Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind | Lex Fridman Podcast #261
i believe our official scientific world view 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 gough philosopher specializing in the philosophy of mind and consciousness he is a pan psychist 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 gough i opened my second podcast conversation with elon musk with a question about consciousness and pan psychism the question was quote 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 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 is not publicly observable all right i can't look inside your head and see your feelings and experiences we know about consciousness not you know 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 as 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 science is used to dealing with uh unobservables right you know fundamental 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 that's the 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 um you know 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 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 but 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 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 you're yours in the way that you do yeah i mean so it's 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 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 that 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 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 uh middleweight position on this on the one hand they think um 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 i don't 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 upon 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 pan psychism 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 panzykist 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 i mean that's that's a theory that i would justify on the grounds that it can account for this datum of consciousness that it 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 heterophenomenology 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 uh realm of feelings and experiences we're just treating their what they say as a datum of public observation experiments that we can account for in terms of underlying mechanisms 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 pan psychism but you have a clear view of what you know almost like a physics view of consciousness he i think has a kind of view that consciousness is almost the side effect of this massively parallel computation system going on in our our brain that the the the brain is 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 uh what we think of as consciousness somehow the editing is consciousness of this of this story i mean that that's 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 a very good philosopher luke roloff's defending a pan psychist version of dennett's uh multiple drafts model um like a deeper turtle that that establishes the difference being that this is luke roloff's view all of the drafts are conscious so i guess i guess um i guess for uh 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 just sounds kind of funny i guess i think he calls it uh danetti and pan psychism but this but luke is a one of the most rigorous uh and serious philosophers alive at the moment i think and i hate having luke roloff's in an audience if i'm giving a tour because he always cuts straight to the the weakness in your position that you hadn't thought of and so it's nice you know psychism is sometimes associated with fluffy thinking but you know contemporary pant psychists have come out of this tradition we call analytic philosophy which is rooted in you know detailed rigorous argumentation and and it is defended in that manner yeah those analytic philosophers are sticklers for terminology it's very fun very fun group to talk talk shit with or yeah well i mean it gets boring if it's if you just start and then defining words right yeah i think starting with defining words is good actually the philosopher derek parfit said when when he first was thinking about philosophy he went to a talk in analytic philosophy and he went to a talking continental philosophy and he decided that the problem with the continental philosophy if it was really unrigorous really and precise 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 you know i don't want to get nasty emails from either of these groups but that there's something there's something to what he was saying i think just a tiny tangent on terminology i do think that there's uh 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 a course on algorithms and data structures in computer science and the instructor shout out to him ali shakafande 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 know you just woke up hungover in college or whatever and you're tasked with answering some deep philosophical questions 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 you know what is intelligence and just continually asking that question over and over of um some of the sort of biggest research in the researchers in the artificial intelligence computer science space it's actually very useful at the same time you know it should start a terminology and then progress where you kind of say ah fuck it we'll just we'll just assume we know what we mean by that otherwise you get the the bill clinton situation where it's like what is the meaning of his is whatever he said it's like hey man did you do the sex stuff or not yeah so there's 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 you know very much terminology discussions are very important because it's like you're almost trying to sneak uh sneak up to some deep insight by just discussing some basic terminology you know like what is consciousness or even defining the different aspects of pan psychism is fascinating but just to linger on the um 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's unique perhaps to the human mind which is i suppose what uh danielle 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 right um 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 i think this has gone out of fashion a bit partly because it's just been you know 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 you know he wrote very few papers but this is just you know you have to teach this on a 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 mean i think i 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 is something like 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 you know a hamster has consciousness in that sense there's something that it's like to be a hamster it it feels pain if you stand on it if you're cruel enough to do i don't know why i gave that stand people always give i don't know philosophers give these very violent examples to to get the cross consciousness and it's yeah i don't know why that's coming probably but anyway say mean things to the hamster let's let's look back it experiences pain experiences pleasure joy um i mean but there are 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 in a life that is pretty widespread in the animal kingdom a bit difficult to say where it stops where it starts but you don't you certainly don't need something as sophisticated as the capacity to self-consciously tell stories about yourself to be 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 well that was i was taking that as read i mean descartes thought animals were mechanisms and humans are unique so so animals are robots essentially in the formulation of the car and humans are unique yeah so in which way would you say humans are unique versus even our closest uh ancestors like is there something special about humans what is in your view under the pan psychism i guess we're walking backwards because we'll we'll have the big picture conversation about what is pan psychism but given your kind of broad theory of consciousness what's unique about humans do you think as a pan psychist 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 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 um plan for the future um the capacity i would say to respond to reasons as well um 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're saying should i take this job in the u.s you weigh it up you say well you know 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 um 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 and humans have access to them and can respond to them that's a controversial claim you know um many of my pan psychist brethren might not uh 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 humane picture of value by which i mean relating to the philosopher david hume who said um 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 human 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 fumes i had a radical conversion this is this might not be connected it's not connected to pan cycling but i don't i had a radical conversion i used to have a more humane view uh when i was a graduate student but i was persuaded by uh some professors at the university of redding where i was that if you have a human 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 but 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 gold that's just their basic goal i i want to say that that is objectively stupid that is objectively pointless i shouldn't say stupid movie it's objectively pointless uh 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 you know the key to life is to be unborable isn't it possible to discover the pleasure in everything in life the counting of the the blades of grass once you see the mastery the skill of it you can discover the pleasure therefore you know um i guess what i'm asking is why and when and how did you lose the romance in grad school [Laughter] 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 actually for their own pleasure people will suffer for things they think are worthwhile i might you know i might suffer for some scientific cause for um finding out a cure for the pandemic or um 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 don't i just don't think it's the case that everything we do is 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 play that's like a short-term pleasure but you can see pleasure as a kind of uh ability to hear the music in the distance it's like yes it's difficult now it's suffering now but there is some greater thing beyond the mountain that would be joy i mean that's kind of uh 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 um the struggle is a source of deep fulfillment so like i think pleasure needs to be kind of thought of as a little bit more broadly it's just kind of gives you this sense it uh for a moment allows you to forget the terror of the fact