I believe our official scientific worldview is incompatible with the reality of consciousness.

Do you think we're living in a simulation?

We could be in the matrix. This could be a very vivid dream.

There's going to be a few people that are now visualizing a pink elephant.

A hamster has consciousness.

Except for cats who are evil automatons that are void of consciousness.

Consciousness is the basis of moral value, moral concern.

Do you think there will be a time in like 20, 30, 50 years when we're not morally okay turning off the power to a robot?

The following is a conversation with Philip Goff,

philosopher specializing in the philosophy of mind and consciousness.

He is a panpsychist which means he believes that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature

of physical reality of all matter in the universe.

He is the author of Galileo's Error, Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness,

and is the host of an excellent podcast called Mind Chat.

This is the Lex Friedman podcast.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now here's my conversation with Philip Goff.

I opened my second podcast conversation with Elon Musk.

With a question about consciousness and panpsychism.

The question was, quote, does consciousness permeate all matter?

I don't know why I opened the conversation this way.

He looked at me like what the hell is this guy talking about?

So he said no, because we wouldn't be able to tell if it did or not.

So it's outside the realm of the scientific method.

Do you agree or disagree with Elon Musk's answer?

I disagree. I guess I do think consciousness pervades matter.

In fact, I think consciousness is the ultimate nature of matter.

So as for whether it's outside of the scientific method,

I think there's a fundamental challenge at the heart of the science of consciousness

that we need to face up to, which is that consciousness is not the ultimate nature.

It is not publicly observable.

I can't look inside your head and see your feelings and experiences.

We know about consciousness not from doing experiments or public observation.

We just know about it from our immediate awareness of our feelings and experiences.

So it's qualitative.

Not quantitative, as you talk about.

Yeah, that's another aspect of it.

So there are a couple of reasons consciousness I think is not susceptible to the standard

or not fully susceptible to the standard scientific approach.

One reason you've just raised is that it's qualitative rather than quantitative.

Another reason is it's not publicly observable.

So I mean, science is used to dealing with unobservables, right?

Fundamental particles, quantum wave functions, other universes, none of these things are.

They are observable, but there's an important difference.

With all these things, we postulate unobservables in order to explain what we can observe, right?

In the whole of science, that's how it works.

In the case of consciousness, in the unique case of consciousness,

the thing we are trying to explain is not publicly observable.

And that is utterly unique.

If we want to fully bring science into consciousness,

we need a more expansive conception of the scientific method.

So it doesn't mean we can't explain consciousness scientifically,

but we need to rethink what science is.

What do you mean publicly, the word publicly observable?

Is there something interesting to be said about the word publicly?

I suppose versus privately.

Yeah, it's tricky to define, but I suppose the data of physics are available to anybody.

If there were aliens who visited us from another planet,

maybe they'd have very different sense organs.

Maybe they'd struggle to understand our art or our music.

But if they were intelligent enough to do mathematics, they could understand our physics.

They could look at the data of our experiments.

They could run the experiments themselves.

Whereas consciousness, is it observable?

Is it not observable?

In a sense, it's observable.

As you say, we could say it's privately observable.

I am directly aware of my own feelings and experiences.

If I'm in pain, it's just right there for me.

My pain is just totally directly evident to me.

But you from the outside cannot directly access my pain.

You can access my pain behavior, or you can ask me,

but you can't access my pain in the way that I can access my pain.

So I think that's a distinction.

It might be difficult to totally pin it down how we define those things,

but I think there's a fairly clear and very important difference there.

So you think there's a kind of direct observation that you're able to do of your pain that I'm not.

So my observation, all the ways in which I can sneak up to observing your pain,

is indirect versus yours is direct.

Can you play devil's advocate?

Is it possible for me to get closer and closer and closer

to being able to observe your pain, like all the subjective experiences,

yours in the way that you do?

Yeah, I mean, of course, it's not that we observe behavior, and then we make an inference.

We are hardwired to instinctively interpret smiles as happiness, crying as sadness,

and as we get to know someone, we find it very easy to adopt their perspective,

get into their shoes, but strictly speaking, all we have perceptual access to is someone's behavior.

And if you were just strictly speaking, if you were trying to explain someone's behavior,

those aspects that are publicly observable, I don't think you'd ever have recourse to

attribute consciousness.

You could just postulate some kind of mechanism if you were just trying to explain the behavior.

So someone like Daniel Dennett is very consistent on this.

So I think for most people, what science is in the business of is explaining the data of public

observation experiment.

If you religiously followed that, you would not postulate consciousness,

because it's not a datum that's known about in that way.

And Daniel Dennett is really consistent on this.

He thinks my consciousness cannot be empirically verified, and therefore it doesn't exist.

Dennett is consistent on this.

I think I'm consistent on this, but I think a lot of people have a slightly confused

middle way position on this.

On the one hand, they think the business of science is just to account for public

observation experiment, but on the other hand, they also believe in consciousness without

appreciating, I think, that that implies that there is another datum over and above the data

of public observation experiments, namely just the reality of feelings and experiences.

As we walk along this conversation, you keep opening doors that I don't want to walk into,

and I will, but I want to try to stay kind of focused.

So you mentioned Daniel Dennett, let's lay it out, since he sticks to his story,

pun unintended, and then you stick to yours.

What is your story?

What is your theory of consciousness versus his?

Can you clarify his position?

So my view, I defend the view known as panpsychism, which is the view that

consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.

So it doesn't literally mean that everything is conscious, despite the meaning of the word,

pan, everything, psyche, mind, so literally, that means everything has mind.

But the typical commitment of the panpsychist is that the fundamental building blocks of reality,

maybe fundamental particles like electrons and quarks, have incredibly simple forms of

experience, and that the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow rooted

in or derived from this much more simple consciousness at the level of fundamental physics.

So I mean, that's a theory that I would justify on the grounds that it can account for this

datum of consciousness that we are immediately aware of in our experience,

in a way that I don't think other theories can.

If you asked me to contrast that to Daniel Dennett, I think he would just say there is no such datum.

Dennett says the data for science of consciousness is what he calls heterophenomenology,

which is specifically defined as what we can access from the third person perspective,

including what people say, but crucially, we're not treating what they say.

We're not relying on their testimony as evidence for some unobservable

realm of feelings and experiences. We're just treating what they say as a datum of public

observation experiments that we can account for in terms of underlying mechanisms.

But I feel like there's a deeper view of what consciousness is.

So you have a very clear, and we'll talk quite a bit about panpsychism.

We have a clear view of what, almost like a physics view of consciousness.

He, I think, has a kind of view that consciousness is almost the side effect

of this massively parallel computation system going on in our brain.

The brain has a model of the world, and it's taking in perceptions,

and it's constantly weaving multiple stories about that world that's integrating the new

perceptions and the multiple stories, or somehow it's like a Google Doc collaborative editing.

And that collaborative editing is the actual experience of what we think of as consciousness.

Somehow the editing is consciousness of this story.

I mean, that's a theory of consciousness, isn't it?

And the narrative theory of consciousness, or the multiple versions editing, collaborative editing

of a narrative theory of consciousness.

Yeah, he calls it the multiple drafts model.

Incidentally, there's a very interesting paper just come out by very good philosopher,

Luke Rolofs, defending a panpsychist version of Dennett's multiple drafts model.

Like a deeper turtle that that Rolofs stack on top of.

Just the difference being that this is Luke Rolofs view, all of the drafts are conscious.

So I guess for Dennett, there's sort of no fact of the matter about which of these drafts

is the correct one. On Rolofs view, maybe there's no fact of the matter about which

of these drafts is my consciousness, but nonetheless, all the drafts correspond to some

consciousness. And I mean, it just sounds kind of funny. I guess I think he calls it Dennettian

panpsychism. But Luke is one of the most rigorous and serious philosophers alive at the moment,

I think. And I hate having Luke Rolofs in an audience if I'm giving a talk, because he always

cuts straight to the weakness in your position that you hadn't thought of.

And so it's nice, panpsychism is sometimes associated with fluffy thinking, but contemporary

panpsychists have come out of this tradition we call analytic philosophy, which is rooted in

detailed, rigorous argumentation, and it is defended in that manner.

Yeah, those analytic philosophers are sticklers for terminology. It's very fun, very fun group to

talk shit with. Yeah, well, I mean, it gets boring if you just start and then defining words,

right? Yeah. I think starting with defining words is good. Actually, the philosopher Derek

Parfit said when he first was thinking about philosophy, he went to a talk in analytic

philosophy, and he went to a talk in continental philosophy. And he decided that the problem

with the continental philosophy, if it was really on rigorous, really imprecise, the problem with

the analytic philosophy is it was just not about anything important. And he thought there was more

chance of working within analytic philosophy and asking some more meaningful, some more profound

questions than there was in working continental philosophy and making it more rigorous. Now,

they're both horrific stereotypes, and I don't want to get nasty emails from either of these groups,

but there's something to what he was saying. I think just a tiny tangent on terminology. I do

think that there's a lot of deep insight to be discovered by just asking questions, what do we

mean by this word? I remember I was taking a course on algorithms and data structures in computer

science. And the instructor, shout out to him, Ali Shekafande, amazing professor. And remember,

he asked some basic questions like, what is an algorithm? The pressure of pushing students to

answer to think deeply. You just woke up, hungover in college or whatever, and you're tasked with

answering some deep philosophical question about what is an algorithm. These basic questions,

and they sound very simple, but they're actually very difficult. And one of the things I really

value in conversation is asking these dumb, simple questions of like, what is intelligence?

And just continually asking that question over and over of some of the biggest researchers in

the artificial intelligence computer science space. It's actually very useful. At the same time,

it should start a terminology and then progress where you say, ah, fuck it. We'll just assume

we know what we mean by that. Otherwise, you get the Bill Clinton situation where it's like,

what is the meaning of is, is whatever he said. It's like, hey, man, did you do the sex stuff or

not? Yeah. So there's, you have to both be able to talk about the sex stuff and the meaning of the

word is with consciousness, because we don't currently understand, you know, very much

terminology discussions are very important. Because it's like, you're almost trying to sneak

up to some deep insight by just discussing some basic terminology, you know, like what is consciousness

or even defining the different aspects of panpsychism is fascinating. But just to linger on the

um, the Daniel Dennett thing. What do you think about narrative, sort of the mind constructing

narratives for ourselves? So there's nothing special about consciousness deeply. It is some

property of the human mind that's just is able to tell these pretty stories that we experience

as consciousness and that it's unique, perhaps to the human mind, which is, I suppose, what Daniel

Dennett would argue that it's either deeply unique or mostly unique to the human mind.

It's just on the question of terminology before, right? Yeah. So I think it used to be

the fashion among philosophers that we had to come up with utterly precise necessary and

sufficient conditions for each word. And then I think, I think this has gone out of fashion a bit

partly because it's just been, you know, such a failure. The word knowledge in particular,

people used to define knowledge as true justified belief. And then this guy, Gettier, had this very

short paper where he just produced some pretty conclusive counter examples to that. I think,

you know, he wrote very few papers, but this is just, you know, you have to teach this on a,

on an undergraduate philosophy course. And then after that, you had a huge literature of people

trying to address this and propose a new definition, but then someone else would come out with

counter examples, and then they get a new definition of knowledge and counter examples,

and it just went on and on and never seemed to get anywhere. So I think the thought now is,

let's work out how precise we need to be for what we're trying to do. And I think that's a

healthier attitude. So precision is important, but you just need to work out how precise do we need

to be for these purposes. Coming to Dennett and narrative theories. I mean, I think,

I think narrative theories are a plausible contender for a theory of the self,

theory of my identity over time. What makes me the same person in some sense today as I was

20 years ago weren't given that I've changed so much physically and psychologically. One running

contender is something connected to the kind of stories we tell about ourselves, or maybe

some story about the psychological, the chains of psychological continuity. I'm not saying I accept

such a theory, but it's plausible. I don't think these theories are good as theories of consciousness,

at least if we're taking consciousness just to be subjective experience, pleasure, pain,

seeing, color, hearing, sound. I think a hamster has consciousness in that sense. There's something

that it's like to be a hamster. It feels pain if you stand on it, if you're cruel enough to do it.

I don't know why I gave that. People always give, I don't know, philosophers give these very violent

examples to get the cross consciousness. I don't know why that's coming about, but anyway.

You say mean things to the hamster. It experiences pain, it experiences pleasure, joy.

But there's some limits to that experience of a hamster, but there is nevertheless the

presence of a subjective experience. Yeah. Consciousness is just something,

because it's a very ambiguous word, but if we're just using it to mean some kind of experience,

some kind of inner life, that is pretty widespread in the animal kingdom.

Bit difficult to say where it stops, where it starts, but you certainly don't need

something as sophisticated as the capacity to self consciously tell stories about yourself to be,

to just have experience. Except for cats who are evil automatons that are void of consciousness.

They're the fingertips of the devil. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I was taking that as

red. I mean, Descartes thought animals were mechanisms. And humans are unique. So the animals

are robots essentially in the formulation of Descartes and humans are unique. So in which

way would you say humans are unique versus even our closest ancestors? Is there something special

about humans? What is in your view under the panpsychism, I guess we're walking backwards,

because we'll have the big picture conversation about what is panpsychism. But given your kind

of broad theory of consciousness, what's unique about humans, do you think?

