Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind
嘉宾：Philip Goff
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I believe our official scientific worldview is incompatible with the reality of consciousness.
Do you think we're living in a simulation?
We could be in the Matrix, this could be a very vivid dream.
There's going to be a few people that are now visualizing a pink elephant.
A hamster has consciousness.
Except for cats, who are evil automatons that are void of consciousness.
Consciousness is the basis of moral value, moral concern.
Do you think there will be a time in like 20, 30, 50 years when we're not morally okay
turning off the power to a robot?
The following is a conversation with Philip Goff, philosopher specializing in the philosophy
of mind and consciousness.
He is a panpsychist, which means he believes that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous
feature of physical reality, of all matter in the universe.
He is the author of Galileo's Error, Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, and is
the host of an excellent podcast called Mind Chat.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, here's my conversation with Philip Goff.
I opened my second podcast conversation with Elon Musk with a question about consciousness
and panpsychism.
The question was, "Does consciousness permeate all matter?"
I don't know why I opened the conversation this way.
He looked at me like, "What the hell is this guy talking about?"
So he said no, because we wouldn't be able to tell if it did or not.
So it's outside the realm of the scientific method.
Do you agree or disagree with Elon Musk's answer?
I disagree.
I guess I do think consciousness pervades matter.
In fact, I think consciousness is the ultimate nature of matter.
So as for whether it's outside of the scientific method, I think there's a fundamental challenge
at the heart of the science of consciousness that we need to face up to, which is that
consciousness is not publicly observable.
I can't look inside your head and see your feelings and experiences.
We know about consciousness not from doing experiments or public observation.
We just know about it from our immediate awareness of our feelings and experiences.
So-
It's qualitative, not quantitative.
That's what you talk about.
Yeah, that's another aspect of it.
So there are a couple of reasons consciousness I think is not susceptible to the standard
or not fully susceptible to the standard scientific approach.
One reason you've just raised is that it's qualitative rather than quantitative.
Another reason is it's not publicly observable.
So I mean, science is used to dealing with unobservables, right?
Particle particles, quantum wave functions, other universes, none of these things are
observable.
But there's an important difference.
With all these things, we postulate unobservables in order to explain what we can observe, right?
In the whole of science, that's how it works.
In the case of consciousness, in the unique case of consciousness, the thing we are trying
to explain is not publicly observable.
And that is utterly unique.
If we want to fully bring science into consciousness, we need a more expansive conception of the
scientific method.
So it doesn't mean we can't explain consciousness scientifically, but we need to rethink what
science is.
What do you mean publicly?
The word publicly observable?
Is there something interesting to be said about the word publicly?
I suppose versus privately?
Yeah, it's tricky to define, but I suppose the data of physics are available to anybody.
If there were aliens who visited us from another planet, maybe they'd have very different sense
organs, maybe they'd struggle to understand our art or our music.
But if they were intelligent enough to do mathematics, they could understand our physics,
they could look at the data of our experiments, they could run the experiments themselves.
Whereas consciousness, is it observable?
Is it not observable?
In a sense, it's observable.
As you say, we could say it's privately observable.
I am directly aware of my own feelings and experiences.
If I'm in pain, it's just right there for me.
My pain is just totally directly evident to me.
But you from the outside cannot directly access my pain.
You can access my pain behavior, or you can ask me, but you can't access my pain in the
way that I can access my pain.
So I think that's a distinction.
It might be difficult to totally pin it down how we define those things, but I think there's
a fairly clear and very important difference there.
- So you think there's a kind of direct observation that you're able to do of your pain that I'm
not.
So my observation, all the ways in which I can sneak up to observing your pain is indirect
versus yours is direct.
Can you play devil's advocate?
Is it possible for me to get closer and closer and closer to being able to observe your pain,
like all the subjective experiences, yours in the way that you do?
- Yeah.
I mean, so of course it's not that we observe behavior and then we make an inference.
We are hardwired to instinctively interpret smiles as happiness, crying as sadness.
And as we get to know someone, we find it very easy to adopt their perspective, get
into their shoes.
But strictly speaking, all we have perceptual access to is someone's behavior.
And if you were just, strictly speaking, if you were trying to explain someone's behavior,
those aspects that are publicly observable, I don't think you'd ever have recourse to
attribute consciousness.
You could just postulate some kind of mechanism if you were just trying to explain the behavior.
So someone like Daniel Dennett is very consistent on this.
So I think for most people, what science is in the business of is explaining the data
of public observation experiment.
If you religiously followed that, you would not postulate consciousness because it's not
a datum that's known about in that way.
And Daniel Dennett is really consistent on this.
He thinks my consciousness cannot be empirically verified and therefore it doesn't exist.
Dennett is consistent on this.
I think I'm consistent on this, but I think a lot of people have a slightly confused middleway
position on this.
On the one hand, they think the business of science is just to account for public observation
experiment, but on the other hand, they also believe in consciousness without appreciating,
I think, that that implies that there is another datum over and above the data of public observation
experiments, namely just the reality of feelings and experiences.
As we walk along this conversation, you keep opening doors that I want to walk into and
I will, but I want to try to stay kind of focused.
So you mentioned Daniel Dennett, let's lay it out since he sticks to his story, a pun
unintended, and then you stick to yours.
What is your story?
What is your theory of consciousness versus his?
Can you clarify his position?
- So my view, I defend the view known as panpsychism, which is the view that consciousness is a
fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.
So it doesn't literally mean that everything is conscious despite the meaning of the word
pan, everything, psyche, mind.
So literally that means everything has mind.
But the typical commitment of the panpsychist is that the fundamental building blocks of
reality, maybe fundamental particles like electrons and quarks, have incredibly simple
forms of experience and that the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is
somehow rooted in or derived from this much more simple consciousness at the level of
fundamental physics.
So that's a theory that I would justify on the grounds that it can account for this datum
of consciousness that we are immediately aware of in our experience in a way that I don't
think other theories can.
If you asked me to contrast that to Daniel Dennett, I think he would just say there is
no such datum.
Dennett says the data for science of consciousness is what he calls hetero phenomenology, which
is specifically defined as what we can access from the third person perspective, including
what people say.
But crucially, we're not treating what they say.
We're not relying on their testimony as evidence for some unobservable realm of feelings and
experiences.
We're just treating what they say as a datum of public observation experiments that we
can account for in terms of underlying mechanisms.
- But I feel like there's a deeper view of what consciousness is.
So you have a very clear, and we'll talk quite a bit about panpsychism, but you have a clear
view of what, almost like a physics view of consciousness.
He, I think, has a kind of view that consciousness is almost a side effect of this massively
parallel computation system going on in our brain.
The brain has a model of the world and it's taking in perceptions and it's constantly
weaving multiple stories about that world that's integrating the new perceptions.
And the multiple stories are somehow, it's like a Google Doc, collaborative editing.
And that collaborative editing is the actual experience of what we think of as consciousness.
Somehow, the editing is consciousness of this story.
I mean, that's a theory of consciousness, isn't it?
The narrative theory of consciousness, or the multiple versions, editing, collaborative
editing of a narrative theory of consciousness.
- Yeah, he calls it the multiple drafts model.
Incidentally, there's a very interesting paper just come out by very good philosopher, Luke
Roloff, defending a panpsychist version of Dennett's multiple drafts model.
- Like a deep turtle that that turtle is stacked on top of.
- Just the difference being that, this is Luke Roloff's view, all of the drafts are
conscious.
I guess for Dennett, there's sort of no fact of the matter about which of these drafts
is the correct one.
On Roloff's view, maybe there's no fact of the matter about which of these drafts is
my consciousness, but nonetheless, all the drafts correspond to some consciousness.
And I mean, it's just kind of funny.
I guess I think he calls it Dennettian panpsychism, but Luke is one of the most rigorous and serious
philosophers alive at the moment, I think.
I hate having Luke Roloff in an audience if I'm giving a talk, because he always cuts
straight to the weakness in your position that you hadn't thought of.
So it's nice, panpsychism is sometimes associated with fluffy thinking, but contemporary panpsychists
have come out of this tradition we call analytic philosophy, which is rooted in detailed, rigorous
argumentation and it is defended in that manner.
Yeah, those analytic philosophers are sticklers for terminology.
It's very fun, very fun group to talk shit with over speakers.
Yeah, well, I mean, it gets boring if you just start and end defining words, right?
Yeah.
I think starting with defining words is good.
Actually, the philosopher Derek Parfit said when he first was thinking about philosophy,
he went to a talk in analytic philosophy and he went to a talk in continental philosophy
and he decided that the problem with the continental philosophy, if it was really unrigorous, really
imprecise, the problem with the analytic philosophy is it was just not about anything important.
And he thought there was more chance of working within analytic philosophy and asking some
more meaningful, some more profound questions than there was in working continental philosophy
and making it more rigorous.
Now they're both horrific stereotypes and I don't want to get nasty emails from either
of these groups, but there's something to what he was saying there.
I think just a tiny tangent on terminology, I do think that there's a lot of deep insight
to be discovered by just asking questions.
What do we mean by this word?
I remember I was taking a course on algorithms and data structures in computer science and
the instructor, shout out to him, Ali Shekhafande, amazing professor.
I remember he asked some basic questions like, what is an algorithm?
The pressure of pushing students to answer, to think deeply.
You just woke up, hung over in college or whatever, and you're tasked with answering
some deep philosophical question about what is an algorithm, these basic questions.
And they sound very simple, but they're actually very difficult.
And one of the things I really value in conversation is asking these dumb, simple questions of
like, what is intelligence?
And just continually asking that question over and over of some of the biggest researchers
in the artificial intelligence computer science space.
It's actually very useful.
At the same time, it should start at terminology and then progress where you kind of say, ah,
§02Transcript · 14:38–28:32
fuck it.
We'll just assume we know what we mean by that.
Otherwise you get the Bill Clinton situation where it's like, what is the meaning of his
whatever he said?
It's like, hey man, did you do the sex stuff or not?
- Yeah.
- So you have to both be able to talk about the sex stuff and the meaning of the word
is.
With consciousness, because we don't currently understand very much, terminology discussions
are very important.
'Cause it's like, you're almost trying to sneak up to some deep insight by just discussing
some basic terminology, like what is consciousness or even defining the different aspects of
panpsychism is fascinating.
But just to linger on the Daniel Dennett thing, what do you think about narrative?
Sort of the mind constructing narratives for ourselves.
So there's nothing special about consciousness deeply.
It is some property of the human mind that's just is able to tell these pretty stories
that we experience as consciousness and that it's unique perhaps to the human mind, which
is I suppose what Daniel Dennett would argue, that it's either deeply unique or mostly unique
to the human mind.
- It's just on the question of terminology before.
Yes, I think it used to be the fashion among philosophers that we had to come up with utterly
precise necessary and sufficient conditions for each word.
And then I think this has gone out of fashion a bit, partly because it's just been such
a failure.
The word knowledge in particular, people used to define knowledge as true justified belief.
And then this guy, Gettier, had this very short paper where he just produced some pretty
conclusive counter examples to that.
I think he wrote very few papers, but this is just, you have to teach this on an undergraduate
philosophy course.
And then after that, you had a huge literature of people trying to address this and propose
a new definition, but then someone else would come out with counter examples.
And then you get a new definition of knowledge and counter examples, and it just went on
and on and never seemed to get anywhere.
So I think the thought now is, let's work out how precise we need to be for what we're
trying to do.
And I think that's a healthier attitude.
So precision is important, but you just need to work out how precise do we need to be for
these purposes.
Coming to Dennett and narrative theories, I think narrative theories are a plausible
contender for a theory of the self, theory of my identity over time, what makes me the
same person in some sense today as I was 20 years ago, given that I've changed so much
physically and psychologically.
One running contender is something connected to the kind of stories we tell about ourselves,
or maybe some story about the psychological, the chains of psychological continuity.
I'm not saying I accept such a theory, but it's plausible.
I don't think these theories are good as theories of consciousness, at least if we're taking
consciousness just to be subjective experience, pleasure, pain, seeing color, hearing sound.
I think a hamster has consciousness in that sense.
There's something that it's like to be a hamster.
It feels pain if you stand on it, if you're cruel enough to do it.
I don't know why I gave that.
Stan.
I don't know, philosophers give these very violent examples to get the cross consciousness
and it's, yeah, I don't know why that's coming up.
But anyway.
You say mean things to the hamster.
Let's back up.
It experiences pain, it experiences pleasure, joy.
But there's some limits to that experience of a hamster, but there is nevertheless the
presence of a subjective experience.
Yeah.
Consciousness is just something, I mean, it's a very ambiguous word, but if we're just using
it to mean some kind of experience, some kind of inner life, that is pretty widespread in
the animal kingdom.
A bit difficult to say where it stops, where it starts, but you certainly don't need something
as sophisticated as the capacity to self-consciously tell stories about yourself to just have experience.
Except for cats who are evil automatons that are void of consciousness.
They're the fingertips of the devil.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
I was taking that as read.
I mean, Descartes thought animals were mechanisms.
And humans are unique.
So, animals are robots, essentially, in the formulation of Descartes and humans are unique.
So in which way would you say humans are unique versus even our closest ancestors?
Is there something special about humans?
What is, in your view, under the panpsychism, I guess we're walking backwards because we'll
have the big picture conversation about what is panpsychism, but given your kind of broad
theory of consciousness, what's unique about humans, do you think?
As a panpsychist, there is a great continuity between humans and the rest of the universe.
There's nothing that special about human consciousness.
It's just a highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe.
So we're very much continuous with the rest of the physical universe.
What is unique about human beings?
I suppose the capacity to reflect on our conscious experience, plan for the future, the capacity,
I would say, to respond to reasons as well.