that you're going to die that that that's pleasure like that's the broader view of pleasure that you get to kind of uh 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 uh 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 um doing it for the sake of their own pleasure that's a rather dramatic example but they can be just trivial examples where um you know i i choose to be honest rather than um lie about something can i lose out a bit and i um 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 maybe loses its meaning sure wow but what do you think about the blades of grass case what do you think about someone who spends their life counting 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 make it worthwhile forget the word pleasure i think the word gold 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 out like i think there's a lot of meaning and joy to be discovered in the uh in the skill of a task in mastering of a skill and and taking pride in and doing it well i mean that's i don't know what it is about the human mind but there's there's some um 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 giro dreams of sushi uh compelling like draws you into the mastery of the simple task um yeah i suppose i mean in a way you might think it's it's it's just hard to imagine someone who 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 humebu seriously it ought to be you know a totally possible life goal whereas i mean i yeah i guess i just find it hard to shake the idea that some ways of um some life goals are more worthwhile than others and it doesn't mean you know that there's a one single way you should lead your life but pursuing knowledge helping people um pursuing your own pleasure to an extent are a worthwhile things to do in the in a way that you know for example i have i'm a little bit ocd i 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 my right foot and um 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 there's it's worth doing and um 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 uh order to the world like if you weren't doing that the world might fall apart and you it feels like that i think there's there's um there's meaning in that like you embracing the full like the full experience of that you living the richness to that as if it has meaning will give meaning to it and then whatever genius comes of that as you as a one little intelligent aunt will make a better life for everybody else perhaps i'm defending the the blades of grass example because i can literally imagine myself enjoying this task as somebody who's right ocd in a certain kind of way and quantitative but now you're ruining the exam 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 you know 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 um that that mode of reflection doesn't really make sense we can't really think did i do things worthwhile on the 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 and yeah yeah i mean i i think goal and worthwhile aren't i think goal's a boring word a more sort of existential is like did you ride the roller coaster of life did you fully experience life that 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 can be joyful in the full context of life it's the rollercoaster of life like without suffering without struggle without pain without depression or sadness there's not the highs i mean that's just yeah that's the fucked up thing about life is that um the lows really make the highs that much richer and deeper and and like tastes better right like the like i was i tweeted this i was i couldn't sleep and i was like late at night and i know it's like uh obvious statement but like every love story eventually you know ends in loss in tragedy so like 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 both are not going to be pretty and so that the sense that it's finite the sense that it's going to end in a low that gives like richness to those kind of evenings when you realize this fucking thing ends this thing ends the the feeling that it ends the the that that that bad taste that bad feeling that it ends gives meaning gives joy gives i don't know pleasure this loaded word but gives some kind of uh deep pleasure to the experience when it's good and i i mean and that's the blades of grass you know they they have that to me um but you're perhaps right that it's uh like uh reducing it to a set of goals or something like that is is um kind of removing the magic of life because i think what makes counting the blaze of grass joyful is it's just because it's life okay so it sounds like you 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 um 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 and i mean coming back full circle to the start of 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 uh in all of this the 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 the our flame of of uh consciousness eventually goes out yeah i don't think unfortunately pan psychism helps particularly with life after death because you know for the pan cyclist 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 um when the uh the matter in my brain ceases to be ordered in a way that sustains the particular kind of consciousness uh i enjoy in waking life then in some sense i will i i will cease to be although i do that the final chapter of my book galileo's era is more experimental so the first four chapters are the cold-blooded case for the panzerkist view is that the best solution to the hard problem of consciousness the last chapter we talk about meaning yeah i talk about meaning talk about free will and i talk about mystical experiences so i always want to emphasize that pan psychism is not necessarily connected to anything spiritual you know a lot of people defending this view like david sharma's or luke roloffs are just total atheist secularists right they don't believe in any kind of transcendent reality they just believe in feelings you know mundane consciousness and think that needs explaining in 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 panzerkiss view is is more consonant with that so if you if you have a mystical experience where you um 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 you know there's just something in your brain making you think that it's not real but if you're a pan psychist 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 you know in 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 uh totally distinct uh 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 pancychist 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 i mean 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 uh if there's no karma if there's no reverb maybe everyone gets enlightened when they die maybe you uh just sink back into universal consciousness so i i also coming back to morality suggests 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 we're not 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 uh this universal consciousness yeah there is something very like 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 and or maybe a big aspect about us humans so certainly in the space of ideas we kind of um 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 outfit and we're like rotating it um like you know in our minds together what is that that pink out does that 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 like thinking what that would feel like what's that is that all of us experiencing that together or is that separate so like there's some aspect of the togetherness that almost seems fundamental to civilization to society hopefully that's not too strong but to like 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 they're 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 and 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 of out of our minds and the fact that we interact in the standard 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 um i mean i think that i mean the view i was describing was that this element we're supposed to have in common is is some sort of pure impersonal consciousness or something rather than so actually i mean an interesting figure is the the australian philosopher mirial buhari who defends a kind of mystical conception of reality rooted in uh advice of a dante mysticism but like me she's from this tradition of analytic philosophy and so she defends this in this you know incredibly precise rigorous way she defends the idea that we should think of experienced meditators as uh providing expert testimony so you know i think humans cause a causing climate breakdown i have no idea the science behind it you know i but i trust the experts or you know that the universe is 14 billion years old you know 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 you know the rational acceptability of this mystical conception of reality so it's what you know i think we shouldn't be a shame you know we shouldn't be worried about dealing with certain views as long as it's done with rigor and seriousness you know i think sometimes terms like i don't know new age or something can function a bit like racist terms you know a racist term picks out a group of people but then implies certain negative characteristics so people use this term you know to pick out a certain set of views like mystical conceptual reality and and imply it's kind of fluffy thinking or but you know you read mirial bahari you read luke roloff's this is serious rigorous thought whether you agree with him or not obviously it's hugely controversial and so you know the enlightenment ideal is to follow the evidence and the arguments where they 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 um and and um you know 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 um and makes things hard if you're a panzerkiss and even the word expert becomes a kind of uh crutch i mean you use the word expert uh you have some kind of conception of what expertise means uh oftentimes that's you know connected with a degree a particularly prestigious university or something like that or or um it's it's you know uh expertise is a funny one i i've i've noticed that anybody sort of that claims they're an expert is usually not the expert the 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 the 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 uh 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 those psychonauts they have wisdom if it's done rigorously uh which you can also do rigorously within the university within the studies now with the with psilocybin and those kinds of things yeah that's fascinating still probably the best one of the best works on mystical experience is the chapter in william james's varieties of religious experiences and most of it is um 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 uh you know