Dr. Jack Symes is a public philosopher and researcher at Durham University. He is the editor of the Talking About Philosophy book series, and has written and edited a number of books on the philosophy of consciousness and the morality of the God that is being portrayed as being, what will you say, a religious believer. In this episode, Dr. Symes talks about his views on the nature of consciousness, and the role of consciousness in our understanding of the world, and how it relates to the concept of God and morality. He also talks about how we can re-specify consciousness and understand it, and what it means to be a Christian and an atheist. He's also a podcaster and host of the Panpsychist Philosophy Podcast, which is one of the UK's most popular higher education programs, and is a regular contributor to the "Talking About Philosophy" podcast, where he discusses philosophy, philosophy, and religion. In this conversation, we discuss: What is consciousness? Who is God? What does it mean to be an atheist and what does it have to do with religion? Why does it matter? How does it relate to religion and morality? Is God real or not? And what is the difference between God and the God we see in the world? Does God exist? If so, who is it really? and is he real? or is he a straw man or a figment of our imagination? Do you know who he is? ? Is he a Christian or an atheist or an agnostic? Can he be a God or a skeptic? Or is he even a Christian? Are we even a God a real or a Christian, a Buddhist or a Buddhist, a Hindu or Buddhist, or a Hindu, a Taoist, etc.? And does he exist at all? All of these things really exist or is there a God? What does he really exist? What is he really think about consciousness? And why is he here? This episode is part of a larger problem we need to know about consciousness and what we should know about it? And is there any such thing at all of that? We'll find out in this episode of "The Philosophy of Consciousness?" Join the conversation by using the hashtag on Insta: . and find out more by searching in the comments section below! Thank you for listening to the podcast!
00:07:48.120So, let me ask you a couple of questions about that.
00:07:51.220Because I've thought for a long time that the formulators of the hard problem of consciousness
00:07:57.780are actually wildly optimistic, in a sense.
00:08:01.320Because I don't really think they are tackling the hard problem of consciousness.
00:08:06.380I think the hard problem of consciousness is distinguishing consciousness from being itself.
00:08:13.280And I have a hard time distinguishing consciousness from being.
00:08:17.460And it's also quite difficult in some ways to distinguish consciousness from intelligence.
00:08:24.560So, let me delve into that on the consciousness side a little bit to begin with.
00:08:30.760So, I've spent a lot of time studying comparative mythology and also binding that analysis with my knowledge of neuroscience.
00:08:44.560And so, I don't want to generate interpretations of cosmogonic narratives that run in contradiction to what I know on the neurobiological side.
00:08:57.440And I like that way of triangulating, so to speak, because it seems to me the probability that ancient mythology and modern neuroscience will come to the same conclusions by chance is very low.
00:09:08.760Because they're so disparate in terms of their mechanisms of generating knowledge.
00:09:14.000So, in the typical cosmogonic myth, which seems to involve consciousness, you have three fundamental attributes of being and becoming.
00:09:58.000It has a terrible aspect and a positive aspect because out of potential comes everything good and everything terrible.
00:10:04.120And then you have an active mediary agent that's an intermediary.
00:10:08.380And in the Christian conception, that's the logos, for example.
00:10:11.860The logos is the active principle that mediates between the forces of order and chaos.
00:10:17.220And this conceptualization makes a lot of sense to me phenomenologically.
00:10:22.700And I think it actually maps on quite well to the neuroscience.
00:10:25.040But the reason I'm giving you this lengthy exposition as part of this question is because it's relevant to this issue of separating consciousness from being.
00:10:35.100So I don't see how you can separate consciousness from being, even in principle, because I don't understand what it would mean.
00:10:42.680And you alluded to this, what it would mean for there to be a reality without awareness.
00:10:49.080Now, that doesn't mean I understand anything about what awareness is.
00:10:52.160But I don't think it's distinguishable from the problem of being itself.
00:10:57.020Well, I think you're in very good company.
00:11:04.140Philip Goff, Galen Strawson, Miriel Bahari.
00:11:06.860There are a lot of people who share this view that you can't separate consciousness from being.
00:11:12.920And that being as a whole, whether that's cosmos, existence, God, the divine, as a whole, has to have the property of consciousness.
00:11:21.660And I suppose that is slightly separate from intelligence in the sense that I can imagine some large language model being intelligent.