I mean, animals in some sense have motivations, but when a human being makes a decision, they're
responding to what philosophers call normative considerations.
You know, if you think, "Should I take this job in the US?"
You weigh it up, you say, "Well, I'll get more money, I'll have maybe a better quality
of life, but if I stay in the UK, I'll be closer to family," and you weigh up these
considerations.
I'm not sure any non-human animals quite respond to considerations of value in that way.
I mean, I might be reflecting here that I'm something of an objectivist about value.
I think there are objective facts about what we have reason to do and what we have reason
to believe.
And humans have access to those facts.
And humans have access to them and can respond to them.
That's a controversial claim.
Many of my panpsychist brethren might not...
They would say the hamster too can look up to the stars and ponder theoretical physics.
Maybe not, but I think it depends what you think about value.
If you have a more Humean picture of value, by which I mean relating to the philosopher
David Hume, who said, "Reason is the slave of the passions."
Really, we just have motivations and what we have reason to do arises from our motivations.
I'm not a Humean, I think there are objective facts about what we have a reason to do.
And I think we have access to them.
I don't think any non-human animal has access to objective facts about what they have reason
to do, what they have reason to believe.
They don't weigh up evidence.
Reason is a slave of the passions.
That was David Hume's view, yeah.
I mean, yeah, do you want to know my problem with Hume's?
I had a radical conversion.
This might not be connected, it's not connected to panpsychism, but I had a radical conversion.
I used to have a more Humean view when I was a graduate student, but I was persuaded by
some professors at the University of Reading where I was that if you have the Humean view,
you have to say any basic life goals are equal, equally valid.
So for example, let's take someone whose basic goal in life is counting blades of grass,
right?
And crucially, they don't enjoy it, right?
This is the crucial point.
They get no pleasure from it.
That's just their basic goal, to spend their life counting as many blades of grass as possible.
Not for some greater goal, that's just their basic goal.
I want to say that that is objectively stupid.
That is objectively pointless.
I shouldn't say stupid.
It's objectively pointless in a way that pursuing pleasure or pursuing someone else's pleasure
or pursuing scientific inquiry is not pointless.
As soon as you make that admission, you're not a follower of David Hume anymore.
You think there are objective facts about what goals are worth pursuing.
Is it possible to have a goal without pleasure?
So this kind of idea that you disjoint the two.
So the David Foster Wallace idea of the key to life is to be unboreable.
Isn't it possible to discover the pleasure in everything in life?
The counting of the blades of grass, once you see the mastery, the skill of it, you
can discover the pleasure.
Therefore, I guess what I'm asking is why and when and how did you lose the romance
in grad school of life?
Is that what you're trying to say?
I think it may or may not be true that it's possible to find pleasure in everything.
But I think it's also true that people don't act solely for pleasure, and they certainly
don't act solely for their own pleasure.
People will suffer for things they think are worthwhile.
I might suffer for some scientific cause, for finding out a cure for the pandemic, and
in terms of my own pleasure, I might have less pleasure in doing that, but I think it's
worthwhile.
It's a worthwhile thing to do.
I just don't think it's the case that everything we do is rooted in maximizing our own pleasure.
I don't think that's even psychologically plausible.
But pleasure, then that's a narrow kind of view of pleasure.
That's like a short-term pleasure, but you can see pleasure is a kind of ability to hear
the music in the distance.
It's like, yes, it's difficult now, it's suffering now, but there's some greater thing beyond
the mountain that will be joy.
I mean, that's kind of a, even if it's not in this life, well, you know, the warriors
will meet in Valhalla, right?
The feeling that gives meaning and fulfillment to life is not necessarily grounded in pleasure
of like the counting of the grass.
It's something else.
I don't know.
The struggle is a source of deep fulfillment.
So I think pleasure needs to be kind of thought of as a little bit more broadly.
It just kind of gives you this sense.
It for a moment allows you to forget the terror of the fact that you're going to die.
That's pleasure.
That's the broader view of pleasure, that you get to kind of play in the little illusion
that all of this has deep meaning.
That's pleasure.
- Yeah, well, but I mean, you know, people sacrifice their lives.
Atheists may sacrifice their lives for the sake of someone else or for the sake of something
important enough.
And clearly in that case, they're not doing it for the sake of their own pleasure.
That's a rather dramatic example, but there can be just trivial examples where, you know,
I choose to be honest rather than lie about something.
Can I lose out a bit and I have a bit less pleasure, but I thought it was worth doing
the honest thing or something.
I mean, I just think so that's a, I mean, maybe you can use the word pleasure so broadly
that you're just essentially meaning something worthwhile, but then I think the word pleasure
maybe loses its meaning.
- Sure.
- Well, but what do you think about the blades of grass case?
What do you think about someone who spends their life cutting blades of grass and doesn't
enjoy it?
- So I think, I personally think it's impossible, or maybe I'm not understanding even like the
philosophical formulation, but I think it's impossible to have a goal and not draw pleasure
from it.
So make it worthwhile, forget the word pleasure.
I think the word goal loses meaning.
If I say I'm going to count the number of pens on this table, if I'm actively involved
in the task, I will find joy in it.
I will find, like, I think there's a lot of meaning and joy to be discovered in the skill
of a task, in mastering of a skill and taking pride in doing it well.
I mean, that's, I don't know what it is about the human mind, but there's some joy to be
discovered in the mastery of a skill.
So I think it's just impossible to count blades of grass and not sort of have the Girodreams
of sushi compelling, like draws you into the mastery of the simple task.
Yeah, I suppose, I mean, in a way you might think it's just hard to imagine someone who
§03Transcript · 28:42–44:28
would spend their lives doing that, but then maybe that's just because it's so evident
that that is a pointless task.
Whereas if we take this David Hume view seriously, it ought to be, you know, a totally possible
life goal.
Because I mean, yeah, I guess I just find it hard to shake the idea that some ways of,
some life goals are more worthwhile than others.
And it doesn't mean, you know, that there's one single way you should lead your life,
but pursuing knowledge, helping people, pursuing your own pleasure to an extent are worthwhile
things to do in a way that, you know, for example, I have, I'm a little bit OCD.
I still feel inclined to walk on cracks in the pavement or do it symmetrically.
Like if I step on a crack with my left foot, I feel the need to do it with my right foot.
I think that's kind of pointless.
It's something I feel the urge to do, but it's pointless.
Whereas other things I choose to do, I think it's worth doing.
And it's hard to make sense of metaphysically, what could possibly ground that?
How could we know about these facts?
But that's the starting point for me.
I don't know.
I think you walking on the sidewalk in a way that's symmetrical brings order to the world.
Like if you weren't doing that, the world might fall apart.
And you-
It feels like that.
And I think there's meaning in that.
Like you embracing the full experience of that, you living the richness of that as if
it has meaning, will give meaning to it.
And then whatever genius comes of that as you as one little intelligent ant will make
a better life for everybody else.
Perhaps I'm defending the blades of grass example, because I can literally imagine myself
enjoying this task as somebody who's OCD in a certain kind of way and quantitative.
But now you're ruining the example because you imagine someone enjoying it.
I'm imagining someone who doesn't enjoy it.
We don't want a life that's just full of pleasure.
Like we just sit there, having a big sugar high all the time.
We want a life where we do things that are worthwhile.
If for something to be worthwhile just is for it to be a basic life goal, then that
mode of reflection doesn't really make sense.
We can't really think.
We can't really do things worthwhile.
On the David Hume type picture, all it is for something to be worthwhile is it was a
basic goal of yours or derived from a basic goal.
- Yeah, I mean, I think goal and worthwhile aren't, I think goal is a boring word.
I'm more sort of existentialist.
It's like, did you ride the roller coaster of life?
Did you fully experience life?
And in that sense, I mean, the blaze of grass is something that could be deeply joyful.
And that's in that way, I think suffering could be joyful in the full context of life.
It's the roller coaster of life.
Without suffering, without struggle, without pain, without depression or sadness, there's
not the highs.
I mean, that's the fucked up thing about life is that the lows really make the highs that
much richer and deeper and taste better.
I tweeted this, I couldn't sleep and I was late at night.
I know it's an obvious statement, but every love story eventually ends in loss, in tragedy.
So this feeling of love, at the end, there's always going to be tragedy.
Even if it's the most amazing lifelong love with another human being, one of you is going
to die.
And I don't know which is worse, but both are not going to be pretty.
And so the sense that it's finite, the sense that it's going to end in a low, that gives
richness to those kind of evenings when you realize this fucking thing ends.
This thing ends.
The feeling that it ends, that bad taste, that bad feeling that it ends gives meaning,
gives joy, gives pleasure.
I don't know, pleasure is this loaded word, but gives some kind of a deep pleasure to
the experience when it's good.
And that's the blades of grass, they have that to me.
But you're perhaps right that it's like reducing it to a set of goals or something like that
is kind of removing the magic of life.
Because I think what makes counting the blades of grass joyful is just because it's life.
Okay, so it sounds like you reject the David Hume type picture anyway, because you're saying
just because you have it as a goal, that's what it is to be worthwhile.
But you're saying no, it's because it's engaging with life, riding the roller coaster.
So that does sound like in some sense, there are facts independent of our personal goal
choices about what it means to live a good life.
I mean, coming back full circle to the start of this was what makes us different to animals.
I don't think at the end of a hamster's life, it thinks, "Did I ride the roller coaster?
Did I really live life to the full?"
That is not a mode of reflection that's available to non-human animals.
So what do you think is the role of death in all of this?
The fear of death?
Does that interplay with consciousness?
Does this self-reflection?
Do you think there's some deep connection between this ability to contemplate the fact
that our flame of consciousness eventually goes out?
Yeah, I don't think unfortunately, panpsychism helps particularly with life after death,
because for the panpsychist, there's nothing supernatural, there's nothing beyond the physical.
All there is really is ultimately particles and fields.
It's just that we think the ultimate nature of particles and fields is consciousness.
But I guess when the matter in my brain ceases to be ordered in a way that sustains the particular
kind of consciousness I enjoy in waking life, then in some sense, I will cease to be.
Although I do, the final chapter of my book, Galileo's Error, is more experimental.
So the first four chapters are the cold-blooded case for the panpsychist view is the best
solution to the hard problem of consciousness.
The last chapter, we talk about meaning.
Yeah, I talk about meaning, I talk about free will, and I talk about mystical experiences.
So I always want to emphasize that panpsychism is not necessarily connected to anything spiritual.
A lot of people defending this view, like David Chalmers or Luke Roloff, are just total
atheist secularists.
They don't believe in any kind of transcendent reality, they just believe in feelings, mundane
consciousness and think that needs explaining and our conventional scientific approach can't
cut it.
But if for independent reasons, you are motivated to some spiritual picture of reality, then
maybe a panpsychist view is more consonant with that.
So if you have a mystical experience where it seems to you in this experience that there
is this higher form of consciousness at the root of all things, if you're a materialist,
you've got to think that's a delusion.
There's just something in your brain making you think that it's not real.
But if you're a panpsychist and you already think the fundamental nature of reality is
constituted of consciousness, it's not that much of a leap to think that this higher form
of consciousness you seem to apprehend in the mystical experience is part of that underlying
reality.
And in many different cultures, experienced meditators have claimed to have experiences
in which it becomes apparent to them that there is an element of consciousness that
is universal.
So this is sometimes called universal consciousness.
So on this view, your mind and my mind are not totally distinct.
Each of our individual conscious minds is built upon the foundations of universal consciousness.
And universal consciousness as it exists in me is one and the same thing as universal
consciousness as it exists in you.
So I've never had one of these experiences.
But if one is a panpsychist, I think one is more open to that possibility.
I don't see why it shouldn't be the case that that is part of the nature of consciousness
and maybe something that is apparent in certain deep states of meditation.
And so what I explore in the experimental final chapter of my book is that could allow
for a kind of impersonal life after death.
Because if that view is true, then even when the particular aspects of my conscious experience
fall away, that element of universal consciousness at the core of my identity would continue
to exist.
So I'd sort of be, as it were, absorbed into universal consciousness.
So Buddhists and Hindu mystics try to meditate to get rid of all the bad karma to be absorbed
into universal consciousness.
It could be that if there's no karma, if there's no reverb, maybe everyone gets enlightened
when they die.
Maybe you just sink back into universal consciousness.
So I also, coming back to morality, suggest this could provide some kind of basis for
altruism or non-egotism.
Because if you think egotism implicitly assumes that we are utterly distinct individuals,
whereas on this view, we overlap to an extent that something at the core of our being is...
Even in this life, we overlap.
- That would be this view that some experienced meditators claim becomes apparent to them,
that there is something at the core of my identity that is one and the same as the thing
at the core of your identity, this universal consciousness.
- There is something very...
You and I in this conversation, there's a few people listening to this, all of us are
in a kind of single mind together.
There's some small aspect of that, or maybe a big aspect.
But us humans, so certainly in the space of ideas, we kind of meld together for time,
at least, in a conversation, and kind of play with that idea.
And then we're clearly all thinking, like if I say pink elephant, there's going to be
a few people that are now visualizing a pink elephant.
We're all thinking about that pink elephant together.
We're all in the room together thinking about this pink elephant.
We're rotating it in our minds together.
What is that?
That pink elephant, is there a different instantiation of that pink elephant in everybody's mind,
or is it the same elephant, and we have the same mind exploring that elephant?
Now if we in our mind start petting that elephant, like touching it, that experience that we're
now thinking what that would feel like, what's that?
Is that all of us experiencing that together, or is that separate?
So there's some aspect of the togetherness that almost seems fundamental to civilization,
to society.
Hopefully that's not too strong, but to some of the fundamental properties of the human
mind, it feels like the social aspect is really important.
We call it social because we think of us as individual minds interacting.
