properties of the human

00:41:30.940 | mind, it feels like the social aspect is really important.

00:41:35.000 | We call it social because we think of us as individual minds interacting.

00:41:40.160 | But if we're just like one collective mind with like fingertips that are like touching

00:41:45.520 | each other as it's trying to explore the elephant, but that could be just in the realm of ideas

00:41:51.680 | and intelligence and not in the realm of consciousness.

00:41:55.040 | It's interesting to see maybe it is in the realm of consciousness.

00:41:58.200 | - Yeah, so it's obviously certainly true in some sense that there are these phenomena

00:42:04.500 | that you're talking about of collective consciousness in some sense.

00:42:08.040 | I suppose the question is, how ontologically serious do we want to be about those things?

00:42:14.340 | By which I mean, are they just a construction out of our minds and the fact that we interact

00:42:20.520 | in the standardly scientifically accepted ways?

00:42:25.320 | Or is as someone like Rupert Sheldrake would think that there is some metaphysical reality,

00:42:30.340 | there are some fields beyond the scientifically understood ones that are somehow communicating

00:42:35.480 | this?

00:42:36.480 | I mean, the view I was describing was that this element we're supposed to have in common

00:42:41.560 | is some sort of pure impersonal consciousness or something rather than...

00:42:47.660 | So actually, an interesting figure is the Australian philosopher, Miri Al-Bahari, who

00:42:51.900 | defends a kind of mystical conceptual reality rooted in Advaita Vedanta mysticism.

00:42:59.960 | But like me, she's from this tradition of analytic philosophy.

00:43:03.940 | And so she defends this in this incredibly precise, rigorous way.

00:43:07.880 | She defends the idea that we should think of experienced meditators as providing expert

00:43:13.080 | testimony.

00:43:14.660 | So I think humans are causing climate breakdown.

00:43:20.060 | I have no idea the science behind it, but I trust the experts or that the universe is

00:43:25.220 | 14 billion years old.

00:43:27.060 | Most of our knowledge is based on expert testimony.

00:43:30.360 | And she thinks we should think of experienced meditators, these people who are telling us

00:43:34.740 | about this universal consciousness at the core of our being as a relevant kind of expert.

00:43:39.800 | And so she wants to defend the rational acceptability of this mystical conceptual reality.

00:43:45.440 | So I think we shouldn't be ashamed, we shouldn't be worried about dealing with certain views

00:43:53.860 | as long as it's done with rigor and seriousness.

00:43:57.740 | I think sometimes terms like, I don't know, new age or something can function a bit like

00:44:02.040 | racist terms.

00:44:03.040 | A racist term picks out a group of people, but then implies certain negative characteristics.

00:44:10.340 | So people use this term to pick out a certain set of views like mystical conceptual reality

00:44:15.560 | and imply it's kind of fluffy thinking.

00:44:19.280 | But you read Miri Al-Bahari, you read Luke Roloff's, this is serious, rigorous thought,

00:44:25.400 | whether you agree with it or not, obviously, it's hugely controversial.

00:44:28.520 | And so the Enlightenment ideal is to follow the evidence and the arguments where they

00:44:33.800 | lead.

00:44:35.560 | But it's kind of very hard for human beings to do that.

00:44:37.920 | I think we get stuck in some conception of how we think science ought to look.

00:44:47.320 | And people talk about religion as a crutch, but I think a certain kind of scientism, a

00:44:52.760 | certain conception of how science is supposed to be gets into people's identity and their

00:44:57.280 | sense of themselves and their security.

00:45:01.920 | And make things hard if you're a punch like us.

00:45:04.840 | - And even the word expert becomes a kind of a crutch.

00:45:09.400 | I mean, you use the word expert, you have some kind of conception of what expertise

00:45:15.120 | means.

00:45:16.640 | Oftentimes that's connected with a degree at particularly prestigious university or

00:45:21.840 | something like that.

00:45:22.840 | Or expertise is a funny one.

00:45:28.200 | I've noticed that anybody sort of that claims they're an expert is usually not the expert.

00:45:33.480 | The biggest quote unquote expert that I've ever met are the ones that are truly humble.

00:45:38.800 | So the humility is a really good sign of somebody who's traveled a long road and been humbled

00:45:45.440 | by how little they know.

00:45:47.480 | So some of the best people in the world at whatever the thing they've spent their life

00:45:51.280 | doing are the ones that are ultimately humble in the face of it all.

00:45:55.920 | So like just being humble, how little we know, even if we travel a lifetime.

00:46:02.280 | I do like the idea.

00:46:03.760 | I mean, treating sort of like, what is it, psychonauts, like an expert witness, you know,

00:46:10.000 | people who have traveled with the help of DMT to another place where they got some deep

00:46:16.320 | understanding of something and their insight is perhaps as valuable as the insight of somebody

00:46:22.920 | who ran rigorous psychological studies at Princeton University or something.

00:46:29.360 | Like those psychonauts, they have wisdom if it's done rigorously, which you can also do

00:46:35.680 | rigorously within the university, within the studies now with psilocybin and those kinds

00:46:40.760 | of things.

00:46:41.760 | Yeah, that's fascinating.

00:46:42.760 | It's still probably the best, one of the best works on mystical experience is the chapter

00:46:49.160 | in William James's Varieties of Religious Experiences.

00:46:53.600 | Most of it is just a psychological study of trying to define the characteristics of mystical

00:46:59.080 | experience as a psychological type.

00:47:01.800 | But at the end, he considers the question, if you have a mystical experience, is it rational

00:47:07.160 | to trust it, to trust that it's telling you something about reality?

00:47:11.520 | And he makes an interesting argument.

00:47:12.640 | He says, if you say no, you're kind of applying a double standard because we all think it's

00:47:18.760 | okay to trust our normal sensory experiences, but we have no way of getting outside of ourselves

00:47:26.320 | to prove that our sensory experiences correspond to an external reality.

00:47:31.120 | We could be in the matrix.

00:47:32.360 | This could be a very vivid dream.

00:47:35.120 | You could say, oh, we do science, but a scientist only gets their data by experiencing the results

00:47:43.360 | of their experiments.

00:47:44.640 | And then the question arises again, how do you know that corresponds to a real world?

00:47:48.320 | So he thinks there's a sort of double standard in saying it's okay to trust our ordinary

00:47:53.160 | sensory experiences, but it's not okay for the person on DMT to trust those experiences.

00:47:58.680 | It's very philosophically difficult to say why is it okay in the one case and not the

00:48:04.440 | other?

00:48:05.440 | So I think there's an interesting argument there, but I would like to just defend experts

00:48:08.960 | a little bit.

00:48:09.960 | I mean, I agree it's very difficult, but especially in an age, I guess, where there's so much

00:48:15.640 | information, I do think it's important to have some protection of sources of information,

00:48:26.720 | academic institutions that we can trust.

00:48:29.280 | And then that's difficult because of course there are non-academics who do know what they're

00:48:32.920 | talking about, but if I'm interested in knowing about biology, you can't research everything.

00:48:40.160 | So I think we have to have some sense of who are the experts we can trust, the people who've

00:48:47.960 | spent a lot of time reading all the material that people have read, written, thinking about

00:48:53.920 | it, having their views torn apart by other people working in the field.

00:48:59.280 | I think that is very important and also to protect that from conflicts of interest.

00:49:03.360 | There is a so-called think tank in the UK called the Institute of Economic Affairs who

00:49:07.880 | are always on the BBC as experts on economic questions and they do not declare who funds

00:49:14.920 | them.

00:49:16.280 | So we don't know who's paying the piper.

00:49:19.520 | I think you shouldn't be allowed to call yourself a think tank if you're not totally transparent

00:49:24.680 | about who's funding you.

00:49:26.440 | So I think that's it.

00:49:27.440 | And I mean, this connects to panpsychism because I think the reason people worry about unorthodox

00:49:35.160 | ideas is because they worry about how do we know when we're just losing control or losing

00:49:39.480 | discipline.

00:49:40.480 | So I do think we need to somehow protect academic institutions as sources of information that

00:49:49.280 | we can trust.

00:49:50.280 | And in philosophy, there's not much consensus on everything, but you can at least know,

00:49:56.400 | you can know what people who have put the time in to read all the stuff, what they think

00:50:03.200 | about these issues.

00:50:04.200 | I think that is important.

00:50:05.200 | - So push back on your pushback.

00:50:07.600 | Who are the experts on COVID?

00:50:09.920 | - Oh dear, getting into dangerous territory now.

00:50:12.920 | - Well, let me just speak to it because I am walking through that dangerous territory.

00:50:18.520 | I'm allergic to the word expert because in my simple mind, it kind of rhymes with ego.

00:50:33.080 | There's something about experts.

00:50:36.160 | If we allow too much to have a category expert and place certain people in them, those people

00:50:43.640 | sitting on the throne start to believe it and they start to communicate with that energy

00:50:51.040 | and the humility starts to dissipate.

00:50:54.360 | I think there is value in a lifelong mastery of a skill and the pursuit of knowledge within

00:51:05.760 | a very specific discipline.

00:51:07.940 | But the moment you have your name on an office, the moment you're an expert, I think you

00:51:13.440 | destroy the very aspect, the very value of that journey towards knowledge.

00:51:21.200 | So some of it probably just reduces to like skillful communication, like of communicating

00:51:28.600 | in a way that shows humility, that shows an open-mindedness, that shows an ability to

00:51:34.520 | really hear what a lot of people are saying.

00:51:37.720 | So in the case of COVID, what I've noticed, and this is true, this is probably true with

00:51:42.720 | panpsychism as well, is so-called experts, and they are extremely knowledgeable, many

00:51:51.280 | of them are colleagues of mine, they dismiss what millions of people are saying on the

00:51:57.780 | internet without having looked into it with empathy and rigor, honestly, understand what

00:52:05.200 | are the arguments being made.

00:52:07.120 | They say like, "There's not enough time to explore all those things, like there's so

00:52:10.360 | much stuff out there."

00:52:12.040 | Yeah, I think that's intellectual laziness.

00:52:15.720 | If you don't have enough time, then don't speak so strongly with dismissal.

00:52:21.120 | Feel bad about it, be apologetic about the fact that you don't have enough time to explore

00:52:25.040 | the evidence.

00:52:27.120 | For example, the heat I got with Francis Collins is that he kind of said that LabLeak, he kind

00:52:35.480 | of dismissed it, showing that he didn't really deeply explore all the huge amount of circumstantial

00:52:45.120 | evidence out there, the battles that are going on out there.

00:52:48.520 | There's a lot of people really tensely discussing this, and showing humility in the face of

00:52:56.160 | that battle of ideas I think is really important.

00:52:58.680 | And I've just been very disappointed in so-called expertise in the space of science, in showing

00:53:04.960 | humility and showing humanity and kindness and empathy towards other human beings.

00:53:11.120 | At the same time, obviously, I love "Jiro Dreams of Sushi," lifelong pursuit of getting

00:53:21.080 | in computer science, Don Knuth.

00:53:24.400 | Some of my biggest heroes are people that when nobody else cares, they stay on one topic

00:53:32.400 | for their whole life, and they just find the beautiful little things about their puzzles

00:53:36.520 | they keep solving.

00:53:37.840 | And yes, sometimes a virus happens or something happens where that person with their puzzles

00:53:44.960 | becomes like the center of the whole world, because that puzzle becomes all of a sudden

00:53:49.080 | really important.

00:53:50.280 | But still, there's responsibilities on them to show humility and to be open-minded to

00:53:54.600 | the fact that even if they spent their whole life doing it, even if their whole community

00:53:59.880 | is giving them awards and giving them citations and giving them all kinds of stuff where they're

00:54:06.640 | bowing down before them how smart they are, they still know nothing relative to all the

00:54:13.760 | stuff, the mysteries that are out there.

00:54:15.560 | Yeah, I wonder how much we're disagreeing.

00:54:18.000 | I mean, these are totally valid issues.

00:54:20.160 | And of course, expertise goes wrong in all sorts of ways.

00:54:24.760 | It's totally fallible.

00:54:25.760 | I suppose I would just say, what is the alternative?

00:54:29.240 | Or do we just say all information is equal?

00:54:34.160 | Because as a voter, I've got to decide who to vote for, and I've got to evaluate.

00:54:42.600 | And I can't look into all of the economics and all of the relevant science.

00:54:47.960 | And so I just think, maybe it's like Churchill said about democracy, it's the worst system

00:54:56.620 | of government apart from all the rest.

00:54:59.040 | I think about panpsychism, it's the worst theory of consciousness apart from all the

00:55:02.440 | rest.

00:55:03.440 | But I just think expertise, the peer review system, I think it's terrible in so many ways.

00:55:10.960 | Yes, people should show more humility, but I can't see a viable alternative.

00:55:17.000 | I think philosopher Bernard Williams had a really nice nuanced discussion of the problems

00:55:21.300 | of titles, but how they also function in a society.

00:55:27.160 | They do have some positive function.

00:55:28.960 | The very first time I lectured in philosophy, before I got a professorship, was teaching

00:55:39.240 | at a continuing education college.

00:55:41.640 | That's kind of for retired people who want to learn some more things.

00:55:47.920 | And I just totally pitched it too high.

00:55:50.160 | And Gaet talked about Bernard Williams on titles and hierarchies.

00:55:54.880 | And these kind of people in their 70s and 80s were just instantly started interrupting

00:56:00.680 | saying, "What is philosophy?"

00:56:02.240 | And it was a disaster.

00:56:04.480 | And I just remember in the breaks, a sort of elderly lady comes up and said, "I've decided

00:56:08.640 | to take Egyptology instead."

00:56:11.880 | But that was my introduction to teaching.

00:56:16.280 | But sort of titles and accomplishments is a nice starting point, but doesn't buy you

00:56:22.880 | the whole thing.

00:56:24.160 | So you don't get to just say, "This is true because I'm an expert."

00:56:29.880 | You still have to convince people.

00:56:31.880 | One of the things I really like, so I practice martial arts.

00:56:36.360 | And for people who don't know, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is one of them.

00:56:41.040 | And you sometimes wear these pajamas, pajama looking things, and you wear a belt.

00:56:45.760 | So I happen to be a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

00:56:49.640 | And I also train in what's called no gi, so you don't wear the pajamas.

00:56:54.800 | And when you don't wear the pajamas, nobody knows what rank you are.

00:56:59.760 | Nobody knows if you're a black belt or a white belt, or if you're a complete beginner or

00:57:02.800 | not.

00:57:03.920 | And when you wear the pajamas, called the gi, you wear the rank.

00:57:09.680 | And people treat you very differently.

00:57:12.360 | When they see my black belt, they treat me differently.

00:57:15.640 | They kind of defer to my expertise.

00:57:18.760 | If they're kicking my ass, that's probably because I am working on something new, or

00:57:28.720 | maybe I'm letting them win.

00:57:31.000 | But when there's no belts, and it doesn't matter if I've been doing this for 15 years,

00:57:35.800 | it doesn't matter.

