Philip Goff, a philosophy professor at Durham University, joins me to talk about consciousness, and whether or not other things have something akin to it, like plants, are capable of experiencing consciousness. We also talk about some of the weirdest things we've discovered about plants and their minds, and how they might be capable of consciousness, too. And we talk about why we should care about consciousness at all, because it might be the most fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world, and the best hope we have to address the hard problem of consciousness and the scientific and philosophical challenges it raises. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg. Our theme song was written and performed by Micah Vellian and our ad music was provided by Mark Phillips. Additional music was produced by Ian Dorsch. The show was mixed and produced by Matthew Boll. It was edited by Matt Newell. Thanks to Caitlin Durante and Rachel Ward. Music was mixed by Haley Shaw. Special thanks to Mark Newell and Rachel Goodman. Art: Mackenzie Moore. Music: Hayden Coplen, Matthew Boll, Matthew Newell, Rachel Ward, and Rachel Gooding. Editor: Annie-Rose Strasser. Cover art by Jeff Perla. Fact checking by Mike McLendon. We've been working on this episode for The Joe Rogan Experience and the excellent work of Mark Gooding, courtesy of the New York Times Magazine. Thank you to Joe Rogans. Please take a shot at this episode and the amazing work done by Mark Goodling at the Newellis, and our excellent sound engineer, and thanks to the amazing sound engineer and his amazing sound effects, and so much more at The New York Public Relations Agency, and all of his amazing engineering, thanks to our good friend, and good sound design, thanks to , and by for the excellent sound effects by . is a really good friend of mine, and , and thanks also to the wonderful in this podcast, the amazing people at at , thanks , thank you, and thank you & . Thank you so much to , so much thank you for all of you, thanks etc, thanks and thanks for all the work done at this , all of your support at the to all of my work, all of our support at and all the people who helped us out there
00:01:03.000I'm a philosophy professor from Durham University in the north of England.
00:01:08.000And I spend most of my time thinking about consciousness.
00:01:12.000And specifically, I guess I defend this view, panpsychism, which is roughly the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.
00:01:25.000So it doesn't literally mean that everything is conscious necessarily.
00:01:30.000The basic commitment is that the fundamental building blocks of reality, maybe fundamental particles like electrons and quarks, have incredibly simple forms of experience.
00:01:44.000The very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow rooted in or derived from this very simple experience at the level of fundamental physics.
00:01:55.000So, sounds kind of wacky but I think more and more philosophers and even some neuroscientists are thinking this might be our best hope for addressing the hard problem of consciousness and the scientific and philosophical challenges consciousness raises.
00:02:11.000Well, we are starting to challenge whether or not other things have something akin to consciousness, like plants, right?
00:02:19.000There's real evidence that plants both feel something when they're being eaten and react to it.
00:02:27.000The real evidence that they react to it, they actually change the profile, the chemical profile, to make themselves taste disgusting so that animals will not eat them.
00:02:38.000And that could actually be replicated with noises of the leaves being chewed on, which is really fascinating.
00:02:44.000They played tape recordings of caterpillars eating leaves next to trees, and those trees have triggered that response, this chemical response of whatever it is inside of them that makes them taste disgusting.
00:02:57.000Yeah, I mean, the extent to which we've discovered how intelligent the kind of mental sophistication of plants is incredible.
00:03:07.000So Monica Gagliano, for example, has done experiments subjecting pea plants to conditioned learning.
00:03:15.000So, you know, the old Pavlov's dog idea that, you know, he rang the bell every time the dog gets food and then eventually the dog starts salivating when the bell rings.
00:03:27.000But she's actually done this with pea plants.
00:03:32.000Taught them to associate the ultraviolet light with the hum of a computer fan.
00:03:39.000And eventually they started growing towards the hum of the computer fan.
00:03:44.000So there'd been some kind of conditioned association there.
00:03:48.000And also other people, you know, the sophistication of trees and the life of trees, to the extent that they're hooked up Under the ground, what some people have called the wood wide web.
00:04:00.000And that even across species, there's kind of a sort of quid pro quo that the evergreen, the deciduous trees giving nutrients to the evergreen trees giving nutrients to the deciduous trees when they've lost their leaves and then this being reciprocated and So there's,
00:04:23.000you know, much more sophistication in the plant kingdom than we previously realized.
00:04:29.000Now, but whether that's, I mean, whether that is consciousness, Is another question.
00:04:34.000I mean, there's a core difficulty at the heart of the science of consciousness, which is that consciousness is not publicly observable, right?
00:04:46.000I can't look inside your head and see your feelings and experiences.
00:04:51.000You know, we know about consciousness not from...
00:04:55.000Observation and experiment, but just from our immediate awareness of our own feelings and experiences.
00:05:01.000So, you know, science is used to dealing with unobservables, fundamental particles, quantum wave functions, you know, maybe even other universes.
00:05:11.000None of these things are directly observable.
00:05:13.000But there's a really important difference in the case of consciousness, because in all these other cases, We're postulating things that are unobservable in order to explain what we can observe.
00:05:27.000That's ultimately the standard model of particle physics.
00:05:30.000It's all about explaining what is publicly observable.
00:05:35.000But in the unique case of consciousness, The thing we are trying to explain is not publicly observable.
00:05:43.000And that is utterly unique and really constrains our capacity to investigate it experimentally.
00:05:50.000So it is, I mean in the case of human beings, I can't directly observe your feelings, but I can ask you.
00:05:58.000And I can scan your brain at the same time or maybe stimulate bits of your brain and ask you what you're feeling, what you're experiencing.
00:06:09.000And in this way, neuroscientists try to match up what kinds of brain activity are correlated with what kind of experience.
00:06:17.000And we can hopefully make some progress on that in the human case.
00:06:20.000But the further we get away from the human case, The harder it is to establish what things are or are not conscious.
00:06:29.000I mean, some people are now starting to think there might just be real limits to our knowledge here because consciousness is not publicly observable.
00:06:38.000So there's a real challenge there, I think.
00:06:40.000It is a fascinating thing in that it's agreed upon, right?
00:06:42.000Everybody knows that we have it, but then trying to figure out what else has it, we must rely on their reactions and motion.
00:06:51.000That's one of the things about plants, right?
00:06:53.000The motion is so slow, like the motion of their growth or of the expanding of the petals of a flower.
00:07:00.000The motion is so small that we think of it as not being in motion at all.
00:07:06.000I mean, actually, if you watch things of the plants sped up, it starts to look a lot more like something you'd want to ascribe mentality, even consciousness to.
00:07:16.000So maybe there's just something going on in a different frame of reference here.
00:07:22.000But, yeah, I mean, actually, so the neuroscientist...
00:07:27.000Christoph Koch had a bet with the philosopher David Chalmers in the 1990s that in 25 years we would have completely established what is called the neural correlates of consciousness.
00:07:42.000You know, exactly what kinds of physical activity go along with consciousness.
00:07:46.000He bet him a case of wine, a case of fine wine.
00:08:07.000We have to establish, to do the science, we're not even talking about the philosophy, the hard problem of consciousness yet, just this scientific project of trying to map up, map which kinds of brain activity go with experience.
00:08:21.000To do that, we have to set up what we can call detection procedures, kind of rules for mapping behaviour to experience.
00:08:32.000So one of these might be If someone is having an experience, they can report it.
00:08:54.000So some people who accept what's sometimes called the overflow thesis think that there's more experience than we can actually think or attend to.
00:09:03.000So if you think about your experience of your clothes on your body right now.
00:09:08.000So now I've said it, you might be attending to it and aware of it.
00:09:12.000But before I mentioned it, you weren't thinking about it, you weren't attending to it.
00:09:17.000It's an open Debated question whether you're actually experiencing that, whether you can have an experience that you're not aware of, that you're not attending to.
00:09:28.000And what stance you take on that philosophical question leads to different scientific predictions.
00:09:35.000So people who think there's a close connection between attention and consciousness tend to think consciousness is in the prefrontal cortex because that's where things like cognition, like working memory is.
00:09:47.000But people who think there can be more experience than we can attend to, they tend to think it's in the back of the brain.
00:09:55.000And it's just, you know, wildly different predictions.
00:10:23.000So, I mean, you know, to take, you know, all of your experience right now, you know, all of these beautiful, slightly odd objects and, you know, your experience of the clothes on your body and the sound of my voice...
00:10:38.000So what we know experimentally is that you can't attend to all of that, right?
00:10:43.000There are real limits to what you can attend to.
00:10:46.000So the question is, those things you're not attending to, are they part of your experience?
00:11:15.000But I suppose for those people who think awareness and consciousness can come apart, some people think there could be All kinds of really vivid experiences that we're just totally unaware of.
00:11:29.000And then, you know, so I mean, I think we're just, in a way, we're not at first base.
00:11:33.000We're not even at the kind of hard problem of consciousness yet.
00:11:36.000Just in these scientific questions, we're really not at first base in how to think about them properly.
00:11:41.000The way we interface with the world as a life form is based essentially on instincts and on genetics that have all been hammered into our system in order to keep us alive.
00:11:56.000You can only concentrate on so many things.
00:12:00.000You have to have a certain amount of concentration on your environment and the world around you.