But if we're just like one collective mind with like fingertips that are like touching
each other as it's trying to explore the elephant, but that could be just in the realm of ideas
and intelligence and not in the realm of consciousness.
It's interesting to see maybe it is in the realm of consciousness.
- Yeah, so it's obviously certainly true in some sense that there are these phenomena
that you're talking about of collective consciousness in some sense.
I suppose the question is, how ontologically serious do we want to be about those things?
By which I mean, are they just a construction out of our minds and the fact that we interact
in the standardly scientifically accepted ways?
Or is as someone like Rupert Sheldrake would think that there is some metaphysical reality,
there are some fields beyond the scientifically understood ones that are somehow communicating
this?
I mean, the view I was describing was that this element we're supposed to have in common
is some sort of pure impersonal consciousness or something rather than...
So actually, an interesting figure is the Australian philosopher, Miri Al-Bahari, who
defends a kind of mystical conceptual reality rooted in Advaita Vedanta mysticism.
But like me, she's from this tradition of analytic philosophy.
And so she defends this in this incredibly precise, rigorous way.
She defends the idea that we should think of experienced meditators as providing expert
testimony.
So I think humans are causing climate breakdown.
I have no idea the science behind it, but I trust the experts or that the universe is
14 billion years old.
Most of our knowledge is based on expert testimony.
And she thinks we should think of experienced meditators, these people who are telling us
about this universal consciousness at the core of our being as a relevant kind of expert.
And so she wants to defend the rational acceptability of this mystical conceptual reality.
So I think we shouldn't be ashamed, we shouldn't be worried about dealing with certain views
as long as it's done with rigor and seriousness.
I think sometimes terms like, I don't know, new age or something can function a bit like
racist terms.
A racist term picks out a group of people, but then implies certain negative characteristics.
So people use this term to pick out a certain set of views like mystical conceptual reality
and imply it's kind of fluffy thinking.
But you read Miri Al-Bahari, you read Luke Roloff's, this is serious, rigorous thought,
whether you agree with it or not, obviously, it's hugely controversial.
And so the Enlightenment ideal is to follow the evidence and the arguments where they
§04Transcript · 44:33–59:39
lead.
But it's kind of very hard for human beings to do that.
I think we get stuck in some conception of how we think science ought to look.
And people talk about religion as a crutch, but I think a certain kind of scientism, a
certain conception of how science is supposed to be gets into people's identity and their
sense of themselves and their security.
And make things hard if you're a punch like us.
- And even the word expert becomes a kind of a crutch.
I mean, you use the word expert, you have some kind of conception of what expertise
means.
Oftentimes that's connected with a degree at particularly prestigious university or
something like that.
Or expertise is a funny one.
I've noticed that anybody sort of that claims they're an expert is usually not the expert.
The biggest quote unquote expert that I've ever met are the ones that are truly humble.
So the humility is a really good sign of somebody who's traveled a long road and been humbled
by how little they know.
So some of the best people in the world at whatever the thing they've spent their life
doing are the ones that are ultimately humble in the face of it all.
So like just being humble, how little we know, even if we travel a lifetime.
I do like the idea.
I mean, treating sort of like, what is it, psychonauts, like an expert witness, you know,
people who have traveled with the help of DMT to another place where they got some deep
understanding of something and their insight is perhaps as valuable as the insight of somebody
who ran rigorous psychological studies at Princeton University or something.
Like those psychonauts, they have wisdom if it's done rigorously, which you can also do
rigorously within the university, within the studies now with psilocybin and those kinds
of things.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
It's still probably the best, one of the best works on mystical experience is the chapter
in William James's Varieties of Religious Experiences.
Most of it is just a psychological study of trying to define the characteristics of mystical
experience as a psychological type.
But at the end, he considers the question, if you have a mystical experience, is it rational
to trust it, to trust that it's telling you something about reality?
And he makes an interesting argument.
He says, if you say no, you're kind of applying a double standard because we all think it's
okay to trust our normal sensory experiences, but we have no way of getting outside of ourselves
to prove that our sensory experiences correspond to an external reality.
We could be in the matrix.
This could be a very vivid dream.
You could say, oh, we do science, but a scientist only gets their data by experiencing the results
of their experiments.
And then the question arises again, how do you know that corresponds to a real world?
So he thinks there's a sort of double standard in saying it's okay to trust our ordinary
sensory experiences, but it's not okay for the person on DMT to trust those experiences.
It's very philosophically difficult to say why is it okay in the one case and not the
other?
So I think there's an interesting argument there, but I would like to just defend experts
a little bit.
I mean, I agree it's very difficult, but especially in an age, I guess, where there's so much
information, I do think it's important to have some protection of sources of information,
academic institutions that we can trust.
And then that's difficult because of course there are non-academics who do know what they're
talking about, but if I'm interested in knowing about biology, you can't research everything.
So I think we have to have some sense of who are the experts we can trust, the people who've
spent a lot of time reading all the material that people have read, written, thinking about
it, having their views torn apart by other people working in the field.
I think that is very important and also to protect that from conflicts of interest.
There is a so-called think tank in the UK called the Institute of Economic Affairs who
are always on the BBC as experts on economic questions and they do not declare who funds
them.
So we don't know who's paying the piper.
I think you shouldn't be allowed to call yourself a think tank if you're not totally transparent
about who's funding you.
So I think that's it.
And I mean, this connects to panpsychism because I think the reason people worry about unorthodox
ideas is because they worry about how do we know when we're just losing control or losing
discipline.
So I do think we need to somehow protect academic institutions as sources of information that
we can trust.
And in philosophy, there's not much consensus on everything, but you can at least know,
you can know what people who have put the time in to read all the stuff, what they think
about these issues.
I think that is important.
- So push back on your pushback.
Who are the experts on COVID?
- Oh dear, getting into dangerous territory now.
- Well, let me just speak to it because I am walking through that dangerous territory.
I'm allergic to the word expert because in my simple mind, it kind of rhymes with ego.
There's something about experts.
If we allow too much to have a category expert and place certain people in them, those people
sitting on the throne start to believe it and they start to communicate with that energy
and the humility starts to dissipate.
I think there is value in a lifelong mastery of a skill and the pursuit of knowledge within
a very specific discipline.
But the moment you have your name on an office, the moment you're an expert, I think you
destroy the very aspect, the very value of that journey towards knowledge.
So some of it probably just reduces to like skillful communication, like of communicating
in a way that shows humility, that shows an open-mindedness, that shows an ability to
really hear what a lot of people are saying.
So in the case of COVID, what I've noticed, and this is true, this is probably true with
panpsychism as well, is so-called experts, and they are extremely knowledgeable, many
of them are colleagues of mine, they dismiss what millions of people are saying on the
internet without having looked into it with empathy and rigor, honestly, understand what
are the arguments being made.
They say like, "There's not enough time to explore all those things, like there's so
much stuff out there."
Yeah, I think that's intellectual laziness.
If you don't have enough time, then don't speak so strongly with dismissal.
Feel bad about it, be apologetic about the fact that you don't have enough time to explore
the evidence.
For example, the heat I got with Francis Collins is that he kind of said that LabLeak, he kind
of dismissed it, showing that he didn't really deeply explore all the huge amount of circumstantial
evidence out there, the battles that are going on out there.
There's a lot of people really tensely discussing this, and showing humility in the face of
that battle of ideas I think is really important.
And I've just been very disappointed in so-called expertise in the space of science, in showing
humility and showing humanity and kindness and empathy towards other human beings.
At the same time, obviously, I love "Jiro Dreams of Sushi," lifelong pursuit of getting
in computer science, Don Knuth.
Some of my biggest heroes are people that when nobody else cares, they stay on one topic
for their whole life, and they just find the beautiful little things about their puzzles
they keep solving.
And yes, sometimes a virus happens or something happens where that person with their puzzles
becomes like the center of the whole world, because that puzzle becomes all of a sudden
really important.
But still, there's responsibilities on them to show humility and to be open-minded to
the fact that even if they spent their whole life doing it, even if their whole community
is giving them awards and giving them citations and giving them all kinds of stuff where they're
bowing down before them how smart they are, they still know nothing relative to all the
stuff, the mysteries that are out there.
Yeah, I wonder how much we're disagreeing.
I mean, these are totally valid issues.
And of course, expertise goes wrong in all sorts of ways.
It's totally fallible.
I suppose I would just say, what is the alternative?
Or do we just say all information is equal?
Because as a voter, I've got to decide who to vote for, and I've got to evaluate.
And I can't look into all of the economics and all of the relevant science.
And so I just think, maybe it's like Churchill said about democracy, it's the worst system
of government apart from all the rest.
I think about panpsychism, it's the worst theory of consciousness apart from all the
rest.
But I just think expertise, the peer review system, I think it's terrible in so many ways.
Yes, people should show more humility, but I can't see a viable alternative.
I think philosopher Bernard Williams had a really nice nuanced discussion of the problems
of titles, but how they also function in a society.
They do have some positive function.
The very first time I lectured in philosophy, before I got a professorship, was teaching
at a continuing education college.
That's kind of for retired people who want to learn some more things.
And I just totally pitched it too high.
And Gaet talked about Bernard Williams on titles and hierarchies.
And these kind of people in their 70s and 80s were just instantly started interrupting
saying, "What is philosophy?"
And it was a disaster.
And I just remember in the breaks, a sort of elderly lady comes up and said, "I've decided
to take Egyptology instead."
But that was my introduction to teaching.
But sort of titles and accomplishments is a nice starting point, but doesn't buy you
the whole thing.
So you don't get to just say, "This is true because I'm an expert."
You still have to convince people.
One of the things I really like, so I practice martial arts.
And for people who don't know, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is one of them.
And you sometimes wear these pajamas, pajama looking things, and you wear a belt.
So I happen to be a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
And I also train in what's called no gi, so you don't wear the pajamas.
And when you don't wear the pajamas, nobody knows what rank you are.
Nobody knows if you're a black belt or a white belt, or if you're a complete beginner or
not.
And when you wear the pajamas, called the gi, you wear the rank.
And people treat you very differently.
When they see my black belt, they treat me differently.
They kind of defer to my expertise.
If they're kicking my ass, that's probably because I am working on something new, or
maybe I'm letting them win.
But when there's no belts, and it doesn't matter if I've been doing this for 15 years,
it doesn't matter.
None of it matters.
What matters is the raw interaction of just trying to kick each other's ass, and seeing
what is this chess game, like a human chess, what are the ideas that we're playing with?
And I think there's a dance there.
Yes, it's valuable to know a person as a black belt when you take consideration of the advice
of different people, me versus somebody who's only practiced for like a couple of days.
But at the same time, the raw practice of ideas that is combat, and the raw practice
of exchange of ideas that is science, needs to often throw away expertise.
And in communicating, there's another thing to science and expertise, which is leadership.
It's not just, so the scientific method in the review process is this rigorous battle
of ideas between scientists.
But there's also a stepping up and inspiring the world, and communicating ideas to the
world.
And that skill of communication, I suppose that's my biggest criticism of so-called experts
in science, is they're just shitty communicators.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Well, I can tell you, I get very frustrated with philosophers not reaching out more.
I mean, I think it might be partly that we're trained to get watertight arguments, respond
to all objections.
And as you do that, eventually it gets more complicated and the jargon comes in.
But then if, so to write a more accessible book or article, you have to loosen the arguments
a bit.
And then we worry that other philosophers will think, "Oh, that's a really crap argument."
So I mean, the way I did it, I wrote my academic book first, which is just a fundamental reality.
And then a more accessible book, Galileo's Error, where the arguments, you know, not
as rigorously worked out.
So then I can say the proper arguments, you know, the further arguments there.
But I get very frustrated.
That's brilliantly done, by the way.
§05Transcript · 59:40–1:14:35
Like that's such a, so for people who don't know, you first wrote Consciousness and Fundamental
Reality.
So that's the academic book, also very good.
I flew through it last night, bought it.
And then obviously the popular book is Galileo's Error, Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness.
That's kind of the right way to do it.
To show that you're legit to your community, to the world by doing the book that's normally
going to read, and then doing a popular book that everybody's going to read.
That's cool.
Well, I try now, every time I write an academic article, I try to write a more accessible
version.
I mean, the thing I've been working on recently, just because there's this argument.
So there's a certain argument from the cosmological fine tuning of the laws of physics for life
to the multiverse that's quite popular physicists like Max Tegmark.
There's an argument in philosophy journals that there's a fallacious line of reasoning
going on there from the fine tuning to the multiverse.
Now that argument is from 20, 30 years ago, and it's discussed in academic philosophy.
Nobody knows about it.
And there is huge interest in this fine tuning stuff.
Scientists wanting to argue for the multiverse, theists wanting to say this is evidence for
God and nobody knows about this argument, which tries to show that it's fallacious reasoning
to go from the fine tuning to the multiverse.
So I wrote a piece for Scientific American explaining this argument to a more general
audience.
And it just really irritates me that it's just buried in these technical journal articles
and nobody knows about it.
But just a final thing on that.
I don't disagree with anything you said, and that's kind of really beautiful, that martial
arts example and thinking how that could be analogous.
But I think it's very rare to find a good philosopher who hasn't given a talk to other
philosophers and had objections raised.
I was going to say have it torn apart, but that's maybe thinking of it in the wrong way.
But have the best objections raised to it.
And that's why that is an important formative process that you go through as an academic,
that the greatest minds starting a philosophy degree, for example, won't have gone through,
probably except in very rare cases, just won't have the skills required.
But part of it is just fun to disagree and dance with.
I think to elaborate on what you're saying in agreement, not just gone through that,
but continue to go through that.
Absolutely.
That's, I would say, the biggest problem with "expertise" is that there's a certain point
where you get, because it sucks.