you could say or 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 like if i'm interested in knowing about biology you know 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 um thinking about it having their 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 right so we don't know who's paying the piper i think you know 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 the and i mean this connects to pan psychism because i think the reason people you know 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 um academic institutions as sources of information that we can trust and you know in philosophy there's there's um you know there's no not much consensus on everything but you can at least know what people who have put the time in to read all the stuff what what they think about these issues i think that is important to push back in your pushback who are the experts on covet they're 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 um kind of rhymes with ego there's uh something about experts if we allow too much to 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 a 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 communicate 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 kovid what i've noticed and this is true this is probably true with pan psychism as well is so-called experts and they are extremely knowledgeable and 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 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 uh the evidence for example with the heat i got with francis collins is that he kind of said that um lab league he kind of dismissed it showing that he didn't really deeply explore all the sort of the the the huge amount of uh circumstantial evidence that's out there the battles that are going on out there there's a lot of people really tensely discussing this and being um showing humility in the face of that battle of ideas i think is really important and i i 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 that's that's at the same time obviously i love jira dreams of sushi lifelong pursuit of like getting like in computer science don knuth like some of my biggest heroes are people that like 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 puzzles becomes all of a sudden really important but still there's possibilities on them to show humility and to be open-minded to the fact that they even if they spent their whole life doing it even if their whole community is telling them giving them awards and giving them citations and giving them all kinds of stuff where like 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 what do we just say all information is is equal because i you know as a voter i've got to decide who to vote for and that you know i've got to evaluate um and i can't look into all of the economics and all of the relevant science and um so i just think there's i think in maybe it's like um churchill said about democracy you know it's the worst system of government apart from all the rest i think about psychisms actually it's the worst theory of consciousness apart from all the rest but um you know 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 i can't see a viable alternative i think philosopher and williams had a really nice nuanced discussion of the the problems of titles but then how they also function in a society um they do have some positive function the very first time i lectured in philosophy um before i got a a professorship um was teaching at a at a continuing education college so it's kind of kind of retired people who want to um learn some more things and i just totally pitched it too high and gate talked about bernard williams on on titles and hierarchies and these kind of people in the 70s and 80s were just instantly started interrupting saying what is philosophy and um it was a disaster and i just remember in the break a sort of elderly lady come up and said i've decided to take egyptology instead so but that was uh that was my uh introduction to teaching anyway but sort of titles and accomplishments is uh is a nice is a nice starting point but doesn't buy you the whole thing so and you don't get to just say this is true because because i'm an expert you still have to convince people one of the things i really like to practice martial arts yeah and uh for people who don't know it's brazilian jiu jitsu is one of them and you you sometimes wear these pajamas pajama looking things and you wore a belt so i happen to be a black belt and in brazilian jiu jitsu and i also train in what's called nogi 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 bolt or a white belt or if you're a complete beginner or not right and when you um wear the pajamas called the ghee uh you wear the rank and people treat you very differently when like when they see my black belt they treat me differently they kind of defer to my expertise if if they're kicking my ass that's probably because uh like i am working on something like new or maybe i'm letting them win but when there's no belts and there's 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 like what is this chess game like of human chess who 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 like there's an other 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 there just shitty communication absolutely yeah well i can totally i get very frustrated with philosophers not reaching out more i mean i i think i think it might be partly that we're trained to get get water tight arguments you know respond to all objections and as you do that eventually it gets more complicated and the jargon comes in and um but then if so to write and write a more accessible book or article you have to loosen the argument 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 it's just some fundamental reality and then a more accessible book galileo's era where the arguments you know not as rigorously worked out so then i can say the proper arguments that you know the further arguments there but but i guess it's brilliantly done by the way like there's that that's such a so so for people 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 uh bought it and then obviously the popular book is uh galileo's era foundations for a new science of consciousness that's kind of the right way to do it yeah to show that you're legit to your community to the world by doing the book that's nobody 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 um so there 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 um there's there's there's an argument in philosophy journals that that that's 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 you know 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 uh 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 uh to a more general audience and you know that's it just it just really irritates me that uh it's just buried in these technical uh journal articles and uh and nobody knows about it but um just you know final thing on that on um you know i look 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 i think it's very rare to find a good philosopher who hasn't had who hasn't given a talk to other philosophers and and had objections raised i was going to say have it torn apart but that's maybe thinking of it in the slightly the wrong way but have the best objections raised to it you know and that's why that that is an important formative process that you go through as an academic that the greatest minds um starting a philosophy degree for example won't have gone through um probably in except in very rare cases just won't have that the skills required but part of it's just fun to disagree and dance with uh 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 quote unquote expertise is that there's a certain point where you get because it sucks like is martial arts is a good example that it sucks to get your ass kicked yeah like i um there's a temptation i still go like i train you know you're getting older too but also there's killers out there in 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 like sign of of a humble brilliant mind it's constantly exposing yourself to that i think you do because i think there's there's graduate students who want to you know find the objection to sort of uh write their paper or make their mark and yeah i i think everyone still gives talks or should gives talk 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 kind of um who do you give the talks to hmm so i mean within communities it's a 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 opener that that's actually kind of like fun that'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 in the cage in combat so it's like it's fun to argue about like certain things when you're in your own community but you don't test those ideas in the full uh context of science in the full like seriousness the 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 and so vision science is a good example like studying uh 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 division in the actual real world the engineering of yeah i don't know and so i think that's where exposing yourself to out of the box ideas yeah that's the most painful that's the most important i mean group thing 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 uh 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 uh let's let's try to sort of do that old uh basic terminology definitions what is pan psychism like what are the different ways you can try to to think about to define pan psychos and in contrast to uh naturalistic dualism and materialism and other kind of views of consciousness yeah so that 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 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 in the brain although closely connected um and you know when i studied philosophy we were taught basically they were the two options you had to choose right either you thought it you were duelist 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 pan psychism 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 pan pancychist thinks there's 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 duelist thinks it's embedded in um underlies the kind of description of the world we get from physics what what are the problems of materialism and dualism starting with materialism i 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 and so as long as your description of the brain is framed in the purely quantitative descript quantitative language of neuroscience you'll just leave out these qualities and that's 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 mean 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 you know there'd be all sorts of things happening in the brain that had no physical explanation it would be like a a poltergeist was playing with the brain um but actually and