Nov. 24, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:13:45
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it started out as a plain, clean table. | ||
| Because this is a new studio. | ||
| And then along the line, people give you a bunch of shit, and then it just starts piling up. | ||
| And you have to figure out, when do I empty this ashtray? | ||
| When do I throw out some of these objects? | ||
| When do I move them into storage? | ||
| And then when I move them into storage, there always seems to be new ones that show up. | ||
| So these are all things people have brought? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Everything is something someone's given me. | ||
| Oh, I should have brought something. | ||
| The deer head. | ||
| Oh, please don't give me anything. | ||
| We're good. | ||
| Just your pretty self. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| So thanks for doing this, man. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| No worries. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| It's a very fascinating subject because I've always wondered. | ||
| Let's just tell everybody what you do and who you are. | ||
| My name is Philip Goff. | ||
| I'm a philosophy professor from Durham University in the north of England. | ||
| And I spend most of my time thinking about consciousness. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| So it doesn't literally mean that everything is conscious necessarily. | ||
| The basic commitment is that the fundamental building blocks of reality, maybe fundamental particles like electrons and quarks, have incredibly simple forms of experience. | ||
| The 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. | ||
| So, 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. | ||
| Well, we are starting to challenge whether or not other things have something akin to consciousness, like plants, right? | ||
| There's real evidence that plants both feel something when they're being eaten and react to it. | ||
| The 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. | ||
| And that could actually be replicated with noises of the leaves being chewed on, which is really fascinating. | ||
| They 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. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the extent to which we've discovered how intelligent the kind of mental sophistication of plants is incredible. | ||
| So Monica Gagliano, for example, has done experiments subjecting pea plants to conditioned learning. | ||
| So, 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. | ||
| But she's actually done this with pea plants. | ||
| So she's... | ||
| Taught them to associate the ultraviolet light with the hum of a computer fan. | ||
| And eventually they started growing towards the hum of the computer fan. | ||
| So there'd been some kind of conditioned association there. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| And 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, you know, much more sophistication in the plant kingdom than we previously realized. | ||
| Now, but whether that's, I mean, whether that is consciousness, Is another question. | ||
| I mean, there's a core difficulty at the heart of the science of consciousness, which is that consciousness is not publicly observable, right? | ||
| I can't look inside your head and see your feelings and experiences. | ||
| You know, we know about consciousness not from... | ||
| Observation and experiment, but just from our immediate awareness of our own feelings and experiences. | ||
| So, you know, science is used to dealing with unobservables, fundamental particles, quantum wave functions, you know, maybe even other universes. | ||
| None of these things are directly observable. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| That's ultimately the standard model of particle physics. | ||
| It's all about explaining what is publicly observable. | ||
| But in the unique case of consciousness, The thing we are trying to explain is not publicly observable. | ||
| And that is utterly unique and really constrains our capacity to investigate it experimentally. | ||
| So it is, I mean in the case of human beings, I can't directly observe your feelings, but I can ask you. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| And in this way, neuroscientists try to match up what kinds of brain activity are correlated with what kind of experience. | ||
| And we can hopefully make some progress on that in the human case. | ||
| But the further we get away from the human case, The harder it is to establish what things are or are not conscious. | ||
| I mean, some people are now starting to think there might just be real limits to our knowledge here because consciousness is not publicly observable. | ||
| So there's a real challenge there, I think. | ||
| It is a fascinating thing in that it's agreed upon, right? | ||
| Everybody knows that we have it, but then trying to figure out what else has it, we must rely on their reactions and motion. | ||
| That's one of the things about plants, right? | ||
| The motion is so slow, like the motion of their growth or of the expanding of the petals of a flower. | ||
| The motion is so small that we think of it as not being in motion at all. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I 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. | ||
| So maybe there's just something going on in a different frame of reference here. | ||
| But, yeah, I mean, actually, so the neuroscientist... | ||
| Christoph 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. | ||
| You know, exactly what kinds of physical activity go along with consciousness. | ||
| He bet him a case of wine, a case of fine wine. | ||
| Did he pay up? | ||
| Well, I think he's probably about to lose that bet because... | ||
| You know, it's pretty much 25 years later and there's just no consensus. | ||
| There are different theories and there's just no consensus. | ||
| And actually, I mean, it's exactly what you said, right? | ||
| Because we can't observe it. | ||
| We 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. | ||
| To do that, we have to set up what we can call detection procedures, kind of rules for mapping behaviour to experience. | ||
| So one of these might be If someone is having an experience, they can report it. | ||
| Some neuroscientists adopt that rule. | ||
| If someone's having an experience, you can report it. | ||
| So if you adopt that rule, then you can start to test whether someone's having an experience. | ||
| But they're controversial. | ||
| So other people doubt those rules. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| So if you think about your experience of your clothes on your body right now. | ||
| So now I've said it, you might be attending to it and aware of it. | ||
| But before I mentioned it, you weren't thinking about it, you weren't attending to it. | ||
| It'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. | ||
| And what stance you take on that philosophical question leads to different scientific predictions. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| And it's just, you know, wildly different predictions. | ||
| And so, you know, it's a real mess. | ||
| The concept of your unconscious and subconscious thoughts, which are really just consciousness in different layers. | ||
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unidentified
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It's not really unconscious or subconscious. | |
| Yeah, that's controversial again. | ||
| So, I mean, the extreme version of... | ||
| So some people think if you're not aware of it, you're not really experiencing it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, 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... | ||
| So what we know experimentally is that you can't attend to all of that, right? | ||
| There are real limits to what you can attend to. | ||
| So the question is, those things you're not attending to, are they part of your experience? | ||
| That you're just not aware of. | ||
| Some people think that makes no sense. | ||
| If you're not aware of it, you're not experiencing it. | ||
| Or the case, you know, where you're kind of driving along and you're lost in thought, you're just on autopilot. | ||
| Were you actually experiencing the road? | ||
| Or were you just on total unconscious autopilot? | ||
| So there's a real debate just there. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| And then, you know, so I mean, I think we're just, in a way, we're not at first base. | ||
| We're not even at the kind of hard problem of consciousness yet. | ||
| Just in these scientific questions, we're really not at first base in how to think about them properly. | ||
| The 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. | ||
| You can only concentrate on so many things. | ||
| You have to have a certain amount of concentration on your environment and the world around you. | ||
| If you didn't have it, you didn't survive. | ||
| That passed on to where we are today. | ||
| The concept of unconscious thoughts and of memories. | ||
| This is all supposed to be things you could rely upon for certain instincts that you have to avoid certain areas because this is problematic. | ||
| This could cause you to lose your life. | ||
| This could keep you from passing on your genes. | ||
| There's a reason for all this stuff, right? | ||
| When you get down to objects, though, like a thing having consciousness, Or some kind of consciousness. | ||
| That'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? | ||
| There's certain instincts that animals have, like I have a golden retriever. | ||
| He 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. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| I've got a friend who does that as well. | ||
| A human? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I was just joking. | ||
| If 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. | ||
| I don't know what that is, but it's clearly baked into what it means to be a dog. | ||
| There's certain things that are baked into what it means to be a person. | ||
| Now, what are those? | ||
| Is that your DNA? Is that a part of your memories? | ||
| Is that your consciousness? | ||
| And is that the only thing that encompasses consciousness? | ||
| Like, does this table have a certain amount of consciousness? | ||
| I'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. | ||
| And it was kind of a joke, but kind of not. | ||
| There's certain places, like the Comedy Store, for example. | ||
| The Comedy Store in Los Angeles is a very old building that used to be Ciro's nightclub. | ||
| So it used to be owned by Bugsy Siegel. | ||
| And Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis used to play there. | ||
| It was a classic, old, mob-run nightclub that apparently a lot of people got murdered in. | ||
| It was a mob-owned place. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| These ghost stories. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Is that nonsense? | ||
| Or is there a certain amount of memory In that building that echoes sometimes. | ||
| There's a certain amount of the right moment with the right frequency. | ||
| You tune into it and you catch a glimpse. | ||
| You catch a whisper of the memories that are baked into a building. | ||
| I mean, no one wants to have a house where someone was murdered in. | ||
| In fact, in many states, they have laws. | ||
| So they have to let you know if someone was murdered in that house or if someone committed suicide in that house. | ||
| Because we have this feeling that like, oh, whatever that is is still in there. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Yeah, look, I mean, I know what you're talking about. | ||
| I mean, I think these are difficult questions. | ||
| Is this just... | ||
| What associations we have, or is this something we can't explain here? | ||
| I mean, these are ultimately kind of empirical questions that it's hard to settle. | ||
| I 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, you know, this inner world of colors and smells and tastes that, you know, each of us enjoy every second of waking life. | ||
| And That's real. | ||
| That is real. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| We're detecting those with senses, right? | ||
| So 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. | ||
| What is it based on? | ||
| So I think, yeah, there's a tendency to... | ||
| So whenever people hear about panpsychism, there's a tendency to think, oh, it's the kind of consciousness a human being has. | ||
| So we're thinking like particles are feeling existential angst or wondering if it's Tuesday or something. | ||
| But... | ||