00:12:04.000If you didn't have it, you didn't survive.
00:12:09.000The concept of unconscious thoughts and of memories.
00:12:12.000This is all supposed to be things you could rely upon for certain instincts that you have to avoid certain areas because this is problematic.
00:12:21.000This could cause you to lose your life.
00:12:22.000This could keep you from passing on your genes.
00:12:25.000There's a reason for all this stuff, right?
00:12:27.000When you get down to objects, though, like a thing having consciousness, Or some kind of consciousness.
00:12:34.000That's where we have to parse what it means to be a human being, and why do we have all these hammered-in instincts and thoughts?
00:12:46.000There's certain instincts that animals have, like I have a golden retriever.
00:12:51.000He has not been around a lot of dogs to learn certain behavior, but there's certain things that he does that are baked into his DNA. Like one of them, unfortunately, he likes to roll around and fuck shit.
00:13:12.000If you talk to anybody that has a dog, they'll tell you that their dog, if they find wild animal shit sometimes in the woods, they will roll around in it for whatever reason.
00:13:21.000I don't know what that is, but it's clearly baked into what it means to be a dog.
00:13:26.000There's certain things that are baked into what it means to be a person.
00:13:37.000And is that the only thing that encompasses consciousness?
00:13:40.000Like, does this table have a certain amount of consciousness?
00:13:43.000I've always felt like these tables, there's one of them that I have in LA that's like this, and I redid this one, and while we're doing a new studio, it's like, we need to get some memories into this table Because the old table was rich with memories.
00:13:57.000And it was kind of a joke, but kind of not.
00:14:00.000There's certain places, like the Comedy Store, for example.
00:14:03.000The Comedy Store in Los Angeles is a very old building that used to be Ciro's nightclub.
00:14:08.000So it used to be owned by Bugsy Siegel.
00:14:10.000And Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis used to play there.
00:14:13.000It was a classic, old, mob-run nightclub that apparently a lot of people got murdered in.
00:14:23.000And the people that worked there would all, not all, but a good number of them, an unusual number, would have stories about seeing an apparition or hearing someone talk who wasn't there.
00:15:27.000What associations we have, or is this something we can't explain here?
00:15:32.000I mean, these are ultimately kind of empirical questions that it's hard to settle.
00:15:37.000I mean, I suppose, fortunate for me in a way, I think the case for panpsychism is based on Much, you know, in a sense, much more solid data, just the reality of consciousness, the reality of feelings and experiences,
00:15:55.000you know, this inner world of colors and smells and tastes that, you know, each of us enjoy every second of waking life.
00:16:07.000We're detecting those with senses, right?
00:16:10.000So if you have something that you say has consciousness, like this coffee pot, let's imagine this coffee pot has some sort of a consciousness.
00:16:38.000You know, maybe it's good to get clear on what we mean by consciousness because it is a bit of an ambiguous word and often people use it to mean something quite sophisticated like awareness of one's own existence or something.
00:16:52.000That's something I'm not sure a sheep has, never mind a particle.
00:16:55.000Is consciousness and sentient thoughts, are they linked?
00:16:58.000I think I would just say consciousness is, the way it's standardly used in the science and philosophy of consciousness, is just subjective experience.
00:17:13.000Consciousness is what it's like to be you, right?
00:17:17.000And, you know, this comes in all shapes and sizes.
00:17:20.000You know, in human beings, it's incredibly rich and complex.
00:17:24.000A sheep's consciousness is a bit simpler.
00:17:27.000Consciousness of a mouse, simpler again.
00:17:29.000And as we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of experience.
00:17:35.000So for the panpsychist, this just continues right down to the basic building blocks of matter, which have We're good to go.
00:17:59.000I think most panpsychists would not think the coffee pot is conscious.
00:18:04.000The idea is that the fundamental particles, perhaps, are conscious, but maybe not every random aggregation of them is conscious in its own right.
00:18:14.000Although some panpsychists do think literally everything is conscious.
00:18:18.000Luke Rolof is a very good, very rigorous panpsychist philosopher, and he does think literally everything, including the coffee pot, is conscious.
00:18:27.000But even then, you know, it's not going to be like sitting there wanting us to drink it.
00:18:33.000You know, that's the kind of consciousness you get after millions of years of evolution.
00:18:37.000Its consciousness is going to be just some kind of meaningless mess.
00:18:41.000Like the difference between the consciousness of a dog and a human.
00:18:44.000Even though a dog is clearly a conscious animal, it's not having in-depth conversations about its past and talking about what it wants for the future.
00:19:03.000Where did this line of thinking become a serious point of discussion?
00:19:11.000I mean, panpsychism goes back to the start of philosophy and, you know, both East and West and major Enlightenment thinkers were panpsychists like Leibniz, Spinoza.
00:19:21.000And in the 19th century, it was kind of a heyday for panpsychism.
00:19:31.000The latter half of the 20th century, this view fell out of favour and it's, you know, up until ten years ago, it's sort of, hardly anybody took it seriously, at least in Western science and philosophy.
00:19:44.000It's really just, I'd say the last five or ten years, it's really come back on the table as people are taking it as a serious option.
00:19:55.000One reason for this is, in academic philosophy, is the rediscovery of A really interesting approach to consciousness by Bertrand Russell in the 1920s, which was also developed by Arthur Eddington, who was incidentally the first scientist to experimentally confirm Einstein's general theory of relativity,
00:20:16.000which made Einstein an overnight celebrity.
00:20:18.000So what was Bertrand Russell's take on it?
00:20:23.000So Russell's starting point was to focus on The mathematical nature of physics, the story, the description of reality we're getting from physics is just pure math.
00:20:41.000And this was the choice of Galileo back in the 1620s.
00:20:47.000He made the express choice right from now on.
00:20:50.000The language of science is going to be mathematics, right?
00:20:53.000And, you know, the maths has changed a lot.
00:20:56.000It's, you know, we have now imaginary numbers and non-Euclidean geometry, but still, right, physics trades in equations.
00:21:04.000So, I mean, what Russell realised, right, so there's a couple of ways...
00:21:09.000A philosopher can respond to the fact that physics is just purely mathematical.
00:21:14.000One approach is to follow someone like the physicist Max Tegmark and say, well maybe at base, reality just is pure math, right?
00:21:24.000Maybe we live in a mathematical universe.
00:21:27.000The other approach, and this is close to Russell's approach, was to think, well, maybe there's something underlying those mathematical structures.
00:21:38.000Maybe there's something that those mathematical structures are the mathematical structure of.
00:21:45.000So for the panpsychist, in this kind of Bertrand Russell-style panpsychism, at the fundamental level of reality, What we have are networks of very simple conscious entities.
00:22:02.000And these very simple conscious entities behave, because they have incredibly simple kinds of experience, they behave in very simple ways, simple, predictable ways.
00:22:13.000And through their interactions, they realize certain mathematical structures.
00:22:21.000Those mathematical structures are the mathematical structures identified by physicists.
00:22:27.000So when we think about these conscious entities, in terms of the mathematical structures they realize, we call them particles, we call them fields, we call their properties mass, spin and charge.
00:22:43.000But all there is there really are these conscious entities.
00:22:47.000So essentially what Russell realized Is we can take the traditional hard problem of consciousness and turn it on its head, right?
00:22:57.000So the typical way people think about the problem of consciousness is you think, you start with matter and you think, how do we get consciousness out of matter?
00:23:42.000So, I mean, that sounds kind of weird because you think it means that when you're studying physics, you're learning about fundamental consciousness.
00:23:50.000And, you know, that doesn't feel like what you're doing.
00:23:52.000But that's just because, as a physicist, you're just interested in the mathematical structures.
00:23:57.000You're not interested in what, if anything, underlies that.
00:24:00.000That's more of a philosophical question.
00:24:02.000And then the concept of the mathematical structures below the mathematical structures, the mathematical structures of the mathematical structures, and that would be consciousness.
00:24:13.000Actually, I would say that the mathematical structures identified by physics are the bottom level, right, in terms of mathematical structures.
00:24:45.000It won't tell us what breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe.
00:24:51.000So for the panpsychist, it's consciousness that breathes fire into the equations So the concept of consciousness, if you go back to the beginning of life, we basically had a bunch of amino acids and chemicals, and eventually, somehow, some way, through some process,
00:25:12.000Does it emerge then, when you have this organism that's single cell, did it emerge where there's Multi-celled organisms, where it started to split?
00:25:20.000Did it emerge when it started to move?
00:25:22.000And did it emerge when it started to change environments?
00:25:25.000Like, if you really stopped and thought about what consciousness is, just from a traditional perspective, like if a light bulb went off when it existed, like, bing!
00:25:37.000Like, there were, conceivably, was a point in time where there was none, and then all of a sudden it came out of these chemical processes.
00:25:45.000Did it come out of it just because there's predators and prey and it had the need to survive and had to recognize its environment and view its threats and then form communities in order to have more protection because of numbers?
00:25:59.000Yeah, I mean, actually, I mean, the consciousness There are difficulties, apart from the hard problem of consciousness, giving an evolutionary explanation of why consciousness emerged, because it seems like what's important for survival is just behavior,
00:26:19.000So if you could have this notion of a philosophical zombie, right, which David Chalmers popularized, that's A behavioural duplicate of a human being that has no inner experience.