00:11:29.900Or some, let's say, on the physicalist worldview, you could imagine some insect being intelligent in the way that it responds to its environment without being conscious.
00:11:45.620So you can pull them apart conceptually.
00:11:48.260But what I think is interesting is this seems to me to tie into what I understand to be your wider view.
00:11:55.380And I think perhaps it'll be good to just get that on the table so you can see the comparisons there.
00:12:00.980I find it a little bit difficult to follow some of the language you're using there.
00:12:05.680So excuse me if I oversimplify this for the sake of trying to keep it clear in my mind.
00:12:11.500It seems to me that your view consists of essentially three broad propositions.
00:12:17.260Those propositions are something like, one, when we perceive the world and act in the world, we're making value judgments.
00:12:24.460Like, the reason I see you now is because I value this conversation rather than seeing some other thing out of the infinite ways I could see the room before me.
00:12:34.960The second is that you think these values exist on a great chain of being, on Jacob's ladder.
00:12:41.520They emanate the form of the good or they lead to an Anselmian conception of the divine or something like this.
00:12:48.700And third is that I believe you think something like this, and I'm eager to hear any clarifications, is that you see story or fiction and scripture as tapping into the divine, tapping into truth or goodness, whatever that thing is that exists on top of Jacob's ladder.
00:13:08.140And to link to our discussion on consciousness and being there, that the greatest being or the fullness of being, the thing that sits on top of the ladder, must be conscious and must be the totality of being.
00:13:23.180And again, that seems to run through the entire history of Christian philosophy and maybe philosophy more generally.
00:13:29.600So I wonder, do you think that captures it?
00:13:31.960Am I getting the bits and pieces in the right order there?
00:13:34.960I'm taking four of my esteemed colleagues and you across the world.
00:16:00.320Well, I think you've got the bits and pieces in the right order with regard to conceptualizations of the divine.
00:16:08.480I mean, let's take that apart a little bit, because that's very much worth delving into.
00:16:13.280So, in principle, the postmodernists, their ethos is defined by so-called skepticism towards metanarratives, right?
00:16:22.900So, their proposition—this was leotard, but it was shared—well, it's one of the defining characteristics of the postmodern school, I would say,
00:16:29.760is that there's no overarching metanarratives, skepticism toward metanarratives.
00:16:34.900And that actually—I find that—what would you say?
00:16:40.960And the reason for that, as far as I can tell—you can tell me what you think about this technically—is that
00:16:46.120every perception and every action requires a unifying ideal.
00:16:53.660So, for example, if I want to lift a glass of water to my mouth, I'm sequencing—I'm unifying a tremendous number of unbelievably complex operations in order to do that.
00:17:05.560Now, it seems simple in some ways to my consciousness, because I'm operating slightly above what I have automatized neurologically.
00:17:14.280And so, I don't really have any conscious idea of the complexity of the molecules and the atoms and the cells and the muscles, even, that I'm using to move.
00:17:23.740But I'm unifying all those with regards to a value-oriented purpose, and that would be to quench my thirst,
00:17:30.340and then that would be nested in a higher-order structure of values, because I'm quenching my thirst, I presume,
00:17:35.420because I believe it's better not to be thirsty, not to be in pain.
00:17:39.860I believe it's better to be alive than to be dead, etc.
00:17:43.400So, even that micro—that unifying, that micro-unity of a given action unifies all sorts of things that are subordinate to it,
00:17:55.320but it also partakes in a higher unity.
00:17:57.800And what the postmodernists seem to be claiming is that you can just draw some arbitrary upper limit to that unity.
00:18:04.340And so then let's go there for a second.
00:18:06.540Okay, so there's no overarching metanarrative.
00:18:09.520This would be, I suppose, in some way, skepticism about God.
00:19:10.860And then you're in this nihilistic catastrophe that seems to do nothing but demoralize and wreak havoc.
00:19:19.880So, okay, so you mentioned Jacob's Ladder.
00:19:23.020It's like, well, it seems to me that the monotheistic insistence is that all goods unify towards something that brings everything together,
00:19:33.840which would include, but even transcend consciousness, right?
00:19:37.740Because God would be beyond consciousness, beyond unconsciousness.
00:19:41.580But certainly, one definition of God is what stands at the highest level of unity.
00:19:47.460Now, well, so we can bandy that about a bit.