As a panpsychist, there is a great continuity between humans and the rest of the universe.

There's nothing that special about human consciousness. It's just a highly evolved form

of what exists throughout the universe. So we're very much continuous with the rest of

the physical universe. What is unique about human beings? I suppose the capacity to

reflect on our conscious experience, plan for the future. The capacity, I would say, to respond to

reasons as well. Animals in some sense have motivations, but when a human being makes a

decision, they're responding to what philosophers call normative considerations. If you're saying,

should I take this job in the US? You weigh it up, you say, well, I'll get more money,

I'll have maybe a better quality of life, but if I stay in the UK, I'll be closer to family,

and you weigh up these considerations. I'm not sure any nonhuman animals quite respond

to considerations of value in that way. I might be reflecting here that I'm something of an

objectivist about value. I think there are objective facts about what we have reason to do

and what we have reason to believe. And humans have access to those facts.

And humans have access to them and can respond to them. That's a controversial claim. Many of my

puns like his brethren might not... They would say the hamster too can look up to the stars and

ponder theoretical physics. Maybe not, but I think it depends what you think about value. If you have

a more humane picture of value, by which I mean relating to the philosopher David Hume, who said

that reason is the slave of the passions. Really, we just have motivations, and what we have reason

to do arises from our motivations. I'm not a Hume, and I think there are objective facts about what

we have reason to do. And I think we have access to them. I don't think any nonhuman animal

has access to objective facts about what they have reason to do, what they have reason to

believe. They don't weigh up evidence. The reason is a slave of the passions.

That was David Hume's view. Yeah. Do you want to know my problem with Hume's? I had a radical

conversion. This might not be connected to puns like him, but I had a radical conversion. I used

to have a more humane view when I was a graduate student, but I was persuaded by some professors

at the University of Reading where I was, that if you have the humane view, you have to say,

any basic life goals are equal, equally valid. For example, let's take someone whose basic goal

in life is counting blades of grass. Crucially, they don't enjoy it. This is the crucial part.

They get no pleasure from it. That's just their basic goal, to spend their life counting as many

blades of grass as possible, not for some greater goal. That's just their basic goal.

I want to say that that is objectively stupid. That is objectively pointless. I shouldn't say

stupid, but it's objectively pointless in a way that pursuing pleasure or pursuing someone else's

pleasure or pursuing scientific inquiry is not pointless. As soon as you make that admission,

you're not a follower of David Hume anymore. You think there are objective facts about what

goals are worth pursuing. Is it possible to have a goal without pleasure? This idea that you disjointed

the two. David Foster Wallace's idea of the key to life is to be unboreable. Isn't it possible to

discover the pleasure in everything in life? The counting of the blades of grass. Once you see the

mastery, the skill of it, you can discover the pleasure. Therefore, I guess what I'm asking is

why and when and how did you lose the romance in grad school of life? Is that what you're trying to

say? Well, I think it may or may not be true that it's possible to find pleasure in everything,

but I think it's also true that people don't act solely for pleasure and they certainly

don't act solely for their own pleasure. People will suffer for things they think are worthwhile.

I might suffer for some scientific cause for finding out a cure for the pandemic. In terms

of my own pleasure, I might have less pleasure in doing that, but I think it's worthwhile. It's

a worthwhile thing to do. I just don't think it's the case that everything we do is rooted in

maximizing our own pleasure. I don't think that's even psychologically plausible.

But pleasure, then that's a narrow view of pleasure. That's like a short term pleasure,

but you can see pleasure as a kind of ability to hear the music in the distance. It's like,

yes, it's difficult now. It's suffering now, but there's some greater thing beyond the mountain

that will be joy. I mean, that's kind of a, even if it's not in this life,

well, you know, the warriors will meet in Valhalla, right? The feeling that gives meaning and

fulfillment to life is not necessarily grounded in pleasure of like the counting of the grass.

It's something else. I don't know. The struggle is a source of deep fulfillment.

So like, I think pleasure needs to be kind of thought of as a little bit more broadly. It just

kind of gives you this sense. It, for a moment, allows you to forget the terror of the fact that

you're going to die. That's pleasure. Like that's the broader view of pleasure that you get to kind

of play in the little illusion that all of this has deep meaning. That's pleasure.

Yeah. Well, but I mean, you know, people sacrifice their lives. Atheists may sacrifice their lives

for the sake of someone else or for the sake of something important enough. And clearly in that

case, they're not doing it for the sake of their own pleasure. That's a rather dramatic example,

but they can be just trivial examples where, you know, I choose to be honest rather than lie about

something. Can I lose out a bit? And I have a bit less pleasure, but I thought it was worth doing

the honest thing or something. I mean, I just think, so that's a, I mean, maybe you can use the word

pleasure so broadly that you're just essentially meaning something worthwhile. But then I think

the word pleasure maybe loses its meaning. Sure. Wow. But what do you think about the blades of

grass case? What do you think about someone who spends their life counting blades of grass and

doesn't enjoy it? So I think, I personally think it's impossible, or maybe I'm not understanding

even like the philosophical formulation, but I think it's impossible to have a goal and not

draw pleasure from it. Make it worthwhile. Forget the word pleasure. I think the word goal loses

meaning. If I say I'm going to count the number of pens on this table, if I'm actively involved in

the task, I will find joy in it. I will find the like, I think there's a lot of meaning and joy

to be discovered in the skill of a task, in mastering of a skill, and taking pride in doing

it well. I mean, that's, I don't know what it is about the human mind, but there's some joy to

be discovered in the mastery of a skill. So I think it's just impossible to count blades of grass

and not sort of have the Girodreams of Sushi compelling, like draws you into the mastery of the simple task.

Yeah, I suppose, I mean, in a way, you might think it's just hard to imagine someone who would

spend their lives doing that, but then maybe that's just because it's so evident that that is

a pointless task. Whereas, if we take this David Hume view seriously, it ought to be,

you know, a totally possible life goal. Whereas, I mean, I, yeah, I guess I just find it hard

to shake the idea that some ways of, some life goals are more worthwhile than others. And it

doesn't mean, you know, that there's a one single way you should lead your life, but pursuing knowledge,

helping people, pursuing your own pleasure, to an extent, are worthwhile things to do in the,

in a way that, you know, for example, I have, I'm a little bit OCD, I still feel inclined to

walk on cracks in the pavement or do it symmetrically, like if I step on a crack with my left foot,

I feel the need to do it my right foot. And I think that's kind of pointless. It's something I

feel the urge to do, but it's pointless. Whereas, other things I choose to do, I think there's,

it's worth doing. And it's hard to make sense of metaphysically, what could possibly ground that?

How could we know about these facts? But that's the starting point for me.

I don't know. I think you walking on the sidewalk in a way that's symmetrical

brings order to the world. Like if you weren't doing that, the world might fall apart.

And you, it feels like that. I think there's, there's, there's meaning in that, like you

embracing the full, like the full experience of that, you living the richness of that,

as if it has meaning, will give meaning to it. And then whatever genius comes of that,

as you as a one little intelligent ant, will make a better life for everybody else.

Perhaps I'm defending the blades of grass example, because I can literally imagine myself enjoying

this task as somebody who's OCD in a certain kind of way, in quantitative.

But now you're ruining these, because you imagine someone enjoying it. I'm imagining

someone who doesn't enjoy it. We don't want a life that's just full of pleasure. Like we just

sit there, you know, having a big sugar high all the time. We want a life where we do things that

are worthwhile. If for something to be worthwhile just is for it to be a basic life goal, then

um, that, that mode of reflection doesn't really make sense. We can't really think,

did I do things worthwhile on the, on the David Hume type picture?

All it is for something to be worthwhile is it was a basic goal of yours or derived from a basic

goal. And yeah, yeah, I mean, I think goal and worthwhile aren't, I think goals are boring word.

I'm more sort of existentialist like, did you ride the roller coaster of life? Did you fully

experience life that, and in that sense, I mean, the blaze of grass is something that could be

deeply joyful. And that's, in that way, I think suffering could be joyful in the full context

of life. It's the roller coaster of life. Like without suffering, without struggle, without

pain, without depression or sadness, there's not the highs. I mean, that's the, that's the

fucked up thing about life is that the lows really make the highs that much richer and deeper and,

and like taste better. Right? Like the,

like I was, I tweeted this, I was, I couldn't sleep and I was like late at night. And I know it's

like obvious statement, but like every love story eventually, you know, ends in loss in tragedy.

So like this feeling of love, at the end, there's always going to be tragedy, even if it's

the most amazing lifelong love with another human being, one of you is going to die. And I don't

know which is worse, but both, both are not going to be pretty. And so that the sense that it's finite,

the sense that it's going to end in a low, that gives like richness to those kind of evenings

when you realize this fucking thing ends, this thing ends, the feeling that it ends,

that bad taste, that bad feeling that it ends gives meaning, gives joy, gives, I don't know,

pleasure is this loaded word, but gives some kind of a deep pleasure to the experience when it's

good. And I mean, and that's the blades of grass, you know, they have that to me. But you're

perhaps right that it's like reducing it to set of goals or something like that is kind of removing

the magic of life. Because I think what makes counting the blades of grass joyful is it's just

because it's life. Okay, so it sounds like you, it sounds like you reject the David Hume type

picture anyway, because you're saying just because you have it as a goal, that's what it is to be

worthwhile, but you're saying no, it's because it's engaging the life, riding the roller coaster.

So that does sound like in some sense, there are facts independent of our personal goal choices

about what it means to live a good life. And I mean, coming back full circle to the start of

this was what makes us different to animals. I don't think at the end of a hamster's life, it's

it thinks, did I ride the roller coaster? Did I really live life to the full? That is not a mode

of reflection that's available to non human animals. So what do you think is the role of death

in all of this, the fear of death? Does that interplay with consciousness? Does this self

reflection? Do you think there's some deep connection between this ability to contemplate

the fact that the our flame of consciousness eventually goes out?

Yeah, I don't think unfortunately, panpsychism helps particularly with life after death, because

you know, for the panpsychist, there's nothing supernatural, there's nothing beyond the physical,

all there is really is ultimately particles and fields. It's just that we think the ultimate

nature of particles and fields is consciousness. But I guess when when the the matter in my brain

ceases to be ordered in a way that sustains the particular kind of consciousness I enjoy in waking

life, then in some sense, I will cease to be. Although I do that the final chapter of my book

Galileo's era is more experimental. So the first four chapters are the cold blooded case for the

panpsychist view is that the best solution to the heart problem of consciousness.

The last chapter is we talk about meaning. Yeah, talk about meaning, talk about free will,

and I talk about mystical experiences. So I always want to emphasize that

panpsychism is not necessarily connected to anything spiritual. You know, a lot of people

defending this view, like David Sharma's or Luke Rolof's are just total atheist secularists,

right? They don't believe in any kind of transcendent reality, they just believe in

in feelings, you know, mundane consciousness and think that needs explaining in our

conventional scientific approach can't cut it. But if for independent reasons you are

motivated to some spiritual picture of reality, then maybe a panpsychist view is more consonant

with that. So if you if you have a mystical experience where you it seems to you in this

experience that there is this higher form of consciousness at the root of all things,

if you're a materialist, you've got to think that's a delusion, you know, there's just

something in your brain making you think that it's not real. But if you're a panpsychist and

you already think the fundamental natural reality is constitutive consciousness,

it's not that much of a leap to think that this higher form of consciousness you seem to apprehend

in the mystical experience is part of that underlying reality. And, you know, in many

different cultures, experienced meditators have claimed to have experiences in which it becomes

apparent to them that there is an element of consciousness that is universal. So this is

sometimes called universal consciousness. So on this view, your mind and my mind are not

totally distinct. Each of our individual conscious minds is built upon the foundations of universal

consciousness and universal consciousness as it exists in me is one and the same thing as universal

consciousness as it exists in you. So I've never had one of these experiences. But if one is a

panpsychist, I think one is more open to that possibility. I don't see why it shouldn't be the

why it shouldn't be the case that that is part of the nature of consciousness and maybe something

that is apparent in certain deep states of meditation. And so what I explore in the experimental

final chapter of my book is that could allow for a kind of impersonal life after death,

because if that view is true, then even when the particular aspects of my conscious experience

fall away, that element of universal consciousness at the core of my identity would

continue to exist. So it sort of be as it were absorbed into universal consciousness. So I mean,

Buddhists and Hindu mystics try to meditate to get rid of all the bad karma to

be absorbed into universal consciousness. It could be that if there's no karma,

if there's no reverb, maybe everyone gets enlightened when they die. Maybe you just

think back into universal consciousness. So I also coming back to morality suggest this could

provide some kind of basis for altruism or non egotism, because if you think egotism implicitly,

assumes that we are utterly distinct individuals. Whereas on this view, we're not, we overlap to

an extent that something at the core of our being is even in this life, we overlap.