00:26:35.000So there's nothing that it's like to be a zombie.
00:26:39.000So we need to distinguish these kind of philosophical zombies from Hollywood zombies.
00:27:02.000And there are a couple of different reasons we might think about these creatures, but one of them is...
00:27:07.000When we're thinking about the evolutionary emergence of consciousness, a zombie would survive just as well as us, right?
00:27:15.000All that's important for survival is behavior.
00:27:18.000So, if a creature without consciousness, a complicated mechanism that behaves just like us, but doesn't have consciousness, would survive just as well, why did consciousness evolve at all?
00:27:32.000But for the panpsychist, Consciousness was always there at the fundamental level of reality.
00:27:41.000The question is, when did it arrive higher up?
00:27:46.000I mean, so I said panpsychism had something of a heyday in the 19th century.
00:27:50.000Pretty early after Darwin, many philosophers and scientists saw the connection between Darwinism and panpsychism.
00:27:59.000So William James, for example, thought, you know, On a panpsychist view, what natural selection does is take very simple forms of consciousness and moulds them into more complex forms of consciousness, right?
00:28:15.000Whereas if you're not a panpsychist, You've got to have this story of, you know, you're getting more and more complex matter and then suddenly at some point a miracle happens and consciousness emerges and you've got this mystery of, you know, why is that emerging?
00:28:29.000If behavior is all that's important to survival, we could do without it.
00:28:32.000So I think the panpsychist has a better story to tell on the hard problem of consciousness, but also on the evolution of consciousness.
00:28:40.000There's a very interesting kind of consciousness amongst animals, amongst living creatures, and that's insect consciousness.
00:28:48.000Insects have very bizarre and complex worlds, like leafcutter ants.
00:28:54.000Have you ever seen when they've done those cement composures?
00:28:59.000They fill a leafcutter ant colony up with cement, and then they dig it out to try to find how it's constructed.
00:29:11.000It's insanely complex to the point where they have parts in their colonies in this village that they've established that are there to ferment leaves.
00:29:21.000So they have vents that go up through the ceiling and then below that they have this like compost pile of leaves.
00:30:05.000Essentially, when they dig it out slowly and excavate the site, you get to see the actual structure of the leafcutter ant colony and where they lived.
00:30:15.000And it is unbelievably complex and amazing.
00:31:52.000Yeah, I mean, so look, these are really difficult scientific questions.
00:31:57.000So, I mean, I guess the orthodox view would be, in some sense, this is just reducible to underlying chemistry, underlying physics.
00:32:11.000I mean, there are experimental scientists who deviate from that norm.
00:32:17.000I'm friends with Daniel Picard at Columbia University, who's got the psychobiology mitochondria lab at Columbia University, and he's experimentally exploring the hypothesis that mitochondria in the brain, their activity should be understood as irreducible social networks.
00:32:37.000Rather than reducible to underlying chemistry, underlying physics.
00:32:42.000So I think, I mean, I think there's, this is an ongoing argument I'm having with the physicist Sean Carroll at the moment.
00:32:47.000I think he was on my podcast last week.
00:32:51.000We had a three-hour debate on, you know, he's just so confident that You know, we know enough about physics to think that everything in the brain, everything in the biological world is ultimately reducible to underlying physics.
00:33:10.000I used to hold that myself, and I don't necessarily deny it now.
00:33:16.000I used to hold that myself because a panpsychist We're good to go.
00:33:41.000In terms of the causal dynamics of what those ants are doing, or mitochondria in the brain, a panpsychist can accept that the causal dynamics are all bottom out of physics.
00:33:53.000For many people, that's an attraction of panpsychism, that you don't need to deny that.
00:33:59.000So, you know, my first academic book...
00:34:03.000Consciousness and fundamental reality, and actually in my popular book, Galileo's Era, I supported that view.
00:34:10.000But actually, the more I talk to neuroscientists, and we've got an interdisciplinary consciousness group at my university in Durham, and I just don't think we know enough about the brain to know whether that's true or not.
00:34:26.000I think, you know, I think we know a fair bit about the basic chemistry in the brain, like, you know, how neurons fire, calcium chambers, neurotransmitters, and so on.
00:35:27.000We'd have to know a lot more about how the functions of the brain are realized before we can say, oh, yeah, it's all explicable in terms of underlying chemistry and physics.
00:35:38.000So maybe, you know, maybe Daniel Picard is right that it's not, that there are these irreducible social networks at the level of mitochondria.
00:35:57.000To have the assumption that, I think an assumption that goes beyond physics itself, which is that all causal dynamics ultimately bottom out at physics.
00:36:07.000I don't think that's a claim of physics.
00:36:09.000I think that's a philosophical claim that goes beyond physics.
00:36:17.000We know for a fact that the human mind, at least, has reactions to chemicals.
00:36:25.000So there's some sort of a chemical composition that's making it react certain ways, and when the chemical composition is imbalanced, it causes consciousness to go awry.
00:37:02.000I'm going to come back to your point in a roundabout way.
00:37:05.000So, I mean, the experimental task is to try and work out what kinds of electrochemical activity go along with what kinds of experience.
00:37:15.000And you do that by asking people how they're feeling while you're scanning the brain.
00:37:19.000That's a really important project, although there are challenges, as we've discussed already.
00:37:25.000But that's important data, but that's not going to get you a full theory of consciousness.
00:37:30.000Because what we ultimately want from a theory of consciousness It's an explanation of why.
00:37:36.000Why do certain kinds of brain activity go along with experience?
00:37:41.000And because consciousness is not publicly observable, that's not a question you can answer with an experiment.
00:37:47.000At that point, you have to turn to philosophy and you just have to look at the various proposals philosophers have offered for explaining why brain activity goes along with conscious experience.
00:38:02.000So, I mean, or at least it's philosophy at the moment.
00:38:06.000You know, philosophy is what you get when the rules of the game are not set.
00:38:10.000I mean, the subtitle of my book is Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness.
00:38:14.000I hope that this will, what is now philosophy, will one day be established science.
00:38:18.000You know, once the rules of the game are set, it becomes science.
00:38:21.000But coming back to your point, you know, I guess many people have the intuition, if it's just chemicals...
00:38:55.000There's more to the physical than what physical science tells you about.
00:39:00.000Physical science just tells you what matter does, right?
00:39:05.000You know, physics talks about mass and charge, and these properties are completely defined in terms of behavior, you know, attraction, repulsion, resistance to acceleration.
00:39:38.000In our standard scientific story of the universe, and the idea is, well, maybe we can put consciousness in that hole.
00:39:44.000So, we can sort of accommodate your intuition, because you're thinking, when you say, or if you have the intuition, consciousness is more than just chemicals.
00:39:57.000That's because you're thinking, physical science tells us what chemicals are, but the panpsychist says, no.
00:40:04.000Physical science tells you what chemicals do.
00:40:08.000The question what chemicals are is ultimately answered by the underlying consciousness.
00:40:13.000What's fascinating though is that consciousness is manipulated by chemicals, and chemicals are a gigantic part of consciousness, and you can change how consciousness interfaces with the world.
00:40:22.000So if we think about what you are, we think about what it means to be a person, like who are you, Philip?
00:40:29.000If you think of who you are, you are very different if you change your chemical makeup.
00:40:33.000The way you interact with people would be different, your path in life would be different, maybe even your desires and needs would be different if we radically shift the way the chemical composition of your brain is set up.
00:40:45.000Yeah, but on panpsychism that's not a mystery because matter, its nature is consciousness.
00:40:54.000When people hear about panpsychism, they always interpret it dualistically, like we're saying particles have physical properties and then they have consciousness.
00:41:41.000Does any of what he's saying make you pause?
00:41:44.000Imagine if this is all a giant waste of time.
00:41:47.000I've got a huge respect for Sean Carroll, and I think it's reciprocated.
00:41:53.000Because, I mean, a lot of physicists, I'm not going to mention any names, don't have a lot of time for philosophy and think, oh, this is all a lot of bullshit.
00:42:00.000Why are we wasting our time with this?
00:42:02.000But he's really clued up philosophically and takes the time to look at the arguments.
00:42:09.000So, yeah, I've got a lot out of our discussions.
00:42:19.000So, he wants to say, I'm saying consciousness is not just what matter does.
00:42:27.000Physics just tells us what matter does.
00:42:30.000Consciousness is something more than that.
00:42:32.000Consciousness is what underlies what matter does.
00:42:36.000What fills out the mathematical structure?
00:42:38.000So the way he hears that is he thinks, oh, so consciousness doesn't do anything.
00:42:43.000Because if you took it out and you still had the mathematical structures, everything would behave the same.
00:42:50.000So that just sounds like consciousness doesn't do anything.
00:42:53.000But I think he's just making a philosophical mistake there.
00:42:57.000Because for the panpsychist, the relationship between physics and consciousness is like the relationship between software and hardware.
00:43:05.000So physics is like the software and consciousness is the hardware on which physics runs.
00:43:11.000So maybe, you know, in another possible universe, you could have physics run on different hardware and then you wouldn't have consciousness.
00:43:21.000But that doesn't mean consciousness is not doing anything.