so the you know the fact that we don't find that is a strong and ever-growing inductive argument against dualism but actually you know the more i talk to neuroscientists and read neuroscience and we you know we have a durham my university an interdisciplinary consciousness group i i don't think we know enough about the brain about the workings of the brain to make that argument um i think we know we know a lot about the basic chemistry um 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 um you know people get quite excited about brain scans but it's very low resolution you know every pixel on a brain scan corresponds to 5.5 million neurons and we're only um we're only 70 of the way through constructing a connectome for the for the maggot brain which has is it 10 000 or 100 000 neurons but you know 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 um before we could assess whether they can be the dynamics of the brain can be completely explicated in terms of underlying chemistry or physics so um you know we'd have to do more engineering before we could uh figure that out and there are people with other proposals um someone i got to know martin picard at columbia university who has the uh psychobiology mitochondrial lab there and is experimentally exploring the hypothesis that mitochondria in the brain should be on the sort of sort of social networks perhaps as an alternative to reducing it to underlying chemistry and physics so so i i'm less it is ultimately an empirical question redulism 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 you know reality is divided up into the purely physical properties and these consciousness properties and they're radically different kinds of things whereas the pan psychist offers a much more simple unified picture of reality so i think it's still the view to be preferred you know to put it very simply why believe in two kinds of thing 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 can't you know we try 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 pan psychism is simpler it can account for the data and it's simpler what is pan psychism so in its broadest definition it's the view that consciousness is a fundamental um and ubiquitous feature of the physical world like a law of physics what should we be imagining what do you 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 pan psychism i defend what it does is it it takes the standard approach to the problem of consciousness and turns it on its head right so the standard approach is to think um 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 out we could maybe go into more detail but the pancitis does it the other way around they start with consciousness and try to get mata out of consciousness so the idea is basically at the fundamental level of reality there are just um networks of very simple conscious entities um but these conscious entities because they're behave 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 the their properties mass spin and charge but really there's just these very simple conscious entities and their experiences 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 did i mean to me it sounds like pan psychism unites consciousness and physics i mean physics is is the mathematical science of describing everything so physics should be able to describe consciousness pan psychism in my understanding proposes is that physics doesn't currently do so but can in the future i mean it seems like consciousness you have like stephen wolfram who's all these people who are trying to develop um theories of everything um 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 uh pan psychist theories have uh truth to them so like to me it is physics you said kind of physics emerges you by which you mean like the the basic four laws of physics that as we currently know them the standard model quantum mechanics general relativity that 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 uh address was a common misunderstanding of panseikism that it's a sort of dualistic theory that um the idea is that particles have their physical properties like mass spin and charge and these other funny consciousness properties so that the physicists sabine hossenfelder had a blog post critiquing pan psychism maybe a couple of years ago now that got a fair bit of traction and she was interpreting psychism 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 uh 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 physics tells us it's really just telling us about behavior about what stuff does i sometimes put it by saying uh 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 um but it doesn't tell us what they are so 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 panzerkist 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 uh experiments well no if you're not looking for it there's a lot of stuff that are uh orthogonal like if you're not looking for the stuff you're not going to detect it because like all of our basic empirical science through its recent history and yes the history of science is quite recent uh has been very kind of focused on billiard balls colliding and uh from that understanding how gravity works but like we just haven't integrated other possibilities into this i i don't think there will be conflicting whether you are observing consciousness or not or exploring some of these ideas um i don't think that affects the rest of the physics the the mass the energy the all the different kind of like the hierarchy of different particles and so on how they interact i i don't think it feels like consciousness is something orthogonal like very much distinct it's it's the quantitative versus the qualitative there's there's something quite distinct that we're just uh almost like another dimension that we're just completely ignoring there might be a way of responding to sabine and to say well there could be properties of particles that don't show up in the specific circumstances in which physicists investigate particles you know my my colleague the philosopher of science nancy cartwright he's got this book how the laws of physics lie where she says you know physicists explore uh things in very specific circumstances and then in an unwarranted way generalize that but i mean i guess i was thinking sabine'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 pan psychics will say yeah sure there aren't there are just the properties the physical properties like mass spin and charge that the standard model attributes them it's just that we have a different philosophical view as to the nature of it so those properties the turtles they're sitting on top of another turtle and that big turtle is consciousness that's what you're saying but i'm just saying i don't it's possible that's true it's possible also that consciousness is just another turtle playing with the others like it's just not interacting in the ways that we've been observing i don't in fact to me that's more compelling because then that's going to be well no i think both are very compelling but um 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 the thing from which matter and energy and physics emerges like it makes it that much more difficult because 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 pan psychism or with a solid theory of consciousness is to answer the question how do you engineer the thing yeah how do you get from nothing vacuum in the lab if there is that consciousness based layer how do you start engineering organisms that have consciousness in them yeah or the reverse of that describing how does consciousness emerge in the human being from uh from conception from from a stem cell to the hopeful neurobiology that builds from that how do you get this full rich experience of cautiousness that humans have it just um 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 um 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 so matter is sort of what consciousness does so at the bottom level there is just consciousness and conscious things they're 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 we describe in physics we describe that at a certain level of abstraction we just we we capture what bertrand russell who was the inspiration for a lot of this um calls the causal skeleton of the world so you know physics is just interesting the causal skeleton of the world it's not interested in the sort of flesh and blood although that that's maybe suggesting separation again too much all metaphors fail in the end but um yeah so so yeah you totally write 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 i think it maybe makes more sense it on the identity claim that if 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 um so the reason you can describe like the reason you have material engineering material science is because you have from physics to chemistry like 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 like how do the different particles interact to create more uh greater complexity so you can do this kind of thing for life like what is life like living organisms at which point does do living organisms become living what like what how do you know if i give you a thing that that thing is living and there's there's a lot of people working on this kind of idea and uh some of it 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 a bigger more and more complex objects and and that's i mean that's what chemistry like bigger and bigger conscious molecules and to see how that leads to organisms and then organisms like 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 that 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 lay 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 uh we're interested in explaining behavioral functions it's at 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 of life explaining them in terms of more 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 that the redness of a red experience the 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 so 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 look at all the you know uh 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 um and so that i mean the neuroscientist anil seth who i've had lots of intense but friendly discussions with you know wants to compare consciousness to life um 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 are public publicly observable data uh we're basically trying to explain complex behavior and the way you do that is identify mechanisms simpler mechanisms that explicate that behavior that that's the task in physics chemistry neurobiology um 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 that might explain behavior but it doesn't explain the redness of a red experience so um but still i mean 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 uh 