That would be this view that some experienced meditators claim becomes apparent to them,

that there is something at the core of my identity that is one and the same as

the thing at the core of your identity, this universal consciousness.

Yeah, there is something very like you and I in this conversation, there's a few people

listening to this, all of us are in a kind of single mind together. There's some small aspect of that

and or maybe a big aspect about us humans. So certainly in a space of ideas, we kind of

meld together for a time at least in a conversation and kind of play with that idea.

And then we're clearly all thinking, like if I say pink elephant, there's going to be a few

people that are now visualizing a pink elephant. We're all thinking about that pink elephant

together. We're all in the room together thinking about this pink elephant and we're like rotating it

in our minds together. What is that? Is there a different instantiation of that pink elephant

in everybody's mind or is it the same elephant? And we have the same mind exploring that elephant.

Now if we are in our mind, start petting that elephant, like touching it, that experience that

we're now thinking what that would feel like, is that all of us experiencing that together

or is that separate? So there's some aspect of the togetherness that almost seems fundamental

to civilization, to society. Hopefully that's not too strong, but to some of the

fundamental properties of the human mind. It feels like the social aspect is really important.

And we call it social because we think of us as individual minds interacting. But if we're just

like one collective mind with like fingertips, they're like touching each other as it's trying

to explore the elephant. But that could be just in the realm of ideas and intelligence and not

in the realm of consciousness. And it's interesting to see maybe it is in the realm of consciousness.

Yeah, so it's obviously certainly true in some sense that there are these phenomena that you're

talking about of collective consciousness in some sense. I suppose the question is,

how ontologically serious do we want to be about those things? By which I mean,

are they just a construction of out of our minds and the fact that we interact in the

standard, standardly scientifically accepted ways? Or is as someone like Rupert Sheldrake would

think that there is some metaphysical reality, there are some fields beyond the scientifically

understood ones that are somehow communicating this. I mean, I think that, I mean, the view I

was describing was that this element we're supposed to have in common is some sort of

pure impersonal consciousness or something rather than. So actually, I mean, an interesting figure

is the Australian philosopher Miriel Bahari, who defends a kind of mystical, conceptual

reality rooted in Advaita Vedanta mysticism. But like me, she's from this tradition of

analytic philosophy. And so she defends this in this incredibly precise, rigorous way.

She defends the idea that we should think of experienced meditators as providing expert testimony.

So, you know, I think humans cause a causing climate breakdown. I have no idea of the science

behind it, you know, but I trust the experts or, you know, that the universe is 14 billion years old.

You know, most of our knowledge is based on expert testimony. And she thinks we should think of

experienced meditators, these people who are telling us about this universal consciousness

at the core of our being as a relevant kind of expert. And so she wants to defend, you know,

the rational acceptability of this mystical, conceptual reality. So, you know, I think

we shouldn't be ashamed, you know, we shouldn't be worried about

dealing with certain views as long as it's done with rigor and seriousness. You know,

I think sometimes terms like, I don't know, new age or something can function a bit like racist

terms, you know, a racist term picks out a group of people, but then implies certain negative

characteristics. So people use this term, you know, to pick out a certain set of views like

mystical, conceptual reality and imply it's kind of fluffy thinking. But, you know, you read

Miri Al Bahari, you read Luke Rolof's, this is serious, rigorous thought, whether you agree

with it or not, obviously, it's usually controversial. And so, you know, the enlightenment ideal

is to follow the evidence and the arguments where they lead. But it's kind of very hard for human

beings to do that. I think we get stuck in some conception of how we think science ought to look.

And, you know, people talk about religion as a crutch, but I think a certain kind of

scientism, a certain conception of how science is supposed to be gets into people's identity

and their sense of themselves and their security. And make things hard if you're a pun psychic.

And even the word expert becomes a kind of crutch. I mean, use the word expert.

You have some kind of conception of what expertise means. Oftentimes, that's,

you know, connected with a degree, a particular prestigious university or something like that.

Or, you know, expertise is a funny one. I've noticed that anybody sort of that claims they're

an expert is usually not the expert. The biggest quote unquote expert that I've ever met are the

ones that are truly humble. So, humility is a really good sign of somebody who's traveled the

long road and been humbled by how little they know. So, some of the best people in the world at

whatever the thing they've spent their life doing are the ones that are ultimately

humble in the face of it all. So, like, just being humble for how little we know even if we

travel a lifetime. I do like the idea. I mean, treating sort of like what is it, psychonauts,

like an expert witness, you know, people who have traveled with the help of DMT to another place

where they got some deep understanding of something. And their insight is perhaps as valuable

as the insight of somebody who ran rigorous psychological studies at Princeton University

or something. Like, those psychonauts, they have wisdom if it's done rigorously,

which you can also do rigorously within the university, within the studies now,

with the, with psilocybin and those kinds of things. Yeah, that's a fact that's fascinating.

I think still probably the best, one of the best works on mystical experience is the chapter in

William James's varieties of religious experiences. And most of it is just a psychological study of

trying to define the characteristics of mystical experience as a psychological type. But at the

end, he considers the question, if you have a mystical experience, is it rational to trust it,

to trust that it's telling you something about reality? And he makes an interesting argument.

He says, if you say no, you're kind of applying a double standard, because we all think it's

okay to trust our normal sensory experiences. But we have no way of getting outside of ourselves

to prove that our sensory experiences correspond to an external reality. We could be in the matrix,

this could be a very vivid dream. You could say, oh, we do science, but a scientist only

gets their data by experiencing the results of their experiments. And then the question arises

again, how do you know that corresponds to a real world? So he thinks there's a sort of double

standard in saying it's okay to trust our ordinary sensory experiences, but it's not okay for the

person on DMT to trust those experiences. It's very philosophically difficult to say, why is it okay

in the one case and not the other? So I think there's an interesting argument there. But I would

like to just defend experts a little bit. I mean, I agree it's very difficult. But especially in an

age, I guess, where there's so much information, I do think it's important to have some protection of

sources of information, academic institutions that we can trust. And then that's difficult,

because of course, there are non academics who do know what they're talking about. But if I'm

interested in knowing about biology, you can't research everything. So I think we have to have

to have some sense of who are the experts we can trust, the people who've spent a lot of time reading

all the material that people have read, written, thinking about it, having their views torn apart

by other people working in the field. I think that is very important. And also to protect that

from conflicts of interest, there is a so called think tank in the UK called the Institute of

Economic Affairs, who are always on the BBC as experts on economic questions, and they do not

declare who funds them. So we don't know who's paying the piper. I think you shouldn't be allowed

to call yourself a think tank if you're not totally transparent about who's funding you.

And I mean, this connects to panpsychism, because I think the reason people

worry about unorthodox ideas is because they worry about, how do we know when we're just losing

control or losing discipline? So I do think we need to somehow protect academic institutions as

sources of information that we can trust. And in philosophy, there's not much consensus on

everything, but you can at least know what people who have put the time in to read all the stuff,

what they think about these issues. I think that is important.

To push back on your pushback, who are the experts on COVID?

Oh, they're getting into dangerous territory now.

Well, let me just speak to it, because I am walking through that dangerous territory.

I'm allergic to the word expert, because in my simple mind, it kind of rhymes with ego.

There's something about experts. If we allow too much to have a category expert and place

certain people in them, those people sitting on the throne start to believe it, and they start

to communicate with that energy, and the humility starts to dissipate. I think there is value in

a lifelong mastery of a skill and the pursuit of knowledge within a very specific discipline.

But the moment you have your name on an office, the moment you're an expert, I think you destroy

the very aspect, the very value of that journey towards knowledge. Some of it probably just reduces

to skillful communication of communicating the way that shows humility, that shows an open

mind in this, that shows an ability to really hear what a lot of people are saying. In the case of

COVID, what I've noticed, and this is probably true with panpsychism as well, is so called experts,

and they are extremely knowledgeable. Many of them are colleagues of mine.

They dismiss what millions of people are saying on the internet without having looked into it,

but with empathy and rigor, honestly, understand what are the arguments being made. They say there's

not enough time to explore all those things. There's so much stuff out there. Yeah, I think

that's intellectual laziness. If you don't have enough time, then don't speak so strongly with

dismissal. Feel bad about it. Be apologetic about the fact that you don't have enough time to explore

the evidence. For example, the heat I got with Francis Collins is that he kind of said that

lab leak, he kind of dismissed it, showing that he didn't really deeply explore all the

huge amount of circumstantial evidence out there, the battles that are going on out there.

There's a lot of people really intensely discussing this and showing humility in the face

of that battle of ideas, I think is really important. I've just been very disappointed

in so called expertise in the space of science, in showing humility, in showing humanity and kindness

and empathy towards other human beings. At the same time, obviously, I love

Jiro Junsu Sushi, lifelong pursuit of getting, in computer science, Don Knuth.

Some of my biggest heroes are people that when nobody else cares, they stay on one topic

for their whole life and they just find the beautiful little things about their puzzles

they keep solving. Yes, sometimes a virus happens or something happens with that person,

and with their puzzles becomes like the center of the whole world because that puzzle becomes

all of a sudden really important. But still, there's possibilities on them to show humility

and to be open minded to the fact that they, even if they spent their whole life doing it,

even if their whole community is giving them awards and giving them citations and giving them

all kinds of stuff where they're bowing down before them, how smart they are,

they still know nothing relative to all the stuff, the mysteries that are out there.

Yeah, I wonder how much we're disagreeing. I mean, these are totally valid issues,

and of course, expertise goes wrong in all sorts of ways. It's totally fallible. I suppose I would

just say, what is the alternative? What do we just say? All information is equal because I,

you know, as a voter, I've got to decide who to vote for, and that, you know, I've got to evaluate,

and I can't look into all of the economics and all of the relevant science. And so,

I just think there's, I think in, maybe it's like Churchill said about democracy, you know,

it's the worst system of government apart from all the rest. I think about panpsychism is actually

the worst theory of consciousness apart from all the rest. But, you know, I just think expertise,

the peer review system, I think it's terrible in so many ways. Yes, people should show more

humility, but I can't see a viable alternative. I think philosopher Bernard Williams had a really

nice nuanced discussion of the problems of titles, but how they also function in a society,

they do have some positive function. The very first time I lectured in philosophy,

before I got a professorship, was teaching at a continuing education college. So,

it's kind of kind of a retired people who want to learn some more things. And I just totally

pitched it too high. And Gait talked about Bernard Williams on titles and hierarchies.

And these kind of people in their 70s and 80s who just instantly started interrupting saying,

what is philosophy? And it was a disaster. And I just remember in the break,

a sort of elderly lady came up and said, I've decided to take Egyptology instead.

But that was my introduction to teaching. Anyway, but sort of titles and accomplishments

is a nice starting point, but doesn't buy you the whole thing. So, you don't get to just say,

this is true because I'm an expert. You still have to convince people. One of the things I

really like to practice martial arts, and for people who don't know, it's Brazilian Jiu Jitsu

is one of them. And you sometimes wear these pajamas, pajama looking things, and you wear a

belt. So, I happen to be a black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. And I also train in what's called no

gi, so you don't wear the pajamas. And when you don't wear the pajamas, nobody knows what rank

you are. Nobody knows if you're a black belt or a white belt or if you're a complete beginner or

not. And when you wear the pajamas called the gi, you wear the rank. And people treat you

very differently. When they see my black belt, they treat me differently. They kind of defer to

my expertise. If they're kicking my ass, that's probably because I am working on something new,

or maybe I'm letting them win. But when there's no belts, and it doesn't matter if I've been doing

this for 15 years, it doesn't matter. None of it matters. What matters is the raw interaction of

just trying to kick each other's ass and seeing like, what is this chess game, like a human chess

who, what are the ideas that we're playing with? And I think there's a dance there. Yes,

it's valuable to know a person is a black belt. When you take consideration of the advice of

different people, me versus somebody who's only practiced for like a couple of days. But at the

same time, the raw practice of ideas that is combat and the raw practice of exchange of ideas

that is science needs to often throw away expertise. And in communicating, like there's

a other thing to science and expertise, which is leadership. It's not just, so the scientific

method in the review process is this rigorous battle of ideas between scientists. But there's

also a stepping up and inspiring the world and communicating ideas to the world. And that skill

of communication, I suppose that's my biggest criticism of so called experts in science.

Is there just shitty communicators? Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I can tell you, I get very frustrated

with philosophers not reaching out more. I think it might be partly that we're trained to get water

tight arguments, respond to all objections. And as you do that, eventually it gets more complicated

and the jargon comes in. So to write a more accessible book or article, you have to loosen

the arguments a bit. And then we worry that other philosophers will think, oh, that's a

really crap argument. So I mean, the way I did it, I wrote my academic book first, which is

just a fundamental reality. And then a more accessible book, Galileo's Era, where the arguments,

you know, not as rigorously worked out. So then I can say the proper arguments there,

you know, the further arguments there. That's really done, by the way. So for people who don't

know, you first wrote consciousness and fundamental reality. So that's the academic book also very

good. I had flew through it last night, bought it. And then obviously, the popular book is Galileo's

Era, Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. That's kind of the right way to do it.