00:43:23.000You know, just because Microsoft Word can run on different computers, it doesn't mean the computer's not doing anything.
00:43:30.000Anyway, that's the debate we've been having for about three months now.
00:43:34.000And so when you and Sean Carroll have this debate, these last for hours.
00:43:40.000And I'm assuming you're essentially doing the same shit you're doing right now in your head.
00:44:19.000It's a huge debate, but I think that the core of it is that physical science works with a purely quantitative vocabulary, whereas consciousness essentially involves qualities.
00:44:32.000If you think about the smell of coffee, the taste of mint, that deep red you experience as you watch a sunset.
00:44:41.000These kinds of qualities Can't be captured in the purely quantitative vocabulary of physical science.
00:44:49.000And so as long as your description of the brain is framed in the purely quantitative language of neuroscience, you're essentially just leaving out these qualities and really leaving out consciousness itself.
00:45:04.000And, you know, I think we shouldn't be surprised That physical science has this difficulty of consciousness because the scientific paradigm we've been operating in for the last 500 years was designed by Galileo to exclude consciousness.
00:45:26.000So, yeah, so this is why I defend in my book, Galileo's Error.
00:45:31.000Really, the most important, well, I shouldn't say that, a key moment in the scientific revolution, right, is 1623, Galileo's decision that mathematics was going to be the language of science, right?
00:45:44.000This was the start of mathematical physics.
00:45:46.000What is not discussed much is the philosophical work Galileo had to do to get there, right?
00:45:54.000Because the problem was, Before Galileo, people thought the world, the physical world, was filled with qualities, right?
00:46:03.000So you have colours on the surfaces of objects, smells floating through the air, tastes inside food.
00:46:11.000And this was a problem for Galileo because...
00:46:15.000You can't capture these qualities in the purely quantitative language of mathematics.
00:46:22.000You know, an equation can't capture the redness of a red experience.
00:46:29.000So Galileo, you know, he wanted to describe it all in math.
00:46:33.000So Galileo got around this problem by proposing a radically new philosophical theory of reality.
00:46:39.000So we think of Galileo as a great experimental scientist, which he was, but he was also a great philosopher.
00:46:45.000So he proposed this new philosophical theory of reality, and according to this theory, The qualities aren't really out there in the physical world, right?
00:46:57.000They're in the consciousness of the observer, right?
00:47:00.000So if you're looking at this, is that black?
00:47:04.000You're looking at that, you know, the blackness isn't really on the surface of the pen, it's in the consciousness of the person looking at it.
00:47:13.000Or if you're eating a spicy curry, the spiciness isn't really in the curry, it's in the consciousness of So Galileo strips the physical world of its qualities.
00:47:25.000And after he's done that, all that's left are the purely quantitative properties, size, shape, location, motion, properties that you can capture in mathematical geometry.
00:47:38.000So in Galileo's worldview, there's this radical division in nature between two domains.
00:47:46.000The quantitative domain of science, the physical world with its mathematical quantitative properties, and the qualitative domain of consciousness, consciousness with its colours, sounds, smells, tastes, which he took to be outside of the domain of science.
00:48:03.000So this is the start of mathematical physics, which has gone incredibly well.
00:48:08.000But I think what we've forgotten is Is that it's gone so well because Galileo gave science this narrow specific focus.
00:48:17.000Galileo essentially said, you know, just put consciousness on one side, just focus on what you can capture in mathematics.
00:48:25.000So I think people were now living in a strange period of history where people like Sean Carroll, for example, think Oh, materialism has to be true because, you know, look how well physical science has done.
00:48:37.000Surely it's going to explain consciousness.
00:48:40.000The irony is it's done so well precisely because it was designed to exclude consciousness.
00:48:46.000So I think if we want to bring consciousness fully into science, We need a new worldview.
00:48:54.000We need to find a way to bring together what Galileo separated, to bring together the quantitative domain of science and the qualitative domain of human consciousness.
00:50:39.000There's certain compounds that cause certain reactions.
00:50:43.000We even attribute genes to those compounds, like the genes for, with some people, cilantro tastes like soap.
00:50:50.000And some people would taste delicious.
00:50:54.000We know for sure that there's a genetic component to that.
00:50:58.000We can actually isolate the very specific genes that cause people to have that reaction.
00:51:04.000So I think that the chemical story, the physical story can explain How people react to the taste, how people store information about it, how that impacts on their later behavior.
00:51:18.000But all of that story could in principle go on in what we call a zombie without any kind of inner life, any kind of experience of spiciness.
00:51:32.000You know, it's conceivable that you could have a mechanism that had all those reactions And all those responses, but there was no feeling of spiciness.
00:51:44.000I mean, it's sometimes a bit more vivid with color, if you think about it.
00:51:50.000So, I mean, here's another way of putting it, right?
00:51:53.000Suppose I wanted to explain in a neuroscientific theory the redness of a red experience, right?
00:52:01.000Why red experiences have that red quality?
00:52:08.000So, the first issue is, I don't think you can, and this is essentially Galileo's insight, you can't capture The redness of a red experience in the language of neuroscience.
00:52:21.000And the way to see that, you know, you couldn't convey to a blind neuroscientist what it's like to see red by, you know, getting him to read your theory in Braille, right?
00:52:34.000So that's a descriptive limitation, right?
00:52:37.000That the language of neuroscience, this purely quantitative language, can't express The redness of a red experience So that's just a descriptive limitation But I think it entails an explanatory limitation Because if I wanted to present my brilliant neuroscientific theory that explained the redness of a red experience,
00:52:58.000my theory would first have to describe that quality and then explain it in terms of underlying physical processes.
00:53:07.000But if the theory can't even describe it, then it can't explain it.
00:53:11.000So I think, in principle, A neuroscientific theory cannot explain the qualities of our experience.
00:53:21.000Galileo 500 years ago realised that and he said, if we want science to be mathematical, we have to take consciousness out of the story.
00:53:30.000And that was a good move, but we've sort of forgotten that that's what we did.
00:53:33.000So now we're in a weird period of history where people think, oh, it's gone so well!
00:53:37.000But yeah, it's gone so well because we took consciousness out of the story, because you can't capture those qualities in a purely quantitative language.
00:55:51.000Aren't the qualities of experience quantitative in and of itself?
00:55:56.000So you can, to an extent, capture the structure in quantitative terms.
00:56:03.000So, like, color experience has a mathematical structure.
00:56:07.000We can analyze it in terms of hue, saturation, lightness, and we can map out a color space in terms of those three dimensions.
00:56:20.000It's not that they obviously have that quantitative structure, but You can't fully pin down, I would argue, maybe you disagree, the redness of a red experience in that language.
00:56:33.000I mean, I talk in my book about the colour scientist Nut Norby, who's a colour scientist who's got some cones missing from his eyes, and so he's only ever seen black and white and shades of grey, but he's a colour expert.
00:56:49.000And he talks about this and he says, when he tries to think about colour, He compares it to sound.
00:56:56.000So he thinks of brightness, maybe like loudness.
00:57:01.000And he says he can get some grip on the structure.
00:57:05.000But he says, you know, I'll never fully understand, you know, the redness that underlies that structure.
00:58:27.000If you add things to the brain, it changes the quality of the experience.
00:58:31.000If you add certain chemicals, certain dopamine, serotonin, you add things to the experience, it literally changes the way you view an interface.
00:58:43.000So, yeah, I agree with what you've just said, which is basically a claim about correlation.
00:58:49.000That certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of experience, right?
00:58:56.000Yes, and certain kinds of chemicals are responsible for certain types of experiences being different.
00:59:04.000I would just say that they go together.
00:59:49.000Well, if you're experiencing something, and you're explaining the experience based on the brain activity, or you're explaining the brain activity based on the experience, they're happening at the same time.
01:00:47.000Like the reason why this structure exists is because it enhances the ability for these creatures to procreate and innovate and move things forward.
01:01:01.000Because life propagates better when it has this consciousness.
01:01:06.000So just like sight is an element of life because you can pick out your prey and your food and what the dangers are, just like sounds are an element and the ability to receive those sounds enhances this being's ability to survive.
01:01:22.000Consciousness is a more complex version of all these senses, that it's an all-encompassing thing that allows this creature to innovate, To create structures like the leafcutter ants have built this insanely complex colony, like bees create beehives,
01:01:39.000But why couldn't you have all of that without experience?
01:01:42.000Why couldn't we just have, as long as you have complicated enough Physical structure to behave in the right ways, like those ants are doing, you'd survive as well.
01:02:55.000Yes, but the curiosity of the human being and the thought process of the human being is what causes it to try to invent things and innovate and survive and do calculations based on past experiences.
01:03:10.000So the past experiences are all correlated.
01:03:13.000They're all added up, and this animal goes based on its experience and tries to figure out what to do with the current moment, what decisions to make.
01:03:24.000So you could think of it as being a form of mathematics, that consciousness itself is a complex way to ensure that these very sophisticated life forms continue to innovate and procreate.
01:03:37.000Yeah, I wonder whether there's a kind of ambiguity in the word experience.
01:03:44.000I think sometimes we do use experience in a sort of mechanistic or functional way to mean responding to the environment or storing information, using that information.
01:04:01.000In some sense, planning for the future.