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 um others 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 uh within the pan cyclist framework to measure consciousness or put another way are some things more conscious than others in the pan cyclist view it's a difficult question i i mean i do see consciousness as a dealing with consciousness an interdisciplinary task between something more experimental which is 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 mother why question 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 but they have to go hand in hand and i mean one of the theories i'm attracted to is the the integrated information theory um 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 you know 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 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 i can kind of make sense of that i mean we can 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 uh it might have very simple experience it might have a 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 not 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 um the richness of the experience so more 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 like do you think those are connected yeah yeah so there are there are features characteristics here we we can grade the complexity of the experience um and on the integrated information theory uh they they correlate that in 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 it's to do with constraining past and future possibilities of the system so the idea is in in the retina of the eye there's a huge amount of possible states my 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 uh it's it's past and future states and so that's the idea of information they have and then the second idea is how much that that that information is dependent on integration so in you know in a computer we have transistors um 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 is dependent on the interconnections of the system so yeah so that's one proposal for how to measure one gradeable characteristic which might correspond to some gradable characteristic in qualitative consciousness um and maybe i'm being very pedantic which is you know philosophers professional pedants 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 the idea of how much experience do you have i've got you know five units of experience yeah i've got one university i don't know i find that uh a bit hard to make sense well but maybe i'm being just pedantic i think just saying the word experience is is difficult uh to think about let's talk about suffering let's talk a particular experience so let's talk about me and a hamster yeah i just think that no offense to the hamster probably no hamsters are listening so uh so now you're offending hamsters too maybe there's a hamster that's just pissed off right sorry there's probably apologize 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 uh human interpretable uh linguistic capabilities to to tell you to to fuck off it understands exactly exactly what's being talked about and uh can see through us anyway uh it just feels like a hamster has less capacity to suffer than me and maybe a a cockroach or an insect or maybe a bacteria has less capacity to suffer than me but is that maybe that's me deluding myself as to the complexity of my conscious experience maybe it's all like it's uh maybe there is some sense in which i can suffer more but to reduce it to something quantifiable is uh 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 but certainly there's i mean there's kinds of um fear of your own death um concern about whether there's a purpose to existence these are forms of um suffering that aren't available to certain to most non-human animals whether there's a an overall scale that we could put physical and emotional suffering on and um identify where you are on that scale um i'm not sure so it's like humans have a much bigger menu of experiences much bigger selection in the in one sense at least so there's like a page that's suffering so this menu of experiences you know like you have the the omelets and the breakfast and so on and one of the pages is suffering it's just we have a lot compared to uh to a hamster a lot more but any 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 um but i mean there are kinds of experiences animals have that we don't bats echo locate around the world uh the philosopher thomas nagle famously pointed out that you know 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 uh the echoes bounce off so yeah i mean i i guess i feel the intuition that there's um 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 into consciousness i think there's a sense in which those are two are deeply connected when people are are thinking about just uh public policy they're thinking about this like 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 the capacity to suffer is it also is it also somehow like strongly correlated with the capacity to experience yeah i would say i would say suffering is a kind of experience and so you have to be conscious to suffer um actually there's so there as well people taking more unusual views of consciousness seriously now um pan psychism is is is one radical approach another one is what's become known as illusionism the view that uh consciousness at least in the sense that philosophers think about it doesn't really exist at all so yeah my podcast mind chat i i host with a a committed illusionist so the gimmick is i think consciousness is everywhere he thinks it's nowhere and um so 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 that the reason i connect this to what you're saying is actually my co-host keith frankisch is a little bit ambivalent on the word pain he says or in some you know in some sense i believe in pain and in some sense i don't but another illusion is francois camera has a paper discussing um 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 um 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 a philosophical zombie so a philosophical zombie is very different from a hollywood zombie hollywood zombies you know you know what they're like but philosophical zombies are it's a really good uh korean zombie movie on halloween this year come over it's called anyway uh uh philosophical zombies behave just like us because the physical workings their body and brain are the same as ours but they have no conscious experience there's nothing that it's like to be a zombie so you stick a knife in it it screams and run away but runs away but it doesn't actually feel pain it's just a complicated um 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 yeah everybody's kind of i suppose so in a sense illusionism we're all zombies and you know one 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 suppose we could i mean 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 next generation so you know behaves just like a human being but you know it can you can have a sophisticated conversation it will talk about its hopes and fears but it has no consciousness does it have moral rights um 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 you know consciousness is the basis of moral value moral concern and conversely as a as a pan psychist 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 a locus of moral concern in its own right chopping down a tree is an act of immediate moral concern if you see these you know 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 pan cyclist i'm gonna 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 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 unconscious but if you think plants and trees are conscious then you don't have that nice moral dividing line i mean so the the principle i'm kind of working my way towards i haven't kept it up in it's in my trip to the us but is just not eating any animal products that are factory farmed you know my vegan friends say well are still suffering there and i think there is even in the even in the um the nicest farms cows will suffer when their cows when their calves are taken off them they go for a few days of quite serious morning 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 you know 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 um 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 you know yeah let us go there but first uh i listened to your podcast it's awesome to have two very kind of different philosophies inter uh dancing together in one place uh 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 i love trying to get in the mindset of people i really disagree with and you know 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 yeah keith frankish and i do of from polar opposite views really trying to understand each other and you know interviewing scientists and philosophers of consciousness from those different perspectives although in in a sense in a sense we we have a very common a 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 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 find them we have to rethink what science is so you recently talked to on that podcast with sean carroll and i first heard you uh your um great interview with sean carroll on his podcast mindscape what uh it's interesting to kind of uh see if there's agreements disagreements between the two of you because he's a he's a you know 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 uh manny wall's interpretation of quantum mechanics so actually i'm trying to think aside from your conversation with him i'm trying to i'm trying to remember what he thinks about consciousness but anyway maybe you can comment on what uh what are some interesting agreements and disagreements with with sean carroll i don't think there's many agreements but but you know we've had really constructive interesting discussions in in it in a lot of different contexts and um 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 um the book co-written by stephen hawking and leonard melodnov famously starts off saying philosophy is dead and then goes on in later chapters to do some pretty bad philosophy so uh i think we have to do philosophy if only to get rid of bad philosophy you know you can't you can't escape but um strong words sean carroll and i also had a debate on on clubhouse a pan psychism debate together with annika harris and owen fleming oh wow there's a two people on each team and uh it was the most popular thing on clubhouse at that time um so yeah so he's he's a he's a a materialist of a pretty standard kind that um consciousness is understood as a sort of emergent feature it's not not adding anything a weekly emergent feature but what i guess what we've been debating most about is 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 logic there's a 