| You 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. | ||
| That's something I'm not sure a sheep has, never mind a particle. | ||
| Is consciousness and sentient thoughts, are they linked? | ||
| I think I would just say consciousness is, the way it's standardly used in the science and philosophy of consciousness, is just subjective experience. | ||
| Pleasure, pain, seeing colour, hearing sound. | ||
| Consciousness is what it's like to be you, right? | ||
| And, you know, this comes in all shapes and sizes. | ||
| You know, in human beings, it's incredibly rich and complex. | ||
| A sheep's consciousness is a bit simpler. | ||
| Consciousness of a mouse, simpler again. | ||
| And as we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of experience. | ||
| So for the panpsychist, this just continues right down to the basic building blocks of matter, which have incredibly simple forms of experience to reflect their incredibly simple nature. | ||
| So that's one clarification that we're talking about just very simple kinds of experience. | ||
| But also, I mean, you say, is the coffee pot conscious? | ||
| I think most panpsychists would not think the coffee pot is conscious necessarily. | ||
| The idea is that the fundamental particles, perhaps, are conscious, but maybe not every random aggregation of them is conscious in its own right. | ||
| Although some panpsychists do think literally everything is conscious. | ||
| Luke Rolof is a very good, very rigorous panpsychist philosopher, and he does think literally everything, including the coffee pot, is conscious. | ||
| But even then, you know, it's not going to be like sitting there wanting us to drink it. | ||
| You know, that's the kind of consciousness you get after millions of years of evolution. | ||
| Its consciousness is going to be just some kind of meaningless mess. | ||
| Like the difference between the consciousness of a dog and a human. | ||
| Even 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the panpsychus is kind of like a... | ||
| A Copernican revolution where you stop thinking about consciousness rooted in the idea of human consciousness. | ||
| When did this start? | ||
| Where did this line of thinking become a serious point of discussion? | ||
| I 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. | ||
| And in the 19th century, it was kind of a heyday for panpsychism. | ||
| But I suppose... | ||
| How was it proposed? | ||
| How was it... | ||
| I mean, I suppose for the... | ||
| The 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. | ||
| It'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. | ||
| One 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, which made Einstein an overnight celebrity. | ||
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So what was Bertrand Russell's take on it? | |
| So 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. | ||
| And this was the choice of Galileo back in the 1620s. | ||
| He made the express choice right from now on. | ||
| The language of science is going to be mathematics, right? | ||
| And, you know, the maths has changed a lot. | ||
| It's, you know, we have now imaginary numbers and non-Euclidean geometry, but still, right, physics trades in equations. | ||
| So, I mean, what Russell realised, right, so there's a couple of ways... | ||
| A philosopher can respond to the fact that physics is just purely mathematical. | ||
| One approach is to follow someone like the physicist Max Tegmark and say, well maybe at base, reality just is pure math, right? | ||
| Maybe we live in a mathematical universe. | ||
| The other approach, and this is close to Russell's approach, was to think, well, maybe there's something underlying those mathematical structures. | ||
| Maybe there's something that those mathematical structures are the mathematical structure of. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| And these very simple conscious entities behave, because they have incredibly simple kinds of experience, they behave in very simple ways, simple, predictable ways. | ||
| And through their interactions, they realize certain mathematical structures. | ||
| And then the idea is... | ||
| Those mathematical structures are the mathematical structures identified by physicists. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| But all there is there really are these conscious entities. | ||
| So essentially what Russell realized Is we can take the traditional hard problem of consciousness and turn it on its head, right? | ||
| So 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? | ||
| I think that problem is unsolvable. | ||
| I mean, we could talk about why. | ||
| But what Russell did is turn it on its head, right? | ||
| Instead, start with consciousness. | ||
| And get matter out of consciousness in the way I've just described. | ||
| Because physics is purely mathematical, if we can have facts about these conscious entities that realize those mathematical structures... | ||
| Then we can essentially get physics out of consciousness. | ||
| And that's much easier than getting consciousness out of physics. | ||
| That's the basic idea. | ||
| So, I mean, that sounds kind of weird because you think it means that when you're studying physics, you're learning about fundamental consciousness. | ||
| And, you know, that doesn't feel like what you're doing. | ||
| But that's just because, as a physicist, you're just interested in the mathematical structures. | ||
| You're not interested in what, if anything, underlies that. | ||
| That's more of a philosophical question. | ||
| And then the concept of the mathematical structures below the mathematical structures, the mathematical structures of the mathematical structures, and that would be consciousness. | ||
| Kind of. | ||
| I mean, I would say... | ||
| Actually, I would say that the mathematical structures identified by physics are the bottom level, right, in terms of mathematical structures. | ||
| But there's something... | ||
| That fills out those mathematical structures. | ||
| So I disagree with Max Tegmark that it's just pure math. | ||
| There's something... | ||
| So I mean, the final page of the Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking famously said, even the final complete theory of physics... | ||
| We'll be just a set of equations. | ||
| It won't tell us what breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe. | ||
| So 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, it became a single cell organism. | ||
| When did consciousness emerge? | ||
| Does 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? | ||
| Did it emerge when it started to move? | ||
| And did it emerge when it started to change environments? | ||
| Like, 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! | ||
| There's one. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Now we have one. | ||
| Like, 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. | ||
| Did 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? | ||
| I mean, what is it, right? | ||
| Yeah, 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, right? | ||
| So 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. | ||
| So there's nothing that it's like to be a zombie. | ||
| So we need to distinguish these kind of philosophical zombies from Hollywood zombies. | ||
| These are creatures... | ||
| That behave just like us in every way. | ||
| You stick a knife in it, it screams and runs away. | ||
| It's navigating the world in all the ways we do, but there's no visual or auditory experience. | ||
| There's no feeling of pain. | ||
| And there are a couple of different reasons we might think about these creatures, but one of them is... | ||
| When we're thinking about the evolutionary emergence of consciousness, a zombie would survive just as well as us, right? | ||
| All that's important for survival is behavior. | ||
| So, 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? | ||
| So that is a deep mystery. | ||
| But for the panpsychist, Consciousness was always there at the fundamental level of reality. | ||
| The question is, when did it arrive higher up? | ||
| I mean, so I said panpsychism had something of a heyday in the 19th century. | ||
| Pretty early after Darwin, many philosophers and scientists saw the connection between Darwinism and panpsychism. | ||
| So 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? | ||
| Whereas 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? | ||
| If behavior is all that's important to survival, we could do without it. | ||
| So I think the panpsychist has a better story to tell on the hard problem of consciousness, but also on the evolution of consciousness. | ||
| There's a very interesting kind of consciousness amongst animals, amongst living creatures, and that's insect consciousness. | ||
| Insects have very bizarre and complex worlds, like leafcutter ants. | ||
| Have you ever seen when they've done those cement composures? | ||
| They fill a leafcutter ant colony up with cement, and then they dig it out to try to find how it's constructed. | ||
| Have you ever seen that? | ||
| I don't think I have actually, no. | ||
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Oh my god, you gotta see it. | |
| I'll have Jamie pull something up. | ||
| It'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. | ||
| So they have vents that go up through the ceiling and then below that they have this like compost pile of leaves. | ||
| This is good, but I'd like to see it. | ||
| There's some images of ones that they've taken. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| So that is amazing. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Subterranean portion of a giant leafcutter ant nest in Brazil. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So what they did is they took this leafcutter ant nest, and we're looking at something that's enormous. | ||
| It's like a small house in terms of the amount of coverage that this colony has. | ||
| And the scientists filled it with cement. | ||
| So I don't know how they did it. | ||
| I don't know how long it took. | ||
| Essentially, 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. | ||
| And it is unbelievably complex and amazing. | ||
| And somehow or another, they... | ||
| They know how to do this. | ||
| And it's not just that they know how to do this, but that all leafcutter ants know how to do this. | ||
| This is not unique to this one individual colony that's figured something out that other ones haven't. | ||
| And there's a series of complex little pods and holes and tunnels. | ||
| And again, they actually have vents. | ||
| They have like an area where the leaves they bring in are fermenting and they go through this process. | ||
| And when you're looking at this, and for the folks that are just listening, these folks are, you know, eight, nine, ten feet down in the ground, digging out these incredibly complex. | ||
| It looks like tunnels that lead into these large pods. | ||
| And it's just wild. | ||
| It's wild to see. | ||
| What causes this incredibly complex construction? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| How are they communicating? | ||
| If they're just communicating through pheromones and odd signals that they're giving off, how do they know how to do this? | ||
| What is this? | ||
| What causes bees to make beehives all over the world? | ||
| Why are they doing that? | ||
| Why is it such an immense structure? | ||
| Why have they figured out the correct way of making these geometric patterns that form the hive itself? | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, so look, these are really difficult scientific questions. | ||
| So, I mean, I guess the orthodox view would be, in some sense, this is just reducible to underlying chemistry, underlying physics. | ||
| I mean, there are experimental scientists who deviate from that norm. | ||
| I'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. | ||
| Rather than reducible to underlying chemistry, underlying physics. | ||
| So I think, I mean, I think there's, this is an ongoing argument I'm having with the physicist Sean Carroll at the moment. | ||
| I think he was on my podcast last week. | ||
| We 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. | ||
| I used to hold that myself, and I don't necessarily deny it now. | ||
| I'm just more agnostic. | ||
| I used to hold that myself because a panpsychist can totally accept that, right? | ||
| A panpsychist can just hold, yeah, everything's reducible. | ||
| The causal dynamics of the world are reducible to physics. | ||
| All that the panpsychist adds is that the causal dynamics of physics are sort of filled out with consciousness. | ||
| But they can agree with Sean Carroll that in terms of like 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. | ||