01:04:03.000We just use it in a kind of, the kind of thing a computer could in principle do, just a kind of totally mechanistic way, mechanistic thing.
01:04:10.000But I think we also use experience in a different way to mean having an inner life, having there being something that it's like to be this physical system.
01:04:27.000And in principle, it seems you could have all the mechanistic responding to the environment, processing information, all that good stuff for survival without any kind of inner experience.
01:04:41.000Or maybe you think that just doesn't make sense.
01:04:43.000I mean, I guess some people think that just doesn't make sense.
01:04:45.000Well, I think the animal needs motivation, right?
01:04:47.000Without that inner experience, what gives an animal a cause to action?
01:04:53.000I think all the things are connected, whether it's...
01:04:56.000The desire to breathe, the desire for acceptance among the social group and social hierarchies.
01:05:02.000All these things motivate action and innovation.
01:05:05.000They motivate this human creature to continue to do what it does, which is make things.
01:05:11.000Like the human animal, if you looked at it objectively, if you were standing outside of our life form, if you were visiting from somewhere else, you say, what does this human thing do?
01:05:49.000It has to do with the way it interfaces with its neighbors and its peers and how it wants to be judged by strangers.
01:05:56.000And all these things move this animal in this very certain and specific direction, which fuels the innovation, which fuels the construction of these new things.
01:06:10.000So, I mean, I think if aliens came and, you know, very different kind of aliens came and looked at us, they might make all the kinds of observations you're saying, and it's a very, you know, a really interesting take on it, you know,
01:06:25.000that they're doing these things, they're making this technology, they're constructing it, they might describe the mechanisms in our brains that are making us do that.
01:06:33.000But then you can imagine a conversation, another alien says, so are they conscious?
01:07:59.000What's what cognitive scientists sometimes call theory of mind to make these intuitive judgments about other people's experience, right?
01:08:08.000You know, a baby sees its parents' smile.
01:08:12.000It naturally attributes happiness to the mother.
01:08:16.000You know, you see someone crying, you naturally...
01:08:18.000Actually, an argument, I'm having another long argument also with Donald Hoffman, right, who kind of has a similar view to me in some ways, different in other ways, that there's consciousness at the fundamental level.
01:08:52.000Our senses have evolved for survival, not for truth, right?
01:08:55.000So our senses will make us think what is good for survival, not what is true.
01:09:02.000So my argument against him is I worry this overgeneralizes because coming back to Theory of mind or instinctive judgments about the mental states of others.
01:09:13.000If we've evolved to survive, then if this kind of argument can make us doubt our senses, then it should make us doubt our instinctive attributions of conscious experience to other people as well.
01:09:36.000Well, he just thinks, you know, if I mean, I guess he thinks he thinks in a sensory experience is kind of like an interface between the world.
01:09:45.000And if like, I mean, like when you're playing a computer game, you get a kind of I'm trying to remember his details as you know, you kind of get an icon, but that's not what's going on in the in the physical mechanism, the machine, but that allows you to interface with the computer.
01:09:59.000So he thinks the physical world out there It's there, right?
01:10:04.000And it's real, but it's very different to how we experience it.
01:10:09.000What we've evolved to experience is a useful way of representing it, but one that doesn't necessarily correspond to the actual reality, doesn't mirror the reality.
01:10:24.000Well, if we take things down to the quantum level, that has to be accurate.
01:10:51.000The point I was trying to make is that there is...
01:10:53.000Look, I agree with you that I know you're conscious, but there's a deep philosophical mystery about how I know that and...
01:11:06.000How and why it's rational for me to trust my instinctive sense that you're conscious when all I have really access to is just your behavior.
01:11:42.000What if it really is just sort of a mathematical component of the biological systems of these animals that have this This imperative, this biological imperative is to innovate and create new things.
01:11:56.000Like the same way, again, that a beehive is created by these bees with this imperative to create this thing.
01:12:06.000In recent times in philosophy, people are taking panpsychism much more seriously, but people are also taking a view that's become known as illusionism quite seriously, which is basically the idea that consciousness is an illusion,
01:12:47.000MindChat was sort of, you know, the...
01:12:51.000In the age of polarization, you know, we're trying to bridge divides.
01:12:54.000But I guess we start from a common starting point, which is that we both think that the conventional scientific approach can't deal with consciousness, at least consciousness as philosophers normally conceive of it.
01:13:11.000And I think that's because Galileo designed science to ignore it.
01:13:49.000And then a challenge remains, which is to explain why it seems to be there, you know, explain away apparent cases of telekinesis.
01:13:57.000And he wants to apply that to consciousness as well, you know, that What we should say is it's not there, and then the problem that remains is not the hard problem, but the illusion problem.
01:14:10.000Why is it so hard to deny the reality of consciousness?
01:14:15.000Because, I mean, there are a lot of these troubling philosophical phenomena that philosophers worry about, like free will.
01:14:22.000How does free will fit into our conventional scientific story?
01:14:26.000Or morality, you know, facts about right and wrong.
01:14:30.000But in all these other cases, it always seems like an option to deny the datum.
01:14:35.000You know, maybe we're not really free in the way we think we are.
01:14:39.000Maybe there aren't really facts about good and bad, right and wrong.
01:14:42.000Maybe that's just our kind of projecting our feelings onto the world.
01:15:32.000When I was a first year philosopher, When I was 18, I wrote an essay expressing these sentiments, saying, you know, if I kind of stuck a rusty blade in one of these people, and I got a really bad mark.
01:16:31.000That guy sounds like I don't want to listen to him about anything.
01:16:34.000Anyway, but look, no, look, I want to disagree.
01:16:36.000Yeah, my fellow panpsychists get annoyed at me taking this illusionist view seriously, but, you know, consciousness is difficult, and so this guy thinks, yeah, you know, if you punched him repeatedly in the face, he wouldn't like it, and he'd feel like he was in pain,
01:17:14.000But in a way, I've got more respect because I think it's coherent.
01:17:18.000I think the conventional materialist position, which is that consciousness exists, but we can totally explain it in terms of electrochemical signaling, I think that's just incoherent.
01:17:30.000The idea that we really believe in these The qualities, the colours, the sounds, the smells, the tastes.
01:17:39.000But at the same time, that's nothing more than the purely quantitative story of electrochemical signalling.
01:18:31.000Reductively, fully account for the taste of coffee or the blueness of a blue experience in terms of a purely quantitative story of electrochemical signalling.
01:18:47.000You can't convey those qualities in that language.
01:18:50.000Well, you can't using a language, but you could recognize the concept of these things, these components, these compounds interacting with each other in a way that's going to cause a reaction.
01:19:00.000We know that certain chemicals have various reactions in the human mind.
01:19:04.000As we said with dopamine and serotonin and adrenaline and all these different things that do different things to the way people perceive reality around them.
01:19:15.000Different sounds, different feelings, different reactions from the very nerves of your body themselves, the hormones that you have, fight or flight, all the different things that are going on inside the body, that these chemicals interact and that ultimately the end goal of all these experiences is to encourage Survival,
01:19:37.000to encourage reproduction, to encourage advancement in the social structure of these tribes and groups that we're in, and that this will also encourage survival of your genes.
01:19:50.000Yeah, I mean, I think I can agree with pretty much everything you've just said there, but I mean, well, it depends.
01:19:58.000I think there's a bit of an ambiguity.
01:20:25.000Why should the chemical structures go along with An inner world of these subjective qualities rather than just a mechanism doing all the same stuff.
01:20:39.000Well, it's maybe perhaps that's what has led us to where we are today and that all these interactions have proven to be successful in this quest for innovation and breeding and Social structure, that all these chemicals, this has led us into this point now where it allows you to be successful with what it means to be a person today in 2021,
01:21:05.000Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years of evolution have led us into these chemical pathways that will allow this thing that the human animal does so well, which is innovate, breed, procreate, form social structures, try to climb the social hierarchy.
01:21:21.000There's clearly a lot of motivation to do those things.
01:21:24.000There's clearly a lot of motivation to innovate, climb the social structure, make friends, form communities, be loved.
01:21:34.000Well, clearly all those things help you procreate and establish your genes and allow them to carry on.
01:21:43.000Yeah, yeah, I mean look I What is so attractive about panpsych is, you know, when I studied philosophy, we were taught that, you know, you had two choices on consciousness, right?
01:21:55.000Either you say it's something magical and mysterious, something supernatural, something that it's hard to fit into the kind of scientific evolutionary story you've just described.
01:22:08.000Or you think it's just totally reducible to electrochemical signaling in the brain, right?
01:22:35.000I mean, the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder wrote a blog post criticizing panpsychism that got a little bit of traction saying, you know, well, look, this panpsychism stuff must be bullshit because if particles had these funny consciousness properties,
01:22:53.000it would have showed up in our physics, right?
01:22:56.000You know, because the standard model of particle physics...
01:24:13.000Because you look at technology and, you know, people talk about religion as a crutch, but I think a certain kind of scientism can really get into people's identity.
01:24:21.000You think, oh no, we've got something that works!
01:24:24.000But it works because, from Galileo onwards, it's just focused on this narrow task of what stuff does.
01:24:32.000I sometimes say, like, doing physics is like playing chess when you don't care what the pieces are made of.