00:19:50.300Well, I wonder, just to ask you then, at the top of Jacob's Ladder, then, you take God to be there.
00:19:56.220You take God to be the thing on which all values hang on, slash the thing that grounds all other values.
00:20:03.180To be clear, are you happy to say that?
00:20:05.400To say, I believe in the existence of God as the greatest conceivable being, let's say?
00:20:10.740Well, I think it's, in some ways, it's a matter of definition.
00:20:15.420I guess I would, it's a matter of definition.
00:20:18.460So, because before we can talk about whether or not God exists, we should have some sense of exactly what it is that we're talking about.
00:20:25.760In the moment, we're talking about the highest conceivable potential unity.
00:20:30.180But then I would also say, so it stands at the top, but it also stands in the top in a peculiar way.
00:20:35.800And this is definitely insisted upon in the Judeo-Christian canon, because God is inconceivable and ineffable.
00:20:43.940And so, even if you do put him at the top, as you approach him, he recedes, and that capacity to recede is infinite.
00:20:51.420It's also not within the scope of conceptualization, right?
00:20:55.460I mean, the classic atheists, they perform a sort of sleight of hand, and what their God is always the wise old man in the sky who's the superstitious obstacle to the progress of science.
00:21:09.580But that's not at all how God is conceptualized in the biblical corpus.
00:21:13.120I mean, God is put at the top of Jacob's ladder, but he's also ineffable and receding.
00:21:18.220Well, let's pick up on a few of those ideas then.
00:21:21.240The first thing I think that's worth pointing out is, obviously, as you've said there, there are conceptions of God in which God is ineffable.
00:21:30.320And there's a big debate, as you know, there in philosophy of religion to the extent to which God is ineffable.
00:21:35.220Some people take God to be completely ineffable.
00:21:37.560You can't say anything positive about God.
00:21:39.620You can only say what God's not in this view.
00:22:09.080You can't understand God in his entirety, but you can pick up a few rocks.
00:22:13.520You can describe a few rocks and say, hey, this is the property of omnipotence, omniscience, somnibenevolence, consciousness, being immutable, being unchanging, and the like.
00:22:24.220And so, I think there are some things we can reasonably say that God must have as part of God's essence.
00:22:30.880On this question of, oh, let's, okay, let's go, there are some things that we can, let's pause for a moment.
00:22:40.420Some things we can say about God's essence, such as this.
00:22:45.740And just finally on this, because I know that you know your scripture very well.
00:22:50.340I don't know my scripture certainly as well as you do.
00:22:54.440I'm more from the camp of perfect being theology.
00:22:57.740As you know, there are three major strands of theology and philosophy, which all try and arrive at a different or the same definition of God, really.
00:23:06.080Revelation theology looks at religious experience and scripture and tries to infer properties from God from revelation.
00:23:12.920Creation theology looks at God's hand in the world and says, well, God must be powerful enough to create the world,
00:23:18.220good enough to give us the world and knowledgeable enough to give us such a finely tuned universe.
00:23:23.660And then when we look at other versions like perfect being theology, and this is the version I think is the most reflective of God,
00:23:33.120is that God, by definition, must be the greatest conceivable being.
00:23:38.840If there is a greater being than God, then the thing that you're talking about that isn't the greatest thing isn't God.
00:23:45.780God must have all great making properties, that is power, goodness, knowledge, and anything else we take to be intrinsically great at the top of Jacob's ladder.
00:23:56.440If God has those things, then it is worthy of the name God.
00:24:02.660Okay, so with regards to the argument about ineffability, Mercia Eliade points out one of the consequences of a God that's too ineffable.
00:24:14.120So a God that you can't characterize this, and he's mapped out the death of God phenomenon across many cultures and over many times.
00:24:27.780And what you often see happening when a culture emerges and begins to flourish is that there's a revelation at its beginning,
00:24:36.200interestingly enough, that has a certain amount of psychological and sociological energy, and it unites people.
00:24:43.000It offers them a framework of meaning that quells their anxiety, and also a goal or a destination that imbues them with positive emotion,
00:24:52.860And then it happens upon occasion that the pinnacle value that's posited by that culture comes under rational assault or perhaps falls prey to conflict with other religions,
00:25:08.220and people start to doubt and the system decays, the death of God, let's say.