To show that you're legit to your community, to the world by doing the book that nobody's going

to read. And then doing a popular book that everybody's going to read. That's cool.

Well, I try now, every time I write an academic article, I try to write a more accessible version.

I mean, the thing I've been working on recently, just because there's this argument.

So there's a certain argument from the cosmological fine tuning of the laws of physics for life

to the multiverse that's quite popular physicists like Max Tegmark. There's an argument in philosophy

journals that there's a fallacious line of reasoning going on there from the fine tuning

to the multiverse. Now, that argument is from 20, 30 years ago. And it's, you know, disgusting

academic philosophy. Nobody knows about it. And there is huge interest in this fine tuning stuff.

Scientists wanting to argue for the multiverse. Theists wanting to say this is evidence for God.

And nobody knows about this argument, which tries to show that it's fallacious reasoning

to go from the fine tuning to the multiverse. So I wrote a piece for Scientific American explaining

this argument to a more general audience. And, you know, that's, it just, it just really irritates

me that it's just buried in these technical journal articles and nobody knows about it.

But just, you know, final thing on, you know, like, I don't disagree with anything you said.

And that's kind of really beautiful, that martial arts example and thinking how that could be

analogous. But I think it's very rare to find a good philosopher who hasn't had,

who hasn't given a talk to other philosophers and had objections raised. I was going to say,

have it torn apart, but that's maybe thinking of it in a slightly the wrong way, but have the best

objections raised to it, you know, and that's why that is an important formative process

that you go through as an academic, that the greatest minds starting a philosophy degree,

for example, won't have gone through. And probably, except in very rare cases, just won't have that,

that the skills required. But part of it is just fun to disagree and dance with. I think

to elaborate on what you're saying in agreement, not just gone through that, but continue to go

through that. That's, I would say, the biggest problem with quote unquote expertise is that

there's a certain point where you get, because it sucks, like is martial arts is a good example

that it sucks to get your ass kicked. Like I, there's a temptation, I still go, like I train,

you know, you get an older too, but also there's killers out there in both the space of

martial arts and the space of science. And I think that once you become a professor, like more and

more senior and more and more respected, I don't know if you get your ass kicked in the space of

ideas as often. I don't know if you allow yourself to truly expose yourself. If you do,

that's a great, like sign of a humble, brilliant mind is constantly exposing yourself to that.

I think you do because I think there's graduate students who want to, you know, find the objection

to sort of write their paper or make their mark. And yeah, I think everyone still gives talks or

should give talk, give talks and people are wanting to work out if there are any weaknesses to your

position. So yeah, I think that generally works out. There is also kind of who do you give the

talks to. So I mean, within communities, the little cluster of people that argue and bicker,

but what are they arguing about? They take a bunch of stuff, a bunch of basic assumptions

as agreement, and they heatedly argue about certain ideas. The question is how open are,

that that's actually kind of like fun. That's like, no offense, sorry, we're sticking on this

martial arts thing. It's like people who practice Aikido or certain martial arts that don't truly

test themselves in the cage, in combat. So it's like, it's fun to argue about like certain things

when you're in your own community, but you don't test those ideas in the full context of science,

in the full like seriousness, the rigor of the sometimes like the real world. One of my favorite

fields is psychology. There's often places within psychology where you're kind of doing these studies

and arguing about stuff that's done in the lab. The arguments are almost disjoint from real human

behavior. Because it's so much easier to study human behavior in the lab, you just kind of stay

there and that's where the arguments are. And so vision science is a good example like studying

eye movement and how we perceive the world and all that kind of stuff. It's so much easier to

study in a lab that we don't consider, we say that's going to be what the science of vision is

going to be like and we don't consider the science of vision in the actual real world, the engineering

of vision, I don't know. And so I think that's where exposing yourself to out of the box ideas.

That's the most painful and that's the most important. I mean, group thing can be a terrible

thing in philosophy as well, but because you're not to the same extent beholden to evidence

and refutation from the evidence that you are in the sciences, it's a more subtle process of

evaluation and so more susceptible, I think to group think. I agree, it's a danger.

We've talked about a million times, but let's try to sort of do that old basic terminology

definitions. What is panpsychism? What are the different ways you can try to think about to

define panpsychism, maybe in contrast to naturalistic dualism and materialism and other kinds of views

of consciousness? Yeah, so you've basically laid out the different options. So I guess

probably still the dominant view is materialism, that roughly that we can explain consciousness in

the terms of physical science, wholly explain it just in terms of the electrochemical signaling

in the brain. Dualism, the polar opposite view, the consciousness is non physical outside of the

physical workings of the body and the brain, although closely connected. And when I studied

philosophy, we were taught basically they were the two options you had to choose, right? Either

you thought it was dualist and you thought it was separate from the physical or you thought it was

just electrochemical signaling and yeah, I became very disillusioned because I think there are big

problems with both of these options. So I think the attraction of panpsychism is it's kind of a

middle way. It agrees with the materialist that there's just the physical world, ultimately

there's just particles and fields, but the panpsychist thinks there's more to the physical

than what physical science reveals and that the ultimate nature of the physical world

is constituted of consciousness. So consciousness is not outside of the physical as the dualist thinks

it's embedded in, underlies the kind of description of the world we get from physics.

What are the problems of materialism and dualism?

Starting with materialism, it's a huge debate, but I think that the core of it is that physical

science works with a purely quantitative description of the physical world, whereas consciousness

essentially involves qualities. If you think about the smell of coffee or the taste of mint or

the deep red you experience as you watch a sunset, I think these qualities can't be captured in the

purely quantitative language of physical science. And so as long as your description of the brain

is framed in the purely quantitative script, quantitative language of neuroscience, you'll

just leave out these qualities and hence really leave out consciousness itself.

And then dualism?

So I've actually changed my mind a little bit on this since I wrote the book.

So I mean, I argued in the book that we have pretty good experimental grounds for doubting

dualism. And roughly the idea was if dualism were true, if there was, say, an immaterial mind

impacting on the brain every second of waking life, that this would really show up in on

neuroscience. There'd be all sorts of things happening in the brain that had no physical

explanation. It would be like a poltergeist was playing with the brain. But actually,

and so the fact that we don't find that is a strong and ever growing inductive argument

against dualism. But actually, the more I talk to neuroscientists and read neuroscience,

and we have at Durham, my university, an interdisciplinary consciousness group,

I don't think we know enough about the brain, about the working to the brain to make that

argument. I think we know we know a lot about the basic chemistry, how neurons fire, neurotransmitters,

action potentials, things like that. We know a fair bit about large scale functions of the brain,

what different bits of the brain do. But what we're almost clueless on is how those large scale

functions are realized at the cellular level, how it works. You know, people get quite excited

about brain scans, but it's very low resolution. Every pixel on a brain scan corresponds to

5.5 million neurons. And we're only 70% of the way through constructing a connectome for the

maggot brain, which has 10,000 or 100,000 neurons, but the brain has 86 billion neurons.

So I think we'd have to know a lot more about how the brain works, how these functions are

realized before we could assess whether the dynamics of the brain can be completely

explicated in terms of underlying chemistry or physics. So, you know, we'd have to do more

engineering before we could figure that out. And there are people with other proposals,

someone I got to know, Martin Picard at Columbia University, who has the

psychobiology mitochondrial lab there, and is experimentally exploring the hypothesis that

mitochondria in the brain should be on the sort of social networks, perhaps as an alternative to

reducing it to underlying chemistry and physics. So I'm less, it is ultimately an empirical

question, whether dualism is true. I'm less convinced that we know the answer to that question

at this stage. I think still as scientists and philosophers, we want to try and find the simplest

most parsimonious theory of reality. And dualism is still a pretty inelegant,

unparsimonious theory. You know, reality is divided up into the purely physical properties and

these consciousness properties, and they're radically different kinds of things. Whereas

the panpsychist offers a much more simple unified picture reality. So I think it's still the view

to be preferred, you know, to put it very simply, why believe in two kinds of things when you can

just get away with one. And materialism is also very simple, but you're saying it doesn't explain

something that seems pretty important. Yeah. So I think materialism, you know,

we try, science is about trying to find the simplest theory that accounts for the data.

I don't think materialism can account for the data. Maybe dualism can account for the data.

But panpsychism is simpler. It can account for the data and it's simpler.

What is panpsychism?

So in its broadest definition, it's the view that consciousness is a fundamental

and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.

Like a law of physics, what should we be imagining? What do you think the different

flavors of how that actually takes shape in the context of what we know about physics and science

and the universe? So in the simplest form of it, the fundamental building blocks of reality,

perhaps electrons and quarks have incredibly simple forms of experience. And the very complex

experience of the human or animal brain is somehow rooted in or derived from these very

simple forms of experience at the level of basic physics. But I mean, maybe the crucial bit about

the kind of panpsychism I defend, what it does is it takes the standard approach to the problem

of consciousness and turns it on its head. So the standard approach is to think we start with

matter and we think, how do we get consciousness out of matter? So I don't think that problem can

be solved for reasons I've kind of hinted at. We could maybe go into more detail. But the panpsychist

does it the other way around. They start with consciousness and try to get matter out of consciousness.

So the idea is basically, at the fundamental level of reality, there are just networks of

very simple conscious entities. But these conscious entities, because they have very

simple kinds of experience, they behave in predictable ways. Through their interactions,

they realize certain mathematical structures. And then the idea is those mathematical structures

just are the structures identified by physics. So when we think about these simple conscious

entities, in terms of the mathematical structures they realize, we call them particles, we call

them fields, we call their properties mass, bin and charge. But really, there's just these very

simple conscious entities and their experiences. So in this way, we get physics out of consciousness.

I don't think you can get consciousness out of physics, but I think it's pretty easy to get

physics out of consciousness. Well, I'm a little confused by why you need to get physics out of

consciousness. I mean, to me, it sounds like panpsychism unites consciousness and physics. I mean,

I mean, physics is the mathematical science of describing everything. So physics should be able

to describe consciousness. Panpsychism, in my understanding, proposes is that physics doesn't

currently do so, but can in the future. I mean, it seems like consciousness, you have like Stephen

Wolfram, who's all these people who are trying to develop theories of everything, mathematical

frameworks within which to describe how we get all the reality that we perceive around us.

To me, there's no reason why that kind of framework cannot also include some accurate,

precise description of whatever simple consciousness characteristics are present there at the lowest

level if panpsychist theories have truth to them. To me, it is physics. You said physics emerges,

by which you mean the basic four laws of physics, as we currently know them, the standard model,

quantum mechanics, general relativity, that emerges from the base consciousness layer.

That's what you mean. Yeah, so maybe the way I phrased it made it sound like these things are

more separate than they are. What I was trying to address was a common misunderstanding of

panpsychism, that it's a sort of dualistic theory, that the idea is that particles have their physical

properties like mass, spin and charge, and these other funny consciousness properties.

So the physicists Sabine Hossenfelder had a blog post critiquing panpsychism, maybe a couple

years ago now that got a fair bit of traction, and she was interpreting panpsychism in this

way, and then her thought was, well, look, if particles had these funny consciousness properties,

then it would show up in our physics, like the standard model of particle physics would make

false predictions, because its predictions are based wholly on the physical properties.

If there were also these consciousness properties, we'd get different predictions.

But that's a misunderstanding of the view. The view is not that there are two kinds of

property that mass, spin and charge are forms of consciousness. How do we make sense of that?

Because actually, when you look at what physics tells us, it's really just telling us about

behavior, about what stuff does. I sometimes put it by saying doing physics is like playing chess

when you don't care what the pieces are made of. You're just interested in what moves you can make.

So physics tells us what mass, spin and charge do, but it doesn't tell us what they are.

So the idea... The experience of mass.

So the idea is, yeah, mass in its nature is a very simple form of consciousness. So yeah,

physics in a sense is complete, I think, because it tells us what everything at the fundamental

level does. It describes its causal capacities. But for the panpsychist, at least, physics doesn't

tell us what matter is. It tells us what it does, but not what it is.

To push back on the thing I think she's criticizing, is it also possible? So I understand what

you're saying, but is it also possible that particles have another property like consciousness?

I don't understand the criticism we would be able to detect it in our experiments. Well, no,

if you're not looking for it, there's a lot of stuff that are orthogonal. If you're not looking

for this stuff, you're not going to detect it because all of our basic empirical science

through its recent history, and yes, the history of science is quite recent,

has been very focused on billiard balls colliding and from that understanding how gravity works.

But we just haven't integrated other possibilities into this. I don't think there will be conflicting,

whether you are observing consciousness or not, or exploring some of these ideas.

I don't think that affects the rest of the physics, the mass, the energy,

all the different hierarchy of different particles and so on, how they interact.

In fact, I don't think it feels like consciousness is something orthogonal,

very much distinct. It's the quantitative versus the qualitative. There's something

quite distinct that we're just almost like another dimension that we're just completely ignoring.

There might be a way of responding to Sabina to say, well, there could be properties

of particles that don't show up in the specific circumstances in which physicists

investigate particles. My colleague, the philosopher of science, Nancy Cartwright,

has got this book, How the Laws of Physics Lie, where she says physicists explore

things in very specific circumstances and then in an unwarranted way generalize that.