01:24:36.000You're just interested in the moves you can make, right?
01:24:40.000And the panpsychist can just say, yeah, that's alright, that's fine.
01:24:45.000But there's this other thing we know to be real, not from observation experiments.
01:24:50.000Consciousness isn't something we discovered in a particle collider.
01:24:53.000It's something we know about just from our immediate awareness.
01:24:57.000If you're in pain, you're just directly aware of your pain.
01:25:00.000And that needs to be fitted into reality.
01:25:10.000And much more than panpsychism is just getting people to see that the reality of consciousness is a hard scientific datum in its own right.
01:25:21.000I think most people have this conception of science.
01:26:32.000It's the interaction that this sentient, this aware thing, this life form has with everything around it.
01:26:40.000And then this idea that all these other things around it have some, whatever the quality is, however you can measure it, some quality of their own that allows them to experience their surroundings.
01:26:55.000And that everything is experiencing itself subjectively and constantly.
01:27:41.000I guess it's something we're stuck with, but I would like to swap it for just experience, although that's a bit ambiguous as well because sometimes by experience you mean your perceptual relationship with the environment around you rather than just something kind of inner.
01:28:02.000I think we're just kind of stuck with the word now.
01:28:04.000One of the things that I love about science and the study of quantum mechanics and quantum physics is that we find things out that defy all understanding, like spooky action at a distance,
01:28:20.000like particles being in superposition, where they're moving and still at the same time.
01:28:26.000There's certain things that happen under observation That throw all of our assumptions of what reality is out the window.
01:28:37.000And then you have to wonder like how much of what we're experiencing is because this is the easiest way for you to interface with the environment and stay alive.
01:28:47.000How much of what our senses are are just limited to what do we need in order to be effective as a human being and procreate and keep ourselves going and then innovate and then keep this whole process that we're involved in moving in the same general direction?
01:29:04.000And how much of it is out there that we're not tuned into?
01:29:07.000Like, you could wave your hand above an ant colony and they have no idea that you're there.
01:29:15.000They have a limited amount of senses, right?
01:29:17.000We have more senses, but we don't have all of them.
01:29:21.000There's clearly some things that we can't detect, whether it's because they're too small, or in the sense of the universe, because they're too big.
01:29:29.000We don't have the senses that are available to detect supermassive black holes that are in the center of the very galaxy that we live in.
01:29:37.000We can't see it, but we know it's out there, right?
01:29:42.000We don't have that sense, or we don't have the ability.
01:29:47.000Whatever we are, As a physical structure, the physical structure of a human animal on Earth, dealing with gravity and the environment and going through life, we only have so much of a capacity to understand all the things that are around us all the time.
01:30:04.000Yeah, look, I mean, I think we've all got to accept that reality is weird.
01:30:12.000It's very different to our intuitive sense of how it should be.
01:30:17.000And, I mean, so sometimes people, when I'm talking about, oh, you know, normal science can't explain consciousness, people say, oh, you're just thinking it needs to be intuitive or something.
01:30:27.000But, I mean, the motivation for panpsychism is not...
01:30:32.000Capturing our common sense intuitions or something.
01:30:35.000The motivation is there's something real here, pain, seeing, you know, experience that needs to be accommodated.
01:30:45.000But, you know, I mean, what I've been thinking about recently is how whether The need to explain this fundamental datum of experience could interact with how we think about fundamental physics and certain theory choices there.
01:31:04.000If you think consciousness is just in the domain of neuroscience, then physics is completely irrelevant.
01:31:11.000But if you think consciousness exists at the fundamental level of reality, You know, this might interact with certain questions in fundamental physics.
01:31:20.000So I've been thinking, for example, about...
01:31:22.000So I've got a paper coming out and there's going to be a volume with Oxford University Press on quantum mechanics and consciousness.
01:31:29.000And my paper for that volume is, you know, thinking about...
01:31:34.000We've got these different interpretations of quantum mechanics and...
01:31:39.000As far as we can tell, there's no way to distinguish between them.
01:31:45.000There's various arguments we can have, but it's really in the realm of philosophy, and this is why it annoys a lot of physicists, right?
01:31:51.000They just get on with the experiments.
01:31:54.000But it could be that certain interpretations of quantum mechanics fit better, say, with a panpsychist theory at the fundamental level.
01:32:03.000Because, I mean, so some interpretations of quantum mechanics, you've just got the wave function at the fundamental level, which is this really weird esoteric entity, just kind of vector in high-dimensional space.
01:32:19.000Now, I think that view is maybe difficult to square with a panpsychist theory, because on a panpsychist theory, you've got to be able to get from the fundamental level of reality To our consciousness through some kind of process of combination or decombination,
01:32:36.000if you're just starting with a vector, it's hard to see how you can do it.
01:32:41.000I mean, maybe it can be done, but whereas there are other interpretations of quantum mechanics, like the Bohmian interpretation, sometimes called hidden variables, I don't think that name's that appropriate, but where you've got the wave function and you've got particles, So,
01:32:59.000you know, one of the puzzles about quantum mechanics is things are sort of wave-like, some kind of particle-like.
01:33:05.000What Bohm thought was, well, maybe there's waves and particles.
01:33:08.000And then on his interpretation, the wave function kind of pulls the particles around.
01:33:13.000So I'm inclined to think that kind of view fits better with a panpsychist view.
01:33:18.000And so, you know, I mean, I'm not a physicist.
01:33:21.000I'm not even, you know, a fully trained philosopher of physics.
01:33:27.000A new generation of physicists who take consciousness seriously, who see it as this datum that doesn't come from public observation experiment but is real, needs to be accounted for, and reflect on that in terms of choices in fundamental physics.
01:33:44.000So someone who's doing this actually, Lee Smolin, A friend of mine who's, so there was recently this issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies with 19 essays on my book Galileo's Error by scientists and philosophers and theologians.
01:33:58.000And Lee Smolin has this idea that the kind of radical rethinking We're going to have to do to bring general relativity together with quantum mechanics can come together with a role for consciousness at the fundamental level of reality.
01:34:13.000Now, I have some concerns with his view in a number of ways, some disagreements, but that kind of thinking about physics, taking consciousness as a serious datum, you know, I think that could be a real important thing.
01:34:43.000Now, how does one go from trying to understand consciousness in the human being, trying to understand consciousness in living organisms, to consciousness exists in water, or consciousness exists in the environment,
01:36:27.000I think the motivation for trying to do that is rooted in a sort of misunderstanding of the history of science and why it's been as successful as it is.
01:36:38.000This is an alternative research program.
01:36:41.000You know, rather than trying to explain consciousness in terms of utterly non-conscious processes in the brain, We try to explain complicated human consciousness in terms of simpler forms of consciousness.
01:36:54.000Simpler forms of consciousness that are then postulated to exist as basic aspects of matter.
01:37:01.000So this is an ongoing research program.
01:37:03.000Nobody has a complete theory of consciousness.
01:37:23.000So it might be particles, or it might be, you know, many theoretical physicists prefer to think of fields as the fundamental building blocks of reality, sort of universe-wide fields, and then particles are just sort of local excitations.
01:37:36.000So if you combine that view with panpsychism, The fundamental forms of consciousness are the ultimate nature of these universe-wide fields.
01:37:44.000And the thing that has those forms of consciousness is the universe itself.
01:37:49.000So this is sometimes called cosmopsychism, the kind of the universe itself.
01:37:54.000But, you know, you needn't think of it as God or something.
01:37:56.000It could be just, you know, a mess that the universe has experienced.
01:38:02.000But it's just so, you know, you might think...
01:38:10.000You know, our experience is a result of millions of years of evolution, but if the universe has experience, it hasn't evolved, it could be just, you know, you needn't think of it as intelligent or an agent, it could be.
01:38:26.000Yeah, so panpsychists needn't think rocks are conscious.
01:38:29.000But look, it's, you know, I see this as a collaboration between science and philosophy.
01:38:33.000This is partly an empirical question of At higher levels, What kinds of physical activity go along with experience?
01:38:45.000You know, so the philosopher Hedda Hassel Merck, who's also a panpsychist, has spent a year in the lab of Giulio Tononi, who's the originator of the integrated information theory of consciousness, a proposal about the neural correlates,
01:39:02.000the physical correlates of consciousness, spelling that theory out in a panpsychist way.
01:39:06.000So on that theory, We get consciousness at the level at which you have most integrated information, and that is a notion they try to give a mathematically precise definition of.
01:39:21.000So on that view, probably the cup of water is not conscious because there's probably more integration in the molecules than there is in the...
01:39:41.000What's distinctive about the human brain, or at least certain parts of the human brain, is That there's massively more integrated information in the whole than there is in any individual neuron.
01:39:53.000The way the brain stores information is heavily dependent on its connectivity.
01:39:57.000So if you combine panpsychism with that view, then rocks wouldn't be conscious.
01:40:06.000So it's a collaboration between science and philosophy.
01:40:09.000Panpsychism offers us a broad brushstrokes Account of the kind of approach to solving the hard problem.
01:40:21.000But spelling it out is going to require collaboration with neuroscience, physics as well.
01:40:28.000You know, what's exciting to me at the moment, you know, I get contacted by a lot of scientists now, seeing a connection with their work.