00:25:12.120Well, Eliade pointed out that a God that is so ineffable that nothing can be said about him tends to float off into, what would you say,
00:25:22.740into the cosmic ether and lose his connection with humanity.
00:25:27.440And so I think it's better to think about it as in a hierarchical manner.
00:25:32.040And so here's one way that I've come to understand it that's both neuropsychological and mythological at the same time.
00:25:39.360So, you know, in the story of Exodus, Moses is compelled forward to take a position of leadership as a consequence of his encounter with the burning bush.
00:25:53.480It's the tree of life, and it's on fire because it's alive.
00:25:56.180And a burning bush is a representation of that which calls you forward.
00:26:02.900That's a good way of thinking about it.
00:26:04.360Now, that takes concrete form in your life, right?
00:26:07.520So you might be attracted to a particular lover.
00:26:10.340You might be attracted to a particular profession or a particular book on a shelf when you walk into a library.
00:26:18.460It's like a light turns on and you're called forward to it like a moth.
00:26:24.200And then, as you know, as you mature and you transform and the way that you look at the world changes, the thing that compels your interest transforms.
00:26:33.800But then you could imagine something at the bottom of that that's constant across all those transformations that's like the spirit of calling per se.
00:26:44.380And it spirals you upwards in a developmental path, and it recedes as you move towards it.
00:26:51.020Now, that's one characterization of God, particularly in the Old Testament, is God is calling, right?
00:26:57.580And that's reasonably well mappable, I would say, onto the neurological systems that mediate positive emotion because the positive emotion systems do call you forward.
00:27:10.260They fill you with enthusiasm, which is a word derived from the phrase for being possessed by God.
00:27:16.940But, you know, you can kind of understand that behind all the things that call, proximately, is the spirit that calls transcendentally.
00:27:26.540And you could think of the essence of that spirit as a closer approximation of the divine.
00:27:33.000And that's not a full characterization of the divine because in the Old Testament, for example, you also have God as the voice of conscience, which is quite different.
00:27:42.260That's more of a restrictive voice or impulse, so to speak.
00:27:46.720This is good, though, because I think that these things that are in Scripture, whether Scripture is revealing truths or it's revealing moral truths and the like, whether it's revealing symbols,
00:27:57.440I take your view to be, they're reflecting the divine, they're, as Schopenhauer would put it, Schopenhauer's view of aesthetics was that when we're having an aesthetic experience, it taps into the rhythm of what he called the will.
00:28:11.660So you're tapping into the form of aesthetic beauty, which I think your view is sort of similar to there in terms of Scripture.
00:28:19.740There's certainly parallels, at least.
00:28:21.340But what I think is interesting from a philosophical point of view is, and I think for people more generally, is whether these events are concrete in the sense that they're historical events.
00:28:35.900And second, whether or not you do take this God to be a perfect being, like the God of Anselm, the God of Aquinas, the God of Augustine, like the classical conception of God.
00:28:48.220Because I think there are a lot of Christians out there at the moment that are holding you up and saying, look, Christianity's back.
00:28:55.160Here's Jordan Peterson saying he's a Christian, and here's him talking about Scripture.
00:28:59.920Like, new atheism's dead, and here we are with the resurrection of Christianity.
00:29:05.920But I don't think you're the type of Christian which they have traditionally had in mind, for sure.
00:29:12.720My colleague at Durham University, Philip Goff, is either coming out, or maybe I'm going to be coming out for him here, as a heretical Christian.
00:29:22.600And he thinks you don't have to believe in a perfect God, and you don't have to believe that the Christ event was a real event in order to be a Christian.
00:29:31.420There is a middle way between God and atheism, and that's my view as an agnostic as well.
00:29:36.560It's just different to perhaps yours and Philip Goff's.
00:29:39.060And I wonder, would you be happy to be characterized in that middle ground, in finding new radical solutions to what's been a very partisan debate between theists and atheists?
00:29:51.080Well, I don't think that characterization is quite accurate, although I think, not in its details, but I think perhaps there's elements of the gist that are accurate.
00:30:00.860I mean, I suppose, would you say, you could say philosophically that I'm an existential Christian.
00:30:10.280Maybe that's a reasonable way of putting it, in that I think that what, I believe that the Judeo-Christian ethos is not an ethos of, what would you say, of propositional belief.