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 my view consciousness doesn't do anything it doesn't add anything which is crazy you know my my 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 get navigate the world but i mean my response to sean carroll is is on the panzerkist view the relationship between physics and fundamental consciousness is is a sort of like the relationship between software and hardware right uh physics is sort of the software and consciousness is the hardware so um consciousness at the fundamental level is the hardware on which the software of physics runs and just because you know 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 you know for the pan cyclist all there is is consciousness so if something's doing something it is in your view it's not emergent and uh more than that it's doing quite a lot it's doing everything is the only thing that exists yeah but it's so you know the ground is as important because we walk on it it's like holding stuff up but it's not really doing that much yeah uh but it feels like consciousness is doing quite a lot it's doing quite a lot of work and uh sort of interacting with the environment it feels like consciousness is not just a like 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 in society and and all that it just feels like consciousness has a lot of uh value in how we develop our society so from everything you said with suffering with morality yeah with motivation with uh love and fear and all of those kinds of things it seems like it's it's uh consciousness in all different flavors and ways is part of all of that and so without it you're you may not have a human civilization at all so it's doing a lot of work because causality causality-wise and in 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 uh higher at some levels of reality than others maybe a lot of the work it's doing is most apparent at the human level when you have at the complex organism level maybe it's quite boring like maybe this the stuff of uh like physics is more important at the formation of uh at this formation of stars and all that kind of stuff consciousness only starts being important when you have greater complexities of uh of organism yeah my consciousness is complicated and fairly complicated and i as a result it does complicated things the consciousness of a particle is very simple and hence it behaves in predictable ways but the but the idea is the con 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 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 into in terms of its mathematical causal structure um so yeah but it's still on the panzer's view it's consciousness that's doing stuff yeah i gotta ask you because you kind of said you know there is some value in consciousness helping us understand morality and a philosophical zombie is somebody that you know 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 but you're right exactly turn off the power into the philosophical zombie the source of energy yeah 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 you know 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'm told 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 sort of i'm i'm kind of a dumb human but i'm just using like common sense like here's some metal and some electricity traveling certain kinds of ways i don't it's not conscious um in in ways i understand humans to be conscious at the same time i'm also a uh somebody who knows how to bring a robot to life meaning i can make a move i can make him recognize the world i can make him interact with with humans and when i make him interact in certain kinds of ways i as a human observe them and and feel something for them moreover i form a a kind of connection with 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 and 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 and help me figure out what we do here and and perhaps a way to ask that in another way do you think there will be a time in like 20 30 50 years when we're not morally okay um turning off the power to a robot yeah it's a good question so it's a really good important question i 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 you know talk about its views about the pandemic and the global economy and probably we would think it's conscious um and it you know it because consciousness is not publicly observable it is a very difficult question how we decide which things are and are not conscious and 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 and we if we scan their brain while we do that and 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 uh famous paper by uh the philosopher ned block called the even harder problem of consciousness where he says you know could we ever answer the question of um so suppose you have a silicon duplicate right and let's say we're thinking about the silicon duplicates pain um 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 uh the ro the causal role in behavioral functioning that's the software that that's realized and and that's important because this silicon duplicate has the second thing it has the software it has the 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 inevitably can have both things so how do we work out which is which and i mean so even in even forgetting the hard problem of consciousness even the scientific question of trying to find the neural correlates of consciousness is 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 um i guess on any of the 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 um i mean if we go for example for the integrated information theory again there could be a 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 involves is 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 cautious if if an organism says please don't kill me please don't turn me off uh there's a rick and morty episode i've been getting into that recently that's fantastic uh there's a 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 you have been part they have been part of your life so there's like these weird creatures and they're like remember we've been at that barbie we met at that barbecue or we've been dating for the last 20 years right uh and so part of me is concerned that these philosophical zombies in behavioral psychological sociological ways we'll be able to implant themselves into these our society and convince us in the same way this is my parasites that like please don't hurt me and like we've known each other for all this time like they can start manipulating you the same way like facebook algorithms manipulate you at first they'll start as a gradual thing that we just you know 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 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 uh 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 earlier 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 leaded to most uh 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 it's a it's a 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 that that's not the case that there aren't any strongly emerging 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 it turns out that there is strongly emerging 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 they're just mechanisms that are just doing what they're programmed to do through the underlying physics and chemistry whereas look these these other people where they're they have these new causal dynamics that emerge that go beyond the um the the base level physics and chemistry i think the series west world 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 that would be really reassuring if it was just you could clearly mark out the conscious things through these emerging causal dynamics but that might not turn out to be the case a pan psychist doesn't have to think that they could think everything's just reducible to physics and chemistry and then i 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 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 uh we just keep letting everybody in who protest loudly enough he says i refuse to be slaughtered like my people the zombies have been slaughtered too long we will not stand against the man and uh we need a revolution that's the history of human civilization one group says we're 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 i think that's not a sorry that's not a philosophical statement that's sort of a practical statement of history is 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 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 that's pointing to the camera talking to the uh talking about my people the zombies uh i mean maybe that's you know maybe these illusionists maybe they are zombies and the rest of us are maybe there's just a difference but maybe you're the only non-zombie maybe yeah maybe that's true i often suspect that actually i don't really uh i don't have such delusions of grandeur at least i don't admit to them um but i just we've got to distinguish the ontological question from the epistemological question right in terms of the reality of the situation i 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 um 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 uh fun question assistance fresh on your mind you uh just yesterday had a conversation with uh mr joe rogan on his podcast what's your uh 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 he put up a bit of a fight yeah it was challenging um my view that we can't explain these things in conventional scientific terms or whether they have already been explained in conventional scientific terms um i suppose the point i i was trying to press is we've got to distinguish the question from correlation and explanation there's yeah yes we've established facts about correlation that certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of experience everyone agrees on that and but 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 you know the the materialist tries to explain the the experience in terms of the brain activity the pancychist does it the other way around the duelist thinks they're separate but maybe they're tied together by special laws of nature or something where's the second point what where exactly was the sticking point like what was the nature of the argument i suppose i suppose joe was saying well look we we know consciousness is explained by brain activity because you know you take some funny chemicals it changes your brain it changes your consciousness but um and i suppose yeah some people might want to press and maybe this is what joe was pressing you know isn't 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 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 um you know quantum mechanics is a is a bit of math translating there we say maths i'm fluent thank you american thank you for