01:40:37.000And, you know, I want to at some point get together a kind of interdisciplinary network.
01:40:41.000Which disciplines or content do you see any connection with their work?
01:40:44.000I had a guy from Jonathan Delafield-Butt, an experimental psychologist.
01:40:51.000So he's one of the contributors to this volume of essays on my book, Galileo's Era.
01:40:55.000So he's spent his career working on...
01:41:01.000Experimental study of autism and he's reached the conclusion that, you know, understanding autism in a panpsychist framework gives us a much deeper explanatory insight than understanding it in a materialist framework.
01:41:16.000So, I mean, Daniel Picard, the example I already gave you of The guy who's experimentally exploring the idea that mitochondria might be understood as social networks, there's obvious kind of connections to panpsychism there,
01:41:32.000rather than reducible to underlying chemistry and physics.
01:41:35.000Lee Smolin, who has these ideas of, you know, speculative theoretical physics allowing consciousness to play a fundamental role.
01:41:47.000So, you know, what I'm really excited about, I just, you know, I think you start to get taken seriously when you, most of the time panpsychism has just been trying to justify its existence, and we've been very successful at that, I think.
01:41:57.000But I think it's now time to just get on with getting this research program going.
01:42:02.000What research could be done to prove the existence of consciousness?
01:42:08.000In things other than human beings that speak a language that could explain their consciousness to you.
01:42:14.000Like, what can be done to try to quantify this idea?
01:42:20.000And make it so that not only is it taken seriously, but it's doctrine.
01:42:26.000There's something we've got to face up to.
01:43:01.000Who like science, you know, who think of themselves pro-science, might resist this because they think, you know, look, this works!
01:43:08.000You know, public observation experiment, it's got us technology, it's done so well.
01:43:13.000And, you know, for a lot of the 20th century, Because of that enthusiasm for observation experiment, people basically just pretended consciousness didn't exist for a long period of time till kind of the 80s, 90s.
01:43:28.000And because it's not publicly observable, we're not going to be able to get a theory, a solution to the hard problem that we can kind of test in that way.
01:43:38.000But But more broadly, what you do is what you always do in science is you just try and find the simplest theory that can accommodate the data.
01:43:49.000And it's just that for a theory of consciousness, the data is not just public observation experiment.
01:43:56.000But also the reality of consciousness.
01:43:58.000We need to find the simplest theory that can accommodate both of those things.
01:44:03.000And I think the panpsychist direction of that looks more promising than the alternatives that have kind of got nowhere.
01:44:13.000Out of the people that are critiquing this and the people that disagree with it, whether it's Sean Carroll or whoever, is there ever some arguments that they give you that make you have pause, that make you stop and think about whether or not you're wasting your time with all this?
01:44:31.000Yeah, no, I mean, I've definitely learned a lot.
01:44:35.000You know, I'm still with ongoing discussion about What follows from what we know in physics about...
01:44:42.000I mean, this discussion that I'm more agnostic on of whether all causal dynamics are reducible to underlying chemistry and physics, you know, I'm really open-minded on that.
01:44:53.000A panpsychist can be open-minded on that.
01:44:56.000And so, you know, it's something I... I used to think everything was reducible to physics.
01:45:10.000Sometimes I would be more open-minded to actually the illusionist position that consciousness doesn't exist.
01:45:16.000You know, I think the regular material position just doesn't make sense.
01:45:21.000So the illusionist position that consciousness doesn't exist is that it's all just down to chemical reactions?
01:45:28.000And that, yeah, no one's ever had experience.
01:45:32.000We think, and look, it sounds crazy and I don't really believe it, but then in some mindsets I think, you know, people can be brainwashed to think kind of crazy things, like you think in 1984 there's the character who's...
01:45:46.000Brainwashed into thinking 2 plus 2 is 5. Maybe evolution has just totally brainwashed us into thinking we have experience and we just, you know, you said to me that's just total bullshit.
01:45:57.000Maybe it's just so ingrained in us we can't not believe it, but maybe it's false.
01:46:05.000Well isn't that where we're headed if we continue down this virtual reality road?
01:46:09.000This is the concept of the matrix, that you will have experiences that are not real.
01:46:15.000If your consciousness is taking these experiences in, are they real?
01:46:20.000Yeah, well, you mean the experience itself?
01:46:22.000Yes, I mean, if we really do get to a point where technology is sufficiently advanced to the point where they can make a virtual reality that's indiscernible, you cannot tell the difference between this Artificially created reality of pixels and ones and zeros through this amazing graphic engine that you're witnessing through whatever equipment they design,
01:46:45.000that it's so good that it hits all of the various aspects of your sensory perceptions.
01:47:17.000In some ways as real an environment as the external physical world.
01:47:22.000I don't think that questions the reality of experience itself.
01:47:27.000But one thing that could do is the question of could you upload your consciousness?
01:47:33.000If it got to the point not just of you being in your brain interacting with the virtual world, but your consciousness being sort of uploaded into the virtual world, That's another question.
01:47:49.000I mean, I'm inclined to think that that would be suicide.
01:47:58.000As a panpsychist, I think of consciousness as the stuff of the brain.
01:48:05.000So, if you upload the information in my brain...
01:48:10.000I'm inclined to think the consciousness would be lost and so we might get to a situation where we think, oh my god, we've discovered immortality and we're all uploading our minds, but we're actually killing ourselves and replacing consciousness with non-consciousness.
01:48:25.000Well also consciousness as it exists as a human being like as in you and I experiencing this conversation We are there's so many components to what we are right you have Muscles And inside those muscles,
01:49:11.000Where can you say, here's where it is?
01:49:14.000Because if you are looking at the fact, and we know for a fact that we are created out of atoms, We are created out of these particles that exist in everything and all things all around us all the time.
01:49:29.000So if we're thinking in the concept of that there is no real pain and there is no real vision, there's no real love, there's no real experience, it's not real.
01:49:42.000If you get down to the lowest observable structure that we know exists, there's seemingly no change in those structures between the experience and no experience.
01:50:12.000Just a slight digression that panpsychism, you know, has gone from being a view that kind of nobody took seriously to being, you know...
01:50:20.000Still a minority view, but pretty well respected.
01:50:22.000And this kind of annoyed certain people in the field.
01:50:25.000But anyway, one kind of interesting recent development is Michael Tai, who's a guy who you won't know maybe if you're not in academic philosophy, but is a huge figure in academic philosophy and an influential proponent of materialism for the last 30-40 years.
01:50:43.000And in his recent book, he's converted to a kind of panpsychism, which is, I mean, I can't convey this, but that's like, oh my god!
01:50:52.000It's like, you know, it's like, I don't know, Richard Dawkins becoming a Christian or something.
01:51:03.000Difficult to do with evolution and difficulties making sense of where...
01:51:09.000I mean, we could ask in the process of evolution, you know, the slow development over time, or just in like a fetus, an embryo becoming a fetus, where does the consciousness switch on?
01:51:21.000Now, with most properties, there's going to be a fuzzy boundary, right?
01:51:26.000So like you think, I don't know, where does life emerge?
01:51:30.000Maybe there's a fuzzy boundary, you know, where it's like...
01:51:33.000I think most concepts admit of these fuzzy boundaries like, you know, whether someone is bald or not.
01:53:41.000If you are at a warehouse and you're inside the warehouse and the warehouse explodes and you manage to survive, that is a very different experience than if you're watching an explosion from a mile away.
01:54:54.000I think, you know, like a newborn baby.
01:54:58.000Actually, you know, it's only recently people said, you know, a lot of people used to think babies didn't have consciousness until very recently.
01:55:06.000A guy called Peter Carruthers, he's a really good philosopher, totally disagree with.
01:55:10.000He thinks babies don't have consciousness.
01:56:27.000Why assume that as you get more complex that it's not just a mechanism?
01:56:33.000I suppose if you're wrapped up in a kind of theory of consciousness, You know, you asked the question, does the experience and the ability to process it go together?
01:56:43.000Well, one theory says they do, the higher order thought theory of consciousness.
01:56:48.000That says that to have an experience essentially involves reflecting upon it and being aware of it.
01:56:55.000And if you can't reflect upon it, you don't really have experience.
01:57:01.000That view, then maybe you bite the bullet and you say, you know, the baby can't reflectively attend, you know, reflect on its consciousness, so maybe it doesn't really have consciousness.
01:57:13.000Well, it's developing, just like a baby has motion, but it can't run, right?
01:57:45.000You learn so much about just human life in general when you watch them develop and grow.
01:57:52.000It's like, oh, this is fascinating to see all these little pieces fall into place and mature and solidify.
01:57:58.000Yeah, so look, the question, you know, Where on this gradual train of complexity and development and evolution does experience suddenly switch on?
01:58:10.000I think if you're not a panpsychist, you've just got to say...
01:58:14.000There's this moment when it suddenly switches on and it's going to look really arbitrary.
01:58:19.000It's going to look, you know, if it suddenly switches on, that's going to look really...
01:58:26.000Whereas if you're a panpsychist, I mean, it's a much more elegant view that, look, consciousness is there all along, but simple forms of consciousness and...
01:58:36.000Cognitive development and evolution in the broader screen of things mould that simple forms of consciousness into more complex forms.