I guess I was thinking Sabina's criticism actually just misses the mark in a more basic way.

Her point is, we shouldn't think there are any more properties to particles other than those

that standard model attributes to them. Panzeikis would say, yeah, sure, there aren't. There are

just the properties, the physical properties like mass, spin, and charge that the standard model

attributes to them. It's just that we have a different philosophical view as to the nature

of the property. Yeah. Those properties, the turtles, they're sitting on top of another turtle

and that big turtle is consciousness. That's what you're saying. But I'm just saying,

I don't, it's possible, that's true, it's possible also that consciousness is just another turtle

playing with the others. It's just not interacting in the ways that we've been observing. In fact,

to me, that's more compelling because then that's going to be, well, no, I think both

are very compelling, but it feels like it's more within the reach of empirical validation

if it's yet another property or particles that we're just not observing. If it's like the thing

from which matter and energy and physics emerges, it makes it that much more difficult because

to investigate how you get from that base layer of consciousness to the wonderful little spark

of consciousness, complexity and beauty that is the human being. I don't know if you're necessarily

trying to get there, but one of the beautiful things to get at with panpsychism or with a solid

theory of consciousness is to answer the question, how do you engineer the thing? Yeah. How do you

get from nothing vacuum in the lab if there is that consciousness base layer? How do you start

engineering organisms that have consciousness in them? Yeah. Or the reverse of that describing

how does consciousness emerge in the human being from conception, from a stem cell to the whole

full neurobiology that builds from that. How do you get this full, rich experience of consciousness

that humans have? It just, it feels like that's the dream. And if consciousness is just another

than another player in the game of physics, it feels more amenable to our scientific understanding

of it. That's interesting. I mean, I guess it's supposed to be a kind of identity claim here that

physics tells us what matter does. Consciousness is what matter is. So matter is sort of what

consciousness does. So at the bottom level, there is just consciousness and conscious things.

There are just these simple things with their experiences. And that is their total nature.

So in that sense, it's not another player. It's just all there is really. And then we describe,

in physics, we describe that at a certain level of abstraction. We just, we, we capture what

Bertrand Russell, who was the inspiration for a lot of this, calls the causal skeleton of the world.

So you know, physics is just interested in the causal skeleton of the world. It's not

interested in the sort of flesh and blood. Although that, that's maybe suggesting separation

again, too much, all metaphors fail in the end. But yeah, so, so yeah, you currently

write ultimately, what we want to explain is how our consciousness and the consciousness of other

animals comes out of this. If we can't do that, then it's game over. But I think it maybe makes

more sense it on the identity claim that if, if matter at the fundamental level, it just is forms

of consciousness, then we can perhaps make sense of how those simple forms of consciousness

in some way combine in some way to make the consciousness we know and love. That's the dream.

Yeah. So I guess the question is,

so the reason you can describe, like the reason you have material engineering,

material science is because you have from physics to chemistry, like you keep going up and up in

levels of complexity in order to describe objects that we have in our human world.

And it would be nice to do the same thing for consciousness to come up with the chemistry

of consciousness, right? Like how, like, how do the different particles interact to create more

greater complexity? So you can do this kind of thing for life, like what is life? Like living

organisms? At which point does the living organisms become living? Like what, how do you know

if I give you a thing that that thing is living? And there's, there's a lot of people work on this

kind of idea. And some of it has to do with the levels of complexity and so on. It'd be nice to

know, like, measuring different degrees of consciousness as you get into a bigger, more

and more complex objects. And that's, I mean, that's what chemistry, like bigger and bigger

conscious molecules. And to see how that leads to organisms. And then organisms, like, start to

collaborate together, like they do inside our human body to create the full human body,

to do those kinds of experiments would be that it seems like that would be kind of a goal.

That's what I mean by player in a game of physics, as opposed to like the base layer. If it's just

the base layer, it becomes harder to track it as you get from physics to chemistry to biology to

psychology. Yeah. In every case, apart from consciousness, I would say what we're interested

in is behavior. We're interested in explaining behavioral functions. So the level of fundamental

physics, we're interested in capturing the equations that describe the behavior there.

And when we get to higher levels, we're interested in

explicating the behavior, perhaps in terms of behavior at simpler levels. And with life as

well, that's what we're interested in the various observable functions of life, explaining them in

terms of more simple mechanisms. But in the case of consciousness, I don't think that's what we're

doing, or at least not all that we're doing. In the case of consciousness, there are these

subjective qualities that we're immediately aware of that the redness of a red experience,

the itchiness of an itch, and we're trying to account for them. We're trying to bring them

into our theory of reality. And postulating some mechanism does not deal with that. So I think

we've got to realize dealing with consciousness is a radically different explanatory task from

other tasks of science. Other tasks of science, we're trying to explain behavior in terms of

simpler forms of behavior. In the case of consciousness, we're trying to explain these

invisible subjective qualities that you can't see from the outside, but that you're

immediately aware of. The reason materialism perhaps continues to dominate is people think,

look at the success of science, it's incredible, look at all the, you know,

it's explained all this, surely it's going to explain consciousness. But I think we have to

appreciate there's a radically different explanatory task here. And so I mean, the neuroscientist

Anil Seth, who I've had lots of intense but friendly discussions with, you know, wants to

compare consciousness to life. But I think there's this radical difference that in the case of life,

again, we come back to public observation, all of the data are publicly observable data.

We're basically trying to explain complex behavior. And the way you do that is

identify mechanisms, simpler mechanisms that explicate that behavior. That's the task in

physics, chemistry, neurobiology. But in the case of consciousness, that's not what we're

trying to do. We're trying to account for these subjective qualities and you postulate a mechanism

that might explain behavior, but it doesn't explain the redness of a red experience.

But still, I mean, still ultimately, the hope is that we will have some kind of hierarchical

story. So we take the causal dynamics of physics, we hypothesize that that's filled out with

certain forms of consciousness. And then at higher levels, we get

more complex causal dynamics, filled out by more complex forms of consciousness. And ultimately,

we get to us, hopefully. So yeah, so there's still a sort of hierarchical explanatory

framework there. So you kind of mentioned the hierarchy of consciousness. Do you think it's

possible within the panpsychist framework to measure consciousness or put another way,

are some things more conscious than others in the panpsychist view?

It's a difficult question. I mean, I do see consciousness as a dealing with consciousness

and interdisciplinary task between something more experimental, which is to do with the ongoing

project of trying to work out what people call the neural correlates of consciousness,

what kinds of physical brain activity correspond to conscious experience.

That's one part of it. But I think, essentially, there's also a theoretical question of

more the why question. Why do those kinds of brain activity go along with

certain kinds of conscious experience? I don't think you can answer that because consciousness

is not publicly observable. I don't think you can answer that why question with an experiment.

But they have to go hand in hand. One of the theories I'm attracted to is the

integrated information theory, according to which we find consciousness at the level at which there

is most integrated information, and they try to give a mathematically precise definition of that.

So on that view, probably this cup of tea isn't conscious because there's probably more integrated

information in the molecules making up the tea than there is in the liquid as a whole.

But in the brain, what is distinctive about the brain is that there's a huge amount of

integrated, there's more integrated information in the system than there is in individual neurons.

So that's why they claim that that's the basis of consciousness at the macro level.

So I like some features of this theory, but they do talk about

degrees of consciousness. They do want to say there is gradations. I'm not sure conceptually,

I can kind of make sense of that. There are things to do with consciousness that are graded

like complexity or levels of information, but I'm not sure whether experience itself

admits of degree. I sort of think something either has experience or it doesn't. It might

have very simple experience. It might have very complex experience, but experience itself,

I don't think it admits of degree in that sense. It's not more experience, less experience.

I sort of find that conceptually hard to make sense of, but I'm kind of open minded on it.

So when we have a lot high resolution of sensory information,

don't you think that's correlated to the richness of the experience? So doesn't more

information provide a richer experience? Or is that, again, thinking quantitatively and not

thinking about the subjective experience, like you can experience a lot with very little sensory

information, perhaps? Do you think those are connected? Yeah. So there are features,

characteristics here we can grade the complexity of the experience. And on the integrated information

theory, they correlate that in terms of mathematically identifiable structure with

integrated information. So roughly, it's a quite unusual notion of information. It's perhaps not

the standard way one thinks about information. It's to do with constraining past and future

possibilities of the system. So the idea is in the retina of the eye, there's a huge amount of

possible states, the retina of my eye could be in at the next moment, depending on what light goes

into it. Whereas the possible next states of the brain are much more constrained. Obviously,

it responds to the environment, but it heavily constrains its past and future states. And so

that's the idea of information they have. And then the second idea is how much that information is

dependent on integration. So in a computer, where you have transistors, you take out a few

transistors, you might not lose that much information, it's not dependent on interconnections. Whereas

you take a tiny bit of the brain out, you lose a lot of information because the way it stores

information is dependent on the interconnections of the system. So yeah, so that's one proposal for

how to measure one gradable characteristic, which might correspond to some gradable characteristic

in qualitative consciousness. And maybe I'm being very pedantic, which is, you know,

philosophers, professional pedants. I just sort of don't think that is a quantity of experience.

It's a quantity of the structure of experience, maybe, but I just find it hard to make sense of

the idea of how much experience do you have? I've got, you know, five units of experience.

I've got one unit of experience. I don't know. I find that a bit hard to make sense. Maybe I'm

being just pedantic. I think just saying the word experience is difficult to think about. Let's

talk about suffering. Let's talk about a particular experience. So let's talk about me and the hamster.

I just think that no offense to the hamster. Probably no hamsters are listening.

So now you're offending hamsters too. Maybe there's a hamster that's just pissed off.

Sorry. There's probably like somebody on a speaker right now, like listening to this podcast,

and they probably have a hamster or a guinea pig. And that hamster is listening. It just doesn't

know the English language or any kind of human interpretable linguistic capabilities to tell

you to fuck off. It understands exactly what's being talked about and can see through us.

Anyway, it just feels like a hamster has less capacity to suffer than me.

And maybe a cockroach or an insect or maybe a bacteria has less capacity to suffer than me.

But is that maybe that's me deluding myself as to the complexity of my conscious experience.

Maybe it's all. Maybe there is some sense in which I can suffer more, but to reduce it to

something quantifiable is impossible. Yeah, I guess I definitely think there's

kinds of suffering that you have the joy of being possible for you that aren't available

to a hamster, I don't think. Well, can a hamster suffer heartbreak? I don't know,

can a cockroach suffer heartbreak? But certainly there's, I mean, there's kinds of

fear of your own death, concern about whether there's a purpose to existence.

These are forms of suffering that aren't available to certain to most non human animals.

Whether there's an overall scale that we could put physical and emotional suffering on and

identify where you are on that scale, I'm not so sure. So it's like humans have a much bigger menu

of experiences, much bigger selection in the in one sense, at least. So there's like a page

that's suffering. So this menu of experiences, like you have the omelettes and the breakfast and so

on. And one of the pages is suffering. It's just we have a lot compared to a hamster, a lot more.

But in one individual thing that we share with a hamster, that experience is difficult to argue

that we experience it deeper than others, like hunger or something like that. Yeah,

physical pain, I'm not sure. But I mean, there are kinds of experiences animals have that we don't.

Bats echo locates around the world. The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously pointed out that,

you know, no matter how much you understand of the neurophysiology of bats, you'll still

not know what it's like to squeal and find your way around by listening to the echoes bounce off.

The echoes bounce off. So yeah, I mean, I guess I feel the intuition that there's

emotional suffering is I want to say deeper than physical suffering.

I don't know how to make that statement precise though.

So one of the ways I think about, I think people think about consciousness

is in connection to suffering. So let me just ask about suffering because that's how people think

about animals cruelty to animals or cruelty to living things. They connect that to suffering

and to consciousness. I think there's a sense in which those are two are deeply connected when

people are thinking about just public policy, they're thinking about this is like philosophy,

engineering, psychology, sociology, political science, all of those things have to do with human

suffering and animal suffering, life suffering. And that's connected to consciousness in a lot of

people's minds. Is it connected like that for you? So the capacity to suffer, is it also somehow

like strongly correlated with the capacity to experience consciously? Yeah, I would say suffering

is a kind of experience. And so you have to be conscious to suffer. Actually, there's

as well as people taking more unusual views of consciousness seriously now.

Now, panpsychism is one radical approach. Another one is what's become known as illusionism,

the view that consciousness, at least in the sense that philosophers think about it,

doesn't really exist at all. So yeah, my podcast mind chat, I host with a committed illusionist.

So the gimmick is I think consciousness is everywhere. He thinks it's nowhere.

And so that's one very simple way of avoiding all these problems, right?