| For many people, that's an attraction of panpsychism, that you don't need to deny that. | ||
| But actually, the more... | ||
| So, you know, my first academic book... | ||
| Consciousness and fundamental reality, and actually in my popular book, Galileo's Era, I supported that view. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| I 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. | ||
| We know a fair bit about large scale functions in the brain. | ||
| You know, what large bits of the brain do. | ||
| So we know kind of the top and the bottom. | ||
| But what we're almost totally ignorant about is the middle bit is how large scale brain functions are realized at the cellular level. | ||
| How the brain works, right? | ||
| We are, you know, people get very excited with brain scans, but they're very low resolution. | ||
| You know, every pixel on a brain scan corresponds to, I think, 5.5 million neurons. | ||
| You know, we're only 70% of the way through getting a connectome of the maggot brain with its 10,000 or 100,000 neurons, whereas the human brain has 86 billion neurons. | ||
| So I think we'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. | ||
| So maybe, you know, maybe Daniel Picard is right that it's not, that there are these irreducible social networks at the level of mitochondria. | ||
| I think that's just an open question. | ||
| And I think physicists, I think I saw Brian Green making a similar comment on your podcast. | ||
| I think physicists are too quick. | ||
| To have the assumption that, I think an assumption that goes beyond physics itself, which is that all causal dynamics ultimately bottom out at physics. | ||
| I don't think that's a claim of physics. | ||
| I think that's a philosophical claim that goes beyond physics. | ||
| And we just don't know yet. | ||
| I mean, this has implications for free will as well, I think. | ||
| But anyway, I'm talking. | ||
| We know for a fact that the human mind, at least, has reactions to chemicals. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| We know there's so much going on, but to reduce it down to just those chemicals seems silly as well. | ||
| Yeah, so the way I think about consciousness is... | ||
| There's a division of labour here. | ||
| There's an experimental aspect to the science of consciousness, and there's a philosophical aspect. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I'm going to come back to your point in a roundabout way. | ||
| So, I mean, the experimental task is to try and work out what kinds of electrochemical activity go along with what kinds of experience. | ||
| And you do that by asking people how they're feeling while you're scanning the brain. | ||
| That's a really important project, although there are challenges, as we've discussed already. | ||
| But that's important data, but that's not going to get you a full theory of consciousness. | ||
| Because what we ultimately want from a theory of consciousness It's an explanation of why. | ||
| Why do certain kinds of brain activity go along with experience? | ||
| And because consciousness is not publicly observable, that's not a question you can answer with an experiment. | ||
| At 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. | ||
| So, I mean, or at least it's philosophy at the moment. | ||
| You know, philosophy is what you get when the rules of the game are not set. | ||
| I mean, the subtitle of my book is Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. | ||
| I hope that this will, what is now philosophy, will one day be established science. | ||
| You know, once the rules of the game are set, it becomes science. | ||
| But coming back to your point, you know, I guess many people have the intuition, if it's just chemicals... | ||
| That's not quite feelings. | ||
| Feelings and electrochemical activity are somehow not the same thing. | ||
| The panpsychist has a nice way of accommodating that intuition whilst also disagreeing a bit. | ||
| So the panpsychist will say, look, all there is in the brain is physical activity. | ||
| Nothing spooky, nothing supernatural, just physical activity. | ||
| But... | ||
| There's more to the physical than what physical science tells you about. | ||
| Physical science just tells you what matter does, right? | ||
| You know, physics talks about mass and charge, and these properties are completely defined in terms of behavior, you know, attraction, repulsion, resistance to acceleration. | ||
| It's all about what stuff does. | ||
| It's all about mathematically capturing the causal dynamics of the physical world, what Russell called the causal skeleton of the world. | ||
| The idea of the panpsychist is, so physics doesn't tell you what matter is, it just tells you what it does. | ||
| And so there's a kind of hole. | ||
| In our standard scientific story of the universe, and the idea is, well, maybe we can put consciousness in that hole. | ||
| So, 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. | ||
| That's because you're thinking, physical science tells us what chemicals are, but the panpsychist says, no. | ||
| Physical science tells you what chemicals do. | ||
| The question what chemicals are is ultimately answered by the underlying consciousness. | ||
| What'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. | ||
| So if we think about what you are, we think about what it means to be a person, like who are you, Philip? | ||
| If you think of who you are, you are very different if you change your chemical makeup. | ||
| The 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. | ||
| Yeah, but on panpsychism that's not a mystery because matter, its nature is consciousness. | ||
| When people hear about panpsychism, they always interpret it dualistically, like we're saying particles have physical properties and then they have consciousness. | ||
| But that's not the idea. | ||
| The idea is that physical properties like mass spin and charge are forms of consciousness. | ||
| All there is, is consciousness. | ||
| So that you're saying, you know, your brain activity changes your consciousness. | ||
| For the panpsychist, the brain activity just is consciousness. | ||
| Consciousness is all there is. | ||
| So it's not surprising that changing your brain activity changes your consciousness because brain activity just is consciousness. | ||
| Matter is what consciousness does. | ||
| And when Sean Carroll's pushing back against us, what is he saying? | ||
| He's a very smart guy. | ||
| Does any of what he's saying make you pause? | ||
| Imagine if this is all a giant waste of time. | ||
| I've got a huge respect for Sean Carroll, and I think it's reciprocated. | ||
| Because, 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. | ||
| Why are we wasting our time with this? | ||
| But he's really clued up philosophically and takes the time to look at the arguments. | ||
| So, yeah, I've got a lot out of our discussions. | ||
| But I suppose, I mean... | ||
| One issue is... | ||
| So, he wants to say, I'm saying consciousness is not just what matter does. | ||
| Physics just tells us what matter does. | ||
| Consciousness is something more than that. | ||
| Consciousness is what underlies what matter does. | ||
| What fills out the mathematical structure? | ||
| So the way he hears that is he thinks, oh, so consciousness doesn't do anything. | ||
| Because if you took it out and you still had the mathematical structures, everything would behave the same. | ||
| So that just sounds like consciousness doesn't do anything. | ||
| But I think he's just making a philosophical mistake there. | ||
| Because for the panpsychist, the relationship between physics and consciousness is like the relationship between software and hardware. | ||
| So physics is like the software and consciousness is the hardware on which physics runs. | ||
| So maybe, you know, in another possible universe, you could have physics run on different hardware and then you wouldn't have consciousness. | ||
| But that doesn't mean consciousness is not doing anything. | ||
| You know, just because Microsoft Word can run on different computers, it doesn't mean the computer's not doing anything. | ||
| Anyway, that's the debate we've been having for about three months now. | ||
| And so when you and Sean Carroll have this debate, these last for hours. | ||
| And I'm assuming you're essentially doing the same shit you're doing right now in your head. | ||
| Right? | ||
| For a lot of people, this is like, God, it seems almost pointless or impossible to solve. | ||
| And then the idea is like, well, why do you think consciousness isn't everything? | ||
| Like, why even assume that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so look, this is, I mean, why the hell should we take this seriously? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The starting point is I don't think we can explain consciousness in terms of matter. | ||
| I don't think we can explain consciousness in terms of physical science. | ||
| How do I know that? | ||
| It'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. | ||
| If you think about the smell of coffee, the taste of mint, that deep red you experience as you watch a sunset. | ||
| These kinds of qualities Can't be captured in the purely quantitative vocabulary of physical science. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| And, 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. | ||
| Should I talk a bit about that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So, yeah, so this is why I defend in my book, Galileo's Error. | ||
| Really, 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? | ||
| This was the start of mathematical physics. | ||
| What is not discussed much is the philosophical work Galileo had to do to get there, right? | ||
| Because the problem was, Before Galileo, people thought the world, the physical world, was filled with qualities, right? | ||
| So you have colours on the surfaces of objects, smells floating through the air, tastes inside food. | ||
| And this was a problem for Galileo because... | ||
| You can't capture these qualities in the purely quantitative language of mathematics. | ||
| You know, an equation can't capture the redness of a red experience. | ||
| So Galileo got around this. | ||
| So Galileo, you know, he wanted to describe it all in math. | ||
| So Galileo got around this problem by proposing a radically new philosophical theory of reality. | ||
| So we think of Galileo as a great experimental scientist, which he was, but he was also a great philosopher. | ||
| So 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? | ||
| They're in the consciousness of the observer, right? | ||
| So if you're looking at this, is that black? | ||
| You'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. | ||
| Or 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. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| So in Galileo's worldview, there's this radical division in nature between two domains. | ||
| The 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. | ||
| So this is the start of mathematical physics, which has gone incredibly well. | ||
| But I think what we've forgotten is Is that it's gone so well because Galileo gave science this narrow specific focus. | ||
| Galileo essentially said, you know, just put consciousness on one side, just focus on what you can capture in mathematics. | ||
| So this is so important. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| You know, it's explained so much. | ||
| Surely it's going to explain consciousness. | ||
| The irony is it's done so well precisely because it was designed to exclude consciousness. | ||
| So I think if we want to bring consciousness fully into science, We need a new worldview. | ||
| We 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. | ||
| And that's what panpsychism does. | ||
| It gives us a way of bringing this together. | ||
| I still am not getting how Galileo excluded consciousness. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| I do understand that mathematics are what he felt was the underlying building blocks of all things. | ||
| But even if you're talking about how like spicy curry, for example, spicy curry doesn't exist in the curry. | ||
| It exists in the consciousness of someone who eats the curry. | ||
| But it's not really true because there's a chemical reaction. | ||
| We know what the ingredients are in the curry that causes it to have a spicy reaction to the human being that's taking it in. | ||
| It's a very distinct, very definable chemical reaction. | ||
| We know that these plants have excreted these chemicals to discourage predation. | ||
| That's why they're so spicy in the first place. | ||
| We know all these things. | ||