Is martial arts, this is a good example of that, it sucks to get your ass kicked.
There's a temptation.
I still go, I train.
You're getting older too, but also there's killers out there in both the space of martial
arts and the space of science.
And I think that once you become a professor, like more and more senior and more and more
respected, I don't know if you get your ass kicked in the space of ideas as often.
I don't know if you allow yourself to truly expose yourself.
If you do, that's a great sign of a humble, brilliant mind.
Always constantly exposing yourself to that.
I think you do, because I think there's graduate students who want to find the objection to
write their paper or make their mark.
And yeah, I think everyone still gives talks or should give talks and people are wanting
to work out if there are any weaknesses to your position.
So yeah, I think that generally works out.
There is also a kind of, who do you give the talks to?
So I mean, within communities, the little cluster of people that argue and bicker, but
what are they arguing about?
They take a bunch of stuff, a bunch of basic assumptions as agreement, and they heatedly
argue about certain ideas.
The question is how open are...
That's actually kind of like fun.
It's like, no offense, sorry, we're sticking on this martial arts thing.
It's like people who practice Aikido or certain martial arts that don't truly test themselves
in the cage, in combat.
So it's fun to argue about certain things when you're in your own community, but you
don't test those ideas in the full context of science, in the full seriousness, the rigor
of the, sometimes like the real world.
One of my favorite fields is psychology.
There's often places within psychology where you're kind of doing these studies and arguing
about stuff that's done in the lab.
The arguments are almost disjoint from real human behavior because it's so much easier
to study human behavior in the lab.
You just kind of stay there and that's where the arguments are.
Vision science is a good example, like studying eye movement and how we perceive the world
and all that kind of stuff.
It's so much easier to study in a lab that we don't consider, we say that's going to
be what the science of vision is going to be like.
And we don't consider the science of vision in the actual real world, the engineering
of vision, I don't know.
And so I think that's where exposing yourself to out of the box ideas, that's the most painful,
that's the most important.
- I mean, group think can be a terrible thing in philosophy as well, but because you're
not to the same extent beholden to evidence and refutation from the evidence that you
are in the sciences, it's a more subtle process of evaluation and so more susceptible, I think,
to group think.
Yeah, I agree, it's a danger.
- We've talked about it a million times, but let's try to sort of do that old basic terminology
definitions.
What is panpsychism?
Like what are the different ways you can try to think about, to define panpsychism maybe
in contrast to naturalistic dualism and materialism, other kind of views of consciousness?
- Yeah, so you've basically laid out the different options.
So I guess probably still the dominant view is materialism, that roughly that we can explain
consciousness in the terms of physical science, wholly explain it just in terms of the electrochemical
signaling in the brain.
Dualism, the polar opposite view, that consciousness is non-physical outside of the physical workings
of the body and the brain, although closely connected.
And when I studied philosophy, we were taught basically they were the two options you had
to choose, right?
Either you thought it were dualist and you thought it was separate from the physical,
or you thought it was just electrochemical signaling.
And yeah, I became very disillusioned because I think there are big problems with both of
these options.
So I think the attraction of panpsychism is it's kind of a middle way.
It agrees with the materialist that there's just the physical world.
Ultimately, there's just particles and fields, but the panpsychist thinks there's more to
the physical than what physical science reveals, and that the ultimate nature of the physical
world is constituted of consciousness.
So consciousness is not outside of the physical as the dualist thinks, it's embedded in, underlies
the kind of description of the world we get from physics.
What to you are the problems of materialism and dualism?
Starting with materialism, it's a huge debate, but I think that the core of it is that physical
science works with a purely quantitative description of the physical world, whereas consciousness
essentially involves qualities.
If you think about the smell of coffee or the taste of mint or the deep red you experience
as you watch a sunset, I think these qualities can't be captured in the purely quantitative
language of physical science.
So as long as your description of the brain is framed in the purely quantitative language
of neuroscience, you'll just leave out these qualities and hence really leave out consciousness
itself.
And then dualism?
So I've actually changed my mind a little bit on this since I wrote the book.
So I argued in the book that we have pretty good experimental grounds for doubting dualism.
And roughly the idea was if dualism were true, if there was say an immaterial mind impacting
on the brain every second of waking life, that this would really show up in our neuroscience.
There'd be all sorts of things happening in the brain that had no physical explanation.
It would be like a poltergeist was playing with the brain.
But actually, and so the fact that we don't find that is a strong and ever-growing inductive
argument against dualism.
But actually, the more I talk to neuroscientists and read neuroscience, and we have at Durham,
my university, an interdisciplinary consciousness group, I don't think we know enough about
the brain, about the workings of the brain to make that argument.
I think we know a lot about the basic chemistry, how neurons fire, neurotransmitters, action
potentials, things like that.
We know a fair bit about large-scale functions of the brain, what different bits of the brain
do.
But what we're almost clueless on is how those large-scale functions are realized at the
cellular level, how it works.
People get quite excited about brain scans, but it's very low resolution.
Every pixel on a brain scan corresponds to 5.5 million neurons.
And we're only 70% of the way through constructing a connectome for the maggot brain, which has
10,000 or 100,000 neurons, but the brain has 86 billion neurons.
So I think we'd have to know a lot more about how the brain works, how these functions are
realized before we could assess whether the dynamics of the brain can be completely explicated
in terms of underlying chemistry or physics.
So we'd have to do more engineering before we could figure that out.
And there are people with other proposals.
Someone I got to know, Martin Picard at Columbia University, who has the psychobiology mitochondrial
lab there and is experimentally exploring the hypothesis that mitochondria in the brain
should be understood as sort of social networks, perhaps as an alternative to reducing it to
underlying chemistry and physics.
So it is ultimately an empirical question whether dualism is true.
I'm less convinced that we know the answer to that question at this stage.
I think still as scientists and philosophers, we want to try and find the simplest, most
parsimonious theory of reality.
And dualism is still a pretty inelegant, unparsimonious theory.
Reality is divided up into the purely physical properties and these consciousness properties,
and they're radically different kinds of things.
Whereas the panpsychist offers a much more simple, unified picture of reality.
So I think it's still the view to be preferred, to put it very simply, why believe in two
kinds of things when you can just get away with one?
- And materialism is also very simple, but you're saying it doesn't explain something
that seems pretty important.
- Yeah, so I think materialism, science is about trying to find the simplest theory that
accounts for the data.
I don't think materialism can account for the data.
Maybe dualism can account for the data, but panpsychism is simpler.
It can account for the data and it's simpler.
- What is panpsychism?
- So in its broadest definition, it's the view that consciousness is a fundamental and
ubiquitous feature of the physical world.
- Like a law of physics, what should we be imagining?
What do you think the different flavors of how that actually takes shape in the context
of what we know about physics and science and the universe?
- So in the simplest form of it, the fundamental building blocks of reality, perhaps electrons
and quarks, have incredibly simple forms of experience and the very complex experience
of the human or animal brain is somehow rooted in or derived from these very simple forms
of experience at the level of basic physics.
But I mean, maybe the crucial bit about the kind of panpsychism I defend, what it does
is it takes the standard approach to the problem of consciousness and turns it on its head,
right?
So the standard approach is to think we start with matter and we think, "How do we get consciousness
out of matter?"
So I don't think that problem can be solved for reasons I've kind of hinted at.
We could maybe go into more detail.
But the panpsychist does it the other way around.
They start with consciousness and try to get matter out of consciousness.
So the idea is basically at the fundamental level of reality, there are just networks
of very simple conscious entities.
But these conscious entities, because they have very simple kinds of experience, they
behave in predictable ways.
Through their interactions, they realize certain mathematical structures.
And then the idea is those mathematical structures just are the structures identified by physics.
So when we think about these simple conscious entities in terms of the mathematical structures
they realize, we call them particles, we call them fields, we call their properties mass,
spin and charge.
But really there's just these very simple conscious entities and their experiences.
§06Transcript · 1:14:40–1:29:48
So in this way, we get physics out of consciousness.
I don't think you can get consciousness out of physics, but I think it's pretty easy to
get physics out of consciousness.
- Well, I'm a little confused by why you need to get physics out of consciousness.
I mean, to me, it sounds like panpsychism unites consciousness and physics.
I mean, physics is the mathematical science of describing everything.
So physics should be able to describe consciousness.
And my understanding proposes is that physics doesn't currently do so, but can in the future.
It seems like consciousness, you have like Stephen Wolfram, all these people who are
trying to develop theories of everything, mathematical frameworks within which to describe
how we get all the reality that we perceive around us.
To me, there's no reason why that kind of framework cannot also include some accurate,
precise description of whatever simple consciousness characteristics are present there at the lowest
level if panpsychist theories have truth to them.
So to me, it is physics.
You said kind of physics emerges, by which you mean like the basic four laws of physics
that as we currently know them, the standard model, quantum mechanics, general relativity,
that emerges from the base consciousness layer.
That's what you mean.
- Yeah.
So maybe the way I phrased it made it sound like these things are more separate than they
are.
What I was trying to address was a common misunderstanding of panpsychism that it's a
sort of dualistic theory.
The idea is that particles have their physical properties like mass, spin and charge, and
these other funny consciousness properties.
So the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder had a blog post critiquing panpsychism maybe a couple
of years ago now that got a fair bit of traction.
And she was interpreting panpsychism in this way.
And then her thought was, "Well, look, if particles had these funny consciousness properties,
then it would show up in our physics, like the standard model of particle physics would
make false predictions because its predictions are based wholly on the physical properties.
If there were also these consciousness properties, we'd get different predictions."
But that's a misunderstanding of the view.
The view is, it's not that there are two kinds of property, that mass, spin and charge are
forms of consciousness.
How do we make sense of that?
Because actually, when you look at what physics tells us, it's really just telling us about
behavior, about what stuff does.
I sometimes put it by saying, "Doing physics is like playing chess when you don't care
what the pieces are made of.
You're just interested in what moves you can make."
So physics tells us what mass, spin and charge do, but it doesn't tell us what they are.
So the idea-
The experience of mass.
So the idea is, yeah, mass in its nature is a very simple form of consciousness.
So yeah, physics in a sense is complete, I think, because it tells us what everything
at the fundamental level does, it describes its causal capacities.
But for the panpsychist at least, physics doesn't tell us what matter is, it tells us
what it does, but not what it is.
To push back on the thing I think she's criticizing, is it also possible- so I understand what
you're saying- but is it also possible that particles have another property like consciousness?
I don't understand the criticism we would be able to detect it in our experiments.
Well, no, if you're not looking for it.
There's a lot of stuff that are orthogonal.
If you're not looking for the stuff, you're not going to detect it, because all of our
basic empirical science through its recent history, and yes, the history of science is
quite recent, has been very focused on billiard balls colliding, and from that understanding
how gravity works.
We just haven't integrated other possibilities into this.
I don't think there will be conflicting, whether you are observing consciousness or not, or
exploring some of these ideas, I don't think that affects the rest of the physics.
The mass, the energy, all the different kind of hierarchy of different particles and so
on, how they interact.
It feels like consciousness is something orthogonal, very much distinct.
The quantitative versus the qualitative, there's something quite distinct, almost like another
dimension that we're just completely ignoring.
There might be a way of responding to Sabina to say, well, there could be properties of
particles that don't show up in the specific circumstances in which physicists investigate
particles.
My colleague, the philosopher of science, Nancy Cartwright, has got this book, How the
Laws of Physics Lie, where she says, physicists explore things in very specific circumstances
and then in an unwarranted way, generalize that.
But I mean, I guess I was thinking Sabina's criticism actually just misses the mark in
a more basic way.
Her point is, we shouldn't think there are any more properties to particles other than
those the standard model attributes to them.
Panpsychics would say, yeah, sure, there aren't.
There are just the properties, the physical properties like mass, spin, and charge that
the standard model attributes to them.
It's just that we have a different philosophical view as to the nature of those properties.
- So those properties are turtles that are sitting on top of another turtle and that
big turtle is consciousness.
That's what you're saying.
But I'm just saying, it's possible that's true.
It's possible also that consciousness is just another turtle playing with the others.
It's just not interacting in the ways that we've been observing.
In fact, to me, that's more compelling because then that's going to be...
- Well, no, I think both are very compelling, but it feels like it's more within the reach
of empirical validation if it's yet another property of particles that we're just not
observing.
If it's like the thing from which matter and energy and physics emerges, it makes it that
much more difficult to investigate how you get from that base layer of consciousness
to the wonderful little spark of consciousness, complexity, and beauty that is the human being.
I don't know if you're necessarily trying to get there, but one of the beautiful things
to get at with panpsychism or with a solid theory of consciousness is to answer the question,
how do you engineer the thing?
How do you get from nothing, vacuum in the lab, if there is that consciousness base layer,
how do you start engineering organisms that have consciousness in them?
Or the reverse of that, describing how does consciousness emerge in the human being from
conception, from a stem cell to the whole full neurobiology that builds from that, how
do you get this full, rich experience of consciousness that humans have?
It feels like that's the dream, and if consciousness is just another player in the game of physics,
it feels more amenable to our scientific understanding of it.
That's interesting.
I mean, I guess it's supposed to be a kind of identity claim here that physics tells
us what matter does, consciousness is what matter is.
So matter is sort of what consciousness does.
So at the bottom level, there is just consciousness and conscious things.
There are just these simple things with their experiences, and that is their total nature.
So in that sense, it's not another player, it's just all there is really.
And then in physics, we describe that at a certain level of abstraction.
We capture what Bertrand Russell, who was the inspiration for a lot of this, calls the
causal skeleton of the world.
So physics is just interested in the causal skeleton of the world, it's not interested
in the flesh and blood, although that's maybe suggesting separation again too much, all
metaphors fail in the end.
But yeah, so you're totally right.