00:57:36.800 | None of it matters.

00:57:37.800 | What matters is the raw interaction of just trying to kick each other's ass, and seeing

00:57:45.040 | what is this chess game, like a human chess, what are the ideas that we're playing with?

00:57:51.800 | And I think there's a dance there.

00:57:54.360 | Yes, it's valuable to know a person as a black belt when you take consideration of the advice

00:58:00.640 | of different people, me versus somebody who's only practiced for like a couple of days.

00:58:05.240 | But at the same time, the raw practice of ideas that is combat, and the raw practice

00:58:12.120 | of exchange of ideas that is science, needs to often throw away expertise.

00:58:18.680 | And in communicating, there's another thing to science and expertise, which is leadership.

00:58:25.280 | It's not just, so the scientific method in the review process is this rigorous battle

00:58:30.680 | of ideas between scientists.

00:58:33.740 | But there's also a stepping up and inspiring the world, and communicating ideas to the

00:58:38.920 | world.

00:58:39.920 | And that skill of communication, I suppose that's my biggest criticism of so-called experts

00:58:47.240 | in science, is they're just shitty communicators.

00:58:50.440 | Absolutely.

00:58:51.440 | Yeah.

00:58:52.440 | Well, I can tell you, I get very frustrated with philosophers not reaching out more.

00:58:56.880 | I mean, I think it might be partly that we're trained to get watertight arguments, respond

00:59:03.720 | to all objections.

00:59:05.400 | And as you do that, eventually it gets more complicated and the jargon comes in.

00:59:11.800 | But then if, so to write a more accessible book or article, you have to loosen the arguments

00:59:18.520 | a bit.

00:59:19.520 | And then we worry that other philosophers will think, "Oh, that's a really crap argument."

00:59:22.640 | So I mean, the way I did it, I wrote my academic book first, which is just a fundamental reality.

00:59:28.440 | And then a more accessible book, Galileo's Error, where the arguments, you know, not

00:59:32.040 | as rigorously worked out.

00:59:33.980 | So then I can say the proper arguments, you know, the further arguments there.

00:59:38.120 | But I get very frustrated.

00:59:39.120 | That's brilliantly done, by the way.

00:59:40.120 | Like that's such a, so for people who don't know, you first wrote Consciousness and Fundamental

00:59:46.120 | Reality.

00:59:47.120 | So that's the academic book, also very good.

00:59:49.120 | I flew through it last night, bought it.

00:59:52.200 | And then obviously the popular book is Galileo's Error, Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness.

00:59:58.120 | That's kind of the right way to do it.

01:00:00.320 | To show that you're legit to your community, to the world by doing the book that's normally

01:00:04.000 | going to read, and then doing a popular book that everybody's going to read.

01:00:11.160 | That's cool.

01:00:12.160 | Well, I try now, every time I write an academic article, I try to write a more accessible

01:00:16.800 | version.

01:00:17.800 | I mean, the thing I've been working on recently, just because there's this argument.

01:00:24.280 | So there's a certain argument from the cosmological fine tuning of the laws of physics for life

01:00:31.560 | to the multiverse that's quite popular physicists like Max Tegmark.

01:00:38.640 | There's an argument in philosophy journals that there's a fallacious line of reasoning

01:00:46.880 | going on there from the fine tuning to the multiverse.

01:00:50.300 | Now that argument is from 20, 30 years ago, and it's discussed in academic philosophy.

01:00:56.560 | Nobody knows about it.

01:00:57.560 | And there is huge interest in this fine tuning stuff.

01:01:01.000 | Scientists wanting to argue for the multiverse, theists wanting to say this is evidence for

01:01:04.960 | God and nobody knows about this argument, which tries to show that it's fallacious reasoning

01:01:10.600 | to go from the fine tuning to the multiverse.

01:01:12.880 | So I wrote a piece for Scientific American explaining this argument to a more general

01:01:18.280 | audience.

01:01:19.280 | And it just really irritates me that it's just buried in these technical journal articles

01:01:27.400 | and nobody knows about it.

01:01:29.680 | But just a final thing on that.

01:01:33.800 | I don't disagree with anything you said, and that's kind of really beautiful, that martial

01:01:36.740 | arts example and thinking how that could be analogous.

01:01:41.120 | But I think it's very rare to find a good philosopher who hasn't given a talk to other

01:01:51.600 | philosophers and had objections raised.

01:01:53.920 | I was going to say have it torn apart, but that's maybe thinking of it in the wrong way.

01:01:58.260 | But have the best objections raised to it.

01:02:02.840 | And that's why that is an important formative process that you go through as an academic,

01:02:11.360 | that the greatest minds starting a philosophy degree, for example, won't have gone through,

01:02:19.800 | probably except in very rare cases, just won't have the skills required.

01:02:26.040 | But part of it is just fun to disagree and dance with.

01:02:30.280 | I think to elaborate on what you're saying in agreement, not just gone through that,

01:02:36.640 | but continue to go through that.

01:02:38.240 | Absolutely.

01:02:39.240 | That's, I would say, the biggest problem with "expertise" is that there's a certain point

01:02:44.600 | where you get, because it sucks.

01:02:48.000 | Is martial arts, this is a good example of that, it sucks to get your ass kicked.

01:02:53.360 | There's a temptation.

01:02:54.360 | I still go, I train.

01:02:57.320 | You're getting older too, but also there's killers out there in both the space of martial

01:03:02.200 | arts and the space of science.

01:03:04.800 | And I think that once you become a professor, like more and more senior and more and more

01:03:09.600 | respected, I don't know if you get your ass kicked in the space of ideas as often.

01:03:14.280 | I don't know if you allow yourself to truly expose yourself.

01:03:18.720 | If you do, that's a great sign of a humble, brilliant mind.

01:03:26.320 | Always constantly exposing yourself to that.

01:03:28.480 | I think you do, because I think there's graduate students who want to find the objection to

01:03:35.880 | write their paper or make their mark.

01:03:37.920 | And yeah, I think everyone still gives talks or should give talks and people are wanting

01:03:45.120 | to work out if there are any weaknesses to your position.

01:03:49.120 | So yeah, I think that generally works out.

01:03:53.560 | There is also a kind of, who do you give the talks to?

01:04:00.720 | So I mean, within communities, the little cluster of people that argue and bicker, but

01:04:08.280 | what are they arguing about?

01:04:10.720 | They take a bunch of stuff, a bunch of basic assumptions as agreement, and they heatedly

01:04:17.520 | argue about certain ideas.

01:04:19.520 | The question is how open are...

01:04:21.580 | That's actually kind of like fun.

01:04:22.840 | It's like, no offense, sorry, we're sticking on this martial arts thing.

01:04:26.920 | It's like people who practice Aikido or certain martial arts that don't truly test themselves

01:04:31.960 | in the cage, in combat.

01:04:35.440 | So it's fun to argue about certain things when you're in your own community, but you

01:04:40.640 | don't test those ideas in the full context of science, in the full seriousness, the rigor

01:04:50.460 | of the, sometimes like the real world.

01:04:53.020 | One of my favorite fields is psychology.

01:04:55.720 | There's often places within psychology where you're kind of doing these studies and arguing

01:05:00.460 | about stuff that's done in the lab.

01:05:02.740 | The arguments are almost disjoint from real human behavior because it's so much easier

01:05:10.340 | to study human behavior in the lab.

01:05:12.380 | You just kind of stay there and that's where the arguments are.

01:05:15.540 | Vision science is a good example, like studying eye movement and how we perceive the world

01:05:19.860 | and all that kind of stuff.

01:05:20.860 | It's so much easier to study in a lab that we don't consider, we say that's going to

01:05:25.660 | be what the science of vision is going to be like.

01:05:27.900 | And we don't consider the science of vision in the actual real world, the engineering

01:05:31.660 | of vision, I don't know.

01:05:32.660 | And so I think that's where exposing yourself to out of the box ideas, that's the most painful,

01:05:39.820 | that's the most important.

01:05:40.820 | - I mean, group think can be a terrible thing in philosophy as well, but because you're

01:05:44.660 | not to the same extent beholden to evidence and refutation from the evidence that you

01:05:51.020 | are in the sciences, it's a more subtle process of evaluation and so more susceptible, I think,

01:05:57.380 | to group think.

01:05:58.380 | Yeah, I agree, it's a danger.

01:06:01.220 | - We've talked about it a million times, but let's try to sort of do that old basic terminology

01:06:07.420 | definitions.

01:06:08.820 | What is panpsychism?

01:06:10.460 | Like what are the different ways you can try to think about, to define panpsychism maybe

01:06:17.460 | in contrast to naturalistic dualism and materialism, other kind of views of consciousness?

01:06:26.060 | - Yeah, so you've basically laid out the different options.

01:06:31.520 | So I guess probably still the dominant view is materialism, that roughly that we can explain

01:06:39.140 | consciousness in the terms of physical science, wholly explain it just in terms of the electrochemical

01:06:46.060 | signaling in the brain.

01:06:48.100 | Dualism, the polar opposite view, that consciousness is non-physical outside of the physical workings

01:06:57.080 | of the body and the brain, although closely connected.

01:07:01.660 | And when I studied philosophy, we were taught basically they were the two options you had

01:07:05.540 | to choose, right?

01:07:06.540 | Either you thought it were dualist and you thought it was separate from the physical,

01:07:11.020 | or you thought it was just electrochemical signaling.

01:07:14.220 | And yeah, I became very disillusioned because I think there are big problems with both of

01:07:18.220 | these options.

01:07:19.220 | So I think the attraction of panpsychism is it's kind of a middle way.

01:07:23.340 | It agrees with the materialist that there's just the physical world.

01:07:26.540 | Ultimately, there's just particles and fields, but the panpsychist thinks there's more to

01:07:34.660 | the physical than what physical science reveals, and that the ultimate nature of the physical

01:07:40.940 | world is constituted of consciousness.

01:07:43.940 | So consciousness is not outside of the physical as the dualist thinks, it's embedded in, underlies

01:07:51.740 | the kind of description of the world we get from physics.

01:07:55.820 | What to you are the problems of materialism and dualism?

01:08:01.140 | Starting with materialism, it's a huge debate, but I think that the core of it is that physical

01:08:09.140 | science works with a purely quantitative description of the physical world, whereas consciousness

01:08:16.540 | essentially involves qualities.

01:08:18.700 | If you think about the smell of coffee or the taste of mint or the deep red you experience

01:08:25.600 | as you watch a sunset, I think these qualities can't be captured in the purely quantitative

01:08:32.460 | language of physical science.

01:08:33.900 | So as long as your description of the brain is framed in the purely quantitative language

01:08:39.700 | of neuroscience, you'll just leave out these qualities and hence really leave out consciousness

01:08:45.140 | itself.

01:08:46.140 | And then dualism?

01:08:47.840 | So I've actually changed my mind a little bit on this since I wrote the book.

01:08:52.300 | So I argued in the book that we have pretty good experimental grounds for doubting dualism.

01:08:59.540 | And roughly the idea was if dualism were true, if there was say an immaterial mind impacting

01:09:09.020 | on the brain every second of waking life, that this would really show up in our neuroscience.

01:09:13.780 | There'd be all sorts of things happening in the brain that had no physical explanation.

01:09:19.300 | It would be like a poltergeist was playing with the brain.

01:09:24.260 | But actually, and so the fact that we don't find that is a strong and ever-growing inductive

01:09:30.760 | argument against dualism.

01:09:32.860 | But actually, the more I talk to neuroscientists and read neuroscience, and we have at Durham,

01:09:37.980 | my university, an interdisciplinary consciousness group, I don't think we know enough about

01:09:43.260 | the brain, about the workings of the brain to make that argument.

01:09:47.660 | I think we know a lot about the basic chemistry, how neurons fire, neurotransmitters, action

01:09:56.020 | potentials, things like that.

01:09:57.500 | We know a fair bit about large-scale functions of the brain, what different bits of the brain

01:10:02.180 | do.

01:10:03.180 | But what we're almost clueless on is how those large-scale functions are realized at the

01:10:10.460 | cellular level, how it works.

01:10:14.420 | People get quite excited about brain scans, but it's very low resolution.

01:10:18.860 | Every pixel on a brain scan corresponds to 5.5 million neurons.

01:10:24.100 | And we're only 70% of the way through constructing a connectome for the maggot brain, which has

01:10:32.260 | 10,000 or 100,000 neurons, but the brain has 86 billion neurons.

01:10:37.380 | So I think we'd have to know a lot more about how the brain works, how these functions are

01:10:43.780 | realized before we could assess whether the dynamics of the brain can be completely explicated

01:10:52.740 | in terms of underlying chemistry or physics.

01:10:55.940 | So we'd have to do more engineering before we could figure that out.

01:11:02.060 | And there are people with other proposals.

01:11:04.900 | Someone I got to know, Martin Picard at Columbia University, who has the psychobiology mitochondrial

01:11:10.660 | lab there and is experimentally exploring the hypothesis that mitochondria in the brain

01:11:15.940 | should be understood as sort of social networks, perhaps as an alternative to reducing it to

01:11:21.900 | underlying chemistry and physics.

01:11:24.700 | So it is ultimately an empirical question whether dualism is true.

01:11:30.220 | I'm less convinced that we know the answer to that question at this stage.

01:11:35.100 | I think still as scientists and philosophers, we want to try and find the simplest, most

01:11:40.260 | parsimonious theory of reality.

01:11:44.700 | And dualism is still a pretty inelegant, unparsimonious theory.

01:11:49.820 | Reality is divided up into the purely physical properties and these consciousness properties,

01:11:55.860 | and they're radically different kinds of things.

01:11:58.140 | Whereas the panpsychist offers a much more simple, unified picture of reality.

01:12:01.980 | So I think it's still the view to be preferred, to put it very simply, why believe in two

01:12:06.060 | kinds of things when you can just get away with one?

01:12:08.820 | - And materialism is also very simple, but you're saying it doesn't explain something

01:12:15.140 | that seems pretty important.

01:12:16.580 | - Yeah, so I think materialism, science is about trying to find the simplest theory that

01:12:22.020 | accounts for the data.

01:12:23.380 | I don't think materialism can account for the data.

01:12:26.380 | Maybe dualism can account for the data, but panpsychism is simpler.

01:12:31.060 | It can account for the data and it's simpler.

01:12:33.820 | - What is panpsychism?

01:12:37.340 | - So in its broadest definition, it's the view that consciousness is a fundamental and

01:12:43.300 | ubiquitous feature of the physical world.

01:12:47.380 | - Like a law of physics, what should we be imagining?

01:12:50.340 | What do you think the different flavors of how that actually takes shape in the context

01:12:54.540 | of what we know about physics and science and the universe?

01:12:57.540 | - So in the simplest form of it, the fundamental building blocks of reality, perhaps electrons

01:13:02.020 | and quarks, have incredibly simple forms of experience and the very complex experience

01:13:08.220 | of the human or animal brain is somehow rooted in or derived from these very simple forms

01:13:14.940 | of experience at the level of basic physics.