| This is, in a way, mathematics. | ||
| It's mathematics engaging with consciousness. | ||
| Yeah, so look, there's definitely a lot we can do mathematically with the tools of mathematical science. | ||
| Yeah, you can capture the chemical composition of the curry. | ||
| You can capture the changes it makes in your brain. | ||
| But then at some point, the resulting brain activity goes along with the sensation of spiciness. | ||
| That's where the miracle happens. | ||
| But you're recognizing your pain sensors in your tongue, the sensations of taste. | ||
| This is mathematics, right? | ||
| There's certain compounds that cause certain reactions. | ||
| We even attribute genes to those compounds, like the genes for, with some people, cilantro tastes like soap. | ||
| And some people would taste delicious. | ||
| We know for sure that there's a genetic component to that. | ||
| We can actually isolate the very specific genes that cause people to have that reaction. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| You 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. | ||
| I mean, it's sometimes a bit more vivid with color, if you think about it. | ||
| So, I mean, here's another way of putting it, right? | ||
| Suppose I wanted to explain in a neuroscientific theory the redness of a red experience, right? | ||
| Why red experiences have that red quality? | ||
| So, 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. | ||
| And 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? | ||
| You couldn't convey that to him. | ||
| So that's a descriptive limitation, right? | ||
| That 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, my theory would first have to describe that quality and then explain it in terms of underlying physical processes. | ||
| But if the theory can't even describe it, then it can't explain it. | ||
| So I think, in principle, A neuroscientific theory cannot explain the qualities of our experience. | ||
| Galileo 500 years ago realised that and he said, if we want science to be mathematical, we have to take consciousness out of the story. | ||
| And that was a good move, but we've sort of forgotten that that's what we did. | ||
| So now we're in a weird period of history where people think, oh, it's gone so well! | ||
| But 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. | ||
| But what if it's both? | ||
| What if it's both conscious and chemical? | ||
| That seems more likely, right? | ||
| Yeah, but that's essentially the panpsychist view, right? | ||
| But The question is, what comes first? | ||
| So both the panpsychists like myself and the materialists like Sean Carroll, for example, you know, many, many people are materialists. | ||
| We both think, you know, in some sense, consciousness and chemicals go together. | ||
| The question is, which is more fundamental? | ||
| I think that we get physics and chemistry out of consciousness and We don't do it the other way around. | ||
| It's very easy to explain. | ||
| I still don't understand why you think that. | ||
| Because I think So we've got a choice. | ||
| There's three options really, right? | ||
| Here are the three options on consciousness. | ||
| Either consciousness is explained in terms of matter. | ||
| That's the materialist view. | ||
| Or matter is explained in terms of consciousness. | ||
| That's the panpsychist view. | ||
| Or we've got a third option. | ||
| Hold on, break that down again. | ||
| Either consciousness can be explained in terms of the brain. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's the materialist view of, say, Sean Carroll. | ||
| Second option, no, the brain is explained in terms of consciousness. | ||
| That's my view. | ||
| That's the panpsychist view. | ||
| Third option is they're two separate things. | ||
| That's the dualist view. | ||
| The soul is separate from the brain. | ||
| Everything has some sort of component of consciousness. | ||
| Now that's what I don't understand. | ||
| How do you make that leap? | ||
| Because I don't... | ||
| You've got these three choices. | ||
| I basically think the materialist view is incoherent. | ||
| You can't account for the qualities of experience in the purely quantitative language of physical science. | ||
| That's Galileo's insight. | ||
| Aren't the qualities of experience quantitative in and of itself? | ||
| So you can, to an extent, capture the structure in quantitative terms. | ||
| So, like, color experience has a mathematical structure. | ||
| We can analyze it in terms of hue, saturation, lightness, and we can map out a color space in terms of those three dimensions. | ||
| It'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. | ||
| I 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. | ||
| And he talks about this and he says, when he tries to think about colour, He compares it to sound. | ||
| So he thinks of brightness, maybe like loudness. | ||
| And he says he can get some grip on the structure. | ||
| But he says, you know, I'll never fully understand, you know, the redness that underlies that structure. | ||
| Because he's colorblind. | ||
| Because he's colorblind. | ||
| So I'm saying the qualities of experience... | ||
| Can't be totally pinned down in that language. | ||
| But right there in that example, the qualities of his experience can be pinned down to a problem in the structure of his eyes. | ||
| It's chemicals. | ||
| Yeah, we all agree. | ||
| So look, we all agree that the kind of experience you have is dependent on the structure of your brain, right? | ||
| We all agree on that. | ||
| That's... | ||
| But then there's a question is what explains that? | ||
| Is that because the experience is explained in terms of the brain or is it the other way around? | ||
| That's the philosophical question. | ||
| The materialist says the experience is explained in terms of the brain activity. | ||
| I think that doesn't work out. | ||
| I do it the other way around. | ||
| I think it's much more straightforward, at least, to explain the brain activity in terms of the consciousness. | ||
| But the quality of the experience can be explained based on the way the brain works. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| If you add things to the brain, it changes the quality of the experience. | ||
| If you add certain chemicals, certain dopamine, serotonin, you add things to the experience, it literally changes the way you view an interface. | ||
| So, yeah, I agree with what you've just said, which is basically a claim about correlation. | ||
| That certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of experience, right? | ||
| Yes, and certain kinds of chemicals are responsible for certain types of experiences being different. | ||
| I would just say that they go together. | ||
| I would put it more neutrally. | ||
| They always go together. | ||
| And that's a scientific question. | ||
| If you go to a concert and you take acid, you're going to have a very different experience than if you didn't take that acid. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So definitely, certain kinds of chemical activity go along with certain kinds of... | ||
| And that's the scientific question. | ||
| The hard problem of consciousness is, why? | ||
| Why do certain kinds of experience go together with certain kinds of... | ||
| Sorry, certain kinds of brain activity go together with certain kinds of experience. | ||
| And there's two ways of explaining that. | ||
| You explain the experience in terms of the activity, the brain activity, or you explain the brain activity in terms of the experience. | ||
| Or both. | ||
| How would that go? | ||
| Well, 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. | ||
| Both things are interacting. | ||
| It's not as simple as one versus the other. | ||
| Well, I mean, let me put it another way. | ||
| What is there at the fundamental level of reality? | ||
| Right? | ||
| For the materialist, what there is at the fundamental level of reality is just the mathematical structures we find in physics. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what there is. | ||
| I think if that was what our world was like, there would be no consciousness. | ||
| There would be complicated mechanisms. | ||
| But what if consciousness is an essential aspect of the fundamental structure? | ||
| Yeah, well that's the panpsychist view! | ||
| You're a panpsychist! | ||
| But what if it's like mathematics? | ||
| Like the reason why this structure exists is because it enhances the ability for these creatures to procreate and innovate and move things forward. | ||
| That it's an element of life. | ||
| Because life propagates better when it has this consciousness. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| Consciousness 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, like humans create computers. | ||
| But why couldn't you have all of that without experience? | ||
| Why 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. | ||
| Why do you need inner experience? | ||
| Where does experience come into the mix? | ||
| I think if you started with just physics, there'd be no need for experience. | ||
| Experience wouldn't pop up. | ||
| Experience. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| Why would there be no need for experience? | ||
| Can you make sense of the idea of, you know, that... | ||
| I mean, I don't mean... | ||
| I mean, does this make sense to you? | ||
| Commander Data from the next generation. | ||
| Let's say he's made of silicon. | ||
| And let's say for the sake of discussion, silicon things aren't conscious. | ||
| There's no inner life. | ||
| There's nothing that it's like to be Commander Data. | ||
| But if he's complicated enough, he could behave just like us. | ||
| So if silicon creatures somehow evolved, then they would survive just as well as us. | ||
| They would behave in all the same ways even though there was no inner experience. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| Yes, 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. | ||
| So the past experiences are all correlated. | ||
| They'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. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| Yeah, I wonder whether there's a kind of ambiguity in the word experience. | ||
| I 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. | ||
| In some sense, planning for the future. | ||
| We 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. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| Or maybe you think that just doesn't make sense. | ||
| I mean, I guess some people think that just doesn't make sense. | ||
| Well, I think the animal needs motivation, right? | ||
| Without that inner experience, what gives an animal a cause to action? | ||
| I think all the things are connected, whether it's... | ||
| The desire to breathe, the desire for acceptance among the social group and social hierarchies. | ||
| All these things motivate action and innovation. | ||
| They motivate this human creature to continue to do what it does, which is make things. | ||
| Like 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? | ||
| Well, it makes things. | ||
| It makes better things constantly. | ||
| It's never quite satisfied, except on maybe an individual basis, it's never quite satisfied with whatever it's got. | ||
| Whether it's a cell phone or an automobile or a television set or a computer, it's always making a newer and better thing. | ||
| Well, what motivates it to do this? | ||
| Well, there's a series of complex interactions that go on in this thing's mind. | ||
| It has to do with sexuality. | ||
| It has to do with sociality. | ||
| It has to do with the way it interfaces with its neighbors and its peers and how it wants to be judged by strangers. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, 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, that 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. | ||
| But then you can imagine a conversation, another alien says, so are they conscious? | ||
| Do they have inner experience? | ||
| I think they might say, I don't know. | ||
| I can tell you what they do. | ||
| I can tell you the mechanisms that give rise to it. | ||
| But that, you know, in principle, You could have all of that stuff in a complicated enough mechanism. | ||
| But no, there's evidence of the consciousness. | ||
| Like if someone that you love dies, you weep. | ||
| Like if you get excited about something, you jump up. | ||
| If your football team scores, you throw your arms in the air and you cheer. | ||
| Like there's evidence of this consciousness. | ||
| Very easily discernible evidence of it. | ||
| I mean, look, in a sense I agree with you, right? | ||
| Obviously I think it's... | ||
| I do think it is, in a sense, obvious that other people are conscious. | ||