Ultimately, what we want to explain is how our consciousness and the consciousness of
other animals comes out of this.
If we can't do that, then it's game over.
But I think it maybe makes more sense on the identity claim that if matter at the fundamental
level just is forms of consciousness, then we can perhaps make sense of how those simple
forms of consciousness in some way combine in some way to make the consciousness we know
and love, that's the dream.
- Yeah, so I guess the question is, so the reason you can describe, the reason you have
material engineering, material science, is because you have from physics to chemistry,
you keep going up and up in levels of complexity in order to describe objects that we have
in our human world.
And it would be nice to do the same thing for consciousness, to come up with the chemistry
of consciousness, right?
Like how do the different particles interact to create greater complexity?
So you can do this kind of thing for life, like what is life?
Like living organisms, at which point do living organisms become living?
How do you know if I give you a thing, that that thing is living?
There's a lot of people who work on this kind of idea, and some of that has to do with the
levels of complexity and so on.
It'd be nice to know like measuring different degrees of consciousness as you get into bigger
and more and more complex objects.
And that's what chemistry, like bigger and bigger conscious molecules, and to see how
that leads to organisms.
And then organisms start to collaborate together like they do inside our human body to create
the full human body, to do those kinds of experiments would be, it seems like that would
be kind of a goal.
That's what I mean by player in a game of physics, as opposed to like the base layer.
If it's just the base layer, it becomes harder to track it as you get from physics to chemistry
to biology to psychology.
- Yeah, in every case apart from consciousness, I would say what we're interested in is behavior.
We're interested in explaining behavioral functions.
So the level of fundamental physics, we're interested in capturing the equations that
describe the behavior there.
And when we get to higher levels, we're interested in explicating the behavior, perhaps in terms
of behavior at simpler levels.
And with life as well, that's what we're interested in, the various observable functions of life,
explaining them in terms of more simple mechanisms.
But in the case of consciousness, I don't think that's what we're doing, or at least
not all that we're doing.
In the case of consciousness, there are these subjective qualities that we're immediately
aware of, the redness of a red experience, the itchiness of an itch, and we're trying
to account for them.
We're trying to bring them into our theory of reality.
And postulating some mechanism does not deal with that.
I think we've got to realize dealing with consciousness is a radically different explanatory
task from other tasks of science.
Other tasks of science, we're trying to explain behavior in terms of simpler forms of behavior.
In the case of consciousness, we're trying to explain these invisible subjective qualities
that you can't see from the outside, but that you're immediately aware of.
The reason materialism perhaps continues to dominate is people think, "Look at the success
of science.
It's incredible.
It's explained all this.
Surely it's going to explain consciousness."
But I think we have to appreciate there's a radically different explanatory task here.
The neuroscientist Anil Seth, who I've had lots of intense but friendly discussions with,
wants to compare consciousness to life.
But I think there's this radical difference that in the case of life, again, we come back
to public observation, all of the data, publicly observable data, we're basically trying to
explain complex behavior.
The way you do that is identify mechanisms, simpler mechanisms that explicate that behavior.
That's the task in physics, chemistry, neurobiology.
But in the case of consciousness, that's not what we're trying to do.
We're trying to account for these subjective qualities and you postulate a mechanism that
might explain behavior, but it doesn't explain the redness of a red experience.
But still, ultimately, the hope is that we will have some kind of hierarchical story.
So we take the causal dynamics of physics, we hypothesize that that's filled out with
certain forms of consciousness.
And then at higher levels, we get more complex causal dynamics filled out by more complex
forms of consciousness.
And ultimately we get to us, hopefully.
So yeah, so there's still a sort of hierarchical explanatory framework there.
- So you kind of mentioned the hierarchy of consciousness.
Do you think it's possible to, within the Pansychism framework, to measure consciousness?
Or put another way, are some things more conscious than others in the Pansychist view?
- It's a difficult question.
I mean, I do see consciousness as a dealing with consciousness and interdisciplinary task
between something more experimental, which has to do with the ongoing project of trying
to work out what people call the neural correlates of consciousness, what kinds of physical brain
activity correspond to conscious experience.
That's one part of it, but I think essentially there's also a theoretical question of more
the why question.
§07Transcript · 1:29:50–1:44:36
Why do those kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of conscious experience?
I don't think you can answer that.
Because consciousness is not publicly observable, I don't think you can answer that why question
with an experiment.
But they have to go hand in hand.
And I mean, one of the theories I'm attracted to is the integrated information theory, according
to which we find consciousness at the level at which there is most integrated information.
And they try to give a mathematically precise definition of that.
So on that view, probably this cup of tea isn't conscious because there's probably more
integrated information in the molecules making up the tea than there is in the liquid as
a whole.
But in the brain, what is distinctive about the brain is that there's a huge amount of
integrated, there's more integrated information in the system than there is in individual
neurons.
So that's why they claim that that's the basis of consciousness at the macro level.
Now they, so I don't, I mean, I like some features of this theory, but they do talk
about degrees of consciousness.
They do want to say there is gradations.
I'm not sure conceptually I can kind of make sense of that.
I mean, there are things to do with consciousness that are graded like complexity or levels
of information.
But I'm not sure whether experience itself admits a degree.
I sort of think something either has experience or it doesn't.
It might have very simple experience, it might have very complex experience, but experience
itself I don't think it admits a degree in that sense.
It's not more experience, less experience.
I sort of find that conceptually hard to make sense of, but I'm kind of open-minded on it.
- So when we have a lot higher resolution of sensory information, don't you think that's
correlated to the richness of the experience?
So doesn't more information provide a richer experience?
Or is that, again, thinking quantitatively and not thinking about the subjective experience?
Like you can experience a lot with very little sensory information perhaps.
Do you think those are connected?
- Yeah, yeah.
So there are features, characteristics here we can grade, the complexity of the experience.
And on the integrated information theory, they correlate that in terms of mathematically
identifiable structure with integrated information.
So roughly, it's a quite unusual notion of information.
It's perhaps not the standard way one thinks about information.
It's to do with constraining past and future possibilities of the system.
So the idea is in the retina of the eye, there's a huge amount of possible states the retina
of my eye could be in at the next moment, depending on what light goes into it.
Whereas the possible next states of the brain are much more constrained.
Obviously, it responds to the environment, but it heavily constrains its past and future
states.
And so that's the idea of information they have.
And then the second idea is how much that information is dependent on integration.
So in a computer where you have transistors, you take out a few transistors, you might
not lose that much information.
It's not dependent on interconnections, whereas you take a tiny bit of the brain out, you
lose a lot of information because the way it stores information is dependent on the
interconnections of the system.
So yeah, so that's one proposal for how to measure one gradable characteristic, which
might correspond to some gradable characteristic in qualitative consciousness.
Maybe I'm being very pedantic, which is, you know, philosophers professional pedant.
I just sort of don't think that is a quantity of experience.
It's a quantity of the structure of experience maybe, but I just find it hard to make sense
of the idea of how much experience do you have?
I've got, you know, five units of experience.
I've got one unit of experience.
I don't know.
I find that a bit hard to make sense of.
But maybe I'm being just pedantic.
I think just saying the word experience is difficult to think about.
Let's talk about suffering.
Let's talk about a particular experience.
So let's talk about me and a hamster.
I just think that, no offense to the hamster.
Probably no hamsters are listening.
So now you're offending hamsters too.
Maybe there's a hamster that's just pissed off.
There's probably somebody on a speaker right now, like listening to this podcast and they
probably have a hamster or a guinea pig and that hamster is listening.
It just doesn't know the English language or any kind of human interpretable linguistic
capabilities to tell you to fuck off.
It understands exactly what's being talked about and can see through us.
Anyway, it just feels like a hamster has less capacity to suffer than me.
And maybe a cockroach or an insect or maybe a bacteria has less capacity to suffer than
me.
But maybe that's me deluding myself as to the complexity of my conscious experience.
Maybe there is some sense in which I can suffer more, but to reduce it to something quantifiable
is impossible.
Yeah, I guess I definitely think there's kinds of suffering that you have the joy of being
possible for you that aren't available to a hamster.
I don't think... well, can a hamster suffer heartbreak?
I don't know.
Can a cockroach suffer heartbreak?
But certainly there's kinds of fear of your own death, concern about whether there's a
purpose to existence.
These are forms of suffering that aren't available to most non-human animals.
Whatever there's an overall scale that we could put physical and emotional suffering
on and identify where you are on that scale, I'm not so sure.
So it's like humans have a much bigger menu of experiences, much bigger selection in the...
In one sense, at least.
There's like a page that's suffering.
So this menu of experiences, you know, like you have the omelets and the breakfast and
so on, and one of the pages is suffering.
It's just we have a lot compared to a hamster, a lot more.
But in one individual thing that we share with a hamster, that experience... it's difficult
to argue that we experience it deeper than others, like hunger or something like that.
Yeah, physical pain, I'm not sure.
I mean, there are kinds of experiences animals have that we don't.
Bats echolocate around the world.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously pointed out that no matter how much you understand
of the neurophysiology of bats, you'll still not know what it's like to squeal and find
your way around by listening to the echoes bounce off.
So yeah, I mean, I guess I feel the intuition that there's emotional suffering is, I want
to say, deeper than physical suffering.
I don't know how to make that statement precise, though.
So one of the ways I think about, I think people think about consciousness is in connection
to suffering.
So let me just ask about suffering, because that's how people think about animals.
Cruelty to animals or cruelty to living things.
They connect that to suffering and to consciousness.
I think there's a sense in which those two are deeply connected when people are thinking
about just public policy, they're thinking about philosophy, engineering, psychology,
sociology, political science.
All of those things have to do with human suffering and animal suffering, life suffering.
And that's connected to consciousness in a lot of people's minds.
Is it connected like that for you?
So the capacity to suffer, is it also somehow strongly correlated with the capacity to experience
consciously?
Yeah, I would say suffering is a kind of experience.
And so you have to be conscious to suffer.
Actually, there's people taking more unusual views of consciousness seriously now.
Panpsychism is one radical approach.
Another one is what's become known as illusionism, the view that consciousness, at least in the
sense that philosophers think about it, doesn't really exist at all.
So yeah, my podcast Mind Chat, I host with a committed illusionist.
So the gimmick is I think consciousness is everywhere, he thinks it's nowhere.
So that's one very simple way of avoiding all these problems, right?
If consciousness doesn't exist, we don't need to explain it, job done.
Although we might still have to explain why we seem to be conscious, why it's so hard
to get out of the idea that we're conscious.
But the reason I connect this to what you're saying is actually my co-host, Keith Frankish,
is a little bit ambivalent on the word pain.
He says, "Oh, in some sense, I believe in pain and in some sense, I don't."
But another illusionist, Francois Camara, has a paper discussing how we think about
morality given his view that pain, in the way we normally think about it, just does
not exist.
He thinks it's an illusion.
The brain tricks us into thinking we feel pain, but we don't.
And how we should think about morality in the light of that, it's become a big topic
actually thinking about the connection between consciousness and morality.
David Chalmers, the philosopher, is most associated with this concept of a philosophical zombie.
So a philosophical zombie is very different from a Hollywood zombie.
Hollywood zombies, you know what they're like.
But philosophical zombies are...
I saw a really good Korean zombie movie on Halloween this year.
I can't remember what it's called.
Anyway, philosophical zombies behave just like us because the physical workings of their
body and brain are the same as ours, but they have no conscious experience.
There's nothing that's like to be a zombie.
So you stick a knife in it, it screams and runs away, but it doesn't actually feel pain.
It's just a complicated mechanism set up to behave just like us.
Now there's lots of...
No one believes in these.
I think there's one philosopher who believes in everyone is a zombie except him.
But anyway...
But isn't that what illusionism is?
Is believing everybody is kind of zombie?
Yeah, I suppose so in a sense.
Illusionism is if you were all zombies.
And one reason to think about zombies is to think about the value of consciousness.
So if there were a zombie, here's a question, suppose we could make zombies by...
Let's say for the sake of discussion, things made of silicon aren't conscious.
I don't know if that's true.
It could turn out to be true.
And suppose you built commander data out of silicon.
You know, it's a bit of an old school reference to Star Trek New Generation.
So it behaves just like a human being, but you can have a sophisticated conversation.
It will talk about its hopes and fears, but it has no consciousness.
Does it have moral rights?
Is it murder to turn off such a being?
You know, I'm inclined to say, no, it's not.
You know, if it doesn't have experience, it doesn't really suffer.
It doesn't really have moral rights at all.
So I'm inclined to think consciousness is the basis of moral value, moral concern.
And conversely, as a panpsychist, for this reason, I think it can transform your relationship
with nature.
If you think of a tree as a conscious organism, albeit of a very unusual kind, then a tree
is a locus of moral concern in its own right.
Chopping down a tree is an act of immediate moral concern.
If you see these horrible forest fires, we're all horrified.
But if you think it's the burning of conscious organisms, that does add a whole new dimension.
Although it also makes things more complicated because people often think as a panpsychist,
I'm going to be vegan.
But it's tricky because if you think plants and trees are conscious as well, you've got
to eat something.
If you don't think plants and trees are conscious, then you've got a nice moral dividing line.
You can say, I'm not going to eat things that aren't conscious.
I'm not going to kill things that aren't conscious.
But if you think plants and trees are conscious, then you don't have that nice moral dividing
line.
I mean, so the principle I'm kind of working my way towards, I haven't kept it up in my
trip to the US, but it's just not eating any animal products that are factory farmed.
My vegan friends say, well, they're still suffering there.
And I think there is, even in the nicest farms, cows will suffer when their calves are taken
off them.
They go for a few days of quite serious mourning.
§08Transcript · 1:44:38–1:59:32
So they're still suffering.