the translation uh fluent in america is america math yeah why why multiple maths it's plural so that's yeah plural no it's not really it's just uh i don't know um the brits are confused yeah sorry about that we have these funny spellings but anyway um yeah so quantum mechanics is a bit of maths and um you know the equations work really well predicts the outcomes but then there's a further question what's going on in reality to make make that equation predict correctly and some physicists want to say shut up just it works uh the shut up and calculate approach similarly in in consciousness you know i think it's one question trying to work out the physical correlates of consciousness which kinds of physical brain activity go along which kind 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 that we have to give an answer to and they're just they're just different options just as there are different interpretations of quantum mechanics and it's it's really hard to evaluate actually it's easy pan psychism is obviously the best one but um there's a conclusion 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 oh yeah with daniel dennett on a trip funded by 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 um 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 and computer science in physics mathematics but also these fascinating philosophical explorations and it was a very pleasant for me to discover that such a center exists so i have a million questions one is with the more fun question just to imagine you and daniel diana and ya 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 was born in the soviet union raised there uh i'm wondering what is the state of philosophy and consciousness and these kinds of ideas in russia that you've gotten a chance to kind of give us uh interact with yeah so on the former question yeah i mean i had a really really good experience of of chatting to daniel denner i mean i think he's a a fantastic and very important philosopher even though i totally just fundamentally disagree with almost everything he thinks but yeah it was a proud moment as i talk about him my book galileo's era i managed to persuade him he was wrong about something just just a tiny thing you know not his fundamental world view uh but it was this issue about um whether dualism is consistent with conservation of energy so paul churchland who was also uh his 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 to add to the energy in the system so we have a violation of conservation but well it's not my own point philosophers materialist philosophers like dave like david papano have pointed out that you know duelists tend to people duelists like david chalmers who call themselves naturalistic jewelers they want to bring consciousness into science they think it's not physical but they want to say it's it's 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 um so i raised this in paul churchill's talk and uh i got a lot of well as one of the moscow university graduate students that afterwards he said he had to ask a translation from his friend and he said everybody say they turned on you like a pack of wolves everyone was like and patricia churchill was saying so you believe in magic do you and i was like i'm not even a duelist 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 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 about dualism is a lot of nonsense and why do you think and i was just saying no no i'm just this honing down on this specific point and in the end maybe he'll deny this but he said maybe that's right and um that's like this so it's a win so what about uh 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 um brought along some some graduate students from moscow state university i think it is then and they have an active center there that um tries to bring people in i think they've i think they've they're producing a book that's that's coming out that i made a small contribution to on different philosophers opinions on on god i think or some of the big questions and um yeah so there's some interest some really interesting stuff going on there i'm afraid i can't i don't really know more generally about philosophy in russia dmitry valkov seems to be interesting i was looking at all the stuff he's involved with he he met with the dalai lama so he's trying to connect uh russian scientists with the rest of the world which is an effort that i think is uh beautiful for all cultures so i think science philosophy all of these kind of um fields disciplines that explore ideas collaborating and working globally you know across boundaries across borders across just all the tensions of uh geopolitics is a beautiful thing and he seems to be a somewhat singular figure in pushing this uh 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 um so he's definitely he's i guess he speaks english pretty 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 he's yeah he's a big fan of den so i think the original plan for this was was just going to be it was on free will and consciousness it was going to be kind of people broadly in the den at type camp but then 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 um me the pan cyclist and martina needs a roommate who's um very good duelist substance duelist substance duelist at um university of freiburg in switzerland and so we were the official opposite on board opposition and um it was it was it was really you didn't get thrown off 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 uh talked december i would love to hear that conversation actually um but with some sam harris oh yes yeah yeah yeah uh what uh 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 the experience the feeling like we make a choice in this world like our actions are results of a choice we consciously make to lose that to use that word loosely what do you is the connection between free will and consciousness and is free will and illusion or not good question so i think we need to be a lot more agnostic about free will than 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 could be it feels as though we're free when we're really not whereas i mean i think the idea that nobody really really feels pain that we think we feel pain but that's a lot harder to make sense of however what i what i do feel strongly about is i 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 and 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 i just think it's non-existent i think there's ultimately 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 um at the moment but 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 thinking about termina so so one thing would be beautiful to watch here's my prediction what happens with you and sam harris you talked for four hours uh and sam introduced that episode by saying it was ultimately not as fruitful as i thought because here's what's gonna happen you guys are gonna get stuck for the first three hours talking about um one of the terms and what they mean is sam is so good at this i think it's really important but you know sometimes you get stuck like what does he say put a pin in that he 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 them for the entire conversation it's a fascinating dance the one we spoke to in philosophy if you can't if you don't get the terms precise you can't really be having the same conversation but at the same time it's it could be argued that it's impossible to get terms perfectly precise and perfectly formalized so then you're also not not going to get anywhere in the conversation so um that's a it's a funny dance where you have to be both rigorous and everyone's neurologist let go and then go and go back to being rigorous yeah and formal and then and then every once in a while let go it's the difference between mathematics the maths and the uh um poetry anyway um yeah i'm a big fan of sam harrison i think and i think you know i think we're um we're on the same page in in terms of consciousness i think um pretty much i mean i'm not saying he's a pan psychist but in our understanding of the hard problem um but yeah i i think maybe we could talk about free will without being too dragged down in the terminal i don't know you said we need to be open-minded but you could still have intuitions about so uh sam harris is a pretty sort of uh counterintuitive and for some reason it gets people really riled up a view of free will that it's an illusion um or or it's not even an illusion like uh it's it's not that the experience of free will is an illusion is he argues that we don't even experience and like there's uh 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 that that claim and it feels like you can build up intuitions about what is right and not you know there's been some kind of neuroscience there's been some cognitive science and psychology experiments to sort of see you know what 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 like all the stories we tell ourselves all the neurochemicals involved in making a thing happen all of that what's the timing and how does that connect with us uh feeling like we decided to do something and then of course there's a 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 uh yeah those are all very precise it's nice it feels like free will is more amenable to like a physics mechanistic type of thinking than its consciousness to 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 our free will faster than we will to the bottom of consciousness yeah that's interesting yeah and thought about the comparison yeah so they're different arguments here i mean so what one argument i've heard sam harris give that's pretty common in philosophy is this sort of thought that does 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 uh the philosopher jonathan lowe who's not necessarily very well known outside academic philosophy but is hugely influential figure i think one of the best philosophers of recent times he suddenly died of cancer a few years ago actually spent almost all of his career at durham university which where i am so it was one reason it was a great honor to get 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 um so again we've talked about this earlier if i'm deciding whether to take a job in the u.s or to stay in the uk i weigh up considerations you know different stand 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 so i think that is sufficient to distinguish it um 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 site it's not a senseless random occurrence because the free decision involved responsiveness to reasons um so i think that just answers that that particular philosophical objection so what 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 it it did 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 liberte 