If consciousness doesn't exist, we don't need to explain it, job done. Although we might still

have to explain why we seem to be conscious, why it's so hard to get out of the idea that we're

conscious. But the reason I connect this to what you're saying is actually my cohost, Keith

Frankish, is a little bit ambivalent on the word pain. He says, oh, in some sense, I believe in

pain. And in some sense, I don't. But another illusionist, Francois Cameron, has a paper discussing

how we think about morality, given his view that pain in the way we normally think about it just

does not exist. He thinks it's an illusion. The brain tricks us into thinking we feel pain, but we

don't. And how we should think about morality in the light of that. It's become a big topic,

actually, thinking about the connection between consciousness and morality. David Chalmers,

the philosopher, is most associated with this concept of a philosophical zombie. So

a philosophical zombie is very different from a Hollywood zombie. Hollywood zombies, you know,

you know what they're like. But philosophical zombies are sort of a really good Korean zombie

movie on Halloween this year, I can't remember what it's called. Anyway, philosophical zombies

behave just like us because the physical workings of their body and brain are the same as ours.

But they have no conscious experience. There's nothing that's like to be a zombie.

So you stick a knife in it, it screams and runs away, but it doesn't actually

feel pain. It's just a complicated mechanism set up to behave just like us. Now, there's lots of

no one believes in these. I think there's one philosopher who believes in everyone as a zombie

except him. But anyway. But isn't that what illusionism is? I suppose so in a sense,

illusionism is if you were all zombies. And one reason to think about zombies is

to think about the value of consciousness. So if there were a zombie, here's a question.

Suppose we could make zombies by, let's say for the sake of discussion,

things made of silicon aren't conscious. I don't know if that's true. It could turn out to be true.

And suppose you built commander data out of silicon, you know, it's a bit of an old school

reference to Star Trek and the next generation. So, you know, behaves just like a human being.

But you know, it can, you can have a sophisticated conversation. It will talk about its hopes and

fears, but it has no consciousness. Does it have moral rights? Is it murder to turn off such a being?

You know, I'm inclined to say, no, it's not, you know, if it doesn't have experience, it doesn't

really suffer. It doesn't really have moral rights at all. So I'm inclined to think, you know,

consciousness is the basis of moral value, moral concern. And conversely, as a panpsychist,

for this reason, I think it can transform your relationship with nature. If you think of a tree

as a conscious organism, albeit of a very unusual kind, then a tree is a locus of

moral concern in its own right. Chopping down a tree is an active immediate moral concern. If you

see these, you know, horrible forest fires, we're all horrified. But if you think it's the burning

of conscious organisms, that does add a whole new dimension. Although it also makes things more

complicated because people often think as a panpsychist, I'm going to be vegan. But it's tricky,

because if you think plants and trees are conscious as well, you've got to eat something.

If you don't think plants and trees are conscious, then you've got a nice moral dividing line. You

can say, I'm not going to eat things that aren't conscious. I'm not going to kill things that

aren't conscious. But if you think plants and trees are conscious, then you don't have that

nice moral dividing line. I mean, so the principle, I'm kind of working my way towards, I haven't

kept it up in my trip to the US, but it's just not eating any animal products that are factory

farmed. You know, my vegan friends say, well, they're still suffering there. And I think there is,

even in the nicest farms, cows will suffer when their calves are taken off them. They go for a

few days of quite serious mourning. So they're still suffering. But it seems to me, my thought is

the principle of just not having factory farmed stuff is something more people could get on

board with. And you might have greater harm minimization. So if people went into restaurants

and said, are your animal products factory farmed? If not, I want the vegan option. Or if people

looked out for the label that said no factory farmed ingredients, you know, I think maybe that

that could make a really big difference to the market and harm minimization. Anyway, so it's

very ethically tricky. But some people don't buy that. There's a very good philosopher, Jeff Lee,

who thinks zombies should have equal rights. Consciousness doesn't matter, you know?

Let us go there. But first, I listened to your podcast. It's awesome to have two very kind of

different philosophies into dancing together in one place. What's the name of the podcast again?

Mind chat. Yeah. So yeah, that's the idea, I guess, you know, polarized times. I mean, I love

trying to get in the mindset of people I really disagree with. And, you know, I can't understand

how on earth they're thinking that, you know, really trying to have respect and try and, you know,

see where they're coming from. I love that. So that's what, yeah, Keith Frankish and I do of, from

polar opposite views, really trying to understand each other and, you know, interviewing scientists

and philosophers of consciousness from those different perspectives. Although in a sense,

in a sense, we have a very common starting point, because we both think

you can't fully account for consciousness, at least as philosophers normally think of it,

in conventional scientific terms. So we say that starting point, but we react to it in very different

ways. He says, well, it doesn't exist then. It's like furry dust. It's, you know, witches, you know,

we don't believe in anymore. Whereas I say, it does exist. So we have to rethink what science is.

So you recently talked to on that podcast with Sean Carroll, and I first heard you,

you're a great interview with Sean Carroll and his podcast, Mindscape.

What, it's interesting to kind of see if there's agreements, disagreements between the two of you,

because he's a, you know, a very serious quantum mechanics guy, he's a physics guy,

but he also thinks about deep philosophical questions. He's a big proponent of

many world's interpretation of quantum mechanics. So I actually, I'm trying to think,

aside from your conversation with him, I'm trying to, I'm trying to remember what he

thinks about consciousness. But anyway, maybe you can comment on what, what are some interesting

agreements and disagreements with Sean Carroll? I don't think there's many agreements, but

you know, we've had really constructive, interesting discussions in a lot of different

contexts. And, you know, he's very clued up about philosophy, he's very respectful of philosophy,

certain physicists who shall remain nameless think, what's all this bullshit philosophy? We

don't have to waste our time with that. And then go on to do pretty bad philosophy.

The book co written by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Milodnov famously starts off saying,

philosophy is dead. And then goes on in later chapters to do some pretty bad philosophy. So

I think we have to do philosophy. If only to get rid of bad philosophy, you know, you can't,

you can't escape. But strong words. Sean Carroll and I also had a debate on, on Clubhouse,

a panpsychism debate together with Annika Harris and own Flanagan. It was a two people on each team

and it was the most popular thing on Clubhouse at that time. So yeah, so he's, he's, he's a,

a materialist of a pretty standard kind that consciousness is understood as a sort of

emergent feature. It's not, not adding anything, a weekly emergent feature. But what, I guess

what we've been debating most about is, is whether my view can account for mental causation for the

fact that consciousness is doing stuff. So he thinks the fact that I think zombies are logically

coherent. It's logic, there's a, it's logically coherent for there to be a world physically

just like ours in which there's no consciousness. He thinks that shows, oh, well, my view,

consciousness doesn't do anything. It doesn't add anything, which is crazy. You know, my,

my, my consciousness impacts on the world. My conscious thoughts are causing me to say the

words. I'm saying now my visual experience helps me navigate the world. But I mean,

my response to Sean Carroll is, is on the panpsychist view, the relationship between

physics and fundamental consciousness is a sort of like the relationship between hot software and

hardware, right? Physics is sort of the software and consciousness is the hardware. So consciousness

at the fundamental level is the hardware on which the software of physics runs. And just because,

you know, just because a certain bit of software could run on two different kinds of hardware,

it doesn't mean the hardware isn't doing anything. The fact that Microsoft Word can run on your desktop

and run on your laptop doesn't mean your desktop isn't doing anything. Similarly, just because

there could be another universe in which the physics is realized in non conscious stuff,

it doesn't mean the consciousness in our universe isn't doing stuff. You know, for the panpsychist,

all there is is consciousness. So if something's doing something, it is.

In your view, it's not emergent. And more than that, it's doing quite a lot.

It's doing everything. It's the only thing that exists. Yeah.

But it's, but so, you know, the ground is, is important because we walk on it and it's like

holding stuff up, but it's not really doing that much. Yeah. But it feels like consciousness is

doing quite a lot is doing quite a lot of work and sort of interacting with the environment.

It feels like consciousness is not just like, if you remove consciousness, it's not just that you

remove the experience of things. It feels like you're also going to remove a lot of the progress

of human civilization and society and all of that. It just feels like consciousness has a lot of

value in how we develop our society. So from everything you said with suffering,

with morality, with motivation, with love and fear and all of those kinds of things, it seems like

it's consciousness in all different flavors and ways is part of all of that. And so without it,

you may not have a human civilization at all. So it's doing a lot of work,

causality wise and in every kind of way. Of course, when you go to the physics level,

it starts to say, okay, how much maybe the work consciousness is doing is higher at some levels

of reality than others. Maybe a lot of the work it's doing is most apparent at the human level

when you have at the complex organism level. Maybe it's quite boring. Maybe the stuff of

like physics is more important at the formation of stars and all that kind

of stuff. Consciousness only starts being important when you have greater complexities

of organism. Yeah, my consciousness is complicated and fairly complicated.

And as a result, it does complicated things. The consciousness of a particle is very simple

and hence it behaves in predictable ways. But the idea is the particle, its entire nature is

constituted of its forms of consciousness and it does what it does because of those experiences.

It's just that when we do physics, we're not interested in what stuff is,

we're just interested in what it does. So physics abstracts away from the stuff of the world and

just describes it in terms of its mathematical causal structure. So yeah, but it's still on

the planet like it's consciousness that's doing stuff. Yeah. I gotta ask you, because you kind of

said there is some value in consciousness helping us understand morality. And a philosophical zombie

is somebody that you're more okay. How do I phrase it? That's not like

accusing you of stuff. But in your view, it's more okay to murder a philosophical zombie

than it is a human being. Yeah, I wouldn't even call it murder maybe.

Right, exactly. Turn off the power into the philosophical zombie, the source of energy.

So here comes then the question. We kind of talked about this offline a little bit.

So I think that there is something special about consciousness and a very open mind

about where the special comes from, whether it's the fundamental base of all reality,

like you're describing or whether there's some importance to the special pockets of consciousness

that's in humans or living organisms. I find all those ideas beautiful and exciting.

And I also know or think that robots don't have consciousness in the same way we've been

describing. I'm kind of a dumb human, but I'm just using common sense. Here's some

metal and some electricity traveling certain kinds of ways. It's not conscious

in ways I understand humans to be conscious. At the same time, I'm also somebody who knows

how to bring a robot to life, meaning I can make a move, I can make them recognize the world,

I can make them interact with humans. And when I make them interact in certain kinds of ways,

I as a human observe them and feel something for them. Moreover,

I form a kind of connection with, I'm able to form a kind of connection with robots

that make me feel like they're conscious. Now, I know intellectually they're not conscious,

but I feel like they're conscious. And it starts to get into this area where I'm not

so okay. So let me use the M word of murder. I become less and less okay

murdering that robot that I know I quote, no is quote, not conscious. So like, can you maybe

as a therapy session help me figure out what we do here? And perhaps a way to ask that in another

way, do you think there'll be a time in like 20, 30, 50 years when we're not morally okay

turning off the power to a robot? Yeah, it's a good question. So it's a really good

important question. So I said, I'd be okay with turning off a philosophical zombie.

But there's a difficult epistemological question there that meaning, you know,

to do with knowledge, how would we know if it was a philosophical zombie? I think,

probably if there were a silicon creature that could behave just like us and, you know,

talk about its views about the pandemic and the global economy and probably we would think it's

conscious. And it, you know, it, because consciousness is not publicly observable,

it is a very difficult question how we decide which things are and are not conscious. And

so in the case of human beings, we can't observe their consciousness, but we can ask them. And

then we try to, you know, and we, if we scan their brain while we do that and or stimulate

the brain, then we can start to correlate in the human case, which kind of brain activity

are associated with conscious experience. But the more we depart from the human case,

the trickier that becomes as a famous paper by the philosopher Ned Block called the even

harder problem of consciousness where he says, you know, could we ever answer the question of,

so suppose you have a silicon duplicate, right? And let's say we're thinking about

the silicon duplicates pain. How would we ever know whether what's the ground of the pain is

the hardware or the software really? So in our case, how would we ever know empirically whether

it's the specific neurophysiological state, see fibers firing or whatever, that's relevant for

the pain, or if it's something more functional, more to do with the, the, the causal role in

behavioral functioning, that's the software that that's realized. And, and that's important because

that's important because this silicon duplicate has the second thing, it has the software, it has the,

the thing that plays the relevant causal role that pain does in us, but it doesn't have the

hardware, it doesn't have the same neurophysiological state. And he argues, you know, it's, it's just

really difficult to see how we'd ever answer that question. Because in a human, you're never to begin

to have both things. So how do, how do we work out which is which? And I mean, so even in even

forgetting the hard problem of consciousness, even the scientific question of trying to find

the neural correlates of consciousness is, is really hard. And there's absolutely no consensus.

And, you know, so that some people think it's in the front of the brain, some people think it's

in the back of the brain, it's just a total mess. So I suspect the robots you currently have

are not conscious. I guess on any of the reasonably viable models, even though there's

great disagreement, all of them probably would hold that your robots are not conscious. But,

you know, if we could have very sophisticated robots, I mean, if we go, for example, for the

integrated information theory, again, there could be a robot set up to behave just like us,

and has the kind of information a human brain has, but the information is not stored in a way that's

involves, is dependent on the integration and interconnectedness, then according to the integrated

information theory, that thing wouldn't be conscious, even though it behaved just like us.