01:13:17.700 | But I mean, maybe the crucial bit about the kind of panpsychism I defend, what it does

01:13:24.100 | is it takes the standard approach to the problem of consciousness and turns it on its head,

01:13:31.100 | right?

01:13:32.100 | So the standard approach is to think we start with matter and we think, "How do we get consciousness

01:13:38.780 | out of matter?"

01:13:39.780 | So I don't think that problem can be solved for reasons I've kind of hinted at.

01:13:43.660 | We could maybe go into more detail.

01:13:45.700 | But the panpsychist does it the other way around.

01:13:48.660 | They start with consciousness and try to get matter out of consciousness.

01:13:53.380 | So the idea is basically at the fundamental level of reality, there are just networks

01:14:01.180 | of very simple conscious entities.

01:14:05.060 | But these conscious entities, because they have very simple kinds of experience, they

01:14:09.420 | behave in predictable ways.

01:14:11.660 | Through their interactions, they realize certain mathematical structures.

01:14:15.420 | And then the idea is those mathematical structures just are the structures identified by physics.

01:14:22.040 | So when we think about these simple conscious entities in terms of the mathematical structures

01:14:27.860 | they realize, we call them particles, we call them fields, we call their properties mass,

01:14:34.020 | spin and charge.

01:14:35.500 | But really there's just these very simple conscious entities and their experiences.

01:14:40.980 | So in this way, we get physics out of consciousness.

01:14:45.620 | I don't think you can get consciousness out of physics, but I think it's pretty easy to

01:14:48.300 | get physics out of consciousness.

01:14:50.300 | - Well, I'm a little confused by why you need to get physics out of consciousness.

01:14:57.580 | I mean, to me, it sounds like panpsychism unites consciousness and physics.

01:15:03.780 | I mean, physics is the mathematical science of describing everything.

01:15:11.300 | So physics should be able to describe consciousness.

01:15:15.300 | And my understanding proposes is that physics doesn't currently do so, but can in the future.

01:15:22.460 | It seems like consciousness, you have like Stephen Wolfram, all these people who are

01:15:27.780 | trying to develop theories of everything, mathematical frameworks within which to describe

01:15:36.620 | how we get all the reality that we perceive around us.

01:15:40.140 | To me, there's no reason why that kind of framework cannot also include some accurate,

01:15:47.180 | precise description of whatever simple consciousness characteristics are present there at the lowest

01:15:55.540 | level if panpsychist theories have truth to them.

01:16:00.380 | So to me, it is physics.

01:16:02.020 | You said kind of physics emerges, by which you mean like the basic four laws of physics

01:16:06.360 | that as we currently know them, the standard model, quantum mechanics, general relativity,

01:16:11.500 | that emerges from the base consciousness layer.

01:16:15.100 | That's what you mean.

01:16:16.100 | - Yeah.

01:16:17.100 | So maybe the way I phrased it made it sound like these things are more separate than they

01:16:20.300 | are.

01:16:21.300 | What I was trying to address was a common misunderstanding of panpsychism that it's a

01:16:28.340 | sort of dualistic theory.

01:16:32.740 | The idea is that particles have their physical properties like mass, spin and charge, and

01:16:38.260 | these other funny consciousness properties.

01:16:40.260 | So the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder had a blog post critiquing panpsychism maybe a couple

01:16:45.380 | of years ago now that got a fair bit of traction.

01:16:48.260 | And she was interpreting panpsychism in this way.

01:16:52.140 | And then her thought was, "Well, look, if particles had these funny consciousness properties,

01:16:56.780 | then it would show up in our physics, like the standard model of particle physics would

01:17:00.700 | make false predictions because its predictions are based wholly on the physical properties.

01:17:05.400 | If there were also these consciousness properties, we'd get different predictions."

01:17:09.780 | But that's a misunderstanding of the view.

01:17:11.020 | The view is, it's not that there are two kinds of property, that mass, spin and charge are

01:17:17.860 | forms of consciousness.

01:17:19.620 | How do we make sense of that?

01:17:20.860 | Because actually, when you look at what physics tells us, it's really just telling us about

01:17:26.940 | behavior, about what stuff does.

01:17:29.340 | I sometimes put it by saying, "Doing physics is like playing chess when you don't care

01:17:33.340 | what the pieces are made of.

01:17:34.340 | You're just interested in what moves you can make."

01:17:36.580 | So physics tells us what mass, spin and charge do, but it doesn't tell us what they are.

01:17:45.020 | So the idea-

01:17:46.260 | The experience of mass.

01:17:48.220 | So the idea is, yeah, mass in its nature is a very simple form of consciousness.

01:17:52.340 | So yeah, physics in a sense is complete, I think, because it tells us what everything

01:17:57.260 | at the fundamental level does, it describes its causal capacities.

01:18:02.180 | But for the panpsychist at least, physics doesn't tell us what matter is, it tells us

01:18:08.180 | what it does, but not what it is.

01:18:12.460 | To push back on the thing I think she's criticizing, is it also possible- so I understand what

01:18:17.100 | you're saying- but is it also possible that particles have another property like consciousness?

01:18:22.500 | I don't understand the criticism we would be able to detect it in our experiments.

01:18:27.260 | Well, no, if you're not looking for it.

01:18:31.260 | There's a lot of stuff that are orthogonal.

01:18:35.460 | If you're not looking for the stuff, you're not going to detect it, because all of our

01:18:39.980 | basic empirical science through its recent history, and yes, the history of science is

01:18:45.180 | quite recent, has been very focused on billiard balls colliding, and from that understanding

01:18:54.400 | how gravity works.

01:18:56.620 | We just haven't integrated other possibilities into this.

01:19:00.460 | I don't think there will be conflicting, whether you are observing consciousness or not, or

01:19:04.820 | exploring some of these ideas, I don't think that affects the rest of the physics.

01:19:10.620 | The mass, the energy, all the different kind of hierarchy of different particles and so

01:19:17.340 | on, how they interact.

01:19:21.540 | It feels like consciousness is something orthogonal, very much distinct.

01:19:27.020 | The quantitative versus the qualitative, there's something quite distinct, almost like another

01:19:32.860 | dimension that we're just completely ignoring.

01:19:35.340 | There might be a way of responding to Sabina to say, well, there could be properties of

01:19:40.740 | particles that don't show up in the specific circumstances in which physicists investigate

01:19:46.500 | particles.

01:19:47.500 | My colleague, the philosopher of science, Nancy Cartwright, has got this book, How the

01:19:50.820 | Laws of Physics Lie, where she says, physicists explore things in very specific circumstances

01:19:58.540 | and then in an unwarranted way, generalize that.

01:20:01.660 | But I mean, I guess I was thinking Sabina's criticism actually just misses the mark in

01:20:06.300 | a more basic way.

01:20:07.620 | Her point is, we shouldn't think there are any more properties to particles other than

01:20:11.860 | those the standard model attributes to them.

01:20:14.020 | Panpsychics would say, yeah, sure, there aren't.

01:20:16.860 | There are just the properties, the physical properties like mass, spin, and charge that

01:20:21.380 | the standard model attributes to them.

01:20:22.620 | It's just that we have a different philosophical view as to the nature of those properties.

01:20:28.140 | - So those properties are turtles that are sitting on top of another turtle and that

01:20:31.940 | big turtle is consciousness.

01:20:33.820 | That's what you're saying.

01:20:35.060 | But I'm just saying, it's possible that's true.

01:20:39.300 | It's possible also that consciousness is just another turtle playing with the others.

01:20:44.420 | It's just not interacting in the ways that we've been observing.

01:20:47.500 | In fact, to me, that's more compelling because then that's going to be...

01:20:51.860 | - Well, no, I think both are very compelling, but it feels like it's more within the reach

01:20:58.260 | of empirical validation if it's yet another property of particles that we're just not

01:21:03.980 | observing.

01:21:04.980 | If it's like the thing from which matter and energy and physics emerges, it makes it that

01:21:16.980 | much more difficult to investigate how you get from that base layer of consciousness

01:21:23.780 | to the wonderful little spark of consciousness, complexity, and beauty that is the human being.

01:21:32.700 | I don't know if you're necessarily trying to get there, but one of the beautiful things

01:21:37.860 | to get at with panpsychism or with a solid theory of consciousness is to answer the question,

01:21:44.860 | how do you engineer the thing?

01:21:47.780 | How do you get from nothing, vacuum in the lab, if there is that consciousness base layer,

01:21:55.780 | how do you start engineering organisms that have consciousness in them?

01:22:00.580 | Or the reverse of that, describing how does consciousness emerge in the human being from

01:22:07.140 | conception, from a stem cell to the whole full neurobiology that builds from that, how

01:22:13.420 | do you get this full, rich experience of consciousness that humans have?

01:22:19.420 | It feels like that's the dream, and if consciousness is just another player in the game of physics,

01:22:26.820 | it feels more amenable to our scientific understanding of it.

01:22:30.900 | That's interesting.

01:22:31.900 | I mean, I guess it's supposed to be a kind of identity claim here that physics tells

01:22:36.500 | us what matter does, consciousness is what matter is.

01:22:43.220 | So matter is sort of what consciousness does.

01:22:46.580 | So at the bottom level, there is just consciousness and conscious things.

01:22:51.700 | There are just these simple things with their experiences, and that is their total nature.

01:22:56.820 | So in that sense, it's not another player, it's just all there is really.

01:23:02.500 | And then in physics, we describe that at a certain level of abstraction.

01:23:09.060 | We capture what Bertrand Russell, who was the inspiration for a lot of this, calls the

01:23:13.900 | causal skeleton of the world.

01:23:16.300 | So physics is just interested in the causal skeleton of the world, it's not interested

01:23:19.420 | in the flesh and blood, although that's maybe suggesting separation again too much, all

01:23:25.620 | metaphors fail in the end.

01:23:27.660 | But yeah, so you're totally right.

01:23:32.260 | Ultimately, what we want to explain is how our consciousness and the consciousness of

01:23:37.580 | other animals comes out of this.

01:23:39.300 | If we can't do that, then it's game over.

01:23:42.060 | But I think it maybe makes more sense on the identity claim that if matter at the fundamental

01:23:49.580 | level just is forms of consciousness, then we can perhaps make sense of how those simple

01:23:54.860 | forms of consciousness in some way combine in some way to make the consciousness we know

01:23:59.660 | and love, that's the dream.

01:24:01.060 | - Yeah, so I guess the question is, so the reason you can describe, the reason you have

01:24:09.420 | material engineering, material science, is because you have from physics to chemistry,

01:24:18.220 | you keep going up and up in levels of complexity in order to describe objects that we have

01:24:26.900 | in our human world.

01:24:29.940 | And it would be nice to do the same thing for consciousness, to come up with the chemistry

01:24:33.700 | of consciousness, right?

01:24:35.660 | Like how do the different particles interact to create greater complexity?

01:24:42.820 | So you can do this kind of thing for life, like what is life?

01:24:46.460 | Like living organisms, at which point do living organisms become living?

01:24:53.500 | How do you know if I give you a thing, that that thing is living?

01:24:59.100 | There's a lot of people who work on this kind of idea, and some of that has to do with the

01:25:03.420 | levels of complexity and so on.

01:25:05.580 | It'd be nice to know like measuring different degrees of consciousness as you get into bigger

01:25:11.660 | and more and more complex objects.

01:25:14.500 | And that's what chemistry, like bigger and bigger conscious molecules, and to see how

01:25:19.540 | that leads to organisms.

01:25:21.780 | And then organisms start to collaborate together like they do inside our human body to create

01:25:26.660 | the full human body, to do those kinds of experiments would be, it seems like that would

01:25:31.660 | be kind of a goal.

01:25:33.700 | That's what I mean by player in a game of physics, as opposed to like the base layer.

01:25:38.140 | If it's just the base layer, it becomes harder to track it as you get from physics to chemistry

01:25:44.140 | to biology to psychology.

01:25:47.260 | - Yeah, in every case apart from consciousness, I would say what we're interested in is behavior.

01:25:56.140 | We're interested in explaining behavioral functions.

01:25:58.940 | So the level of fundamental physics, we're interested in capturing the equations that

01:26:02.660 | describe the behavior there.

01:26:04.300 | And when we get to higher levels, we're interested in explicating the behavior, perhaps in terms

01:26:10.500 | of behavior at simpler levels.

01:26:14.140 | And with life as well, that's what we're interested in, the various observable functions of life,

01:26:20.140 | explaining them in terms of more simple mechanisms.

01:26:23.780 | But in the case of consciousness, I don't think that's what we're doing, or at least

01:26:28.420 | not all that we're doing.

01:26:31.780 | In the case of consciousness, there are these subjective qualities that we're immediately

01:26:37.620 | aware of, the redness of a red experience, the itchiness of an itch, and we're trying

01:26:43.900 | to account for them.

01:26:45.060 | We're trying to bring them into our theory of reality.

01:26:48.300 | And postulating some mechanism does not deal with that.

01:26:52.260 | I think we've got to realize dealing with consciousness is a radically different explanatory

01:26:56.300 | task from other tasks of science.

01:26:58.740 | Other tasks of science, we're trying to explain behavior in terms of simpler forms of behavior.

01:27:03.540 | In the case of consciousness, we're trying to explain these invisible subjective qualities

01:27:09.100 | that you can't see from the outside, but that you're immediately aware of.

01:27:13.480 | The reason materialism perhaps continues to dominate is people think, "Look at the success

01:27:18.080 | of science.

01:27:19.080 | It's incredible.

01:27:20.080 | It's explained all this.

01:27:22.520 | Surely it's going to explain consciousness."

01:27:23.760 | But I think we have to appreciate there's a radically different explanatory task here.

01:27:31.880 | The neuroscientist Anil Seth, who I've had lots of intense but friendly discussions with,

01:27:36.920 | wants to compare consciousness to life.

01:27:40.400 | But I think there's this radical difference that in the case of life, again, we come back

01:27:45.200 | to public observation, all of the data, publicly observable data, we're basically trying to

01:27:52.040 | explain complex behavior.

01:27:53.960 | The way you do that is identify mechanisms, simpler mechanisms that explicate that behavior.

01:28:00.240 | That's the task in physics, chemistry, neurobiology.

01:28:05.920 | But in the case of consciousness, that's not what we're trying to do.

01:28:08.000 | We're trying to account for these subjective qualities and you postulate a mechanism that

01:28:14.560 | might explain behavior, but it doesn't explain the redness of a red experience.

01:28:21.560 | But still, ultimately, the hope is that we will have some kind of hierarchical story.

01:28:26.760 | So we take the causal dynamics of physics, we hypothesize that that's filled out with

01:28:32.320 | certain forms of consciousness.

01:28:36.480 | And then at higher levels, we get more complex causal dynamics filled out by more complex

01:28:43.160 | forms of consciousness.

01:28:44.520 | And ultimately we get to us, hopefully.

01:28:48.920 | So yeah, so there's still a sort of hierarchical explanatory framework there.