| But, I mean, there is a deep mystery how we know that. | ||
| I mean, we're evolved to... | ||
| Can I have some coffee, by the way? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Is that alright? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, thanks. | ||
| That was a heavy conversation. | ||
| Slightly jet-lagged, but... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks for coming here across the pond, by the way. | |
| Oh, thanks for having me. | ||
| No, it's good to... | ||
| We've been planning this for a couple of years, actually. | ||
| It was going to come just at the start of the pandemic. | ||
| The shit hit the fan. | ||
| I thought, oh, we'll do it in a month or so. | ||
| So we've evolved to... | ||
| What's what cognitive scientists sometimes call theory of mind to make these intuitive judgments about other people's experience, right? | ||
| You know, a baby sees its parents' smile. | ||
| It naturally attributes happiness to the mother. | ||
| You know, you see someone crying, you naturally... | ||
| Actually, 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. | ||
| But he has this argument. | ||
| He calls the, what does he call it, fitness beats truth argument. | ||
| He has this argument that we should expect that our senses... | ||
| Are radically deceiving us about reality. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because our senses have evolved for truth. | ||
| Sorry, the opposite. | ||
| Our senses have evolved for survival, not for truth, right? | ||
| So our senses will make us think what is good for survival, not what is true. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| If 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. | ||
| Can I pause you there? | ||
| What does he mean? | ||
| What does he mean by the senses have evolved for survival and not for truth? | ||
| What examples? | ||
| Well, 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. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| So he thinks the physical world out there It's there, right? | ||
| And it's real, but it's very different to how we experience it. | ||
| What 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. | ||
| Well, if we take things down to the quantum level, that has to be accurate. | ||
| Yeah, I suppose. | ||
| I mean, that's another way of defending this view. | ||
| The fundamental structure of reality looks... | ||
| It's wildly satiric according to contemporary physics. | ||
| The fundamental level is just a kind of vector in high-dimensional Hilbert space. | ||
| Where are the tables and chairs? | ||
| So that's another approach. | ||
| The point I was trying to make is that there is... | ||
| Look, I agree with you that I know you're conscious, but there's a deep philosophical mystery about how I know that and... | ||
| How 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. | ||
| That is a deep mystery. | ||
| And we're looking at consciousness as a thing that assumes that it is conscious. | ||
| I mean, we all are under the agreement that we're conscious. | ||
| We are all conscious. | ||
| We're all just debating and discussing consciousness. | ||
| What if that is just a fundamental aspect of what it means to be this creature that needs to innovate and create things? | ||
| Like, what if that's all it is? | ||
| What 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. | ||
| Like the same way, again, that a beehive is created by these bees with this imperative to create this thing. | ||
| Well, I mean... | ||
| In 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, right? | ||
| The brain tricks us into thinking We have conscious experience, but we don't really... | ||
| So what's the replacement? | ||
| If we don't have conscious experiences, what is happening? | ||
| So I run a podcast with a guy who has this view, right? | ||
| So the gimmick is, you know, I think consciousness is everywhere, and he thinks it's nowhere. | ||
| Oh, no, you're the odd couple. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So we're... | |
| MindChat was sort of, you know, the... | ||
| In the age of polarization, you know, we're trying to bridge divides. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| And I think that's because Galileo designed science to ignore it. | ||
| But we both agree with that. | ||
| So then Keith Frankish, this illusionist guy, his response to it is to say, well, it doesn't really exist. | ||
| You know, it's like magic, fairy dust, you know? | ||
| And then, you know, it's a nice, elegant solution because you don't have to explain something that's not there. | ||
| So he thinks, I mean, he compares it to, like, telekinesis. | ||
| He thinks, you know, when there seems to be telekinesis, there's two responses you can make. | ||
| You can either say... | ||
| It's there and radically rethink your science to accommodate it. | ||
| Or you can say it's not there. | ||
| And then a challenge remains, which is to explain why it seems to be there, you know, explain away apparent cases of telekinesis. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| Why is it so hard to deny the reality of consciousness? | ||
| Because, I mean, there are a lot of these troubling philosophical phenomena that philosophers worry about, like free will. | ||
| How does free will fit into our conventional scientific story? | ||
| Or morality, you know, facts about right and wrong. | ||
| But in all these other cases, it always seems like an option to deny the datum. | ||
| You know, maybe we're not really free in the way we think we are. | ||
| Maybe there aren't really facts about good and bad, right and wrong. | ||
| Maybe that's just our kind of projecting our feelings onto the world. | ||
| But with consciousness... | ||
| It's, you know, it's so hard to deny, you know, that nobody's ever really felt pain. | ||
| Nobody's ever really seen colour. | ||
| You just think you feel pain. | ||
| Actually, so, I mean, Keith is, who I do this podcast, he's slightly ambiguous. | ||
| He wants to say, in a sense, I believe in pain, in a sense, I don't. | ||
| But there's another illusionist, Francois Camilla, Who says, he just says, no one's ever felt pain. | ||
| And he's got a really interesting article exploring how we should think about morality. | ||
| What does that mean, no one's ever felt pain? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| What if somebody kicks his ass? | ||
| What if someone holds that guy down and punches him in the nose until he screams to stop? | ||
| Do you think he's in pain? | ||
| This is an intellectual masturbation exercise. | ||
| Do you understand that? | ||
| Things go too far. | ||
| When 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. | ||
| They said it was, like, violent. | ||
| Oh, because you were explaining something that would be physically painful? | ||
| You got a bad mark for that kind of thinking? | ||
| Yeah, I think my tutor didn't lie. | ||
| I think he thought I was a bit of an obnoxious. | ||
| I probably was when I was 18. Well, you're probably challenging ideas, you know, like you should encourage all young minds to. | ||
| I think your teacher's a piece of shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How about that? | |
| I showed him, I took pictures of my, I don't know, my band, we took our group photos of us, on the toilet, we took photos. | ||
| Anyway, it was... | ||
| He got mad tattooed? | ||
| I mean, it wasn't pornographic, you know, it was from an angle, but we thought it was artistic and a bit silly. | ||
| And he wrote a letter to me saying how inappropriate it was that... | ||
| He sounds boring. | ||
| That guy sounds like I don't want to listen to him about anything. | ||
| Anyway, but look, no, look, I want to disagree. | ||
| Yeah, 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, but he wouldn't really be in pain. | ||
| I mean, it's a coherent position, no? | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| No? | ||
| No. | ||
| Light his feet on fire. | ||
| Hold him down, light his feet on fire. | ||
| He's going to scream in pain. | ||
| And they'll be like, tell me it hurts and I'll stop. | ||
| And they'll go, it hurts. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, you have to get an illusionist in to defend their view. | ||
| It's a nonsense perspective. | ||
| Water is wet. | ||
| But in a way, I've got more respect because I think it's coherent. | ||
| I 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. | ||
| The idea that we really believe in these The qualities, the colours, the sounds, the smells, the tastes. | ||
| But at the same time, that's nothing more than the purely quantitative story of electrochemical signalling. | ||
| I think that's just incoherent. | ||
| Whereas at least these guys are coherent. | ||
| They say, look, all there is in your head is the purely quantitative story of electrochemical signalling. | ||
| And so these qualities you seem to experience, the colours, the sounds, the smells, the tastes... | ||
| They don't really exist. | ||
| So at least they're coherent. | ||
| But they do exist, but they are also a part of this interaction that we have with the electrical chemical environment that we live in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
|
unidentified
|
That could be it too. | |
| You don't have to persuade me that the consciousness exists. | ||
| Or that colors exist, or that sounds exist. | ||
| But I don't... | ||
| You're interfacing with these things. | ||
| I don't think you can explain... | ||
| I don't think you can... | ||
| Reductively, fully account for the taste of coffee or the blueness of a blue experience in terms of a purely quantitative story of electrochemical signalling. | ||
| Because you just can't... | ||
| You can't convey those qualities in that language. | ||
| Well, 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. | ||
| We know that certain chemicals have various reactions in the human mind. | ||
| As 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. | ||
| Different colors. | ||
| Different 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, | ||
| to 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. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think I can agree with pretty much everything you've just said there, but I mean, well, it depends. | ||
| I think there's a bit of an ambiguity. | ||
| It depends if we're just... | ||
| It's a question of correlation or explanation. | ||
| Yeah, I totally agree. | ||
| It's just a fact that certain kinds of chemical structures in the brain correlated with certain kinds of experience. | ||
| But why? | ||
| That's the big mystery. | ||
| That's the hard problem of consciousness. | ||
| Why should they go together? | ||
| Why should the chemical structures go along with An inner world of these subjective qualities rather than just a mechanism doing all the same stuff. | ||
| Well, 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, and that all these... | ||
| Hundreds 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. | ||
| There's clearly a lot of motivation to do those things. | ||
| There's clearly a lot of motivation to innovate, climb the social structure, make friends, form communities, be loved. | ||
| Well, why is that? | ||
| Well, clearly all those things help you procreate and establish your genes and allow them to carry on. | ||
| Yeah, 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? | ||
| Either 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. | ||
| Or you think it's just totally reducible to electrochemical signaling in the brain, right? | ||
| What if it's everything? | ||
| What if it's all those things? | ||
| Yeah, well, so I think the attractive part of psychism is you get the best of both, right? | ||
| You get to say, there's nothing supernatural, there's nothing... | ||
| There's just, you know, in a sense, there's just particles and fields at the fundamental level, right? | ||
| There's nothing... | ||
| I 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, it would have showed up in our physics, right? | ||
| You know, because the standard model of particle physics... | ||
| of their physical properties, mass, spin, charge. | ||
| If there were these extra consciousness properties that would presumably have different predictions, they would behave differently. | ||
| But that's not the view, that's dualism. | ||
| That's the view that consciousness is separate from the physical. | ||
| The panpsychist says, "No, no, there's just particles and fields, just mass, spin and charge." But mass, spin and charge are forms of consciousness. | ||
| All of that mathematical structure you get from physics is realized by consciousness. | ||
| So in a sense, you don't change anything. | ||