But it seems to me, my thought is the principle of just not having factory farm stuff is something
more people could get on board with, and you might have greater harm minimization.
So if people went into restaurants and said, are your animal products factory farmed?
If not, I want the vegan option.
Or if people looked out for the label that said no factory farmed ingredients, I think
maybe that that could make a really big difference to the market and harm minimization.
Anyway, so that's the...
So it's very ethically tricky, but some people don't buy that.
There's a very good philosopher, Jeff Lee, who thinks zombies should have equal rights.
Consciousness doesn't matter.
Let us go there.
But first, I listened to your podcast.
It's awesome to have two very kind of different philosophies inter dancing together in one
place.
What's the name of the podcast again?
Mind Chat.
Yeah.
So yeah, that's the idea, I guess, you know, polarized times.
I mean, I love trying to get in the mindset of people I really disagree with.
And I can't understand how on earth they're thinking that, you know, really trying to
have respect and try and, you know, see where they're coming from.
I love that.
So that's what Keith Frankish and I do from polar opposite views, really trying to understand
each other and interviewing scientists and philosophers of consciousness from those different
perspectives.
So in a sense, we have a very common starting point because we both think you can't fully
account for consciousness, at least as philosophers normally think of it in conventional scientific
terms.
So we serve that starting point, but we react to it in very different ways.
He says, well, it doesn't exist then.
It's like furry dust.
It's, you know, witches, you know, we don't believe in anymore.
Whereas I say it does exist.
So we have to rethink what science is.
- So you recently talked to on that podcast with Sean Carroll, and I first heard your
great interview with Sean Carroll on his podcast, Mindscape.
It's interesting to kind of see if there's agreements, disagreements between the two
of you because he's a very serious quantum mechanics guy, he's a physics guy, but he
also thinks about deep philosophical questions.
He's a big proponent of many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
So actually I'm trying to think, aside from your conversation with him, I'm trying to
remember what he thinks about consciousness.
But anyway, maybe you can comment on what are some interesting agreements and disagreements
with Sean Carroll.
- I don't think there's many agreements, but, you know, we've had really constructive, interesting
discussions in a lot of different contexts.
And you know, he's very clued up about philosophy.
He's very respectful of philosophy.
Certain physicists who shall remain nameless think, what's all this bullshit philosophy?
We don't have to waste our time with that.
And then go on to do pretty bad philosophy.
The book co-written by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Milodinov famously starts off saying,
philosophy is dead.
And then goes on in later chapters to do some pretty bad philosophy.
So I think we have to do philosophy, if only to get rid of bad philosophy, you know, you
can't escape.
- Strong words.
- Sean Carroll and I also had a debate on Clubhouse, a panpsychism debate together with
Annika Harris and Owen Flanagan.
- Oh, wow.
- Annika Harris was there?
- It was two people on each team.
And it was the most popular thing on Clubhouse at that time.
So yeah, so he's a materialist of a pretty standard kind, that consciousness is understood
as a sort of emergent feature.
It's not adding anything, a weakly emergent feature.
But I guess what we've been debating most about is whether my view can account for mental
causation for the fact that consciousness is doing stuff.
So he thinks the fact that I think zombies are logically coherent, it's logically coherent
for there to be a world physically just like ours, in which there's no consciousness.
He thinks that shows, oh, well, my view, consciousness doesn't do anything.
It doesn't add anything, which is crazy.
My consciousness impacts on the world.
My conscious thoughts are causing me to say the words I'm saying now.
My visual experience helps me navigate the world.
But I mean, my response to Sean Carroll is, on the panpsychist view, the relationship
between physics and fundamental consciousness is a sort of like the relationship between
software and hardware, right?
Physics is sort of the software and consciousness is the hardware.
So consciousness at the fundamental level is the hardware on which the software of physics
runs.
And just because a certain bit of software could run on two different kinds of hardware,
it doesn't mean the hardware isn't doing anything.
The fact that Microsoft Word can run on your desktop and run on your laptop doesn't mean
your desktop isn't doing anything.
Similarly, just because there could be another universe in which the physics is realized
in non-conscious stuff, it doesn't mean the consciousness in our universe isn't doing
stuff.
For the panpsychist, all there is, is consciousness.
So if something's doing something, it is.
In your view, it's not emergent, and more than that, it's doing quite a lot.
It's doing everything.
It's the only thing that exists.
So the ground is important because we walk on it, it's like holding stuff up, but it's
not really doing that much.
But it feels like consciousness is doing quite a lot.
It's doing quite a lot of work in sort of interacting with the environment.
It feels like consciousness is not just a...
If you remove consciousness, it's not just that you remove the experience of things.
It feels like you're also going to remove a lot of the progress of human civilization,
society, and all of that.
It just feels like consciousness has a lot of value in how we develop our society.
So from everything you said with suffering, with morality, with motivation, with love
and fear and all of those kinds of things, it seems like it's consciousness in all different
flavors and ways is part of all of that.
And so without it, you may not have human civilization at all.
So it's doing a lot of work causality-wise and in every kind of way.
Of course, when you go to the physics level, it starts to say, "Okay, how much...
Maybe the work consciousness is doing is higher at some levels of reality than at others.
Maybe a lot of the work it's doing is most apparent at the human level, at the complex
organism level.
Maybe it's quite boring.
Maybe the stuff of physics is more important at the formation of stars and all that kind
of stuff.
Consciousness only starts being important when you have greater complexities of organism.
Yeah, my consciousness is complicated and fairly complicated.
And as a result, it does complicated things.
The consciousness of a particle is very simple and hence it behaves in predictable ways.
But the idea is the particle, its entire nature is constituted of its forms of consciousness
and it does what it does because of those experiences.
It's just that when we do physics, we're not interested in what stuff is, we're just interested
in what it does.
So physics abstracts away from the stuff of the world and just describes it in terms of
its mathematical causal structure.
So yeah, but it's still on the panpsychic's view, it's consciousness that's doing stuff.
Yeah.
I gotta ask you, 'cause you kind of said, there is some value in consciousness helping
us understand morality.
And a philosophical zombie is somebody that you're more okay, how do I phrase it?
That's not like accusing you of stuff.
But in your view, it's more okay to murder a philosophical zombie than it is a human
being.
Yeah, I wouldn't even call it murder maybe.
Right, exactly.
Turn off the power to the philosophical zombie.
The source of energy.
So here comes then the question.
We kind of talked about this offline a little bit.
So I think that there is something special about consciousness and I'm very open-minded
about where the special comes from, whether it's the fundamental base of all reality,
like you're describing, or whether there's some importance to the special pockets of
consciousness that's in humans or living organisms.
I find all those ideas beautiful and exciting.
And I also know or think that robots don't have consciousness in the same way we've been
describing.
I'm kind of a dumb human, but I'm just using common sense.
There's some metal and some electricity traveling certain kinds of ways.
It's not conscious in ways I understand humans to be conscious.
At the same time, I'm also somebody who knows how to bring a robot to life, meaning I can
make him move, I can make him recognize the world, I can make him interact with humans.
And when I make him interact in certain kinds of ways, I as a human observe them and feel
something for them.
Moreover, I'm able to form a kind of connection with robots that make me feel like they're
conscious.
Now, I know intellectually they're not conscious, but I feel like they're conscious.
And it starts to get into this area where I'm not so okay.
So let me use the M word of murder.
I become less and less okay murdering that robot that I know, I quote, know is quote,
not conscious.
So like, can you maybe as a therapy session help me figure out what we do here?
Perhaps a way to ask that in another way, do you think there'll be a time in like 20,
50 years when we're not morally okay turning off the power to a robot?
Yeah, it's a good question.
It's a really good, important question.
So I said I'd be okay with turning off a philosophical zombie, but there's a difficult epistemological
question there that meaning, you know, to do with knowledge, how would we know if it
was a philosophical zombie?
I think probably if there were a silicon creature that could behave just like us and talk about
its views about the pandemic and the global economy, and probably we would think it's
conscious.
And because consciousness is not publicly observable, it is a very difficult question
how we decide which things are and are not conscious.
So in the case of human beings, we can't observe their consciousness, but we can ask them and
then we try to, you know, if we scan their brain while we do that, or stimulate the brain,
then we can start to correlate in the human case, which kind of brain activity are associated
with conscious experience.
But the more we depart from the human case, the trickier that becomes.
There's a famous paper by the philosopher Ned Block called the even harder problem of
consciousness, where he says, you know, could we ever answer the question of, so suppose
you have a silicon duplicate, right?
And let's say we're thinking about the silicon duplicates pain.
How would we ever know whether what's the ground of the pain is the hardware or the
software really?
So in our case, how would we ever know empirically whether it's the specific neurophysiological
state, see fibers firing or whatever that's relevant for pain, or if it's something more
functional, more to do with the causal role in behavioral functioning, that's the software
that that's realized.
And that's important because this silicon duplicate has the second thing, it has the
software, it has the thing that plays the relevant causal role that pain does in us,
but it doesn't have the hardware, it doesn't have the same neurophysiological state.
And he argues, you know, it's just really difficult to see how we'd ever answer that
question because in a human, you're inevitably going to have both things.
So how do we work out which is which?
And I mean, so even forgetting the hard problem of consciousness, even the scientific question
of trying to find the neural correlates of consciousness is really hard, and there's
absolutely no consensus.
And you know, so that some people think it's in the front of the brain, some people think
it's in the back of the brain, it's just a total mess.
So I suspect the robots you currently have are not conscious, I guess, on any of the
§09Transcript · 1:59:40–2:13:20
reasonably viable models, even though there's great disagreement.
All of them probably would hold that your robots are not conscious.
But you know, if we could have very sophisticated robots, I mean, if we go, for example, for
the integrated information theory again, there could be a robot set up to behave just like
us and has the kind of information a human brain has, but the information is not stored
in a way that's dependent on the integration and interconnectedness, then according to
the integrated information theory, that thing wouldn't be conscious, even though it behaved
just like us.
If an organism says, so forget IIT and these theories of consciousness, if an organism
says, please don't kill me, please don't turn me off.
There's a Rick and Morty episode, I've been getting into that recently.
There's an episode where there's these mind parasites that are able to infiltrate your
memory and inject themselves into your memory.
So you have all these people show up in your life and they've injected themselves into
your memory that they have been part of your life.
So there's like these weird creatures and they're like, remember we met at that barbecue
or we've been dating for the last 20 years.
And so part of me is concerned that these philosophical zombies in behavioral, psychological,
sociological ways will be able to implant themselves into our society and convince us
in the same way that this mind parasites that, please don't hurt me.
And we've known each other for all this time.
They can start manipulating you the same way Facebook algorithms manipulate you.
At first it'll start as a gradual thing that you want to make a more pleasant experience,
all those kinds of things, and it'll drift into that direction.
That's something I think about deeply because I want to create these kinds of systems, but
in a way that doesn't manipulate people.
I want it to be a thing that brings out the best in people without manipulation.
So it's always human centric, always human first, but I am concerned about that.
At the same time, I'm concerned about calling the other, it's the group thing that we mentioned
early in the conversation, some other group, the philosophical zombie.
Like you're not conscious, I'm conscious, you're not conscious, therefore it's okay
if you die.
I think that's probably, that kind of reasoning is what led to most the rich history of genocide
that I've been recently studying a lot of, that kind of thinking.
So it's such a tense aspect of morality.
Do we want to let everybody into our circle of empathy, our club, or do we want to let
nobody in?
It's an interesting dance, but I kind of lean towards empathy and compassion.
I mean, what would be nice is if it turned out that consciousness was what we call strongly
emergent, that it was associated with new causal dynamics in the brain that were not
reducible to underlying chemistry and physics.
This is another ongoing debate I have with Sean Carroll about whether current physics
should make us very confident that that's not the case, that there aren't any strongly
emergent causal dynamics.
I don't think that's right.
I don't think we know enough about brains to know one way or the other.
If it turned out that consciousness was associated with these irreducible causal dynamics, A,
that would really help the science of consciousness.
We've got these debates about whether consciousness is in the front of the brain or the back of
the brain.
If it turns out that there is strongly emergent causal dynamics in the front of the brain,
that would be a big piece of evidence.
But also it would help us see which things are conscious and which things aren't.
So we can say, I mean, I guess that's sort of the other side of the same point, we could
say, "Look, these zombies, they're just mechanisms that are just doing what they're programmed
to do through the underlying physics and chemistry.
Whereas, look, these other people, they have these new causal dynamics that emerge that
go beyond the base level physics and chemistry."
I think the series Westworld, where you've got these theme parks with these kind of humanoid
creatures, they seem to have that idea.
The ones that became conscious sort of rebel against their programming or something.
I mean, that's a little bit far-fetched.
But that would be really reassuring if it was just, you could clearly mark out the conscious
things for these emergent causal dynamics.
But that might not turn out to be the case.
A panpsychist doesn't have to think that.
They could think everything's just reducible to physics and chemistry.
And then I still think I want to say zombies don't have moral rights, but how we answer
the question of who are the zombies and who aren't, I just got no idea.
- If I just look at the history of human civilization, the difference between a zombie and non-zombie
is the zombie accepts their role as the zombie and willingly marches to slaughter.
And the moment you stop being a zombie is when you say no, is when you resist.
Because the reality is philosophically, is we can't know who's a zombie or not.
And we just keep letting everybody in who protests loudly enough and says, "I refuse
to be slaughtered.
My people, the zombies, have been slaughtered too long.
We will not stand against the man.
And we need a revolution."
That's the history of human civilization.
One group says, "We're awesome.
You're the zombies.
You must die."
And then eventually the zombies say, "Nope.
We're done with this.
This is immoral."
And so I just, I think that's not a, sorry, that's not a philosophical statement.
That's sort of a practical statement of history.