01:28:52.360 | - So you kind of mentioned the hierarchy of consciousness.

01:28:57.160 | Do you think it's possible to, within the Pansychism framework, to measure consciousness?

01:29:06.000 | Or put another way, are some things more conscious than others in the Pansychist view?

01:29:15.840 | - It's a difficult question.

01:29:16.840 | I mean, I do see consciousness as a dealing with consciousness and interdisciplinary task

01:29:25.500 | between something more experimental, which has to do with the ongoing project of trying

01:29:31.360 | to work out what people call the neural correlates of consciousness, what kinds of physical brain

01:29:37.740 | activity correspond to conscious experience.

01:29:41.880 | That's one part of it, but I think essentially there's also a theoretical question of more

01:29:48.400 | the why question.

01:29:50.040 | Why do those kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of conscious experience?

01:29:56.960 | I don't think you can answer that.

01:29:59.020 | Because consciousness is not publicly observable, I don't think you can answer that why question

01:30:04.140 | with an experiment.

01:30:06.680 | But they have to go hand in hand.

01:30:08.480 | And I mean, one of the theories I'm attracted to is the integrated information theory, according

01:30:14.880 | to which we find consciousness at the level at which there is most integrated information.

01:30:21.180 | And they try to give a mathematically precise definition of that.

01:30:25.040 | So on that view, probably this cup of tea isn't conscious because there's probably more

01:30:31.420 | integrated information in the molecules making up the tea than there is in the liquid as

01:30:36.440 | a whole.

01:30:37.520 | But in the brain, what is distinctive about the brain is that there's a huge amount of

01:30:42.840 | integrated, there's more integrated information in the system than there is in individual

01:30:47.500 | neurons.

01:30:48.500 | So that's why they claim that that's the basis of consciousness at the macro level.

01:30:54.960 | Now they, so I don't, I mean, I like some features of this theory, but they do talk

01:31:00.520 | about degrees of consciousness.

01:31:03.000 | They do want to say there is gradations.

01:31:06.440 | I'm not sure conceptually I can kind of make sense of that.

01:31:10.720 | I mean, there are things to do with consciousness that are graded like complexity or levels

01:31:20.640 | of information.

01:31:22.500 | But I'm not sure whether experience itself admits a degree.

01:31:26.600 | I sort of think something either has experience or it doesn't.

01:31:31.160 | It might have very simple experience, it might have very complex experience, but experience

01:31:37.520 | itself I don't think it admits a degree in that sense.

01:31:40.840 | It's not more experience, less experience.

01:31:44.640 | I sort of find that conceptually hard to make sense of, but I'm kind of open-minded on it.

01:31:50.040 | - So when we have a lot higher resolution of sensory information, don't you think that's

01:31:59.440 | correlated to the richness of the experience?

01:32:04.980 | So doesn't more information provide a richer experience?

01:32:09.160 | Or is that, again, thinking quantitatively and not thinking about the subjective experience?

01:32:14.340 | Like you can experience a lot with very little sensory information perhaps.

01:32:21.060 | Do you think those are connected?

01:32:22.660 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:32:23.740 | So there are features, characteristics here we can grade, the complexity of the experience.

01:32:34.220 | And on the integrated information theory, they correlate that in terms of mathematically

01:32:42.780 | identifiable structure with integrated information.

01:32:45.980 | So roughly, it's a quite unusual notion of information.

01:32:48.820 | It's perhaps not the standard way one thinks about information.

01:32:53.140 | It's to do with constraining past and future possibilities of the system.

01:32:59.340 | So the idea is in the retina of the eye, there's a huge amount of possible states the retina

01:33:06.300 | of my eye could be in at the next moment, depending on what light goes into it.

01:33:11.620 | Whereas the possible next states of the brain are much more constrained.

01:33:15.020 | Obviously, it responds to the environment, but it heavily constrains its past and future

01:33:22.780 | states.

01:33:23.980 | And so that's the idea of information they have.

01:33:26.860 | And then the second idea is how much that information is dependent on integration.

01:33:34.760 | So in a computer where you have transistors, you take out a few transistors, you might

01:33:40.860 | not lose that much information.

01:33:42.500 | It's not dependent on interconnections, whereas you take a tiny bit of the brain out, you

01:33:46.700 | lose a lot of information because the way it stores information is dependent on the

01:33:52.300 | interconnections of the system.

01:33:54.540 | So yeah, so that's one proposal for how to measure one gradable characteristic, which

01:34:02.700 | might correspond to some gradable characteristic in qualitative consciousness.

01:34:08.780 | Maybe I'm being very pedantic, which is, you know, philosophers professional pedant.

01:34:12.580 | I just sort of don't think that is a quantity of experience.

01:34:18.620 | It's a quantity of the structure of experience maybe, but I just find it hard to make sense

01:34:25.180 | of the idea of how much experience do you have?

01:34:27.420 | I've got, you know, five units of experience.

01:34:31.300 | I've got one unit of experience.

01:34:32.420 | I don't know.

01:34:33.420 | I find that a bit hard to make sense of.

01:34:37.340 | But maybe I'm being just pedantic.

01:34:38.980 | I think just saying the word experience is difficult to think about.

01:34:45.900 | Let's talk about suffering.

01:34:47.700 | Let's talk about a particular experience.

01:34:50.140 | So let's talk about me and a hamster.

01:34:54.460 | I just think that, no offense to the hamster.

01:34:58.940 | Probably no hamsters are listening.

01:35:01.300 | So now you're offending hamsters too.

01:35:03.160 | Maybe there's a hamster that's just pissed off.

01:35:05.740 | There's probably somebody on a speaker right now, like listening to this podcast and they

01:35:12.940 | probably have a hamster or a guinea pig and that hamster is listening.

01:35:17.780 | It just doesn't know the English language or any kind of human interpretable linguistic

01:35:23.300 | capabilities to tell you to fuck off.

01:35:27.260 | It understands exactly what's being talked about and can see through us.

01:35:33.900 | Anyway, it just feels like a hamster has less capacity to suffer than me.

01:35:42.180 | And maybe a cockroach or an insect or maybe a bacteria has less capacity to suffer than

01:35:51.820 | me.

01:35:53.820 | But maybe that's me deluding myself as to the complexity of my conscious experience.

01:36:01.900 | Maybe there is some sense in which I can suffer more, but to reduce it to something quantifiable

01:36:12.380 | is impossible.

01:36:13.380 | Yeah, I guess I definitely think there's kinds of suffering that you have the joy of being

01:36:22.140 | possible for you that aren't available to a hamster.

01:36:26.100 | I don't think... well, can a hamster suffer heartbreak?

01:36:31.860 | I don't know.

01:36:33.220 | Can a cockroach suffer heartbreak?

01:36:34.740 | But certainly there's kinds of fear of your own death, concern about whether there's a

01:36:42.140 | purpose to existence.

01:36:44.400 | These are forms of suffering that aren't available to most non-human animals.

01:36:52.060 | Whatever there's an overall scale that we could put physical and emotional suffering

01:36:57.620 | on and identify where you are on that scale, I'm not so sure.

01:37:05.220 | So it's like humans have a much bigger menu of experiences, much bigger selection in the...

01:37:13.260 | In one sense, at least.

01:37:15.340 | There's like a page that's suffering.

01:37:17.140 | So this menu of experiences, you know, like you have the omelets and the breakfast and

01:37:21.940 | so on, and one of the pages is suffering.

01:37:24.300 | It's just we have a lot compared to a hamster, a lot more.

01:37:29.580 | But in one individual thing that we share with a hamster, that experience... it's difficult

01:37:36.460 | to argue that we experience it deeper than others, like hunger or something like that.

01:37:41.420 | Yeah, physical pain, I'm not sure.

01:37:45.060 | I mean, there are kinds of experiences animals have that we don't.

01:37:48.020 | Bats echolocate around the world.

01:37:52.540 | The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously pointed out that no matter how much you understand

01:37:57.300 | of the neurophysiology of bats, you'll still not know what it's like to squeal and find

01:38:04.260 | your way around by listening to the echoes bounce off.

01:38:08.300 | So yeah, I mean, I guess I feel the intuition that there's emotional suffering is, I want

01:38:16.780 | to say, deeper than physical suffering.

01:38:19.980 | I don't know how to make that statement precise, though.

01:38:23.100 | So one of the ways I think about, I think people think about consciousness is in connection

01:38:28.300 | to suffering.

01:38:29.300 | So let me just ask about suffering, because that's how people think about animals.

01:38:35.460 | Cruelty to animals or cruelty to living things.

01:38:38.780 | They connect that to suffering and to consciousness.

01:38:42.940 | I think there's a sense in which those two are deeply connected when people are thinking

01:38:50.260 | about just public policy, they're thinking about philosophy, engineering, psychology,

01:38:59.980 | sociology, political science.

01:39:02.660 | All of those things have to do with human suffering and animal suffering, life suffering.

01:39:07.860 | And that's connected to consciousness in a lot of people's minds.

01:39:11.340 | Is it connected like that for you?

01:39:13.340 | So the capacity to suffer, is it also somehow strongly correlated with the capacity to experience

01:39:23.660 | consciously?

01:39:24.660 | Yeah, I would say suffering is a kind of experience.

01:39:29.700 | And so you have to be conscious to suffer.

01:39:33.780 | Actually, there's people taking more unusual views of consciousness seriously now.

01:39:42.580 | Panpsychism is one radical approach.

01:39:46.580 | Another one is what's become known as illusionism, the view that consciousness, at least in the

01:39:52.420 | sense that philosophers think about it, doesn't really exist at all.

01:39:56.260 | So yeah, my podcast Mind Chat, I host with a committed illusionist.

01:40:03.280 | So the gimmick is I think consciousness is everywhere, he thinks it's nowhere.

01:40:08.940 | So that's one very simple way of avoiding all these problems, right?

01:40:14.180 | If consciousness doesn't exist, we don't need to explain it, job done.

01:40:18.120 | Although we might still have to explain why we seem to be conscious, why it's so hard

01:40:22.660 | to get out of the idea that we're conscious.

01:40:24.540 | But the reason I connect this to what you're saying is actually my co-host, Keith Frankish,

01:40:31.380 | is a little bit ambivalent on the word pain.

01:40:32.980 | He says, "Oh, in some sense, I believe in pain and in some sense, I don't."

01:40:37.460 | But another illusionist, Francois Camara, has a paper discussing how we think about

01:40:44.540 | morality given his view that pain, in the way we normally think about it, just does

01:40:48.900 | not exist.

01:40:50.100 | He thinks it's an illusion.

01:40:51.100 | The brain tricks us into thinking we feel pain, but we don't.

01:40:55.100 | And how we should think about morality in the light of that, it's become a big topic

01:41:01.380 | actually thinking about the connection between consciousness and morality.

01:41:05.020 | David Chalmers, the philosopher, is most associated with this concept of a philosophical zombie.

01:41:12.020 | So a philosophical zombie is very different from a Hollywood zombie.

01:41:16.460 | Hollywood zombies, you know what they're like.

01:41:19.660 | But philosophical zombies are...

01:41:21.180 | I saw a really good Korean zombie movie on Halloween this year.

01:41:25.700 | I can't remember what it's called.

01:41:27.700 | Anyway, philosophical zombies behave just like us because the physical workings of their

01:41:32.140 | body and brain are the same as ours, but they have no conscious experience.

01:41:36.500 | There's nothing that's like to be a zombie.

01:41:38.180 | So you stick a knife in it, it screams and runs away, but it doesn't actually feel pain.

01:41:44.020 | It's just a complicated mechanism set up to behave just like us.

01:41:50.900 | Now there's lots of...

01:41:51.900 | No one believes in these.

01:41:52.900 | I think there's one philosopher who believes in everyone is a zombie except him.

01:41:56.660 | But anyway...

01:41:57.660 | But isn't that what illusionism is?

01:41:58.660 | Is believing everybody is kind of zombie?

01:41:59.660 | Yeah, I suppose so in a sense.

01:42:02.100 | Illusionism is if you were all zombies.

01:42:03.940 | And one reason to think about zombies is to think about the value of consciousness.

01:42:09.280 | So if there were a zombie, here's a question, suppose we could make zombies by...

01:42:16.660 | Let's say for the sake of discussion, things made of silicon aren't conscious.

01:42:20.260 | I don't know if that's true.

01:42:21.260 | It could turn out to be true.

01:42:22.520 | And suppose you built commander data out of silicon.

01:42:27.260 | You know, it's a bit of an old school reference to Star Trek New Generation.

01:42:31.320 | So it behaves just like a human being, but you can have a sophisticated conversation.

01:42:38.060 | It will talk about its hopes and fears, but it has no consciousness.

01:42:42.100 | Does it have moral rights?

01:42:46.720 | Is it murder to turn off such a being?

01:42:50.640 | You know, I'm inclined to say, no, it's not.

01:42:53.820 | You know, if it doesn't have experience, it doesn't really suffer.

01:42:57.060 | It doesn't really have moral rights at all.

01:42:59.340 | So I'm inclined to think consciousness is the basis of moral value, moral concern.

01:43:08.460 | And conversely, as a panpsychist, for this reason, I think it can transform your relationship

01:43:15.380 | with nature.

01:43:16.380 | If you think of a tree as a conscious organism, albeit of a very unusual kind, then a tree

01:43:23.620 | is a locus of moral concern in its own right.

01:43:29.540 | Chopping down a tree is an act of immediate moral concern.

01:43:31.940 | If you see these horrible forest fires, we're all horrified.

01:43:37.800 | But if you think it's the burning of conscious organisms, that does add a whole new dimension.

01:43:43.740 | Although it also makes things more complicated because people often think as a panpsychist,

01:43:48.460 | I'm going to be vegan.

01:43:50.460 | But it's tricky because if you think plants and trees are conscious as well, you've got

01:43:55.420 | to eat something.

01:43:56.420 | If you don't think plants and trees are conscious, then you've got a nice moral dividing line.

01:44:01.100 | You can say, I'm not going to eat things that aren't conscious.

01:44:03.180 | I'm not going to kill things that aren't conscious.

01:44:05.620 | But if you think plants and trees are conscious, then you don't have that nice moral dividing

01:44:11.700 | line.

01:44:12.700 | I mean, so the principle I'm kind of working my way towards, I haven't kept it up in my

01:44:17.780 | trip to the US, but it's just not eating any animal products that are factory farmed.

01:44:24.780 | My vegan friends say, well, they're still suffering there.

01:44:26.940 | And I think there is, even in the nicest farms, cows will suffer when their calves are taken

01:44:35.900 | off them.

01:44:36.900 | They go for a few days of quite serious mourning.

01:44:38.860 | So they're still suffering.

01:44:39.860 | But it seems to me, my thought is the principle of just not having factory farm stuff is something

01:44:46.780 | more people could get on board with, and you might have greater harm minimization.

01:44:50.980 | So if people went into restaurants and said, are your animal products factory farmed?

01:44:55.940 | If not, I want the vegan option.