| And this is why some people say, well, what's the point of the view? | ||
| But in a sense, if we're just thinking about observable physical science, the evolutionary story... | ||
| What stuff does. | ||
| Basically, I think what physical science is all about is what stuff does. | ||
| And that's really useful information. | ||
| If you know what stuff does, you can manipulate the natural world and you can create technology. | ||
| And I think that's why we're going through a period of history where people think, Oh my god, that's so exciting! | ||
| It's working! | ||
| We've got something that works! | ||
| Because 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. | ||
| You think, oh no, we've got something that works! | ||
| But it works because, from Galileo onwards, it's just focused on this narrow task of what stuff does. | ||
| I sometimes say, like, doing physics is like playing chess when you don't care what the pieces are made of. | ||
| You're just interested in the moves you can make, right? | ||
| And the panpsychist can just say, yeah, that's alright, that's fine. | ||
| But there's this other thing we know to be real, not from observation experiments. | ||
| Consciousness isn't something we discovered in a particle collider. | ||
| It's something we know about just from our immediate awareness. | ||
| If you're in pain, you're just directly aware of your pain. | ||
| And that needs to be fitted into reality. | ||
| What I'm most passionate about... | ||
| And much more than panpsychism is just getting people to see that the reality of consciousness is a hard scientific datum in its own right. | ||
| I think most people have this conception of science. | ||
| You know, what's the task of science? | ||
| To account for the data of observation and experiments. | ||
| Once you've done that, that's job done. | ||
| You can go home. | ||
| I want to say, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| That's important, but there's this other thing... | ||
| Not known about in that way, the reality of conscious experience. | ||
| So we need to expand the task of science. | ||
| It's not about saying science can't explain consciousness. | ||
| It's about saying we need a more expansive conception of science. | ||
| We need a theory that can accommodate both. | ||
| The quantitative data of physical science, what stuff does, but also the reality of conscious experience. | ||
| We need a theory that can accommodate both of those, that can bring together what Galileo separated. | ||
| And I think that's what panpsychism does, that no other theory can really do. | ||
| Is there also a problem just with the term consciousness? | ||
| I mean, is that term not complicated enough for what it means to be conscious? | ||
| Because it seems like it has so many other meanings. | ||
| Consciousness is connected to being unconscious or being knocked unconscious, like being awake, being not awake. | ||
| But it's more than that. | ||
| It's the interaction that this sentient, this aware thing, this life form has with everything around it. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| And that everything is experiencing itself subjectively and constantly. | ||
| All things are moving together. | ||
| So to call this the word consciousness, It's almost like it's too narrow a box for this thought. | ||
| Yeah, I know where you're coming from there. | ||
| I have a problem with students, I think. | ||
| I think people always associated it with something different. | ||
| Some people think of it as self-consciousness. | ||
| Or as you say, in a medical context, someone's conscious if they're awake, right? | ||
| Whereas that's not consciousness in the way... | ||
| Philosophers or scientists of consciousness use it because you can have experiences. | ||
| It's a complex word. | ||
| I 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. | ||
| So I don't know what to do. | ||
| I think we're just kind of stuck with the word now. | ||
| One 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, like particles being in superposition, where they're moving and still at the same time. | ||
| There's certain things that happen under observation That throw all of our assumptions of what reality is out the window. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| How 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? | ||
| And how much of it is out there that we're not tuned into? | ||
| Like, you could wave your hand above an ant colony and they have no idea that you're there. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because it's not really that important for them. | ||
| They're busy. | ||
| They have a limited amount of senses, right? | ||
| We have more senses, but we don't have all of them. | ||
| There'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. | ||
| We 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. | ||
| We can't see it, but we know it's out there, right? | ||
| We don't have that sense, or we don't have the ability. | ||
| Whatever 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. | ||
| Yeah, look, I mean, I think we've all got to accept that reality is weird. | ||
| It's very different to our intuitive sense of how it should be. | ||
| And, 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. | ||
| But, I mean, the motivation for panpsychism is not... | ||
| Capturing our common sense intuitions or something. | ||
| The motivation is there's something real here, pain, seeing, you know, experience that needs to be accommodated. | ||
| But, 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. | ||
| If you think consciousness is just in the domain of neuroscience, then physics is completely irrelevant. | ||
| But if you think consciousness exists at the fundamental level of reality, You know, this might interact with certain questions in fundamental physics. | ||
| So I've been thinking, for example, about... | ||
| So I've got a paper coming out and there's going to be a volume with Oxford University Press on quantum mechanics and consciousness. | ||
| And my paper for that volume is, you know, thinking about... | ||
| We've got these different interpretations of quantum mechanics and... | ||
| As far as we can tell, there's no way to distinguish between them. | ||
| There'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? | ||
| They just get on with the experiments. | ||
| But it could be that certain interpretations of quantum mechanics fit better, say, with a panpsychist theory at the fundamental level. | ||
| Because, 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. | ||
| Now, 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, if you're just starting with a vector, it's hard to see how you can do it. | ||
| I 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, you know, one of the puzzles about quantum mechanics is things are sort of wave-like, some kind of particle-like. | ||
| What Bohm thought was, well, maybe there's waves and particles. | ||
| And then on his interpretation, the wave function kind of pulls the particles around. | ||
| So I'm inclined to think that kind of view fits better with a panpsychist view. | ||
| And so, you know, I mean, I'm not a physicist. | ||
| I'm not even, you know, a fully trained philosopher of physics. | ||
| You know, what I'd love to see is... | ||
| A 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. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| Now, 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. | ||
| Pathway to theoretical progress. | ||
| You know, we haven't really made many huge discoveries in physics since the 70s, you know, I think. | ||
| It's a possible way forward. | ||
| Now, 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, consciousness exists in other things? | ||
| Like, what evidence or what even motivation do you have to make those leaps? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, I guess there could be two questions there. | ||
| One, how the hell do you know it's there? | ||
| You know, what's your justification for this belief? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Another question is, if it is conscious, what the hell is it like? | ||
| You know, what's it like to be a quark or what's it like to be a water molecule, if there is something that's like to be a water molecule? | ||
| I mean, on the first question... | ||
| I would just say that what panpsychism offers us is a... | ||
| So, I mean, it's not something you can demonstrate experimentally just because consciousness is not publicly observable. | ||
| Just as I can't look in your brain and see your feelings, so you can't look in a particle to see whether it has feelings, right? | ||
| You wouldn't... | ||
| Confirm or disconfirm it. | ||
| The motivation of panpsychism is the beautiful, elegant solution it gives to the hard problem of consciousness. | ||
| I think we've been hitting our head against a brick wall for decades now. | ||
| Trying to give a kind of materialist answer to that problem. | ||
| We've got precisely nowhere. | ||
| I 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. | ||
| This is an alternative research program. | ||
| You 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. | ||
| Simpler forms of consciousness that are then postulated to exist as basic aspects of matter. | ||
| So this is an ongoing research program. | ||
| Nobody has a complete theory of consciousness. | ||
| Right, but what's the motivation? | ||
| Solving the hard problem of consciousness. | ||
| But how do you even make the leap to try to attribute consciousness to rocks? | ||
| Right, so whether, look, the panpsychist position is that consciousness is at the fundamental level, right? | ||
| Of everything. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| So if you combine that view with panpsychism, The fundamental forms of consciousness are the ultimate nature of these universe-wide fields. | ||
| And the thing that has those forms of consciousness is the universe itself. | ||
| So this is sometimes called cosmopsychism, the kind of the universe itself. | ||
| But, you know, you needn't think of it as God or something. | ||
| It could be just, you know, a mess that the universe has experienced. | ||
| But it's just so, you know, you might think... | ||
| It's not God, it's a mess. | ||
| It's either God or it's a mess. | ||
| Yeah, that's the truth. | ||
| You 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. | ||
| But, just a mess. | ||
| But back to rocks. | ||
| Yeah, so panpsychists needn't think rocks are conscious. | ||
| But look, it's, you know, I see this as a collaboration between science and philosophy. | ||
| This is partly an empirical question of At higher levels, What kinds of physical activity go along with experience? | ||
| You 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, the physical correlates of consciousness, spelling that theory out in a panpsychist way. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| So 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 liquid as a whole. | ||
| And in a rock, likewise, probably there's more integration in the components of the rock than in the rock as a whole. | ||
| What'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 neurons. | ||
| The way the brain stores information is heavily dependent on its connectivity. | ||
| So if you combine panpsychism with that view, then rocks wouldn't be conscious. | ||
| So it's a collaboration between science and philosophy. | ||
| Panpsychism offers us a broad brushstrokes Account of the kind of approach to solving the hard problem. | ||
| Materialism is a dead end. | ||
| Here's a more promising approach. | ||
| But spelling it out is going to require collaboration with neuroscience, physics as well. | ||
| You 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. | ||
| And, you know, I want to at some point get together a kind of interdisciplinary network. | ||
| Which disciplines or content do you see any connection with their work? | ||
| I had a guy from Jonathan Delafield-Butt, an experimental psychologist. | ||
| So he's one of the contributors to this volume of essays on my book, Galileo's Era. | ||
| So he's spent his career working on... | ||
| Experimental 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. | ||
| So, 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, rather than reducible to underlying chemistry and physics. | ||
| Lee Smolin, who has these ideas of, you know, speculative theoretical physics allowing consciousness to play a fundamental role. | ||
| Yeah, so there are some examples. | ||
| So, 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. | ||
| But I think it's now time to just get on with getting this research program going. | ||
| What research could be done to prove the existence of consciousness? | ||