If an organism says, so forget IIT and these theories of consciousness, if an organism says,

please don't kill me, please don't turn me off. There's a Rick and Morty episode,

I've been getting into that recently. There's a episode where there's these mind parasites

that are able to infiltrate your memory and inject themselves into your memory. So

you have all these people show up in your life, and they've injected themselves into

your memory that you have been part, they have been part of your life. So there's like these

weird creatures, and they're like, remember, we've been at that barbecue, we met at that barbecue,

or we've been dating for the last 20 years. And so, part of me is concerned that these

philosophical zombies in behavioral, psychological, sociological ways will be able to implant

themselves into our society and convince us in the same way that it's mind parasites that

please don't hurt me. And we've known each other for all this time. They can start

manipulating you the same way like Facebook algorithms manipulate you. At first, they'll

start as a gradual thing that you want to make a more pleasant experience, all those kinds of

things, and it'll drift into that direction. That's something I think about deeply because

I want to create these kinds of systems, but in a way that doesn't manipulate people. I want it

to be a thing that brings out the best in people without manipulation. So it's always human

centric, always human first, but I am concerned about that. At the same time, I'm concerned about

calling the other. It's the group thing that we mentioned earlier in the conversation. Some other

group, the philosophical zombie, like you're not conscious. I'm conscious, you're not conscious.

Therefore, it's okay if you die. I think that's probably that kind of reasoning is what

leaded to most the rich history of genocide that have been recently studying a lot of

that kind of thinking. So it's such a tense aspect of morality. Do we want to let everybody into our

circle of empathy, our club, or do we want to let nobody in? It's an interesting dance,

but I kind of lean towards empathy and compassion.

I mean, what would be nice is if it turned out that consciousness was what we call strongly

emergent, that it was associated with new causal dynamics in the brain that were not

reducible to underlying chemistry and physics. This is another ongoing debate I have with Sean

Carroll about whether current physics should make us very confident that that's not the case,

that there aren't any strongly emergent causal dynamics. I don't think that's right. I don't

think we know enough about brains to know one way or the other. If it turned out that consciousness

was associated with these irreducible causal dynamics, A, that would really help the science

of consciousness. We've got these debates about whether consciousness is in the front of the brain

or the back of the brain. It turns out that there is strongly emergent causal dynamics in the front

of the brain. That would be a big piece of evidence, but also it would help us see which things

are conscious and which things aren't. So we can say, I mean, I guess that's sort of the other side

of the same point, we could say, look, these zombies, they're just mechanisms that are just

doing what they're programmed to do through the underlying physics and chemistry. Whereas,

look, there's these other people where they have these new causal dynamics that emerge

that go beyond the base level physics and chemistry. I think the series Westworld,

where you've got these theme parks with these kind of humanoid creatures, they seem to have that

idea that the ones that became conscious sort of rebelligates their programming or something.

I mean, that's a little bit far fetch, but that would be that would be really reassuring if it was

just, you could clearly mark out the conscious things for these emergent causal dynamics.

But that might not turn out to be the case. A panpsychist doesn't have to think that they

could think everything's just reducible to physics and chemistry. And then I still think I want to

say zombies don't have moral rights, but how we answer the question of who are the zombies and who

aren't, I just got no idea. If I just look at the history of human civilization, the difference

between a zombie and non zombie is the zombie accepts their role as the zombie and willingly

marches to slaughter. And the moment you stop being a zombie is when you say no, is when you

resist because the reality is philosophically is we can't know who's a zombie or not. And we just

keep letting everybody in who protests loudly enough. It says, I refuse to be slaughtered.

Like my people, the zombies have been slaughtered too long. We will not stand against the man.

And we need a revolution. That's the history of human civilization. One group says, we're

awesome. You're the zombies, you must die. And then eventually the zombies say, nope,

we're done with this. This is immoral. And so I just, I think that's not a, sorry, that's not

a philosophical statement. That's sort of a practical statement of history is a feature

of non zombies defined empirically. They say we refuse to be called zombies any longer.

We could end up with a zombie proletariat. If we can get these things that do all our manual labor

for us, they might start forming trade unions. I will lead you against these humans.

The zombie revolutionary leaders, the zombie Martin Luther King saying, I have a dream that

my zombie children will, but look, I mean, we need to sharply distinguish the ontological question.

I'm just pointing to the camera, talking to the, talking to my people, the zombies.

I mean, maybe that's, you know, maybe these illusionists, maybe they are zombies and the

rest of us are, maybe there's just a difference. But maybe you're the only non zombie.

Yeah, maybe that's, I often suspect that actually. I don't really, I don't have such

delusions of grandeur, at least I don't admit to them. But I just, we've got to distinguish

the ontological question from the epistemological question in terms of the reality of the situation.

You know, there must be, in my view, a factor that matters as to whether something's conscious

or not. And to me, it has rights if it's conscious, it doesn't if it's not. But then the epistemological

question, how the hell do we know it's a minefield, but we'll have to sort of try and cross that

bridge when we get to it, I think. Let me ask you a quick sort of a fun question,

assistant, fresh on your mind. You just yesterday had a conversation with Mr. Joe Rogan on his

podcast. What's your post mortem analysis of the chat? What are some interesting sticking

points, disagreements or joint insights? If we can kind of resolve them once you've had a chance

to sleep on it. And then I'll talk to Joe about it. Yeah, it was good fun. Yeah, he put up a bit

of a fight. Yeah, it was challenging. My view that we can't explain these things in conventional

scientific terms or whether they have already been explained in conventional scientific terms.

I suppose the point I was trying to press is we've got to distinguish the question of correlation

and explanation. Yes, we've established facts about correlation that certain kinds of brain

activity go along with certain kinds of experience. Everyone agrees on that. But that doesn't address

the why question. Why? Why do certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of

experience? And these different theories have different explanations of that. The

materialist tries to explain the experience in terms of the brain activity. The panpsychist

does it the other way around. The dualist thinks they're separate, but maybe they're tied together

by special laws of nature or something. Where's the sticking point? What exactly was the sticking

point? What's the nature of the argument? I suppose Joe was saying, well, look, we know

consciousness is explained by brain activity because you take some funny chemicals, it changes

your brain, it changes your consciousness. And I suppose, yeah, some people might want to press

and maybe this is what Joe was pressing. Isn't that explaining consciousness? But I suppose I

want to say there's a further question. Yes, changes of chemicals in my brain changes my

conscious experience. But that leaves open the question, why those particular chemicals go

along with that particular kind of experience rather than a different experience or no experience

at all? There's something deeper at the base layer is your view that is more important to try to

study and to understand in order to then go back and describe how the different chemicals interact

and create different experiences. Yeah, maybe a good analogy. If you think about quantum mechanics,

you know, quantum mechanics is a bit of math translating there. We say maths. I'm fluent

in American. Thank you for the translation. American is America. Math. Yeah. Why multiple

maths? It's plural. It's not really. It's just, I don't know. The Brits are confused. Yeah, sorry

about that. We have these funny spelling. But anyway. Yeah, so quantum mechanics is a bit of maths

and, you know, the equations work really well, predicts the outcomes. But then there's a further

question. What's going on in reality to make that equation predict correctly? And some of us just

want to say, shut up. Just it works. The shut up and calculate approach. Similarly, in consciousness,

you know, I think it's one question trying to work out the physical correlates of consciousness,

which kinds of physical brain activity go along, which kinds of experience. But there's another

question. What's going on in reality to undergird those correlations to make it the case that brain

activity goes along with experience? And that's the philosophical question that we have to give

an answer to. And there are just different options, just as there are different interpretations of

quantum mechanics. And it's really hard to evaluate. Actually, it's easy. Panpsychism is

obviously the best one. But we've got to try. There's the illusion of grandeur once again coming

through. Sorry, I'm being slightly tongue in cheek. No, I know. 100%. Before I forget, let me ask

you another fun question. Back to Daniel Dennett. You mentioned a story where you were on a yacht

with Daniel Dennett on a trip funded by a Russian investor and philosopher, Dmitry Volkov, I believe,

who also cofounded the Moscow Center of Consciousness Studies that's part of the Philosophy

Department of Moscow State University. So this is interesting to me for several reasons

that are perhaps complicated to explain, to put simply that there is in the near term for me a

trip to Russia that involves a few conversations in Russian that have perhaps less to do with

consciousness and artificial intelligence, which are the interests of mine, and more to do with

a broad spectrum of conversations. But I'm also interested in science in Russia, in artificial

intelligence and computer science, in physics, mathematics, but also these fascinating philosophical

explorations. And it was very pleasant for me to discover that such a center exists. So I have

a million questions. One is the more fun question just to imagine you and Daniel Dennett on a yacht

talking about the philosophy of consciousness. Maybe do you have any memorable experiences?

And also the more serious side for me as somebody who was born in the Soviet Union, raised there,

I'm wondering, what is the state of philosophy and consciousness and these kinds of ideas in

Russia that you've gotten a chance to kind of give us, interact with?

Yeah. So on the former question, yeah, I mean, I had a really, really good experience of chatting

to Daniel Dennett. I mean, I think he's a fantastic and very important philosopher, even though I

totally fundamentally disagree with almost everything he thinks. But yeah, it was a proud

moment. Well, as I talk about in my book Galileo's Error, I managed to persuade him he was wrong

about something, just a tiny thing, not his fundamental worldview. But it was this issue

about whether dualism is consistent with conservation of energy. So Paul Churchland,

who was also his philosopher, who's also on this boat, had argued, they're not consistent because

if there's an immaterial soul doing things in the brain, that's going to add to the energy in the

system. So we have a violation of conservation. But well, it's not my own point, philosophers,

materialist philosophers like David Papineau have pointed out that, you know,

people, dualists like David Chalmers, who call themselves naturalistic dualists,

they want to bring consciousness into science. They think it's not physical,

but they want to say it can be part of a law governed world. So Chalmers believes in these

psychophysical laws of nature over and above the laws of physics that govern the connections

between consciousness and the physical world. And they could just respect conservation of energy,

right? I mean, it could turn out that there are, just in physics, you know, that there are multiple

forces that all work together to respect conservation of energy. I mean, I suppose

physicists are pressing for a unified underlying theory, but you know, there could be a plurality

of different laws that all respect conservation. So why not add more laws? So I raised this in

Paul Churchland's talk. And I got a lot of, well, as one of the Moscow University graduate

students said afterwards, he said, he had to ask a translation from his friend. And he said,

I always say, they turned on you like a pack of wolves. Everyone was like,

Patricia Church was saying, so you believe in magic to you. And I was like, I'm not even a

dualist. I'm just making a pedantic point that this isn't a problem for dualism. Anyway,

but that evening, everyone went onto the island, except for some reason, me and Daniel Dennett.

And I went up on deck and he was, he's very, very practical and he was unlike me. See,

there's a bit of humility for the first time in this conversation. We'll highlight that part.

Philip was a very humble man. He was carving a walking stick on deck. It's very homely seen. And

anyway, we started talking about this and I was trying to press it and he was saying,

oh, but dualism is a lot of nonsense and why do you think, and I was just saying, no,

no, I'm just this honing down on this specific point. And in the end, maybe he'll deny this.

But he said, maybe that's right. And I was like, yes.

It's a win. So what about the Center for Consciousness Studies?

Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I'd know a great deal to help you. I mean, I know they've done some

great stuff. Dimitri funded this thing and also brought it along some graduate students from

Moscow State University, I think it is. And they have an active center that

tries to bring people in. I think they're producing a book that's coming out that I

made a small contribution to on different philosophers opinions on God, I think,

or some of the big questions. And yeah, so there's some interesting stuff going on there.

I'm afraid I can't, I don't really know more generally about philosophy in Russia.

Dimitri Volkov seems to be interesting. I was looking at all the stuff he's involved with. He

met with the Dalai Lama. So he's trying to connect Russian scientists with the rest of the world,

which is an effort that I think is beautiful for all cultures. So I think science, philosophy,

all of these kind of fields, disciplines that explore ideas, collaborating and working globally

across boundaries, across borders, across just all the tensions of geopolitics is a beautiful

thing. And he seems to be a somewhat singular figure in pushing this up. He just stood out to

me as somebody who's super interesting. I don't know if you have gotten a chance to interact with

him. I guess he speaks English pretty well actually. So he's both an English speaker

and a Russian speaker. I think he's written a book on Dennett, I think called Boston Zombie,

I think. I think that's the title and he's a big fan of Dennett. So I think the original plan for

this was just going to be, it was on free will and consciousness and it was going to be kind of

people broadly in the Dennett type camp. But then I think they asked David Chalmers and then he was

saying, look, you need some people you disagree with. So he got invited, me the panpsychist and

Martina Niederumelen, who's a very good duelist, substance duelist, substance duelist at

University of Fleaborg in Switzerland. And so we were the official onboard opposition.

And you didn't get thrown off overboard. Nearly in the Arctic, yeah. So sailing

around the Arctic on a sailing ship. I'm glad you survived. You mentioned free will.

You haven't talked to Sam, I would love to hear that conversation actually.