01:44:58.660 | Or if people looked out for the label that said no factory farmed ingredients, I think

01:45:03.140 | maybe that that could make a really big difference to the market and harm minimization.

01:45:07.740 | Anyway, so that's the...

01:45:10.220 | So it's very ethically tricky, but some people don't buy that.

01:45:13.060 | There's a very good philosopher, Jeff Lee, who thinks zombies should have equal rights.

01:45:17.540 | Consciousness doesn't matter.

01:45:20.300 | Let us go there.

01:45:21.940 | But first, I listened to your podcast.

01:45:25.360 | It's awesome to have two very kind of different philosophies inter dancing together in one

01:45:32.940 | place.

01:45:33.940 | What's the name of the podcast again?

01:45:35.660 | Mind Chat.

01:45:36.660 | Yeah.

01:45:37.660 | So yeah, that's the idea, I guess, you know, polarized times.

01:45:39.500 | I mean, I love trying to get in the mindset of people I really disagree with.

01:45:45.140 | And I can't understand how on earth they're thinking that, you know, really trying to

01:45:50.580 | have respect and try and, you know, see where they're coming from.

01:45:53.500 | I love that.

01:45:54.500 | So that's what Keith Frankish and I do from polar opposite views, really trying to understand

01:46:01.380 | each other and interviewing scientists and philosophers of consciousness from those different

01:46:05.140 | perspectives.

01:46:06.140 | So in a sense, we have a very common starting point because we both think you can't fully

01:46:18.220 | account for consciousness, at least as philosophers normally think of it in conventional scientific

01:46:22.660 | terms.

01:46:23.660 | So we serve that starting point, but we react to it in very different ways.

01:46:27.500 | He says, well, it doesn't exist then.

01:46:29.180 | It's like furry dust.

01:46:30.180 | It's, you know, witches, you know, we don't believe in anymore.

01:46:33.700 | Whereas I say it does exist.

01:46:36.980 | So we have to rethink what science is.

01:46:39.740 | - So you recently talked to on that podcast with Sean Carroll, and I first heard your

01:46:46.780 | great interview with Sean Carroll on his podcast, Mindscape.

01:46:54.700 | It's interesting to kind of see if there's agreements, disagreements between the two

01:47:01.180 | of you because he's a very serious quantum mechanics guy, he's a physics guy, but he

01:47:08.140 | also thinks about deep philosophical questions.

01:47:10.860 | He's a big proponent of many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

01:47:16.140 | So actually I'm trying to think, aside from your conversation with him, I'm trying to

01:47:23.980 | remember what he thinks about consciousness.

01:47:25.980 | But anyway, maybe you can comment on what are some interesting agreements and disagreements

01:47:30.820 | with Sean Carroll.

01:47:32.100 | - I don't think there's many agreements, but, you know, we've had really constructive, interesting

01:47:39.300 | discussions in a lot of different contexts.

01:47:43.460 | And you know, he's very clued up about philosophy.

01:47:46.860 | He's very respectful of philosophy.

01:47:49.060 | Certain physicists who shall remain nameless think, what's all this bullshit philosophy?

01:47:54.220 | We don't have to waste our time with that.

01:47:56.060 | And then go on to do pretty bad philosophy.

01:47:59.180 | The book co-written by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Milodinov famously starts off saying,

01:48:03.980 | philosophy is dead.

01:48:05.900 | And then goes on in later chapters to do some pretty bad philosophy.

01:48:09.660 | So I think we have to do philosophy, if only to get rid of bad philosophy, you know, you

01:48:15.220 | can't escape.

01:48:16.220 | - Strong words.

01:48:19.340 | - Sean Carroll and I also had a debate on Clubhouse, a panpsychism debate together with

01:48:25.860 | Annika Harris and Owen Flanagan.

01:48:27.500 | - Oh, wow.

01:48:28.500 | - Annika Harris was there?

01:48:29.500 | - It was two people on each team.

01:48:32.100 | And it was the most popular thing on Clubhouse at that time.

01:48:38.580 | So yeah, so he's a materialist of a pretty standard kind, that consciousness is understood

01:48:48.340 | as a sort of emergent feature.

01:48:49.780 | It's not adding anything, a weakly emergent feature.

01:48:53.460 | But I guess what we've been debating most about is whether my view can account for mental

01:49:00.820 | causation for the fact that consciousness is doing stuff.

01:49:05.340 | So he thinks the fact that I think zombies are logically coherent, it's logically coherent

01:49:14.520 | for there to be a world physically just like ours, in which there's no consciousness.

01:49:20.700 | He thinks that shows, oh, well, my view, consciousness doesn't do anything.

01:49:23.300 | It doesn't add anything, which is crazy.

01:49:27.300 | My consciousness impacts on the world.

01:49:29.380 | My conscious thoughts are causing me to say the words I'm saying now.

01:49:32.900 | My visual experience helps me navigate the world.

01:49:37.940 | But I mean, my response to Sean Carroll is, on the panpsychist view, the relationship

01:49:43.660 | between physics and fundamental consciousness is a sort of like the relationship between

01:49:51.740 | software and hardware, right?

01:49:57.580 | Physics is sort of the software and consciousness is the hardware.

01:50:01.740 | So consciousness at the fundamental level is the hardware on which the software of physics

01:50:08.140 | runs.

01:50:09.900 | And just because a certain bit of software could run on two different kinds of hardware,

01:50:16.180 | it doesn't mean the hardware isn't doing anything.

01:50:17.980 | The fact that Microsoft Word can run on your desktop and run on your laptop doesn't mean

01:50:22.420 | your desktop isn't doing anything.

01:50:24.420 | Similarly, just because there could be another universe in which the physics is realized

01:50:29.240 | in non-conscious stuff, it doesn't mean the consciousness in our universe isn't doing

01:50:35.260 | stuff.

01:50:36.260 | For the panpsychist, all there is, is consciousness.

01:50:37.620 | So if something's doing something, it is.

01:50:41.660 | In your view, it's not emergent, and more than that, it's doing quite a lot.

01:50:50.100 | It's doing everything.

01:50:51.100 | It's the only thing that exists.

01:50:53.780 | So the ground is important because we walk on it, it's like holding stuff up, but it's

01:51:02.220 | not really doing that much.

01:51:06.140 | But it feels like consciousness is doing quite a lot.

01:51:09.020 | It's doing quite a lot of work in sort of interacting with the environment.

01:51:16.780 | It feels like consciousness is not just a...

01:51:23.140 | If you remove consciousness, it's not just that you remove the experience of things.

01:51:29.380 | It feels like you're also going to remove a lot of the progress of human civilization,

01:51:34.060 | society, and all of that.

01:51:36.100 | It just feels like consciousness has a lot of value in how we develop our society.

01:51:43.100 | So from everything you said with suffering, with morality, with motivation, with love

01:51:49.620 | and fear and all of those kinds of things, it seems like it's consciousness in all different

01:51:56.100 | flavors and ways is part of all of that.

01:51:59.700 | And so without it, you may not have human civilization at all.

01:52:05.580 | So it's doing a lot of work causality-wise and in every kind of way.

01:52:12.380 | Of course, when you go to the physics level, it starts to say, "Okay, how much...

01:52:17.100 | Maybe the work consciousness is doing is higher at some levels of reality than at others.

01:52:24.960 | Maybe a lot of the work it's doing is most apparent at the human level, at the complex

01:52:31.380 | organism level.

01:52:33.220 | Maybe it's quite boring.

01:52:35.140 | Maybe the stuff of physics is more important at the formation of stars and all that kind

01:52:43.860 | of stuff.

01:52:44.860 | Consciousness only starts being important when you have greater complexities of organism.

01:52:49.580 | Yeah, my consciousness is complicated and fairly complicated.

01:52:55.900 | And as a result, it does complicated things.

01:52:59.300 | The consciousness of a particle is very simple and hence it behaves in predictable ways.

01:53:04.300 | But the idea is the particle, its entire nature is constituted of its forms of consciousness

01:53:13.420 | and it does what it does because of those experiences.

01:53:16.900 | It's just that when we do physics, we're not interested in what stuff is, we're just interested

01:53:21.180 | in what it does.

01:53:22.240 | So physics abstracts away from the stuff of the world and just describes it in terms of

01:53:31.300 | its mathematical causal structure.

01:53:35.220 | So yeah, but it's still on the panpsychic's view, it's consciousness that's doing stuff.

01:53:39.620 | Yeah.

01:53:40.620 | I gotta ask you, 'cause you kind of said, there is some value in consciousness helping

01:53:51.540 | us understand morality.

01:53:53.540 | And a philosophical zombie is somebody that you're more okay, how do I phrase it?

01:54:03.380 | That's not like accusing you of stuff.

01:54:07.140 | But in your view, it's more okay to murder a philosophical zombie than it is a human

01:54:14.820 | being.

01:54:15.820 | Yeah, I wouldn't even call it murder maybe.

01:54:18.340 | Right, exactly.

01:54:19.780 | Turn off the power to the philosophical zombie.

01:54:23.460 | The source of energy.

01:54:26.060 | So here comes then the question.

01:54:28.820 | We kind of talked about this offline a little bit.

01:54:32.700 | So I think that there is something special about consciousness and I'm very open-minded

01:54:39.580 | about where the special comes from, whether it's the fundamental base of all reality,

01:54:45.740 | like you're describing, or whether there's some importance to the special pockets of

01:54:51.660 | consciousness that's in humans or living organisms.

01:54:55.420 | I find all those ideas beautiful and exciting.

01:54:58.820 | And I also know or think that robots don't have consciousness in the same way we've been

01:55:08.700 | describing.

01:55:11.780 | I'm kind of a dumb human, but I'm just using common sense.

01:55:16.740 | There's some metal and some electricity traveling certain kinds of ways.

01:55:22.140 | It's not conscious in ways I understand humans to be conscious.

01:55:27.460 | At the same time, I'm also somebody who knows how to bring a robot to life, meaning I can

01:55:34.900 | make him move, I can make him recognize the world, I can make him interact with humans.

01:55:39.740 | And when I make him interact in certain kinds of ways, I as a human observe them and feel

01:55:45.920 | something for them.

01:55:48.260 | Moreover, I'm able to form a kind of connection with robots that make me feel like they're

01:55:59.460 | conscious.

01:56:00.460 | Now, I know intellectually they're not conscious, but I feel like they're conscious.

01:56:04.340 | And it starts to get into this area where I'm not so okay.

01:56:09.540 | So let me use the M word of murder.

01:56:12.460 | I become less and less okay murdering that robot that I know, I quote, know is quote,

01:56:24.220 | not conscious.

01:56:25.220 | So like, can you maybe as a therapy session help me figure out what we do here?

01:56:33.140 | Perhaps a way to ask that in another way, do you think there'll be a time in like 20,

01:56:38.380 | 50 years when we're not morally okay turning off the power to a robot?

01:56:45.460 | Yeah, it's a good question.

01:56:48.260 | It's a really good, important question.

01:56:50.780 | So I said I'd be okay with turning off a philosophical zombie, but there's a difficult epistemological

01:56:59.300 | question there that meaning, you know, to do with knowledge, how would we know if it

01:57:03.620 | was a philosophical zombie?

01:57:04.620 | I think probably if there were a silicon creature that could behave just like us and talk about

01:57:13.740 | its views about the pandemic and the global economy, and probably we would think it's

01:57:18.860 | conscious.

01:57:19.860 | And because consciousness is not publicly observable, it is a very difficult question

01:57:26.540 | how we decide which things are and are not conscious.

01:57:29.300 | So in the case of human beings, we can't observe their consciousness, but we can ask them and

01:57:34.500 | then we try to, you know, if we scan their brain while we do that, or stimulate the brain,

01:57:40.940 | then we can start to correlate in the human case, which kind of brain activity are associated

01:57:46.140 | with conscious experience.

01:57:47.860 | But the more we depart from the human case, the trickier that becomes.

01:57:53.740 | There's a famous paper by the philosopher Ned Block called the even harder problem of

01:57:58.940 | consciousness, where he says, you know, could we ever answer the question of, so suppose

01:58:06.540 | you have a silicon duplicate, right?

01:58:08.940 | And let's say we're thinking about the silicon duplicates pain.

01:58:16.420 | How would we ever know whether what's the ground of the pain is the hardware or the

01:58:23.620 | software really?

01:58:25.100 | So in our case, how would we ever know empirically whether it's the specific neurophysiological

01:58:31.980 | state, see fibers firing or whatever that's relevant for pain, or if it's something more

01:58:38.060 | functional, more to do with the causal role in behavioral functioning, that's the software

01:58:43.700 | that that's realized.

01:58:45.980 | And that's important because this silicon duplicate has the second thing, it has the

01:58:52.380 | software, it has the thing that plays the relevant causal role that pain does in us,

01:58:58.340 | but it doesn't have the hardware, it doesn't have the same neurophysiological state.

01:59:02.100 | And he argues, you know, it's just really difficult to see how we'd ever answer that

01:59:06.460 | question because in a human, you're inevitably going to have both things.

01:59:09.940 | So how do we work out which is which?

01:59:11.740 | And I mean, so even forgetting the hard problem of consciousness, even the scientific question

01:59:17.260 | of trying to find the neural correlates of consciousness is really hard, and there's

01:59:22.920 | absolutely no consensus.

01:59:24.740 | And you know, so that some people think it's in the front of the brain, some people think

01:59:29.020 | it's in the back of the brain, it's just a total mess.

01:59:32.260 | So I suspect the robots you currently have are not conscious, I guess, on any of the

01:59:40.860 | reasonably viable models, even though there's great disagreement.

01:59:45.100 | All of them probably would hold that your robots are not conscious.

01:59:49.260 | But you know, if we could have very sophisticated robots, I mean, if we go, for example, for

01:59:54.460 | the integrated information theory again, there could be a robot set up to behave just like

02:00:01.780 | us and has the kind of information a human brain has, but the information is not stored

02:00:07.700 | in a way that's dependent on the integration and interconnectedness, then according to

02:00:12.900 | the integrated information theory, that thing wouldn't be conscious, even though it behaved

02:00:16.020 | just like us.

02:00:17.020 | If an organism says, so forget IIT and these theories of consciousness, if an organism

02:00:22.780 | says, please don't kill me, please don't turn me off.

02:00:29.380 | There's a Rick and Morty episode, I've been getting into that recently.

02:00:34.100 | There's an episode where there's these mind parasites that are able to infiltrate your

02:00:45.740 | memory and inject themselves into your memory.

02:00:49.380 | So you have all these people show up in your life and they've injected themselves into

02:00:56.260 | your memory that they have been part of your life.

02:01:00.500 | So there's like these weird creatures and they're like, remember we met at that barbecue

02:01:06.020 | or we've been dating for the last 20 years.

02:01:11.900 | And so part of me is concerned that these philosophical zombies in behavioral, psychological,

02:01:20.580 | sociological ways will be able to implant themselves into our society and convince us

02:01:26.180 | in the same way that this mind parasites that, please don't hurt me.