| In things other than human beings that speak a language that could explain their consciousness to you. | ||
| Like, what can be done to try to quantify this idea? | ||
| And make it so that not only is it taken seriously, but it's doctrine. | ||
| There's something we've got to face up to. | ||
| Which is that... | ||
| I mean, I've said this already, that consciousness is not publicly observable. | ||
| So, you're not... | ||
| People... | ||
| I mean, often the first question when you say about panpsychism, how do you test it? | ||
| You know, what's the... | ||
| I don't think any theory of... | ||
| any philosophical answer to the hard problem can be tested in that sense because consciousness is just not publicly observable. | ||
| And that's uncomfortable, right? | ||
| And that's, I think, why people... | ||
| Who like science, you know, who think of themselves pro-science, might resist this because they think, you know, look, this works! | ||
| You know, public observation experiment, it's got us technology, it's done so well. | ||
| And, 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. | ||
| But it does exist. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| That's what you do in science. | ||
| And it's just that for a theory of consciousness, the data is not just public observation experiment. | ||
| But also the reality of consciousness. | ||
| We need to find the simplest theory that can accommodate both of those things. | ||
| And I think the panpsychist direction of that looks more promising than the alternatives that have kind of got nowhere. | ||
| Out 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? | ||
| Yeah, no, I mean, I've definitely learned a lot. | ||
| You know, I'm still with ongoing discussion about What follows from what we know in physics about... | ||
| I 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. | ||
| A panpsychist can be open-minded on that. | ||
| And so, you know, it's something I... I used to think everything was reducible to physics. | ||
| I'm more agnostic. | ||
| I'm open to going back to that. | ||
| But, yeah, I mean, sometimes... | ||
| Sometimes I would be more open-minded to actually the illusionist position that consciousness doesn't exist. | ||
| You know, I think the regular material position just doesn't make sense. | ||
| So the illusionist position that consciousness doesn't exist is that it's all just down to chemical reactions? | ||
| And that, yeah, no one's ever had experience. | ||
| We 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... | ||
| Brainwashed 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. | ||
| Maybe it's just so ingrained in us we can't not believe it, but maybe it's false. | ||
| Well isn't that where we're headed if we continue down this virtual reality road? | ||
| This is the concept of the matrix, that you will have experiences that are not real. | ||
| But what are experiences? | ||
| If your consciousness is taking these experiences in, are they real? | ||
| Yeah, well, you mean the experience itself? | ||
| Yes, 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, | ||
| that it's so good that it hits all of the various aspects of your sensory perceptions. | ||
| Is that a real experience? | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, I think the... | ||
| Certainly, our relationship as conscious beings to the world around us is going to dramatically change. | ||
| And, you know, we're already increasingly living in a virtual world. | ||
| And that is... | ||
| In some ways as real an environment as the external physical world. | ||
| I don't think that questions the reality of experience itself. | ||
| But one thing that could do is the question of could you upload your consciousness? | ||
| If 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. | ||
| I mean, I'm inclined to think that that would be suicide. | ||
| As a panpsychist, I think of consciousness as the stuff of the brain. | ||
| It's not software, it's the hardware. | ||
| So, if you upload the information in my brain... | ||
| I'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. | ||
| I do worry about that, actually. | ||
| Well 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, there's tissue. | ||
| Inside the tissue is cells. | ||
| Inside those cells is atoms. | ||
| Inside those atoms is subatomic particles. | ||
| As you go deeper and deeper into the structure of what it means to be just a human being, Where does the experience start? | ||
| Does it start at a cellular level? | ||
| Does it start at a structural level? | ||
| Does it start at a level of language and culture? | ||
| Where does the experience start? | ||
| Where can you say, here's where it is? | ||
| Because 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. | ||
| Well, where is the experience? | ||
| So 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. | ||
| Like, it's not... | ||
| If 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. | ||
| So where is it? | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, I think actually you're really making an argument for panpsychism here, Joe, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because... | |
| I think you think that about everything, though. | ||
| No, no, actually, right. | ||
| I mean, it's been... | ||
| Just a slight digression that panpsychism, you know, has gone from being a view that kind of nobody took seriously to being, you know... | ||
| Still a minority view, but pretty well respected. | ||
| And this kind of annoyed certain people in the field. | ||
| But 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. | ||
| And 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! | ||
| It's like, you know, it's like, I don't know, Richard Dawkins becoming a Christian or something. | ||
| Really? | ||
| But his motivation actually is... | ||
| Difficult to do with evolution and difficulties making sense of where... | ||
| I 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? | ||
| Now, with most properties, there's going to be a fuzzy boundary, right? | ||
| So like you think, I don't know, where does life emerge? | ||
| Maybe there's a fuzzy boundary, you know, where it's like... | ||
| I think most concepts admit of these fuzzy boundaries like, you know, whether someone is bald or not. | ||
| Some people are definitely bald. | ||
| Some people are definitely not bald. | ||
| I'm a kind of borderline case. | ||
| I'm kind of thin and, you know, life. | ||
| Maybe there could be, maybe there was a time in evolutionary history. | ||
| Is it life? | ||
| Is it not life? | ||
| With consciousness. | ||
| That's hard to make sense of. | ||
| It's hard to make sense. | ||
| Could there be something where there was no fact of the matter as to whether it had experience or not? | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| There's levels of that consciousness? | ||
| Like, maybe... | ||
| Maybe it's quantifiable, just like everything else. | ||
| Like there's weight. | ||
| There's a difference in the weight of this glass of water versus the weight of a giant basin filled with water. | ||
| There's more water in it. | ||
| Maybe there's a difference between the consciousness of a sloth and the consciousness of a wolf. | ||
| Which is a highly intelligent animal that operates in packs and has some sort of nonverbal communication. | ||
| It would require some sort of a more complex consciousness. | ||
| Something that's slow and seemingly dumb. | ||
| Yeah, I think I agree with that. | ||
| There's something that's gradable here. | ||
| You can have more complicated consciousness. | ||
| You can have more sophisticated consciousness. | ||
| If you're kind of waking up groggy, you can have kind of... | ||
| Tuned out consciousness. | ||
| So there's things that are gradation, but this still seems to be the case, and I don't know, I'd like to know if you agree with this. | ||
| Something either has experience or it doesn't. | ||
| There's either something that it's like to be it, or I can't make sense of the idea. | ||
| So let's say, I mean, let's take snails, right? | ||
| Let's say... | ||
| There's no fact of the matter about whether they have experience or not. | ||
| I just can't make sense of that. | ||
| Either there's something that it's like to be a snail, or there's nothing that it's like to be a snail. | ||
| But maybe it's just the amount of information that's coming to it, the amount of experience it's having. | ||
| Like, here's the difference. | ||
| If 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. | ||
| You still have an experience. | ||
| It's a very distant experience and it's not quite as potent. | ||
| So we're talking about levels and gradations within the category of experience. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But could there be a creature, maybe a snail? | ||
| Some people want to say this about snails. | ||
| It doesn't have any experience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| I can make sense of that. | ||
| I can make sense that a snail is just a mechanism. | ||
| I can make sense that a snail has consciousness. | ||
| What I can't make sense of is that there's no fact of the matter. | ||
| Just like I'm kind of... | ||
| I'm a middle, fuzzy line, borderline case. | ||
| I can't make sense of that in the case of consciousness, that it's sort of neither definitely has nor definitely lacks experience. | ||
| It either has experience or it doesn't. | ||
| Maybe it just lacks the ability to process it. | ||
| Is experience and your ability to process it, are they mutually exclusive? | ||
| Are they the same thing? | ||
| Just because you're having experience... | ||
| I'd say they're different things. | ||
| I think, you know, like a newborn baby. | ||
| Actually, 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. | ||
| A guy called Peter Carruthers, he's a really good philosopher, totally disagree with. | ||
| He thinks babies don't have consciousness. | ||
| What? | ||
| Does he have babies? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Find out if he has babies. | ||
| I think he thinks babies don't have consciousness. | ||
| I bet his wife's mad at him if he has a kid. | ||
| I think he thinks they don't have consciousness, but he sort of thinks consciousness doesn't matter anyway, so... | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| It doesn't matter in what way. | ||
| He's interesting. | ||
| I love... | ||
| I really like engaging with people like this guy I do the podcast. | ||
| I totally disagree with and I love to try and get in their mindset, try and look out of their eyes. | ||
| I really enjoy doing that. | ||
| It's just great when you can, again, coming back to Sean Carroll, engage with someone's worldview in a respectful way. | ||
| But what were we talking about? | ||
| I think that's been a move to think more things are conscious. | ||
| Most people used to think fish weren't conscious and babies weren't conscious. | ||
| I think the dominant view now would be both fish and babies are conscious. | ||
| People are still a bit skeptical of particles. | ||
| How can people think that babies aren't conscious? | ||
| That's someone who doesn't have any experience with babies. | ||
| Babies look at you and they react to things, they laugh. | ||
| Maybe it's just a mechanism. | ||
| Mechanism? | ||
| Then maybe you're just a mechanism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're just a mechanism. | |
| Why assume that as you get more complex that it's not just a mechanism? | ||
| I 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? | ||
| Well, one theory says they do, the higher order thought theory of consciousness. | ||
| That says that to have an experience essentially involves reflecting upon it and being aware of it. | ||
| And if you can't reflect upon it, you don't really have experience. | ||
| So if you just get wrapped up in... | ||
| That 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. | ||
| Well, it's developing, just like a baby has motion, but it can't run, right? | ||
| It's developing. | ||
| It's part of the reason why they're born immature, right? | ||
| Their heads are so big. | ||
| It's the only way you can really viably have a woman carry a child. | ||
| The baby has to come out when it's not quite cooked. | ||
| Yeah, and they can't do anything for such a long time. | ||
| I've got young children. | ||
| They can't do anything, can they? | ||
| It's a bloody nightmare. | ||
| Lots of fun, though. | ||
| But it's fascinating. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| You learn so much about just human life in general when you watch them develop and grow. | ||
| It's like, oh, this is fascinating to see all these little pieces fall into place and mature and solidify. | ||