01:58:44.000So it's a beautiful, elegant, naturalistic view of the world.
01:58:54.000Lost my train of thought there, but yeah.
01:58:55.000Do you think, when it goes along the lines of what we were talking about earlier, about how people don't want to buy a home where someone was murdered in it, do you think that it's possible that things do retain some kind of memory?
01:59:08.000I believe it was Rupert Sheldrake had this idea that everything has some kind of memory, like a form of memory.
01:59:23.000A long, interesting discussion recently walking through London.
01:59:26.000Look, I... He's got very strange ideas, like the morphic resonance theory.
01:59:31.000Yeah, he's an interesting guy, and he makes his case review.
01:59:36.000And look, I suppose these are scientific empirical questions.
01:59:40.000And, you know, I... I guess he's going wildly against the dominant view, right?
01:59:51.000But I suppose his case is, well, look, there's just an establishment view that people aren't taking my work seriously because there's an establishment view.
02:00:05.000I don't, I don't, it's not my area of expertise to evaluate that sort of data.
02:00:13.000I mean, maybe I should put in the time to work out the data.
02:00:16.000I mean, you know, there's a spectrum here.
02:00:19.000Like people like, some people are talking about like Martin Picard or something, where there's And it's not that radical as Sheldrake, but still it's like things are perhaps not reducible to underlying chemistry or physics.
02:00:48.000I'm confident about panpsychism, not for those kind of empirical scientific reasons, but just it's the only viable solution to the hard problem of consciousness.
02:00:57.000So that's, as a philosopher, I feel confident about saying that.
02:01:01.000But the reality of, you know, these unorthodox phenomena, I just don't know.
02:01:31.000And he said, you could feel the sadness and the loss in the area.
02:01:38.000It's a place where there was a great war.
02:01:41.000And so on this battlefield, he said it was the strangest thing, that you could feel the loss.
02:01:49.000Like you could feel something horrible had happened there.
02:01:53.000And this is hundreds of years ago, right?
02:01:55.000So this is embedded into, or 200 years ago almost, Embedded into the ground itself, like the actual area where it happened had retained an experience.
02:02:09.000Like maybe the area had consciousness.
02:02:11.000If you murder enough people on a specific plot of land, maybe the sadness, the loss, the pain, the suffering just gets soaked into the land itself.
02:02:26.000Yeah, I mean, there are experiences, I mean, at a gig or something that, you know, the experience of the excitement, it sort of feels like it's not just...
02:02:39.000But, I mean, it's difficult to exactly pin that down.
02:02:42.000I mean, I suppose, I mean, the closest I've had to...
02:02:45.000These kind of very strange experiences.
02:02:48.000A friend of mine who I hadn't seen for a long time sadly passed away and you know I had that experience of thinking about them before I found that out you know that I found out the next day.
02:03:02.000Like you thought about them were something special?
02:03:05.000For the first time in a long time I thought about this person I found out the next day that They died on that day, I was thinking.
02:03:13.000But, you know, I mean, look, let me be totally clear.
02:03:38.000Here's what I... I think people focus too much on the dichotomy of, do you believe or do you not believe?
02:03:47.000Do you take this seriously or do you not seriously?
02:03:49.000So, I mean, with kind of spiritual experiences of whatever kind, I mean, you're talking about more concrete stuff, but, you know, certain kinds of spiritual experiences, I think people either think you believe those experiences or you think...
02:04:10.000But look, there are possibilities in between that you can engage with an experience.
02:04:15.000You can take seriously the possibility that it corresponds to something real.
02:04:22.000I suppose I would say, you know, in terms of certain fleeting spiritual experiences I have, you know, in certain deep moral experiences, in certain deep engagements with nature, I feel I have a kind of fleeting sense of some...
02:04:40.000Now, I wouldn't say I feel confident enough to say, you know, I believe those experiences are corresponding to something real, but I would just say I engage those experiences and I take seriously the possibility that they correspond to something real.
02:04:56.000So, you know, you can have that kind of engaged agnostic position rather than just What's your decision?
02:05:07.000You can work, you can engage with your certain spiritual...
02:05:11.000Because if you think that things have consciousness, that consciousness is an underlying property of matter, of life itself, of everything...
02:05:20.000Then something about consciousness must be the retaining of experiences that take place within that consciousness.
02:05:28.000Unless consciousness is always completely in the moment with no knowledge about the past and no thought about the future.
02:05:36.000And that's not consciousness as we recognize it.
02:05:40.000Consciousness is a certain amount of awareness, right?
02:05:43.000So if everything is consciousness, including environments, why wouldn't something retain a memory?
02:05:49.000Yeah, I was interviewed on a podcast of a really interesting guy.
02:06:30.000I'm not saying I believe that, but it's...
02:06:34.000It's not obvious to me you'd have to be a panpsych.
02:06:37.000I mean, some people say then, okay, what about quantum entanglement?
02:06:40.000You know, isn't that like, you know, we can have particles that are correlated even though they're so far apart, no signal can pass between them.
02:06:51.000You can't pass a signal with quantum entanglement.
02:06:53.000So, you know, that doesn't show the possibility of something like telepathy.
02:06:59.000But, you know, look, even if you're a total materialist, it seems to me that it could turn out that there's some non-local connection with brains.
02:07:04.000It could turn out that there's, you know, all the kind of...
02:07:08.000And this is maybe a disagreement I have with Rupert Sheldrake, actually.
02:07:10.000I don't see why a materialist couldn't...
02:07:15.000Necessarily accommodate these phenomena.
02:07:16.000So one thing Rupert Sheldrake believes in is you can tell when someone's looking at you.
02:07:22.000And he thinks he's, you know, he's demonstrated this.
02:07:45.000Why couldn't, if you're a materialist and you actually thought there was overwhelming evidence for this phenomenon, you could just think there's some kind of non-local connection between brains, you know?
02:07:55.000So, yeah, I actually think, you know, look, these are just the scientific questions and there's philosophical questions.
02:08:00.000The philosophical question, how do we solve the hard problem of consciousness?
02:08:04.000Scientific questions, you know, we just have to look at the data and, you know, and I mean, I... I mean, a lot of panpsychists are just total secularist atheists, you know, like David Chalmers, like Luke Roloffs.
02:08:20.000They don't believe in any kind of transcendent reality.
02:08:23.000They just believe in feelings, pain, seeing red.
02:08:28.000You know, that's obviously real, and they don't think a conventional scientific approach can account for it.
02:08:32.000So, you know, panpsychism, I don't think...
02:08:36.000It has to be wrapped up in any spiritual or psychic phenomena or so on.
02:08:46.000Although, having said that, I suppose if, for independent reasons...
02:08:53.000You were motivated to adopt some kind of spiritual conception of reality.
02:08:58.000I suppose a panpsychist worldview is a little bit more consonant with that.
02:09:01.000So suppose you have a mystical experience and you think in that mystical experience it seems to you that There's this higher form of consciousness at the root of all things, right?
02:09:13.000If you're a materialist, you've got to think that's a delusion, right?
02:09:16.000Because what's at the fundamental level is just physics and that's inconsistent.
02:09:21.000That doesn't have this higher form of consciousness.
02:09:24.000If you're a panpsychist and you already think There's consciousness at the fundamental level of reality.
02:09:30.000You know, it's not so much of a leap to think what you're experiencing in the mystical experience is part of that fundamental story of consciousness at the fundamental level.
02:10:21.000So yeah, this isn't just an abstract theoretical question.
02:10:26.000Consciousness is at the root of human identity.
02:10:30.000Fundamentally, we relate to each other as beings with feelings and experiences.
02:10:35.000Consciousness is arguably the source of everything that matters in life.
02:10:39.000And yet I would argue that our official scientific worldview is inconsistent with the reality of consciousness.
02:10:46.000And so we're at a very strange period of history where our official worldview denies the existence of the thing that's most evident and the thing that gives life value and meaning.
02:10:58.000And I think this can lead to a deep sense of alienation, you know, a sense we don't...
02:11:33.000We won't prove it with experiments because consciousness is not publicly observable and so you can't answer all the questions you want to answer.
02:11:44.000With consciousness just by doing experiments.
02:11:47.000People used to respond to that in the 20th century by saying, it doesn't exist.
02:12:00.000But I think people are still in the mindset of thinking, oh, we just need to do more neuroscience and we'll solve it.
02:12:06.000I think people need to grasp the philosophical underpinnings, the problems that arise.
02:12:11.000From the fact that there's something we know to be real that's not publicly observable.
02:12:17.000And we just have to accept that and we have to move to a position where, as a scientific community, we think the job of science is not just to account for the data of public observation experiment, but also The reality of human experience.
02:12:34.000I think once we're at that point, I think consciousness is just sort of the...
02:12:38.000Sorry, panpsychism is just sort of the obvious choice.
02:12:41.000I think people are at the moment in this confused position where they think, The only job of science is to account for public observation experiments.
02:12:51.000But if you religiously follow that through, you wouldn't believe in consciousness.
02:12:55.000Because consciousness is not known about in that way.
02:12:58.000We didn't discover it looking for a microscope.
02:13:01.000We know about it in a very different way, just through our awareness of our feelings and experiences.