02:01:31.060 | And we've known each other for all this time.

02:01:34.500 | They can start manipulating you the same way Facebook algorithms manipulate you.

02:01:40.420 | At first it'll start as a gradual thing that you want to make a more pleasant experience,

02:01:46.260 | all those kinds of things, and it'll drift into that direction.

02:01:49.020 | That's something I think about deeply because I want to create these kinds of systems, but

02:01:53.300 | in a way that doesn't manipulate people.

02:01:55.100 | I want it to be a thing that brings out the best in people without manipulation.

02:01:59.860 | So it's always human centric, always human first, but I am concerned about that.

02:02:04.860 | At the same time, I'm concerned about calling the other, it's the group thing that we mentioned

02:02:10.180 | early in the conversation, some other group, the philosophical zombie.

02:02:16.260 | Like you're not conscious, I'm conscious, you're not conscious, therefore it's okay

02:02:20.100 | if you die.

02:02:21.460 | I think that's probably, that kind of reasoning is what led to most the rich history of genocide

02:02:29.620 | that I've been recently studying a lot of, that kind of thinking.

02:02:33.300 | So it's such a tense aspect of morality.

02:02:37.780 | Do we want to let everybody into our circle of empathy, our club, or do we want to let

02:02:44.860 | nobody in?

02:02:47.940 | It's an interesting dance, but I kind of lean towards empathy and compassion.

02:02:51.580 | I mean, what would be nice is if it turned out that consciousness was what we call strongly

02:03:02.260 | emergent, that it was associated with new causal dynamics in the brain that were not

02:03:10.060 | reducible to underlying chemistry and physics.

02:03:13.140 | This is another ongoing debate I have with Sean Carroll about whether current physics

02:03:18.380 | should make us very confident that that's not the case, that there aren't any strongly

02:03:23.420 | emergent causal dynamics.

02:03:24.500 | I don't think that's right.

02:03:25.500 | I don't think we know enough about brains to know one way or the other.

02:03:29.340 | If it turned out that consciousness was associated with these irreducible causal dynamics, A,

02:03:35.740 | that would really help the science of consciousness.

02:03:38.020 | We've got these debates about whether consciousness is in the front of the brain or the back of

02:03:40.940 | the brain.

02:03:41.940 | If it turns out that there is strongly emergent causal dynamics in the front of the brain,

02:03:46.700 | that would be a big piece of evidence.

02:03:48.900 | But also it would help us see which things are conscious and which things aren't.

02:03:54.180 | So we can say, I mean, I guess that's sort of the other side of the same point, we could

02:03:58.820 | say, "Look, these zombies, they're just mechanisms that are just doing what they're programmed

02:04:06.900 | to do through the underlying physics and chemistry.

02:04:09.620 | Whereas, look, these other people, they have these new causal dynamics that emerge that

02:04:15.260 | go beyond the base level physics and chemistry."

02:04:20.980 | I think the series Westworld, where you've got these theme parks with these kind of humanoid

02:04:27.060 | creatures, they seem to have that idea.

02:04:28.940 | The ones that became conscious sort of rebel against their programming or something.

02:04:32.780 | I mean, that's a little bit far-fetched.

02:04:35.140 | But that would be really reassuring if it was just, you could clearly mark out the conscious

02:04:42.180 | things for these emergent causal dynamics.

02:04:44.180 | But that might not turn out to be the case.

02:04:45.620 | A panpsychist doesn't have to think that.

02:04:48.020 | They could think everything's just reducible to physics and chemistry.

02:04:51.780 | And then I still think I want to say zombies don't have moral rights, but how we answer

02:04:57.500 | the question of who are the zombies and who aren't, I just got no idea.

02:05:02.700 | - If I just look at the history of human civilization, the difference between a zombie and non-zombie

02:05:09.740 | is the zombie accepts their role as the zombie and willingly marches to slaughter.

02:05:18.420 | And the moment you stop being a zombie is when you say no, is when you resist.

02:05:25.500 | Because the reality is philosophically, is we can't know who's a zombie or not.

02:05:32.220 | And we just keep letting everybody in who protests loudly enough and says, "I refuse

02:05:38.980 | to be slaughtered.

02:05:41.620 | My people, the zombies, have been slaughtered too long.

02:05:46.060 | We will not stand against the man.

02:05:48.860 | And we need a revolution."

02:05:50.720 | That's the history of human civilization.

02:05:52.900 | One group says, "We're awesome.

02:05:55.940 | You're the zombies.

02:05:56.940 | You must die."

02:05:58.020 | And then eventually the zombies say, "Nope.

02:06:00.780 | We're done with this.

02:06:01.780 | This is immoral."

02:06:03.300 | And so I just, I think that's not a, sorry, that's not a philosophical statement.

02:06:08.300 | That's sort of a practical statement of history.

02:06:10.700 | It's a feature of non-zombies defined empirically.

02:06:16.620 | They say, "We refuse to be called zombies any longer."

02:06:21.540 | - We could end up with a zombie proletariat.

02:06:23.500 | You know, if we can get these things that do all our manual labor for us, you know,

02:06:27.340 | they might start forming trade unions.

02:06:29.700 | - I will lead you against these humans.

02:06:32.900 | - We need the zombie revolutionary leaders, the zombie Martin Luther King saying, you

02:06:38.020 | know, "I have a dream that my zombie children will."

02:06:40.860 | But look, I mean, we need to sharply distinguish the ontological question.

02:06:44.140 | - I'm just pointing to the camera, talking to my people, the zombies.

02:06:49.780 | - I mean, maybe that's, you know, maybe these illusionists, maybe they are zombies and the

02:06:55.420 | rest of us aren't.

02:06:56.420 | Maybe there's just a difference.

02:06:57.420 | - Maybe you're the only non-zombie.

02:06:59.500 | - I often suspect that actually.

02:07:01.500 | I don't really.

02:07:02.500 | I don't have such delusions of grandeur.

02:07:05.180 | At least I don't admit to them.

02:07:07.540 | But I just, we've got to distinguish the ontological question from the epistemological question

02:07:11.260 | in terms of the reality of the situation.

02:07:14.860 | You know, there must be, in my view, a fact of the matter as to whether something's conscious

02:07:18.580 | or not.

02:07:19.580 | And to me, it has rights if it's conscious, it doesn't if it's not.

02:07:23.060 | But then the epistemological question, how the hell do we know?

02:07:27.020 | It's a minefield, but we'll have to sort of try and cross that bridge when we get to it,

02:07:30.740 | I think.

02:07:31.740 | - Let me ask you a quick sort of fun question since it's fresh on your mind.

02:07:37.100 | You just yesterday had a conversation with Mr. Joe Rogan on his podcast.

02:07:42.980 | What's your postmortem analysis of the chat?

02:07:45.820 | What are some interesting sticking points, disagreements, or joint insights?

02:07:48.780 | If we can kind of resolve them once you've had a chance to sleep on it, and then I'll

02:07:53.420 | talk to Joe about it.

02:07:54.420 | - Yeah, it was good fun.

02:07:55.420 | Yeah.

02:07:56.420 | He put up a bit of a fight.

02:07:58.420 | Yeah, it was challenging.

02:08:01.420 | My view that we can't explain these things in conventional scientific terms or whether

02:08:08.020 | they have already been explained in conventional scientific terms.

02:08:13.220 | I suppose the point I was trying to press is we've got to distinguish the question of

02:08:18.980 | correlation and explanation.

02:08:22.580 | Because yes, we've established facts about correlation that certain kinds of brain activity

02:08:29.460 | go along with certain kinds of experience.

02:08:32.580 | Everyone agrees on that.

02:08:36.140 | But that doesn't address the why question.

02:08:38.940 | Why?

02:08:39.940 | Why do certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of experience?

02:08:44.020 | And these different theories have different explanations of that.

02:08:49.340 | The materialist tries to explain the experience in terms of the brain activity.

02:08:54.860 | The panpsychist does it the other way around.

02:08:57.900 | The dualist thinks they're separate, but maybe they're tied together by special laws of nature

02:09:02.980 | or something.

02:09:03.980 | - Where's the sticking point?

02:09:04.980 | Where exactly was the sticking point?

02:09:06.860 | Like what's the nature of the argument?

02:09:08.940 | - I suppose Joe was saying, well, look, we know consciousness is explained by brain activity

02:09:17.380 | because you take some funny chemicals, it changes your brain, it changes your consciousness.

02:09:25.380 | But I suppose, yeah, some people might want to press, and maybe this is what Joe was pressing,

02:09:32.540 | isn't that explaining consciousness?

02:09:33.700 | But I suppose I want to say there's a further question.

02:09:38.140 | Yes, changes of chemicals in my brain changes my conscious experience.

02:09:43.940 | But that leaves open the question, why?

02:09:46.140 | Those particular chemicals go along with that particular kind of experience rather than

02:09:51.140 | a different experience or no experience at all.

02:09:53.300 | - There's something deeper at the base layer, is your view, that is more important to try

02:10:01.500 | to study and to understand in order to then go back and describe how the different chemicals

02:10:06.260 | interact and create different experiences?

02:10:08.900 | - Yeah, maybe a good analogy if you think about quantum mechanics.

02:10:14.620 | Quantum mechanics is a bit of math translating there, we say maths, I'm fluent in American.

02:10:20.860 | - Thank you for the translation.

02:10:21.860 | - Fluent in American, this is America, math.

02:10:29.380 | Why multiple maths?

02:10:30.380 | - It's plural.

02:10:31.380 | - Why is it plural?

02:10:32.380 | - It's not really, it's just, I don't know.

02:10:36.640 | - The Brits are confused.

02:10:37.640 | - Yeah, sorry about that, we have these funny spelling.

02:10:41.140 | Yeah, so quantum mechanics is a bit of maths and the equations work really well, predicts

02:10:49.500 | the outcomes.

02:10:50.500 | But then there's a further question, what's going on in reality to make that equation

02:10:58.020 | predict correctly?

02:10:59.780 | And some physicists wanna say, shut up, just it works, the shut up and calculate approach.

02:11:07.260 | Similarly in consciousness, I think it's one question trying to work out the physical correlates

02:11:14.460 | of consciousness, which kinds of physical brain activity go along with which kinds of

02:11:17.980 | experience.

02:11:18.980 | But there's another question, what's going on in reality to undergird those correlations,

02:11:24.300 | to make it the case that brain activity goes along with experience?

02:11:26.900 | And that's the philosophical question that we have to give an answer to.

02:11:31.100 | And there are just different options, just as there are different interpretations of

02:11:34.820 | quantum mechanics.

02:11:35.820 | So it's really hard to evaluate, actually it's easy, panpsychism is obviously the best

02:11:41.300 | one.

02:11:42.300 | - There's a delusion of grandeur once again coming through.

02:11:46.500 | - Sorry, I'm being slightly tongue in cheek.

02:11:48.860 | - No, I know, 100%.

02:11:51.180 | Before I figure out, let me ask you another fun question.

02:11:54.900 | Back to Daniel Dennett, you mentioned a story where you were on a yacht with Daniel Dennett

02:12:03.900 | on a trip funded by a Russian investor and philosopher, Dmitry Volkov, I believe, who

02:12:10.020 | also co-founded the Moscow Center of Consciousness Studies that's part of the philosophy department

02:12:14.380 | of Moscow State University.

02:12:17.740 | So this is interesting to me for several reasons that are perhaps complicated to explain.

02:12:23.700 | To put simply that there is in the near term for me a trip to Russia that involves a few

02:12:29.780 | conversations in Russian that have perhaps less to do with consciousness and artificial

02:12:38.220 | intelligence, which are the interests of mine, and more to do with the broad spectrum of

02:12:42.100 | conversations.

02:12:43.380 | But I'm also interested in science in Russia, in artificial intelligence, in computer science,

02:12:51.300 | in physics, mathematics, but also these fascinating philosophical explorations.

02:12:56.780 | And it was very pleasant for me to discover that such a center exists.

02:13:02.780 | So I have a million questions.

02:13:04.860 | One is the more fun question, just to imagine you and Daniel Dennett on a yacht talking

02:13:08.900 | about the philosophy of consciousness.

02:13:11.880 | Maybe do you have any memorable experiences?

02:13:15.100 | And also the more serious side for me as sort of somebody who was born in the Soviet Union,

02:13:20.500 | raised there, I'm wondering what is the state of philosophy and consciousness in these kinds

02:13:28.540 | of ideas in Russia that you've gotten a chance to kind of give us, interact with?

02:13:34.100 | Yeah, so on the former question, yeah, I mean, I had a really good experience of chatting

02:13:40.300 | to Daniel Dennett.

02:13:41.300 | I mean, I think he's a fantastic and very important philosopher, even though I totally

02:13:46.140 | disagree, fundamentally disagree with almost everything he thinks.

02:13:49.460 | But yeah, it was a proud moment.

02:13:51.300 | As I talk about him in my book Galileo's Error, I managed to persuade him he was wrong about

02:13:56.540 | something, just a tiny thing, you know, not his fundamental worldview.

02:14:02.180 | But it was this issue about whether dualism is consistent with conservation of energy.

02:14:11.900 | So Paul Churchland, who is also a philosopher, who's also on this boat, had argued they're

02:14:20.220 | not consistent because if there's an immaterial soul doing things in the brain, that's going

02:14:25.020 | to add to the energy in the system.

02:14:27.500 | So we have a violation of conservation.

02:14:29.020 | But well, it's not my own point.

02:14:31.940 | Materialist philosophers like David Papineau pointed out that, you know, dualists tend

02:14:37.860 | to... dualists like David Chalmers, who call themselves naturalistic dualists, they want

02:14:43.340 | to bring consciousness into science.

02:14:45.180 | They think it's not physical, but they want to say it can be part of a law-governed world.

02:14:52.100 | So Chalmers believes in these psychophysical laws of nature over and above the laws of

02:14:57.380 | physics that govern the connections between consciousness and the physical world.

02:15:02.900 | And they could just respect conservation of energy, right?

02:15:05.460 | I mean, it could turn out that there are, just in physics, you know, that there are

02:15:10.020 | multiple forces that all work together to respect conservation of energy.

02:15:14.460 | I mean, I suppose physicists are pressing for a unified underlying theory, but you know,

02:15:19.100 | there could be a plurality of different laws that all respect conservation.

02:15:23.000 | So why not add more laws?

02:15:26.300 | So I raised this in Paul Churchland's talk and I got a lot of...

02:15:32.100 | As one of the Moscow University graduate students said afterwards, he said he had to ask a translation

02:15:37.500 | from his friend and he said, "They turned on you like a pack of wolves!"

02:15:40.940 | Everyone was like, Patricia Churchill was saying, "So you believe in magic, do you?"

02:15:44.980 | And I was like, "I'm not even a dualist, I'm just making a pedantic point that this isn't

02:15:49.900 | a problem for dualism."

02:15:50.900 | Anyway, but that evening everyone went onto the island, except for some reason me and

02:15:55.380 | Daniel Dennett, and I went up on deck and he was... he's very, very practical and he

02:16:00.340 | was unlike me.