| Yeah, so look, the question, you know, Where on this gradual train of complexity and development and evolution does experience suddenly switch on? | ||
| I think if you're not a panpsychist, you've just got to say... | ||
| There's this moment when it suddenly switches on and it's going to look really arbitrary. | ||
| It's going to look, you know, if it suddenly switches on, that's going to look really... | ||
| Why was it just there? | ||
| Whereas 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... | ||
| Cognitive development and evolution in the broader screen of things mould that simple forms of consciousness into more complex forms. | ||
| So it's a beautiful, elegant, naturalistic view of the world. | ||
| Lost my train of thought there, but yeah. | ||
| Do 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? | ||
| I believe it was Rupert Sheldrake had this idea that everything has some kind of memory, like a form of memory. | ||
| Yeah, I've had... | ||
| I'm friends with Rupert, actually. | ||
| We had... | ||
| A long, interesting discussion recently walking through London. | ||
| Look, I... He's got very strange ideas, like the morphic resonance theory. | ||
| Yeah, he's an interesting guy, and he makes his case review. | ||
| And look, I suppose these are scientific empirical questions. | ||
| And, you know, I... I guess he's going wildly against the dominant view, right? | ||
| But 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. | ||
| That could be true. | ||
| I, you know, I just don't know. | ||
| I don't, I don't, it's not my area of expertise to evaluate that sort of data. | ||
| I mean, maybe I should put in the time to work out the data. | ||
| I mean, you know, there's a spectrum here. | ||
| Like 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. | ||
| That's fairly radical in itself. | ||
| I'm much more open-minded about that possibility. | ||
| But Rupert, I mean, I just don't know. | ||
| I think... | ||
| I'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. | ||
| So that's, as a philosopher, I feel confident about saying that. | ||
| But the reality of, you know, these unorthodox phenomena, I just don't know. | ||
| I'm fascinated by it. | ||
| I am as well, but there's certain people that I respect that have They have experiences in places. | ||
| Here's an example. | ||
| My father was in Gettysburg. | ||
| He went to Gettysburg. | ||
| They were just sightseeing. | ||
| They went on this tour. | ||
| And he said, you could feel the sadness and the loss in the area. | ||
| It's a place where there was a great war. | ||
| And so on this battlefield, he said it was the strangest thing, that you could feel the loss. | ||
| Like you could feel something horrible had happened there. | ||
| And this is hundreds of years ago, right? | ||
| So 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or a memory of that experience. | ||
| Like maybe the area had consciousness. | ||
| If 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. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, 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... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, I mean, it's difficult to exactly pin that down. | ||
| I mean, I suppose, I mean, the closest I've had to... | ||
| These kind of very strange experiences. | ||
| A 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. | ||
| Like you thought about them were something special? | ||
| For 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. | ||
| But, you know, I mean, look, let me be totally clear. | ||
| Let me be totally clear. | ||
| I'm not saying that proves anything. | ||
| You know, I guess the opposing explanation is, you know, maybe I did think about him a lot and I didn't notice. | ||
| That's the standard explanation. | ||
| And then Rupert Sheldrake says, well, he's tested that and he's controlled for that, you know, and I don't know. | ||
| So here's what I think, actually. | ||
| Here's what I... I think people focus too much on the dichotomy of, do you believe or do you not believe? | ||
| Do you take this seriously or do you not seriously? | ||
| So, 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... | ||
| No, it's bullshit. | ||
| It's just something in my brain. | ||
| But look, there are possibilities in between that you can engage with an experience. | ||
| You can take seriously the possibility that it corresponds to something real. | ||
| I 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... | ||
| Greater reality or point to it all. | ||
| Now, 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. | ||
| So, you know, you can have that kind of engaged agnostic position rather than just What's your decision? | ||
| Is it bullshit or is it real? | ||
| It's a possibility. | ||
| You can work, you can engage with your certain spiritual... | ||
| Because if you think that things have consciousness, that consciousness is an underlying property of matter, of life itself, of everything... | ||
| Then something about consciousness must be the retaining of experiences that take place within that consciousness. | ||
| Unless consciousness is always completely in the moment with no knowledge about the past and no thought about the future. | ||
| And that's not consciousness as we recognize it. | ||
| Consciousness is a certain amount of awareness, right? | ||
| So if everything is consciousness, including environments, why wouldn't something retain a memory? | ||
| Yeah, I was interviewed on a podcast of a really interesting guy. | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| Is it the Waking Cosmos podcast? | ||
| I think he takes seriously the possibility of telepathy on empirical grounds. | ||
| But he's a really, like Rupert Sheldrake, he can make his case. | ||
| And he had me on and, you know, he wanted to say, you know, panpsychism fits better with telepathy or something. | ||
| But I think maybe I disappointed him. | ||
| I'm not sure, actually. | ||
| I think you could be a materialist and think there's some non-local connection between brains that passes information. | ||
| I mean, it's an empirical question. | ||
| I'm not saying I believe that, but it's... | ||
| It's not obvious to me you'd have to be a panpsych. | ||
| I mean, some people say then, okay, what about quantum entanglement? | ||
| You 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. | ||
| Problem with that is... | ||
| You can't pass a signal with quantum entanglement. | ||
| So, you know, that doesn't show the possibility of something like telepathy. | ||
| But, 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. | ||
| It could turn out that there's, you know, all the kind of... | ||
| And this is maybe a disagreement I have with Rupert Sheldrake, actually. | ||
| I don't see why a materialist couldn't... | ||
| Necessarily accommodate these phenomena. | ||
| So one thing Rupert Sheldrake believes in is you can tell when someone's looking at you. | ||
| And he thinks he's, you know, he's demonstrated this. | ||
| But... | ||
| There's a lot of critiques of that. | ||
| And then he thinks... | ||
| Like, I don't know. | ||
| I just... | ||
| I'm a philosopher. | ||
| I haven't looked at the data. | ||
| That's not my skill set. | ||
| But then he explains that by saying, you know, the consciousness reaches out. | ||
| But, you know, outside of your head and touches the person. | ||
| I mean, not literally. | ||
| But... | ||
| Why 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? | ||
| So, yeah, I actually think, you know, look, these are just the scientific questions and there's philosophical questions. | ||
| The philosophical question, how do we solve the hard problem of consciousness? | ||
| Scientific 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. | ||
| They don't believe in any kind of transcendent reality. | ||
| They just believe in feelings, pain, seeing red. | ||
| You know, that's obviously real, and they don't think a conventional scientific approach can account for it. | ||
| So, you know, panpsychism, I don't think... | ||
| It has to be wrapped up in any spiritual or psychic phenomena or so on. | ||
| Although, having said that, I suppose if, for independent reasons... | ||
| You were motivated to adopt some kind of spiritual conception of reality. | ||
| I suppose a panpsychist worldview is a little bit more consonant with that. | ||
| So 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? | ||
| If you're a materialist, you've got to think that's a delusion, right? | ||
| Because what's at the fundamental level is just physics and that's inconsistent. | ||
| That doesn't have this higher form of consciousness. | ||
| If you're a panpsychist and you already think There's consciousness at the fundamental level of reality. | ||
| You 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. | ||
| But, you know... | ||
| That doesn't mean you should trust mystical experiences. | ||
| That's a difficult question. | ||
| It just removes the reason to doubt them, I suppose. | ||
| Here's my last question to you. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| If this is a real thing, how will it be proven and what will change once it is proven? | ||
| Panpsychism. | ||
| Oh, I thought you were talking about the cup. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm just holding the cup. | ||
| I thought you were like, is this real? | ||
| No, sorry. | ||
| I'm just swirling it around. | ||
| If you can prove that things do have consciousness, what will change? | ||
| And how will you prove it? | ||
| So yeah, this isn't just an abstract theoretical question. | ||
| Consciousness is at the root of human identity. | ||
| Fundamentally, we relate to each other as beings with feelings and experiences. | ||
| Consciousness is arguably the source of everything that matters in life. | ||
| And yet I would argue that our official scientific worldview is inconsistent with the reality of consciousness. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| And I think this can lead to a deep sense of alienation, you know, a sense we don't fit into the world. | ||
| We lack a framework for making sense of the meaning and purpose of our lives. | ||
| And I think in the absence of that, people turn to other ways of making sense of the meaning of their lives, you know, consumerism, nationalism, fundamentalist religion. | ||
| So I think what panpsychism offers us is a worldview that can accommodate both the quantitative data of physical science and the qualitative reality of human consciousness. | ||
| So I think it's deeply important. | ||
| How will we prove it? | ||
| We 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. | ||
| With consciousness just by doing experiments. | ||
| People used to respond to that in the 20th century by saying, it doesn't exist. | ||
| It's weird, spooky, it doesn't exist. | ||
| Since the 90s, people now say, no, consciousness obviously exists. | ||
| We've got this hard problem. | ||
| But I think people are still in the mindset of thinking, oh, we just need to do more neuroscience and we'll solve it. | ||
| I think people need to grasp the philosophical underpinnings, the problems that arise. | ||
| From the fact that there's something we know to be real that's not publicly observable. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| I think once we're at that point, I think consciousness is just sort of the... | ||
| Sorry, panpsychism is just sort of the obvious choice. | ||
| So it's more getting... | ||
| I 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. | ||
| But if you religiously follow that through, you wouldn't believe in consciousness. | ||
| Because consciousness is not known about in that way. | ||
| We didn't discover it looking for a microscope. | ||
| We know about it in a very different way, just through our awareness of our feelings and experiences. | ||
| So we're in a confused state. | ||
| Humans always think that at the end of history, but at the moment we're in a confused state. | ||
| We need to move to a position where we take the datum of consciousness as a fundamental explanatory obligation. | ||
| I think when we get there I think panpsychism will just seem the obvious answer. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, thank you very much. | ||
| This has been a very interesting and brain-bending conversation. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| You've got me thinking, actually. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I will think some more. | |
| That's kind of my job, so that's inevitable. | ||
| That is your job. | ||
| Thank you very much, Philip. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Appreciate you. | |
| Thank you. |
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