00:30:25.280The propositional belief is a surface, and it's necessary, but only insofar as it's in accordance with something deeper.
00:30:32.640Just like your words should be in accordance with your actions, but your actions are the fundament.
00:30:38.300Now, the words shouldn't contradict that.
00:30:40.400And I'm not saying that words are trivial, because they're not, but the commitment to faith that's demanded by Christianity is an existential commitment.
00:30:49.220And what that means, it's an all-in commitment, and that's a definition.
00:30:53.140I mean, Christianity is actually an outline of an all-in commitment.
00:30:59.760And so, now, with regards to God being perfect, well, in some sense, for me, that's a moot point.
00:31:08.260In a way, partly because with this Jacob's Ladder conception, it's enough for me to know that no matter how high I continue to climb, there won't be an upper limit.
00:31:21.420I mean, you know, hell is being characterized as a bottomless pit, and part of the reason for that existentially is because things, no matter how bad things get, and they can get very, very bad, you can make them worse.
00:31:36.280There's something you can do to make them worse.
00:31:38.240But I also think that that's true on the positive side, which is that if you follow your calling, let's say, and abide by your conscience, there's no limit to the upward track.
00:31:48.000And I guess I would say that we've conceptualized belief improperly in our culture, and because of that, we're caught in a dilemma between the Enlightenment rationalists and the Christians, because we have a propositional dispute.
00:32:03.360But I would say, let's talk about calling for a minute.
00:32:08.140Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:32:13.700Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:32:21.460In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury.
00:32:26.420Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:32:35.920And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:32:39.120With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:32:46.500Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:35:18.960As I mentioned a second ago, maybe Goff fits into this view with a God of limited powers or the God which,
00:35:26.120to go back to our earlier part of the discussion, a God whose consciousness underlies our world but is constrained by the laws of physics, let's say.
00:35:34.260There is a greater being than that and there's a being that's not confined to the laws of physics.
00:35:37.860So we're in a really interesting part of philosophy and religion at the moment in our culture where that's changing.
00:35:43.340But the third point, and I think this distinction shows the difference perhaps between your thinking and my thinking on this,
00:35:51.620is that let's take that statement, I believe in God.
00:35:55.860For me, that can be taken in two ways, the focus being on belief.
00:35:59.760Either I believe in God like I believe in humanity.
00:36:03.540When I say that, I don't mean like there's a thing called humanity.
00:36:06.000I mean, there's a thing which I'm putting my hope in.
00:36:08.680There's something that I trust, i.e. humanity.
00:36:11.620But obviously, there's a second way of taking that statement, which is, I believe that this thing exists, like the concept of humanity or God.
00:36:20.400And so when you say you're an existentialist believer in God, I think you probably fall into that first category that you take the leap of faith towards God.
00:36:30.280You put your belief in God in that way, rather than making the propositional claim, there is some concrete entity that is satisfied and is true and described in the proposition there as a perfect being who's conscious, powerful, good, and the like.
00:36:47.900Do you think that's a fair characterization?
00:36:49.200Well, I have a hard time understanding exactly how to get to the second without thoroughly dispensing with the first or thoroughly arranging the first properly.
00:36:59.020So let me respond to that in a way that also addresses another issue that you brought up.
00:37:03.280So you said, with regards to Jacob's ladder, and I described this like infinite upward climb, let's say, at least of human beings, you said, well, there has to be something at the top.
00:37:15.620So let me describe for a moment how I think that's dealt with, at least in part, in the combined Old Testament and New Testament canons.
00:37:25.420And I'll make reference, I think, primarily to the concept of the Logos.
00:37:29.460So there's an insistence in Christianity that, and Christ himself makes this claim, that he's the embodiment of the prophet and the laws.
00:37:37.900And this is a very interesting claim technically, because what you have in the Old Testament, and you already alluded to this, is a series of characterizations of God.
00:37:47.400It's not all the Old Testament is, but the narrative part of it is a sequence of characterizations of God.
00:37:53.640It's sort of like, there's a human being in this situation, and this is what God appears like to him or her.
00:38:00.820And then there's a human being in this situation, and this is how God appears to him or her.
00:38:05.680And so the God of the Tower of Babel is characterized in a different manner than the God in the story of the flood.
00:38:14.160There's an underlying insistence that these are all manifestations of the same transcendent reality.