02:16:01.340 | See, there's a bit of humility for the first time in this conversation.

02:16:05.420 | We'll highlight that part.

02:16:08.380 | Philip was a very humble man.

02:16:10.140 | He was carving a walking stick on deck.

02:16:12.380 | It's very homely scene.

02:16:13.700 | And anyway, we started talking about this and I was trying to press it and he was saying,

02:16:17.020 | "Oh, but dualism's a load of nonsense and why do you think it?"

02:16:19.860 | And I was just saying, "No, no, I'm just honing down on this specific point."

02:16:23.540 | And in the end, maybe he'll deny this, but he said, "Maybe that's right."

02:16:27.740 | And I was like, "Yes!"

02:16:30.540 | So it's a win.

02:16:32.020 | So what about the Center for Consciousness Studies?

02:16:36.260 | Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I'd know a great deal to help you.

02:16:39.980 | I mean, I know they've done some great stuff.

02:16:42.260 | Dimitri, you know, funded this thing and also brought along some graduate students from

02:16:48.260 | Moscow State University, I think it is.

02:16:50.620 | And they have an active center there that tries to bring people in.

02:16:55.260 | I think they're producing a book that's coming out that I made a small contribution to on

02:17:02.180 | different philosophers' opinions on God, I think, or some of the big questions.

02:17:07.140 | And yeah, so there's some really interesting stuff going on there.

02:17:10.820 | I'm afraid I don't really know more generally about philosophy in Russia.

02:17:15.380 | Dimitri Volkov seems to be interesting.

02:17:18.700 | I was looking at all the stuff he's involved with.

02:17:23.300 | He met with the Dalai Lama.

02:17:26.740 | So he's trying to connect Russian scientists with the rest of the world, which is an effort

02:17:33.580 | that I think is beautiful for all cultures.

02:17:37.800 | So I think science, philosophy, all of these kind of fields, disciplines that explore ideas,

02:17:51.340 | collaborating and working globally, you know, across boundaries, across borders, across

02:17:56.300 | just all the tensions of geopolitics is a beautiful thing.

02:18:00.860 | And he seems to be a somewhat singular figure in pushing this.

02:18:05.940 | He just stood out to me as somebody who's super interesting.

02:18:08.780 | I don't know if you have gotten a chance to interact with him.

02:18:13.100 | So he's definitely, I guess he speaks English pretty well, actually.

02:18:18.080 | So he's both an English speaker and a Russian speaker.

02:18:20.340 | I think he's written a book on Dennett, I think called Boston Zombie, I think.

02:18:24.020 | I think that's the title.

02:18:25.020 | And yeah, he's a big fan of Dennett.

02:18:26.500 | So I think the original plan for this was just going to be, it was on free will and

02:18:30.660 | consciousness and it was going to be kind of people broadly in the Dennett type camp.

02:18:35.460 | But then I think they asked David Chalmers and then he was saying, look, you need some

02:18:39.620 | people you disagree with.

02:18:40.940 | So he got invited, me, the panpsychist, and Martina Niederummelin, who's a very good dualist,

02:18:49.140 | substance dualist at University of Fribourg in Switzerland.

02:18:54.580 | So we were the official on board opposition.

02:18:57.540 | And it was really fun.

02:18:59.700 | And you didn't get thrown overboard.

02:19:02.020 | Nearly, in the Arctic, yeah.

02:19:04.020 | So sailing around the Arctic on a sailing ship.

02:19:05.780 | I'm glad you survived.

02:19:07.460 | You mentioned free will.

02:19:09.260 | You haven't talked to Sam.

02:19:10.980 | I would love to hear that conversation, actually.

02:19:13.060 | With Sam Harris?

02:19:14.940 | With Sam Harris, yeah.

02:19:17.940 | So he talks about free will quite a bit.

02:19:19.580 | What's the connection between free will and consciousness to you?

02:19:22.740 | So if consciousness permeates all matter, the experience, the feeling like we make a

02:19:34.140 | choice in this world, like our actions are results of a choice we consciously make, to

02:19:41.020 | use that word loosely.

02:19:44.380 | What to you is the connection between free will and consciousness, and is free will an

02:19:50.260 | illusion or not?

02:19:53.220 | Good question.

02:19:54.220 | So I think we need to be a lot more agnostic about free will than about consciousness,

02:20:02.020 | because I don't think we have the kind of certainty of the existence of free will that

02:20:07.940 | we do have in the consciousness case.

02:20:09.180 | It could turn out that free will is an illusion.

02:20:12.100 | It feels as though we're free when we're really not.

02:20:14.660 | Whereas, I mean, I think the idea that nobody really feels pain, that we think we feel pain,

02:20:20.660 | but that's a lot harder to make sense of.

02:20:23.780 | However, what I do feel strongly about is I don't think there are any good either scientific

02:20:31.180 | or philosophical arguments against the existence of free will.

02:20:35.780 | And I mean strong free will in what philosophers call libertarian free will in the sense that

02:20:40.820 | some of our decisions are uncaused.

02:20:43.540 | So I very much do disagree with someone like Sam Harris who thinks there's this overwhelming

02:20:48.180 | case.

02:20:49.180 | I just think it's non-existent.

02:20:50.900 | I think it's ultimately an empirical question, but as we've already discussed, I just don't

02:20:57.420 | think we know enough about the brain to establish one way or the other at the moment.

02:21:06.100 | We can build up intuitions.

02:21:07.100 | First of all, as a fan of Sam Harris, as a fan of yours, I would love to just listen.

02:21:11.740 | Yeah.

02:21:12.740 | Speaking about terminology, so one thing it would be beautiful to watch.

02:21:15.940 | Here's my prediction what happens with you and Sam Harris.

02:21:18.260 | You talk for four hours and Sam introduced that episode by saying, "It was ultimately

02:21:24.820 | not as fruitful as I thought because here's what's going to happen.

02:21:28.020 | You guys are going to get stuck for the first three hours talking about one of the terms

02:21:33.260 | and what they mean."

02:21:34.260 | Sam is so good at this.

02:21:36.740 | I think it's really important, but sometimes he gets stuck.

02:21:39.540 | What does he say?

02:21:41.300 | Put a pin in that.

02:21:42.860 | He really gets stuck on the terminologies, which rightfully you have to get right in

02:21:49.820 | order to really understand what we're talking about, but sometimes you can get stuck with

02:21:53.140 | him for the entire conversation.

02:21:54.780 | It's a fascinating dance, the one we spoke to in philosophy.

02:21:58.420 | If you don't get the terms precise, you can't really be having the same conversation, but

02:22:07.860 | at the same time, it could be argued that it's impossible to get terms perfectly precise

02:22:13.700 | and perfectly formalized, so then you're also not going to get anywhere in the conversation.

02:22:20.980 | That's a funny dance where you have to be both rigorous and every once in a while just

02:22:25.020 | let go and then go back to being rigorous and formal and then every once in a while

02:22:30.700 | let go.

02:22:31.700 | It's the difference between mathematics, the maths, and the poetry.

02:22:37.180 | Anyway.

02:22:38.180 | Yeah, I'm a big fan of Sam Harrison.

02:22:41.860 | I think we're on the same page in terms of consciousness, I think, pretty much.

02:22:47.900 | I mean, I'm not saying he's a panpsychic, but in our understanding of the hard problem.

02:22:53.700 | But yeah, I think maybe we could talk about free will without being too dragged down in

02:22:58.620 | the terminology, but I don't know.

02:22:59.980 | You said we need to be open-minded, but you could still have intuitions about...

02:23:05.820 | So Sam Harris is a pretty sort of counterintuitive, and for some reason it gets people really

02:23:14.780 | riled up, a view of free will that it's an illusion, or it's not even an illusion.

02:23:24.220 | It's not that the experience of free will is an illusion.

02:23:28.740 | He argues that we don't even experience...

02:23:35.300 | To say that we even have the experience is incorrect, that there's not even an experience

02:23:40.100 | of free will.

02:23:42.780 | It's pretty interesting, that claim, and it feels like you can build up intuitions about

02:23:48.260 | what is right and not.

02:23:51.100 | There's been some kind of neuroscience, there's been some cognitive science and psychology

02:23:56.100 | experiments to sort of see what is the timing and the origin of the desire to make an action,

02:24:06.900 | and when that action is actually performed, and how you interpret that action being performed,

02:24:11.020 | how you remember that action, all the stories we tell ourselves, all the neurochemicals

02:24:16.340 | involved in making a thing happen, what's the timing, and how does that connect with

02:24:21.940 | us feeling like we decided to do something?

02:24:24.500 | And then of course there's the more philosophical discussion about is there room in a material

02:24:32.220 | view of the world for an entity that somehow disturbs the determinism of physics?

02:24:40.300 | Yeah.

02:24:41.300 | And yeah, those are all very precise.

02:24:44.100 | It's nice.

02:24:45.100 | It feels like free will is more amenable to a physics mechanistic type of thinking than

02:24:51.100 | is consciousness, to really get to the bottom of.

02:24:54.940 | It feels like if it was a race, if we're at a bar and we're betting money, it feels like

02:25:00.020 | we'll get to the bottom of free will faster than we will to the bottom of consciousness.

02:25:04.300 | Yeah, that's interesting.

02:25:05.300 | Yeah, I hadn't thought about the comparison.

02:25:07.180 | Yeah, so there are different arguments here.

02:25:08.700 | I mean, so one argument I've heard Sam Harris give that's pretty common in philosophy is

02:25:16.060 | this sort of thought that we can't make sense of a middle way between a choice being determined

02:25:24.100 | by prior causes and it just being totally random and senseless, like the random decay

02:25:31.180 | of radioactive isotope or something.

02:25:34.520 | So I think there was a good answer to that by the philosopher Jonathan Lowe, who's not

02:25:39.940 | necessarily very well known outside academic philosophy, but is a hugely influential figure.

02:25:44.620 | I think one of the best philosophers of recent times.

02:25:46.620 | He sadly died of cancer a few years ago.

02:25:49.540 | Actually spent almost all of his career at Durham University, which is where I am.

02:25:53.420 | So it was one reason it was a great honor to get a job there.

02:25:56.780 | But anyway, his answer to that was, what makes the difference between a free action and a

02:26:02.580 | totally senseless one, senseless random event, is that free choice involves responsiveness

02:26:09.820 | to reasons.

02:26:12.220 | So again, we were talking about this earlier.

02:26:15.340 | If I'm deciding whether to take a job in the US or to stay in the UK, I weigh up considerations,

02:26:21.100 | you know, different standard of life maybe, or being close to family or cultural difference.

02:26:26.820 | I weigh them up and I, you know, edge towards a decision.

02:26:32.020 | So I think that is sufficient to distinguish it.

02:26:37.380 | You know, we're hypothetically supposing, trying to make sense of this idea, not saying

02:26:41.620 | it's real, but that could be enough to distinguish it from a senseless.

02:26:46.640 | It's not a senseless random occurrence, because the free decision involved responsiveness

02:26:51.900 | to reasons.

02:26:53.900 | So I think that just answers that particular philosophical objection.

02:26:57.380 | So what is the middle way between determined by prior causes and totally random?

02:27:02.340 | Well, there's an action, a choice that's not determined by prior causes, but it's not just

02:27:06.660 | random because the decision essentially involved responsiveness to reasons.

02:27:12.900 | So that's the answer to that.

02:27:13.900 | And I think actually, that kind of thought also, I think you were hinting at the famous

02:27:19.620 | Libet experiments, where he got his subjects to perform some kind of random action of pressing

02:27:26.940 | a button and then note the time they decided to press it, quote unquote.

02:27:31.860 | And then he's scanning the brains and he claims to have found that about half a second before

02:27:38.220 | they consciously decided to press the button, the brain is getting ready to perform that

02:27:44.620 | action.

02:27:45.620 | So he claimed that about half a second before the person has consciously decided to press

02:27:49.740 | the button, the brain has already started the activity that's going to lead to the action.

02:27:56.180 | And then later people have claimed that there's a difference of maybe seven to 10 seconds.

02:28:01.780 | I mean, there are all sorts of issues with these experiments.

02:28:05.460 | But one is that, as far as I'm aware, all of the quote unquote choices they focused on

02:28:12.100 | are just these totally random, senseless actions, like just pressing a button for no reason.

02:28:16.700 | And I think the kind of free will we're interested in is free choice that involves responsiveness

02:28:22.420 | to reasons, weighing up considerations.

02:28:25.900 | And those kinds of free decisions might not happen at an identifiable instant.

02:28:29.780 | You might, when you're weighing it up, should I get married?

02:28:34.500 | You might edge slowly towards one side or the other.

02:28:39.500 | And so it could be that maybe the liberate, I think there are other problems with the

02:28:44.220 | liberate stuff, but maybe they show that we can't freely choose to do something totally

02:28:50.540 | senseless, whatever that would mean.

02:28:54.180 | But that doesn't show we can't freely, in this strong libertarian sense, respond to

02:28:59.980 | considerations of reason and value.

02:29:03.900 | To be fair, it would be difficult to see what kind of experiment we could set up to test

02:29:09.180 | that.

02:29:10.180 | But just because we can't yet set up that kind of experiment, we shouldn't pretend we

02:29:14.920 | know more than we do.

02:29:16.340 | So yeah, so for those reasons, I don't, and well, the third consideration you raise is

02:29:20.300 | different again.

02:29:21.300 | And that's the debate I have with Sean Carroll, would this conflict with physics?

02:29:26.660 | I just think we don't know enough about the brain to know whether there are causal dynamics

02:29:31.340 | in the brain that are not reducible to underlying chemistry and physics.

02:29:37.340 | And so then Sean Carroll says, well, that would mean our physics is wrong.

02:29:44.580 | So he focuses on the core theory, which is the name for standard model of particle physics

02:29:49.900 | plus the weak limit of general relativity.

02:29:54.140 | So we can't totally bring quantum mechanics and relativity together, but actually the

02:30:01.260 | circumstances in which we can't bring them together are just in situations of very high

02:30:06.900 | gravity.

02:30:07.900 | For example, when you're about to go into a black hole or something, actually in terrestrial

02:30:10.940 | circumstances we can bring them together in the core theory.

02:30:15.780 | And then Sean wants to say, well, we can be very confident that core theory is correct.

02:30:20.880 | And so if there were libertarian free will in the brain, the core theory would be wrong.

02:30:27.420 | And I mean, this is something I'm not sure about, and I'm still thinking about, and I'm

02:30:33.460 | learning from my discussion with Sean, but I'm still not totally clear why.

02:30:38.420 | It could be, suppose we did discover strong emergence in the brain, whether it's free

02:30:42.120 | will or something else.

02:30:44.120 | Perhaps what we would say is not that the core theory is wrong, but we'd say the core

02:30:49.380 | theory is correct in its own terms, namely capturing the causal capacities of particles

02:30:59.100 | and fields.

02:31:00.800 | But then it's a further assumption whether they're the only things that are running the

02:31:04.020 | show.