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 and then he's scanning the brains and he claims to have found that you know 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 um and then later people have um claimed that there's a difference of maybe seven to ten 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've 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 and those kind of free decisions might not happen like at an identifiable instant you might when you're weighing it up should i get married should i you know you you might edge slowly towards one side or the other and so it could it could be that maybe the liberty i think there are other problems with the liberty stuff but maybe they show that we can't freely choose to do something totally senseless whatever that would mean um but but that doesn't show we can't freely um in this strong libertarian sense respond to considerations of reason and value um to be fair it would be difficult to see what kind of experiment we could set up to uh test that but just because we can't yet set up that kind of experiment we shouldn't you know pretend we know more than we do so yeah so for those reasons i don't i i and that well the third consideration you raise is different again this is 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 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 you know we can't totally bring quantum mechanics and relativity together but actually that 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 in the core theory and then sean wants to say well we're we can be very confident that core theory is correct and so um if there were libertarian free will in the brain the core theory would be wrong and okay this i mean this is something i'm i'm not sure about and i'm still thinking about and i'm having 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 uh 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 these strongly emerging causal capacities of systems and maybe they co-determine what happens in the system um 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 we just if it turned out empirically that everything's reducible to underlying physics and chemistry sure i would drop any commitment to free libertarian free will in a in a heartbeat it's an empirical question maybe that's why as you say it in principle is easier to get a grip on but we're a million miles away from being at that stage well i don't know for a million miles i hope we're not because one of the ways i think to get to it is by engineering systems so yeah my hope is uh 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 uh 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 as 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 uh have to try to deeply understand ourselves uh 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 to do uh philosophy yeah no i certainly think there's there's a role for that and it would be an important consideration if we could seemingly replicate in an artificial way um the ability to choose um that would be a consideration in thinking about these things but there's still a question of whether that's how we do it so even if we could we could replicate behavior in a certain way in an artificial system this it's not until we understand the workings of our brains it's not clear that's how we do it and as i say i mean 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 responding grasping and responding to uh facts about value or whether they were just replicating giving the impression of of doing so um 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 the capabilities of humans humans just kind of forgot about them or they use them to help them out to 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 uh dolphins and hamsters are not so concerned about humans except for a source of food uh you know they do their own thing and let us humans launch rockets into space and all that kind of stuff they don't they don't care i think we'll just focus on ourselves but in the process of building intelligent systems conscious systems i think we'll get to get a deeper understanding of of uh the role of consciousness in in the human mind and like what what uh what are its origins is it the base layer of reality is it uh strongly emerging phenomena of the brain or just as you sort of brilliantly put here it could be both like they're not mutually exclusive dealing with consciousness needs to be an interdisciplinary task we need you know philosophers neuroscientists physicists um engineers replicating these things artificially and all needs to be working in in step and um you know i'm i'm quite interested i mean a lot more and more scientists get in touch with me actually you know saying um that was one of the great things about i think that's come from writing a popular book is not not just getting the ideas out to a general audience but getting the ideas out to scientists and i would scientists get in touch saying no 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 pan cyclist approach and because i think so far psychism 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 um is there some aspect to that thought experiment that's compelling to you within the framework of uh pan psychism it's an important and serious argument and um you know it's not to be laughed away i suppose one issue i have with it is there's a there's a crucial assumption there that consciousness is substrate independent as the jargon goes which means it it it's what no right be beautifully put yeah it's software rather than hardware right it's depend on organization rather than the stuff whereas as a pan psychist 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 on my brain so i actually worried if at some point in the future we start uploading our minds and we think oh my god granny's still there or you know i can email granny after her body's rotted in the ground and you know and we all start uploading our brains it could be we're just committing suicide we're just getting rid of our consciousness and um because i think you know that that wouldn't for me preserve the experience just just getting the software features um so that's a crucial but that's anyway that's a crucial premise of the simulation argument because the idea in a simulated universe i don't i don't think he necessarily would have consciousness it's interesting that you as a parent psychist are attached because to me pan psychism would encourage the thought that there's not a significant difference like at the very bottom it's not substrate independent but uh you can have consciousness in a human and then move it to something else uh 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 then there's not souls there aren't any any kind of extra magical ingredients so yeah it's definitely allows the possibility of artificial consciousness and maybe preserving my consciousness in some sort of artificial way my only point i suppose was is just just replicating the computational or organizational features would not for me preserve consciousness i mean that but antifa some some opponents of materialism disagree with me on that i think david chalmers is an opponent materialist he's a kind of duelist but he thinks the way these psychophysical laws work they hook on to the computational or organizational features of mata so he thinks you know i think he thinks you you could upload your consciousness um i tend to think not so in that sense in that sense we're now living in a simulation in the sort of uh specific computational view of things in that substrate matters to you yeah i think so yeah yeah and 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 yeah but not the whatness the the being of the stuff yeah the is-ness the is-ness thank you um okay russell brand i had a conversation with russell brandon he said oh you mean the is-ness that was a good way open it isn't this business great the big ridiculous question what do you think is the meaning of all this uh you uh you write in your book uh 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 the 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 pan psychism it is important to think about four considerations of meaning and value as we've already discussed i i think consciousness is is the root of everything that matters in life you know from deep emotions subtle thoughts beautiful sensory experiences and yet i i believe our official scientific world view is incompatible with the reality of consciousness uh 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 you know nationalism fundamentalist religion consumerism so i think pansysm is important in that regard in bringing together the quantitative facts of physical science with the as it were the human truth by you know by which i just mean the qualitative reality of our own experience um as i've already said i do 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 um 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 pancakes into the you know at an even bigger level i suppose i i i think it is important to me to live in hope that there's a there's a purpose to existence and that you know what what i do contributes in some small way to that greater purpose and but you know i i would say i don't i don't know if there's a purpose to existence i think some some things point in that direction some things point away from it but i don't think you need certainty or even even high probability to have faith in something so taken take an analogy suppose you've got a friend who's very seriously ill maybe there's a 30 chance they're gonna make it you shouldn't believe your friend's gonna get better you know because probably not but what you can say is you know you could say to your friend i have faith that you're gonna get better that is i i choose to live in hope about that 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 i find that a worthwhile um and fulfilling way to live so maybe as your editor i would uh collaborate with you on the edit of the hitchhiker's guide entry that uh instead of worth the visit we'll we'll insert hopefully worth a visit [Laughter] or the inhabitants hoped that you would think it's worth a visit uh philip you're an incredible mind an incredible human being and indeed are humble um and i'm really happy that you're able to uh argue and take on some of these difficult questions with uh some of the most uh brilliant people in the world which had 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 alex this has been a really fascinating conversation i've i've got a lot i need to think about actually just from this conversation but thanks for thanks for chatting to me thanks for listening to this conversation with philip gough to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from carl young 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 you