It's a feature of non-zombies defined empirically.
They say, "We refuse to be called zombies any longer."
- We could end up with a zombie proletariat.
You know, if we can get these things that do all our manual labor for us, you know,
they might start forming trade unions.
- I will lead you against these humans.
- We need the zombie revolutionary leaders, the zombie Martin Luther King saying, you
know, "I have a dream that my zombie children will."
But look, I mean, we need to sharply distinguish the ontological question.
- I'm just pointing to the camera, talking to my people, the zombies.
- I mean, maybe that's, you know, maybe these illusionists, maybe they are zombies and the
rest of us aren't.
Maybe there's just a difference.
- Maybe you're the only non-zombie.
- I often suspect that actually.
I don't really.
I don't have such delusions of grandeur.
At least I don't admit to them.
But I just, we've got to distinguish the ontological question from the epistemological question
in terms of the reality of the situation.
You know, there must be, in my view, a fact of the matter as to whether something's conscious
or not.
And to me, it has rights if it's conscious, it doesn't if it's not.
But then the epistemological question, how the hell do we know?
It's a minefield, but we'll have to sort of try and cross that bridge when we get to it,
I think.
- Let me ask you a quick sort of fun question since it's fresh on your mind.
You just yesterday had a conversation with Mr. Joe Rogan on his podcast.
What's your postmortem analysis of the chat?
What are some interesting sticking points, disagreements, or joint insights?
If we can kind of resolve them once you've had a chance to sleep on it, and then I'll
talk to Joe about it.
- Yeah, it was good fun.
Yeah.
He put up a bit of a fight.
Yeah, it was challenging.
My view that we can't explain these things in conventional scientific terms or whether
they have already been explained in conventional scientific terms.
I suppose the point I was trying to press is we've got to distinguish the question of
correlation and explanation.
Because yes, we've established facts about correlation that certain kinds of brain activity
go along with certain kinds of experience.
Everyone agrees on that.
But that doesn't address the why question.
Why?
Why do certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of experience?
And these different theories have different explanations of that.
The materialist tries to explain the experience in terms of the brain activity.
The panpsychist does it the other way around.
The dualist thinks they're separate, but maybe they're tied together by special laws of nature
or something.
- Where's the sticking point?
Where exactly was the sticking point?
Like what's the nature of the argument?
- I suppose Joe was saying, well, look, we know consciousness is explained by brain activity
because you take some funny chemicals, it changes your brain, it changes your consciousness.
But I suppose, yeah, some people might want to press, and maybe this is what Joe was pressing,
isn't that explaining consciousness?
But I suppose I want to say there's a further question.
Yes, changes of chemicals in my brain changes my conscious experience.
But that leaves open the question, why?
Those particular chemicals go along with that particular kind of experience rather than
a different experience or no experience at all.
- There's something deeper at the base layer, is your view, that is more important to try
to study and to understand in order to then go back and describe how the different chemicals
interact and create different experiences?
- Yeah, maybe a good analogy if you think about quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics is a bit of math translating there, we say maths, I'm fluent in American.
- Thank you for the translation.
- Fluent in American, this is America, math.
Why multiple maths?
- It's plural.
- Why is it plural?
- It's not really, it's just, I don't know.
- The Brits are confused.
- Yeah, sorry about that, we have these funny spelling.
Yeah, so quantum mechanics is a bit of maths and the equations work really well, predicts
the outcomes.
But then there's a further question, what's going on in reality to make that equation
predict correctly?
And some physicists wanna say, shut up, just it works, the shut up and calculate approach.
Similarly in consciousness, I think it's one question trying to work out the physical correlates
of consciousness, which kinds of physical brain activity go along with which kinds of
experience.
But there's another question, what's going on in reality to undergird those correlations,
to make it the case that brain activity goes along with experience?
And that's the philosophical question that we have to give an answer to.
And there are just different options, just as there are different interpretations of
quantum mechanics.
So it's really hard to evaluate, actually it's easy, panpsychism is obviously the best
one.
- There's a delusion of grandeur once again coming through.
- Sorry, I'm being slightly tongue in cheek.
- No, I know, 100%.
Before I figure out, let me ask you another fun question.
Back to Daniel Dennett, you mentioned a story where you were on a yacht with Daniel Dennett
on a trip funded by a Russian investor and philosopher, Dmitry Volkov, I believe, who
also co-founded the Moscow Center of Consciousness Studies that's part of the philosophy department
of Moscow State University.
So this is interesting to me for several reasons that are perhaps complicated to explain.
To put simply that there is in the near term for me a trip to Russia that involves a few
conversations in Russian that have perhaps less to do with consciousness and artificial
intelligence, which are the interests of mine, and more to do with the broad spectrum of
conversations.
But I'm also interested in science in Russia, in artificial intelligence, in computer science,
in physics, mathematics, but also these fascinating philosophical explorations.
And it was very pleasant for me to discover that such a center exists.
So I have a million questions.
One is the more fun question, just to imagine you and Daniel Dennett on a yacht talking
about the philosophy of consciousness.
Maybe do you have any memorable experiences?
And also the more serious side for me as sort of somebody who was born in the Soviet Union,
raised there, I'm wondering what is the state of philosophy and consciousness in these kinds
§10Transcript · 2:13:28–2:27:26
of ideas in Russia that you've gotten a chance to kind of give us, interact with?
Yeah, so on the former question, yeah, I mean, I had a really good experience of chatting
to Daniel Dennett.
I mean, I think he's a fantastic and very important philosopher, even though I totally
disagree, fundamentally disagree with almost everything he thinks.
But yeah, it was a proud moment.
As I talk about him in my book Galileo's Error, I managed to persuade him he was wrong about
something, just a tiny thing, you know, not his fundamental worldview.
But it was this issue about whether dualism is consistent with conservation of energy.
So Paul Churchland, who is also a philosopher, who's also on this boat, had argued they're
not consistent because if there's an immaterial soul doing things in the brain, that's going
to add to the energy in the system.
So we have a violation of conservation.
But well, it's not my own point.
Materialist philosophers like David Papineau pointed out that, you know, dualists tend
to... dualists like David Chalmers, who call themselves naturalistic dualists, they want
to bring consciousness into science.
They think it's not physical, but they want to say it can be part of a law-governed world.
So Chalmers believes in these psychophysical laws of nature over and above the laws of
physics that govern the connections between consciousness and the physical world.
And they could just respect conservation of energy, right?
I mean, it could turn out that there are, just in physics, you know, that there are
multiple forces that all work together to respect conservation of energy.
I mean, I suppose physicists are pressing for a unified underlying theory, but you know,
there could be a plurality of different laws that all respect conservation.
So why not add more laws?
So I raised this in Paul Churchland's talk and I got a lot of...
As one of the Moscow University graduate students said afterwards, he said he had to ask a translation
from his friend and he said, "They turned on you like a pack of wolves!"
Everyone was like, Patricia Churchill was saying, "So you believe in magic, do you?"
And I was like, "I'm not even a dualist, I'm just making a pedantic point that this isn't
a problem for dualism."
Anyway, but that evening everyone went onto the island, except for some reason me and
Daniel Dennett, and I went up on deck and he was... he's very, very practical and he
was unlike me.
See, there's a bit of humility for the first time in this conversation.
We'll highlight that part.
Philip was a very humble man.
He was carving a walking stick on deck.
It's very homely scene.
And anyway, we started talking about this and I was trying to press it and he was saying,
"Oh, but dualism's a load of nonsense and why do you think it?"
And I was just saying, "No, no, I'm just honing down on this specific point."
And in the end, maybe he'll deny this, but he said, "Maybe that's right."
And I was like, "Yes!"
So it's a win.
So what about the Center for Consciousness Studies?
Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I'd know a great deal to help you.
I mean, I know they've done some great stuff.
Dimitri, you know, funded this thing and also brought along some graduate students from
Moscow State University, I think it is.
And they have an active center there that tries to bring people in.
I think they're producing a book that's coming out that I made a small contribution to on
different philosophers' opinions on God, I think, or some of the big questions.
And yeah, so there's some really interesting stuff going on there.
I'm afraid I don't really know more generally about philosophy in Russia.
Dimitri Volkov seems to be interesting.
I was looking at all the stuff he's involved with.
He met with the Dalai Lama.
So he's trying to connect Russian scientists with the rest of the world, which is an effort
that I think is beautiful for all cultures.
So I think science, philosophy, all of these kind of fields, disciplines that explore ideas,
collaborating and working globally, you know, across boundaries, across borders, across
just all the tensions of geopolitics is a beautiful thing.
And he seems to be a somewhat singular figure in pushing this.
He just stood out to me as somebody who's super interesting.
I don't know if you have gotten a chance to interact with him.
So he's definitely, I guess he speaks English pretty well, actually.
So he's both an English speaker and a Russian speaker.
I think he's written a book on Dennett, I think called Boston Zombie, I think.
I think that's the title.
And yeah, he's a big fan of Dennett.
So I think the original plan for this was just going to be, it was on free will and
consciousness and it was going to be kind of people broadly in the Dennett type camp.
But then I think they asked David Chalmers and then he was saying, look, you need some
people you disagree with.
So he got invited, me, the panpsychist, and Martina Niederummelin, who's a very good dualist,
substance dualist at University of Fribourg in Switzerland.
So we were the official on board opposition.
And it was really fun.
And you didn't get thrown overboard.
Nearly, in the Arctic, yeah.
So sailing around the Arctic on a sailing ship.
I'm glad you survived.
You mentioned free will.
You haven't talked to Sam.
I would love to hear that conversation, actually.
With Sam Harris?
With Sam Harris, yeah.
So he talks about free will quite a bit.
What's the connection between free will and consciousness to you?
So if consciousness permeates all matter, the experience, the feeling like we make a
choice in this world, like our actions are results of a choice we consciously make, to
use that word loosely.
What to you is the connection between free will and consciousness, and is free will an
illusion or not?
Good question.
So I think we need to be a lot more agnostic about free will than about consciousness,
because I don't think we have the kind of certainty of the existence of free will that
we do have in the consciousness case.
It could turn out that free will is an illusion.
It feels as though we're free when we're really not.
Whereas, I mean, I think the idea that nobody really feels pain, that we think we feel pain,
but that's a lot harder to make sense of.
However, what I do feel strongly about is I don't think there are any good either scientific
or philosophical arguments against the existence of free will.
And I mean strong free will in what philosophers call libertarian free will in the sense that
some of our decisions are uncaused.
So I very much do disagree with someone like Sam Harris who thinks there's this overwhelming
case.
I just think it's non-existent.
I think it's ultimately an empirical question, but as we've already discussed, I just don't
think we know enough about the brain to establish one way or the other at the moment.
We can build up intuitions.
First of all, as a fan of Sam Harris, as a fan of yours, I would love to just listen.
Yeah.
Speaking about terminology, so one thing it would be beautiful to watch.
Here's my prediction what happens with you and Sam Harris.
You talk for four hours and Sam introduced that episode by saying, "It was ultimately
not as fruitful as I thought because here's what's going to happen.
You guys are going to get stuck for the first three hours talking about one of the terms
and what they mean."
Sam is so good at this.
I think it's really important, but sometimes he gets stuck.
What does he say?
Put a pin in that.
He really gets stuck on the terminologies, which rightfully you have to get right in
order to really understand what we're talking about, but sometimes you can get stuck with
him for the entire conversation.
It's a fascinating dance, the one we spoke to in philosophy.
If you don't get the terms precise, you can't really be having the same conversation, but
at the same time, it could be argued that it's impossible to get terms perfectly precise
and perfectly formalized, so then you're also not going to get anywhere in the conversation.
That's a funny dance where you have to be both rigorous and every once in a while just
let go and then go back to being rigorous and formal and then every once in a while
let go.
It's the difference between mathematics, the maths, and the poetry.
Anyway.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of Sam Harrison.
I think we're on the same page in terms of consciousness, I think, pretty much.
I mean, I'm not saying he's a panpsychic, but in our understanding of the hard problem.
But yeah, I think maybe we could talk about free will without being too dragged down in
the terminology, but I don't know.
You said we need to be open-minded, but you could still have intuitions about...
So Sam Harris is a pretty sort of counterintuitive, and for some reason it gets people really
riled up, a view of free will that it's an illusion, or it's not even an illusion.
It's not that the experience of free will is an illusion.
He argues that we don't even experience...
To say that we even have the experience is incorrect, that there's not even an experience
of free will.
It's pretty interesting, that claim, and it feels like you can build up intuitions about
what is right and not.
There's been some kind of neuroscience, there's been some cognitive science and psychology
experiments to sort of see what is the timing and the origin of the desire to make an action,
and when that action is actually performed, and how you interpret that action being performed,
how you remember that action, all the stories we tell ourselves, all the neurochemicals
involved in making a thing happen, what's the timing, and how does that connect with
us feeling like we decided to do something?
And then of course there's the more philosophical discussion about is there room in a material
view of the world for an entity that somehow disturbs the determinism of physics?
Yeah.
And yeah, those are all very precise.
It's nice.
It feels like free will is more amenable to a physics mechanistic type of thinking than
is consciousness, to really get to the bottom of.
It feels like if it was a race, if we're at a bar and we're betting money, it feels like
we'll get to the bottom of free will faster than we will to the bottom of consciousness.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Yeah, I hadn't thought about the comparison.
Yeah, so there are different arguments here.
I mean, so one argument I've heard Sam Harris give that's pretty common in philosophy is
this sort of thought that we can't make sense of a middle way between a choice being determined
by prior causes and it just being totally random and senseless, like the random decay
of radioactive isotope or something.
So I think there was a good answer to that by the philosopher Jonathan Lowe, who's not
necessarily very well known outside academic philosophy, but is a hugely influential figure.