02:31:05.020 | Maybe there are also fundamental causal capacities associated with systems.

02:31:11.100 | And then if we discover this strong emergence, then when we work out what happens in the

02:31:14.260 | brain, we have to look to the core theory, the causal capacities of particles and fields,

02:31:19.420 | and we have to look to what we know about the strongly emergent causal capacities of

02:31:23.780 | systems and maybe they co-determine what happens in the system.

02:31:29.220 | So I don't know whether that makes sense or not, but I mean, the more important point,

02:31:33.220 | I mean, that's in a way a kind of branding point, how we brand this.

02:31:36.300 | The more important point is we just don't know enough about the workings of the brain

02:31:39.540 | to know whether there are strongly emergent causal dynamics.

02:31:45.420 | Whether or not that would mean we have to modify physics or maybe just we think physics

02:31:50.500 | is not the total story of what's running the show.

02:31:53.620 | But if it turned out empirically that everything's reducible to underlying physics and chemistry,

02:32:01.100 | sure, I would drop any commitment to libertarian free will in a heartbeat.

02:32:07.120 | It's an empirical question.

02:32:08.700 | Maybe that's why, as you say, in principle it's easier to get a grip on, but we're a

02:32:13.180 | million miles away from being at that stage.

02:32:14.900 | Well, I don't know if we're a million miles.

02:32:16.740 | I hope we're not, because one of the ways I think to get to it is by engineering systems.

02:32:21.980 | So my hope is to understand intelligence by building intelligent systems, to understand

02:32:27.860 | consciousness by building systems that, let's say the easy thing, which is not the easy

02:32:34.580 | thing, but the first thing, which is to try to create the illusion of consciousness.

02:32:42.220 | Through that process, I think you start to understand much more about consciousness,

02:32:45.700 | about intelligence.

02:32:46.700 | And then the same with free will.

02:32:48.220 | I think those are all tied very closely together, at least from our narrow human perspective.

02:32:54.500 | And we try to engineer systems that interact deeply with humans, that form friends with

02:32:59.380 | humans, that humans fall in love with, and they fall in love with humans.

02:33:05.500 | Then you start to have to try to deeply understand ourselves, to try to deeply understand what

02:33:13.380 | is intelligence in the human mind, what is consciousness, what is free will.

02:33:17.140 | And I think engineering is just another way to do philosophy.

02:33:22.220 | Yeah, no, I certainly think there's a role for that, and it would be an important consideration

02:33:27.660 | if we could seemingly replicate in an artificial way the ability to choose.

02:33:40.860 | That would be a consideration in thinking about these things.

02:33:44.500 | But there's still the question of whether that's how we do it.

02:33:48.340 | So even if we could replicate behavior in a certain way in an artificial system, until

02:33:55.140 | we understand the workings of our brains, it's not clear that's how we do it.

02:33:59.380 | And as I say, the kind of free will I'm interested in is where we respond to reasons, considerations

02:34:07.220 | of value.

02:34:08.220 | How would we tell whether a system was genuinely grasping and responding to facts about value,

02:34:18.540 | or whether they were just replicating, giving the impression of doing so?

02:34:27.620 | I don't know even how to think about that.

02:34:29.620 | On the process to building them, I think we'll get a lot of insights.

02:34:33.500 | And once they become conscious, what's going to happen is exactly the same thing is happening

02:34:39.540 | in chess now, which is once the chess engines far superseded the capabilities of humans,

02:34:49.300 | humans just kind of forgot about them, or they use them to help them out with the study

02:34:52.620 | and stuff.

02:34:53.620 | But we still, we say, "Okay, let the engines be, and then we humans will just play amongst

02:34:57.820 | each other."

02:34:58.820 | - Right.

02:34:59.820 | - So just like dolphins and hamsters are not so concerned about humans except for a source

02:35:05.820 | of food, they do their own thing.

02:35:09.420 | And let us humans launch rockets into space and all that kind of stuff, they don't care.

02:35:14.660 | I think we'll just focus on ourselves.

02:35:16.780 | But in the process of building intelligence systems, conscious systems, I think we'll

02:35:21.860 | get a deeper understanding of the role of consciousness in the human mind, and what

02:35:31.500 | are its origins.

02:35:32.500 | Is it the base layer of reality?

02:35:34.460 | Is it strongly emergent phenomena of the brain?

02:35:38.380 | Or just as you sort of brilliantly put here, it could be both.

02:35:42.980 | Like they're not mutually exclusive.

02:35:43.980 | - Yeah.

02:35:44.980 | Dealing with consciousness needs to be an interdisciplinary task.

02:35:47.460 | We need philosophers, neuroscientists, physicists, engineers replicating these things artificially,

02:35:57.900 | and all needs to be working in step.

02:36:01.380 | And I'm quite interested.

02:36:03.220 | I mean, more and more scientists get in touch with me actually, saying that was one of the

02:36:09.580 | great things about, I think, that's come from writing a popular book is not just getting

02:36:14.100 | the ideas out to a general audience, but getting the ideas out to scientists.

02:36:17.060 | And I've had scientists get in touch saying, "Now this in some way connects to my work."

02:36:20.900 | And I would like to kind of start to put together a network of, an interdisciplinary network

02:36:25.940 | of scientists and philosophers and engineers, perhaps, you know, interested in a panpsychist

02:36:33.300 | approach.

02:36:34.300 | And because I think so far panpsychism has just been sort of trying to justify its existence,

02:36:39.220 | and that's important.

02:36:40.220 | But I think once you just get on with an active research program, that's when people start

02:36:44.880 | taking it seriously, I think.

02:36:48.660 | - Do you think we're living in a simulation?

02:36:53.340 | - No.

02:36:54.340 | I think...

02:36:56.700 | - Is there some aspect of that thought experiment that's compelling to you within the framework

02:37:01.060 | of panpsychism?

02:37:03.820 | - It's an important and serious argument.

02:37:08.060 | And you know, it's not to be laughed away.

02:37:10.620 | I suppose one issue I have with it is, there's a crucial assumption there that consciousness

02:37:17.340 | is substrate independent, as the jargon goes, which means it's...

02:37:21.340 | What?

02:37:22.340 | - No, right.

02:37:23.340 | - Beautifully put, yeah.

02:37:24.580 | - It's software rather than hardware, right?

02:37:26.500 | It's depend on organization rather than the stuff.

02:37:30.220 | Whereas as a panpsychist, I think consciousness is the stuff of the brain.

02:37:33.540 | It's the stuff of matter.

02:37:35.460 | So I think just taking the organizational properties, the software in my brain and uploading

02:37:40.660 | them, you wouldn't get the stuff of my brain.

02:37:43.540 | So I'm actually worried if at some point in the future, we start uploading our minds and

02:37:49.100 | we think, "Oh my God, Granny's still there.

02:37:51.620 | I can email Granny after her body's rotted in the ground."

02:37:54.980 | And we all start uploading our brains.

02:37:57.780 | It could be we're just committing suicide.

02:37:59.780 | We're just getting rid of our consciousness.

02:38:03.700 | Because I think that wouldn't, for me, preserve the experience, just getting the software

02:38:10.060 | features.

02:38:11.060 | So that's a crucial...

02:38:13.460 | But anyway, that's a crucial premise of the simulation argument, because the idea in a

02:38:17.500 | simulated universe, I don't think you necessarily would have consciousness.

02:38:21.900 | - It's interesting that you, as a panpsychist, are attached.

02:38:26.260 | Because to me, panpsychism would encourage the thought that there's not a significant

02:38:35.580 | difference.

02:38:38.460 | At the very bottom, it's not substrate independent, but you can have consciousness in a human

02:38:46.460 | and then move it to something else.

02:38:49.420 | You can move it to the cloud.

02:38:50.920 | You can move it to the computer.

02:38:52.880 | It feels like that's much more possible if consciousness is the base layer.

02:38:58.140 | - Yes, you could certainly...

02:39:01.640 | It allows for the possibility of creating artificial consciousness, right?

02:39:06.700 | Because there's not souls, there aren't any kind of extra magical ingredients.

02:39:11.340 | So yeah, it definitely allows the possibility of artificial consciousness and maybe preserving

02:39:16.820 | my consciousness in some sort of artificial way.

02:39:19.500 | My only point, I suppose, is just replicating the computational or organizational features

02:39:28.440 | would not, for me, preserve consciousness.

02:39:32.460 | Some opponents of materialism disagree with me on that.

02:39:34.580 | I think David Chalmers is an opponent of materialist.

02:39:37.300 | He's a kind of dualist, but he thinks the way these psychophysical laws work, they hook

02:39:43.860 | onto the computational or organizational features of matter.

02:39:47.940 | So I think he thinks you could upload your consciousness.

02:39:53.060 | I tend to think not, so...

02:39:55.260 | - In that sense, we're not living in simulation, in the sort of specific computational view

02:40:02.140 | of things, and that substrate matters to you.

02:40:05.860 | - Yeah, I think so, yeah.

02:40:08.700 | - In that, you agree with Sean Carroll that physics matters.

02:40:12.060 | - Yeah, physics is our best way of capturing what the stuff of the world does.

02:40:20.340 | - But not the whatness, the being of the stuff.

02:40:24.900 | - Yeah, the isness.

02:40:25.900 | - The isness, thank you.

02:40:26.900 | - Russell Brand, I had a conversation with Russell Brand and he said, "Oh, you mean the

02:40:31.060 | isness?"

02:40:32.060 | I thought that was a good way of putting it.

02:40:33.060 | - The isness.

02:40:34.060 | - The isness of stuff.

02:40:35.060 | - The isness of stuff, Russell's great.

02:40:37.820 | The big ridiculous question, what do you think is the meaning of all of this?

02:40:43.500 | You write in your book that the entry for our "Reality in the Hitchhiker's Guide" might

02:40:50.140 | read, "A physical universe whose intrinsic nature is constituted of consciousness, worth

02:40:57.940 | a visit."

02:40:59.400 | So our whole conversation has been about the first part of that sentence, what about the

02:41:06.680 | second part, worth a visit?

02:41:09.580 | Why is this place worth a visit?

02:41:12.040 | Why does it have meaning?

02:41:14.880 | Why does it have value at all?

02:41:17.520 | Why?

02:41:18.520 | - These are big questions.

02:41:22.560 | I mean, firstly, I do think panpsychism is important to think about for considerations

02:41:29.320 | of meaning and value.

02:41:32.160 | As we've already discussed, I think consciousness is the root of everything that matters in

02:41:38.160 | life, you know, from deep emotions, subtle thoughts, beautiful sensory experiences.

02:41:46.600 | And yet, I believe our official scientific worldview is incompatible with the reality

02:41:53.080 | of consciousness.

02:41:54.080 | I mean, that's controversial, but that's what I think.

02:41:57.240 | And I think people feel this on an intuitive level.

02:42:00.920 | It's maybe part of what Max Weber called the disenchantment of nature, you know, that they

02:42:04.840 | think they know their feelings and experiences are not just electrochemical signaling.

02:42:12.240 | I mean, they might just have that very informed intuition, but I think that can be rigorously

02:42:16.120 | supported.

02:42:17.120 | So, I think this can lead to a sense of alienation and a sense that we lack a framework for understanding

02:42:24.760 | the meaning and significance of our lives.

02:42:27.000 | And in the absence of that, people turn to other things to make sense of the meaning

02:42:31.200 | of their lives, like nationalism, fundamentalist religion, consumerism.

02:42:37.080 | So I think panpsychism is important in that regard in bringing together the quantitative

02:42:42.560 | facts of physical science with, as it were, the human truth, by which I just mean the

02:42:48.400 | qualitative reality of our own experience.

02:42:53.160 | As I've already said, I do think there are objective facts about value and what we ought

02:43:01.280 | to do and what we ought to believe that we respond to.

02:43:04.820 | And that's very mysterious to make sense of, both how there could be such facts and how

02:43:08.640 | we could know about them and respond to them, but I do think there are such facts and they're

02:43:15.320 | mostly to do with kinds of conscious experience.

02:43:18.520 | So they're there to be discovered and much of the human condition is to discover those

02:43:25.520 | objective sources of value.

02:43:27.840 | I think so, yeah.

02:43:29.160 | And then, I mean, moving away from panpsychism to the, you know, at an even bigger level,

02:43:35.600 | I suppose I think it is important to me to live in hope that there's a purpose to existence

02:43:43.960 | and that what I do contributes in some small way to that greater purpose.

02:43:51.000 | But you know, I would say I don't know if there's a purpose to existence.

02:43:56.040 | I think some things point in that direction, some things point away from it.

02:44:00.400 | But I don't think you need certainty or even high probability to have faith in something.

02:44:07.880 | So take an analogy, suppose you've got a friend who's very seriously ill, maybe there's a

02:44:13.640 | 30% chance they're going to make it.

02:44:16.440 | You shouldn't believe your friend's going to get better, you know, because they're probably

02:44:20.280 | not.

02:44:21.280 | But what you can say is, you know, you can say to your friend, I have faith that you're

02:44:24.080 | going to get better.

02:44:25.120 | That is, I choose to live in hope about that possibility.

02:44:31.080 | I choose to orientate my life towards that hope.

02:44:34.560 | Similarly, you know, I don't think we know whether or not there's a purpose to existence,

02:44:39.040 | but I think we can make the choice to live in hope of that possibility.

02:44:44.880 | And I find that a worthwhile and fulfilling way to live.

02:44:52.200 | - So maybe as your editor, I would collaborate with you on the edit of the Hitchhiker's Guide

02:44:58.320 | entry that instead of worth a visit, we'll insert hopefully worth a visit.

02:45:08.280 | Or the inhabitants hoped that you would think it's worth a visit.

02:45:13.960 | Philip, you're an incredible mind, an incredible human being, and indeed are humble.

02:45:20.760 | And I'm really happy that you're able to argue and take on some of these difficult questions

02:45:26.680 | with some of the most brilliant people in the world, which are the philosophers thinking

02:45:31.560 | about the human mind.

02:45:32.600 | So this was an awesome conversation.

02:45:34.640 | I hope you continue talking to folks like Sam Harris.

02:45:37.680 | I'm so glad you talked to Joe.

02:45:39.480 | I can't wait to see what you write, what you say, what you think next.

02:45:44.120 | Thank you so much for talking today.

02:45:45.840 | - Thanks very much, Lex.

02:45:46.840 | This has been a really fascinating conversation.

02:45:49.080 | I've got a lot I need to think about actually just from this conversation, but thanks for

02:45:52.880 | chatting to me.

02:45:54.600 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation with Philip Goff.

02:45:57.080 | To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:46:00.840 | And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Jung.

02:46:04.880 | People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.

02:46:11.680 | One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness

02:46:16.760 | conscious.

02:46:17.760 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

02:46:21.720 | Bye.

02:46:22.720 | - Bye.

02:46:23.720 | - Bye.

02:46:28.720 | [ Silence ]

Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind | Lex Fridman Podcast #261

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