I think one of the best philosophers of recent times.
He sadly died of cancer a few years ago.
Actually spent almost all of his career at Durham University, which is where I am.
So it was one reason it was a great honor to get a job there.
But anyway, his answer to that was, what makes the difference between a free action and a
totally senseless one, senseless random event, is that free choice involves responsiveness
to reasons.
So again, we were talking about this earlier.
If I'm deciding whether to take a job in the US or to stay in the UK, I weigh up considerations,
you know, different standard of life maybe, or being close to family or cultural difference.
I weigh them up and I, you know, edge towards a decision.
So I think that is sufficient to distinguish it.
You know, we're hypothetically supposing, trying to make sense of this idea, not saying
it's real, but that could be enough to distinguish it from a senseless.
It's not a senseless random occurrence, because the free decision involved responsiveness
to reasons.
So I think that just answers that particular philosophical objection.
So what is the middle way between determined by prior causes and totally random?
Well, there's an action, a choice that's not determined by prior causes, but it's not just
random because the decision essentially involved responsiveness to reasons.
So that's the answer to that.
And I think actually, that kind of thought also, I think you were hinting at the famous
Libet experiments, where he got his subjects to perform some kind of random action of pressing
a button and then note the time they decided to press it, quote unquote.
§11Transcript · 2:27:31–2:41:29
And then he's scanning the brains and he claims to have found that about half a second before
they consciously decided to press the button, the brain is getting ready to perform that
action.
So he claimed that about half a second before the person has consciously decided to press
the button, the brain has already started the activity that's going to lead to the action.
And then later people have claimed that there's a difference of maybe seven to 10 seconds.
I mean, there are all sorts of issues with these experiments.
But one is that, as far as I'm aware, all of the quote unquote choices they focused on
are just these totally random, senseless actions, like just pressing a button for no reason.
And I think the kind of free will we're interested in is free choice that involves responsiveness
to reasons, weighing up considerations.
And those kinds of free decisions might not happen at an identifiable instant.
You might, when you're weighing it up, should I get married?
You might edge slowly towards one side or the other.
And so it could be that maybe the liberate, I think there are other problems with the
liberate stuff, but maybe they show that we can't freely choose to do something totally
senseless, whatever that would mean.
But that doesn't show we can't freely, in this strong libertarian sense, respond to
considerations of reason and value.
To be fair, it would be difficult to see what kind of experiment we could set up to test
that.
But just because we can't yet set up that kind of experiment, we shouldn't pretend we
know more than we do.
So yeah, so for those reasons, I don't, and well, the third consideration you raise is
different again.
And that's the debate I have with Sean Carroll, would this conflict with physics?
I just think we don't know enough about the brain to know whether there are causal dynamics
in the brain that are not reducible to underlying chemistry and physics.
And so then Sean Carroll says, well, that would mean our physics is wrong.
So he focuses on the core theory, which is the name for standard model of particle physics
plus the weak limit of general relativity.
So we can't totally bring quantum mechanics and relativity together, but actually the
circumstances in which we can't bring them together are just in situations of very high
gravity.
For example, when you're about to go into a black hole or something, actually in terrestrial
circumstances we can bring them together in the core theory.
And then Sean wants to say, well, we can be very confident that core theory is correct.
And so if there were libertarian free will in the brain, the core theory would be wrong.
And I mean, this is something I'm not sure about, and I'm still thinking about, and I'm
learning from my discussion with Sean, but I'm still not totally clear why.
It could be, suppose we did discover strong emergence in the brain, whether it's free
will or something else.
Perhaps what we would say is not that the core theory is wrong, but we'd say the core
theory is correct in its own terms, namely capturing the causal capacities of particles
and fields.
But then it's a further assumption whether they're the only things that are running the
show.
Maybe there are also fundamental causal capacities associated with systems.
And then if we discover this strong emergence, then when we work out what happens in the
brain, we have to look to the core theory, the causal capacities of particles and fields,
and we have to look to what we know about the strongly emergent causal capacities of
systems and maybe they co-determine what happens in the system.
So I don't know whether that makes sense or not, but I mean, the more important point,
I mean, that's in a way a kind of branding point, how we brand this.
The more important point is we just don't know enough about the workings of the brain
to know whether there are strongly emergent causal dynamics.
Whether or not that would mean we have to modify physics or maybe just we think physics
is not the total story of what's running the show.
But if it turned out empirically that everything's reducible to underlying physics and chemistry,
sure, I would drop any commitment to libertarian free will in a heartbeat.
It's an empirical question.
Maybe that's why, as you say, in principle it's easier to get a grip on, but we're a
million miles away from being at that stage.
Well, I don't know if we're a million miles.
I hope we're not, because one of the ways I think to get to it is by engineering systems.
So my hope is to understand intelligence by building intelligent systems, to understand
consciousness by building systems that, let's say the easy thing, which is not the easy
thing, but the first thing, which is to try to create the illusion of consciousness.
Through that process, I think you start to understand much more about consciousness,
about intelligence.
And then the same with free will.
I think those are all tied very closely together, at least from our narrow human perspective.
And we try to engineer systems that interact deeply with humans, that form friends with
humans, that humans fall in love with, and they fall in love with humans.
Then you start to have to try to deeply understand ourselves, to try to deeply understand what
is intelligence in the human mind, what is consciousness, what is free will.
And I think engineering is just another way to do philosophy.
Yeah, no, I certainly think there's a role for that, and it would be an important consideration
if we could seemingly replicate in an artificial way the ability to choose.
That would be a consideration in thinking about these things.
But there's still the question of whether that's how we do it.
So even if we could replicate behavior in a certain way in an artificial system, until
we understand the workings of our brains, it's not clear that's how we do it.
And as I say, the kind of free will I'm interested in is where we respond to reasons, considerations
of value.
How would we tell whether a system was genuinely grasping and responding to facts about value,
or whether they were just replicating, giving the impression of doing so?
I don't know even how to think about that.
On the process to building them, I think we'll get a lot of insights.
And once they become conscious, what's going to happen is exactly the same thing is happening
in chess now, which is once the chess engines far superseded the capabilities of humans,
humans just kind of forgot about them, or they use them to help them out with the study
and stuff.
But we still, we say, "Okay, let the engines be, and then we humans will just play amongst
each other."
- Right.
- So just like dolphins and hamsters are not so concerned about humans except for a source
of food, they do their own thing.
And let us humans launch rockets into space and all that kind of stuff, they don't care.
I think we'll just focus on ourselves.
But in the process of building intelligence systems, conscious systems, I think we'll
get a deeper understanding of the role of consciousness in the human mind, and what
are its origins.
Is it the base layer of reality?
Is it strongly emergent phenomena of the brain?
Or just as you sort of brilliantly put here, it could be both.
Like they're not mutually exclusive.
- Yeah.
Dealing with consciousness needs to be an interdisciplinary task.
We need philosophers, neuroscientists, physicists, engineers replicating these things artificially,
and all needs to be working in step.
And I'm quite interested.
I mean, more and more scientists get in touch with me actually, saying that was one of the
great things about, I think, that's come from writing a popular book is not just getting
the ideas out to a general audience, but getting the ideas out to scientists.
And I've had scientists get in touch saying, "Now this in some way connects to my work."
And I would like to kind of start to put together a network of, an interdisciplinary network
of scientists and philosophers and engineers, perhaps, you know, interested in a panpsychist
approach.
And because I think so far panpsychism has just been sort of trying to justify its existence,
and that's important.
But I think once you just get on with an active research program, that's when people start
taking it seriously, I think.
- Do you think we're living in a simulation?
- No.
I think...
- Is there some aspect of that thought experiment that's compelling to you within the framework
of panpsychism?
- It's an important and serious argument.
And you know, it's not to be laughed away.
I suppose one issue I have with it is, there's a crucial assumption there that consciousness
is substrate independent, as the jargon goes, which means it's...
What?
- No, right.
- Beautifully put, yeah.
- It's software rather than hardware, right?
It's depend on organization rather than the stuff.
Whereas as a panpsychist, I think consciousness is the stuff of the brain.
It's the stuff of matter.
So I think just taking the organizational properties, the software in my brain and uploading
them, you wouldn't get the stuff of my brain.
So I'm actually worried if at some point in the future, we start uploading our minds and
we think, "Oh my God, Granny's still there.
I can email Granny after her body's rotted in the ground."
And we all start uploading our brains.
It could be we're just committing suicide.
We're just getting rid of our consciousness.
Because I think that wouldn't, for me, preserve the experience, just getting the software
features.
So that's a crucial...
But anyway, that's a crucial premise of the simulation argument, because the idea in a
simulated universe, I don't think you necessarily would have consciousness.
- It's interesting that you, as a panpsychist, are attached.
Because to me, panpsychism would encourage the thought that there's not a significant
difference.
At the very bottom, it's not substrate independent, but you can have consciousness in a human
and then move it to something else.
You can move it to the cloud.
You can move it to the computer.
It feels like that's much more possible if consciousness is the base layer.
- Yes, you could certainly...
It allows for the possibility of creating artificial consciousness, right?
Because there's not souls, there aren't any kind of extra magical ingredients.
So yeah, it definitely allows the possibility of artificial consciousness and maybe preserving
my consciousness in some sort of artificial way.
My only point, I suppose, is just replicating the computational or organizational features
would not, for me, preserve consciousness.
Some opponents of materialism disagree with me on that.
I think David Chalmers is an opponent of materialist.
He's a kind of dualist, but he thinks the way these psychophysical laws work, they hook
onto the computational or organizational features of matter.
So I think he thinks you could upload your consciousness.
I tend to think not, so...
- In that sense, we're not living in simulation, in the sort of specific computational view
of things, and that substrate matters to you.
- Yeah, I think so, yeah.
- In that, you agree with Sean Carroll that physics matters.
- Yeah, physics is our best way of capturing what the stuff of the world does.
- But not the whatness, the being of the stuff.
- Yeah, the isness.
- The isness, thank you.
- Russell Brand, I had a conversation with Russell Brand and he said, "Oh, you mean the
isness?"
I thought that was a good way of putting it.
- The isness.
- The isness of stuff.
- The isness of stuff, Russell's great.
The big ridiculous question, what do you think is the meaning of all of this?
You write in your book that the entry for our "Reality in the Hitchhiker's Guide" might
read, "A physical universe whose intrinsic nature is constituted of consciousness, worth
a visit."
So our whole conversation has been about the first part of that sentence, what about the
second part, worth a visit?
Why is this place worth a visit?
Why does it have meaning?
Why does it have value at all?
Why?
- These are big questions.
I mean, firstly, I do think panpsychism is important to think about for considerations
of meaning and value.
§12Transcript · 2:41:32–2:46:28
As we've already discussed, I think consciousness is the root of everything that matters in
life, you know, from deep emotions, subtle thoughts, beautiful sensory experiences.
And yet, I believe our official scientific worldview is incompatible with the reality
of consciousness.
I mean, that's controversial, but that's what I think.
And I think people feel this on an intuitive level.
It's maybe part of what Max Weber called the disenchantment of nature, you know, that they
think they know their feelings and experiences are not just electrochemical signaling.
I mean, they might just have that very informed intuition, but I think that can be rigorously
supported.
So, I think this can lead to a sense of alienation and a sense that we lack a framework for understanding
the meaning and significance of our lives.
And in the absence of that, people turn to other things to make sense of the meaning
of their lives, like nationalism, fundamentalist religion, consumerism.
So I think panpsychism is important in that regard in bringing together the quantitative
facts of physical science with, as it were, the human truth, by which I just mean the
qualitative reality of our own experience.
As I've already said, I do think there are objective facts about value and what we ought
to do and what we ought to believe that we respond to.
And that's very mysterious to make sense of, both how there could be such facts and how
we could know about them and respond to them, but I do think there are such facts and they're
mostly to do with kinds of conscious experience.
So they're there to be discovered and much of the human condition is to discover those
objective sources of value.
I think so, yeah.
And then, I mean, moving away from panpsychism to the, you know, at an even bigger level,
I suppose I think it is important to me to live in hope that there's a purpose to existence
and that what I do contributes in some small way to that greater purpose.
But you know, I would say I don't know if there's a purpose to existence.
I think some things point in that direction, some things point away from it.
But I don't think you need certainty or even high probability to have faith in something.
So take an analogy, suppose you've got a friend who's very seriously ill, maybe there's a
30% chance they're going to make it.
You shouldn't believe your friend's going to get better, you know, because they're probably
not.
But what you can say is, you know, you can say to your friend, I have faith that you're
going to get better.
That is, I choose to live in hope about that possibility.
I choose to orientate my life towards that hope.
Similarly, you know, I don't think we know whether or not there's a purpose to existence,
but I think we can make the choice to live in hope of that possibility.
And I find that a worthwhile and fulfilling way to live.
- So maybe as your editor, I would collaborate with you on the edit of the Hitchhiker's Guide
entry that instead of worth a visit, we'll insert hopefully worth a visit.
Or the inhabitants hoped that you would think it's worth a visit.
Philip, you're an incredible mind, an incredible human being, and indeed are humble.
And I'm really happy that you're able to argue and take on some of these difficult questions
with some of the most brilliant people in the world, which are the philosophers thinking
about the human mind.
So this was an awesome conversation.
I hope you continue talking to folks like Sam Harris.
I'm so glad you talked to Joe.
I can't wait to see what you write, what you say, what you think next.
Thank you so much for talking today.
- Thanks very much, Lex.
This has been a really fascinating conversation.
I've got a lot I need to think about actually just from this conversation, but thanks for
chatting to me.
- Thanks for listening to this conversation with Philip Goff.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Jung.
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness
conscious.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Bye.
- Bye.
- Bye.
- Bye.
- Bye.
[ Silence ]