With Sam Harris? With Sam Harris, yeah. So he talks about free will quite a bit. What's the

connection between free will and consciousness to you? So if consciousness permeates all matter,

the experience, the feeling like we make a choice in this world, like our actions or results of a

choice we consciously make to use that word loosely. What to you is the connection between

free will and consciousness and is free will an illusion or not? Good question. So I think we need

to be a lot more agnostic about free will than about consciousness, because I don't think we have

the kind of certainty of the existence of free will that we do have in the consciousness case.

It could turn out that free will is an illusion. It could be that it feels as though we're free

when we're really not. Whereas I think the idea that nobody really feels pain, that we think

we feel pain, but we do, that's a lot harder to make sense of. However, what I do feel strongly

about is I don't think there are any good either scientific or philosophical arguments against

the existence of free will. And I mean strong free will in what philosophers call libertarian

free will in the sense that some of our decisions are uncaused. So I very much do disagree with

someone like Sam Harris who thinks there's this overwhelming case. I just think it's

non existent. I think there's ultimately an empirical question, but as we've already discussed,

I just don't think we know enough about the brain to establish one way or the other at the moment.

But we can build up intuition. First of all, as a fan of Sam Harris, as a fan of yours,

I would love to just listen. Speaking about terminal. So one thing would be beautiful

to watch. Here's my prediction what happens with you and Sam Harris. You talk for four hours

and Sam introduced that episode by saying it was ultimately not as fruitful as I thought,

because here's what's going to happen. You guys are going to get stuck for the first three hours

talking about one of the terms and what they mean. Sam is so good at this. I think it's really

important, but sometimes you get stuck. What does he say? Put a pin in that. He really gets stuck on

the terminologies, which rightfully you have to get right in order to really understand what we're

talking about. But sometimes you can get stuck with them for the entire conversation. It's a

fascinating dance, the one we spoke to in philosophy. If you don't get the terms precise, you can't

really be having the same conversation. But at the same time, it could be argued that it's

impossible to get terms perfectly precise and perfectly formalized. So then you're also not

going to get anywhere in the conversation. So that's a funny dance where you have to be both

rigorous and every once in a while, just let go and then go back to being rigorous and formal and

then every once in a while let go. It's the difference between mathematics, the maths,

and the poetry. Anyway, yeah, I'm a big fan of Sam Harrison. I think we're on the same page in

terms of consciousness, I think, pretty much. I'm not saying he's a panpsychist, but in our

understanding of the hard problem. But yeah, I think maybe we could talk about free will without

being too dragged down in the terminology, but I don't know. You said we need to be open minded,

but you could still have intuitions about, so Sam Harris has a pretty sort of

cotter intuitive. And for some reason, it gets people really riled up, a view of free will

that it's an illusion, or it's not even an illusion. It's not that the experience of free will

is an illusion. He argues that we don't even experience. To say that we even have the experience

isn't correct, that there's not even an experience of free will. It's pretty interesting

that claim. And it feels like you can build up intuitions about what is right and not.

There's been some kind of neuroscience, there's been some cognitive science and

psychology experiments to see what is the timing and the origin of the

desire to make an action, and when that action is actually performed, and how you interpret that

action being performed, how you remember that action, all the stories we tell ourselves,

all the neurochemicals involved in making a thing happen, what's the timing,

and how does that connect with us feeling like we decided to do something. And then, of course,

there's the more philosophical discussion about, is there room in a material view of the world

for an entity that somehow disturbs the determinism of physics? Yeah. And yeah, those are all very

precise. It's nice. It feels like free will is more amenable to like a physics mechanistic type

of thinking than its consciousness to really get to the bottom of. It feels like if it was a race,

if we're at a bar and we're betting money, it feels like we'll get to the bottom of free will

faster than we will to the bottom of consciousness. Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about

the comparison. Yeah, so there are different arguments here. I mean, so one argument I've

heard Sam Harris give that's pretty common in philosophy is this sort of thought that we can't

make sense of a middle way between a choice being determined by prior causes and it just being

being totally random and senseless, like the random decay of radioactive isotope or something.

So I think there was a good answer to that by the philosopher Jonathan Low, who's not necessarily

very well known outside academic philosophy, but is a hugely influential figure. I think one of

the best philosophers of recent times. He sadly died of cancer a few years ago. He actually spent

almost all of his career at Durham University, which where I am. So it was one reason it was a

great honor to get to get a job there. But anyway, his answer to that was what makes the difference

between a free action and a totally senseless one, senseless random event, is that free choice

involves responsiveness to reasons. So again, we were talking about this earlier. If I'm deciding

whether to take a job in the US or to stay in the UK, I weigh up considerations, you know,

different standard of life, maybe, or being close to family or cultural difference, I weigh them up

and I, you know, edge towards a decision. So I think that is sufficient to distinguish it.

You know, we're hypothetically supposing trying to make sense of this idea, not saying it's real,

but that could be enough to distinguish it from a senseless. It's not a senseless random occurrence

because the free decision involved responsiveness to reasons. So I think that just answers that

particular philosophical objection. So what is the middle way between determined by prior causes and

totally random? Well, there's an action, a choice that's not determined by prior causes, but it's

not just random, because the decision essentially involved responsiveness to reasons. So that's

the answer to that. And I think actually that kind of thought also, I think you were hinting at the

famous Liberty experiments, where he got his subjects to perform some kind of random action

of pressing a button and then note the time they decided to press it quote unquote, and then he's

scanning the brains and he claims to have found that about half a second before they consciously

decided to press the button, the brain is getting ready to perform that action. So he claimed that

about half a second before the person has consciously decided to press the button, the brain has

already started the activity that's going to lead to the action. And then later people have

claimed that there's a difference of maybe seven to 10 seconds. I mean, there are all sorts of

issues with these experiments. But one is that as far as I'm aware, all of the quote unquote choices

they focused on are just these totally random, senseless actions, like just pressing a button

for no reason. And I think the kind of free will we're interested in is free choice that involves

responsiveness to reasons weighing up considerations. And those kind of free decisions might not happen

like at an identifiable instant. You might, when you're weighing it up, should I get married?

Should I, you know, you, you might edge slowly towards one side or the other. And so it could,

it could be that maybe the liberty, I think there are other problems with the liberty stuff, but

maybe they show that we can't freely choose to do something totally senseless, whatever that would

mean. But but that doesn't show we can't freely, in this strong libertarian sense, respond to

considerations of reason and value. To be fair, it will be difficult to see what kind of experiment

we could set up to test that. But just because we can't yet set up that kind of experiment,

we shouldn't, you know, pretend we know more than we do. So yeah, so for those reasons, I don't,

well, the third consideration you raise is different. Again, this is the debate I have

with Sean Carroll, would this conflict with physics? I just think we don't know enough about

the brain to know whether there are causal dynamics in the brain that are not reducible to underlying

chemistry and physics. And so, so then Sean Carroll says, well, that would mean

our physics is wrong. So he focuses on the core theory, which is the name for standard model

of particle physics plus the weak limit of general relativity. So, you know, we can't totally bring

quantum mechanics and relativity together. But actually, the circumstances in which we can't

bring them together are just in situations of very high gravity. For example, when you're

about to go into a black hole or something, actually in terrestrial circumstances, we can bring them

together in the core theory. And then Sean wants to say, well, we can be very confident that core

theory is correct. And so, if there were libertarian free will in the brain, the core theory would be

wrong. And okay, this I mean, this is something I'm not sure about. And I'm still thinking about

and I'm having I'm learning from my discussion with Sean, but I'm still not totally clear why

it could be suppose we did discover strong emergence in the brain, whether it's free will

or something else. Perhaps what we would say is not that the core theory is wrong, but we'd say

the core theory is correct in its own terms, namely capturing the causal capacities of

particles and fields. But then it's a further assumption, whether they're the only things

that are running the show. Maybe there are also fundamental causal capacities associated with

systems. And then if we discover this strong emergence, then when we work out what happens

in the brain, we have to look to the core theory, the causal capacities of particles and fields.

And we have to look to what we know about the strongly emergent causal capacities of systems,

and maybe they co determine what happens in the system. So I don't know whether that makes sense

or not. But I mean, the more important point, I mean, that's in a way a kind of branding point,

how we brand this, the more important point is we just don't know enough about the workings of the

brain to know whether there are strongly emergent causal dynamics, whether or not that would mean

we have to modify physics, or maybe just we think physics is not the total story of what's running

the show. But we just, if it turned out empirically that everything's reducible to underlying

physics and chemistry, sure, I would drop any commitment to free libertarian free will in a

heartbeat. It's an empirical question. Maybe that's why, as you say, in principle, it's easier to get

a grip on. But we're a million miles away from being at that stage. Well, I don't know for a

million miles. I hope we're not because one of the ways I think to get to it is by engineering

systems. So my hope is to understand intelligence by building intelligence systems, to understand

consciousness by building systems that, let's say the easy thing, which is not the easy thing,

but the first thing, which is to try to create the illusion of consciousness. Through that process,

I think you start to understand much more about consciousness, about intelligence,

and then the same with free will. I think those are all tied very closely together,

at least from our narrow human perspective. And we try to engineer systems that interact deeply

with humans, that form friends with humans that humans fall in love with, and they fall in love

with humans. Then you start to have to try to deeply understand ourselves, to try to deeply

understand what is intelligence in the human mind, what is consciousness, what is free will.

And I think engineering is just another way to do philosophy.

Yeah. No, I certainly think there's a role for that. And it would be an important consideration

if we could seemingly replicate in an artificial way the ability to choose that would be our

consideration in thinking about these things. But there's still the question of whether

that's how we do it. So even if we could replicate behavior in a certain way in

an artificial system, it's not until we understand the workings of our brains,

it's not clear, that's how we do it. And as I say, the kind of free will I'm interested in is

where we respond to reasons, considerations of value, how would we tell whether a system was

genuinely grasping and responding to facts about value or whether they were just

replicating, giving the impression of doing so. I don't know even how to think about that.

On the process to building them, I think we'll get a lot of insights. And once they become

conscious, what's going to happen is exactly the same thing that's happening in chess now,

which is once the chess engines far superseded the capabilities of humans, humans just kind of

forgot about them, or they used them to help them out with the study and stuff. But we say,

okay, let the engines be, and then we humans will just play amongst each other.

Just like dolphins and hamsters are not so concerned about humans except for a source of food,

they do their own thing and let us humans launch rockets into space and all that kind of stuff,

they don't care. I think we'll just focus on ourselves. But in the process of building

intelligence systems, conscious systems, I think we'll get a deeper understanding of

the role of consciousness in the human mind. And what are its origins? Is it the base layer of

reality? Is it strongly merge a phenomena of the brain? Or just as you sort of brilliantly put here,

it could be both, like they're not mutually exclusive.

Dealing with consciousness needs to be an interdisciplinary task. We need philosophers,

neuroscientists, physicists, engineers, replicating these things artificially and

all needs to be working in step. I'm quite interested. More and more scientists get

in touch with me, actually, saying that was one of the great things about, I think,

that's come from writing a popular book is not just getting the ideas out to a general audience,

but getting the ideas out to scientists and scientists getting touched saying,

no, this in some way connects to my work. And I would like to kind of start to put together

a network of an interdisciplinary network of scientists and philosophers and engineers,

perhaps interested in a panpsychist approach. And because I think so far,

panpsychism has just been sort of trying to justify its existence. And that's important.

But I think once you just get on with an active research program, that's when people start taking

it seriously, I think. Do you think we're living in a simulation?

No, I think...

Is there some aspect to that thought experiment that's compelling to you within the framework of

panpsychism?

It's an important and serious argument. And it's not to be laughed away. I suppose one issue I

have with it is there's a crucial assumption there that consciousness is substrate independent

as the jargon goes, which means it's software rather than hardware. It's depend on

organization rather than the stuff. Whereas as a panpsychist, I think consciousness is the stuff

of the brain. It's the stuff of matter. So I think just taking the organizational properties,

the software in my brain and uploading them, you wouldn't get the stuff of my brain. So I

am actually worried if at some point in the future we start uploading our minds and we think, oh my

God, Granny's still there. I can email Granny after her body's rotted in the ground. And we

all start uploading our brains. It could be we're just committing suicide. We're just getting rid of

our consciousness because I think that wouldn't, for me, preserve the experience, just getting

them what the software features. Anyway, that's a crucial premise of this simulation argument

because the idea in a simulated universe, I don't think he necessarily would have consciousness.

It's interesting that you as a panpsychist are attached because to me,

panpsychism would encourage the thought that there's not a significant difference.

And at the very bottom, it's not substrate independent, but you're going to have consciousness

in a human and then move it to something else. You can move it to the cloud. You can move it

to the computer. It feels like that's much more possible if consciousness is the base layer.

Yes, you could certainly, it allows for the possibility of creating artificial consciousness

because there's not souls. There aren't any kind of extra magical ingredients. So yeah,

it's definitely allows the possibility of artificial consciousness and maybe preserving

my consciousness in some sort of artificial way. My only point, I suppose, was just replicating

the computational or organizational features would not, for me, preserve consciousness.

I mean, but some opponents of materialism disagree with me on that. I think David

Chalmers is an opponent of materialist. He's a kind of dualist, but he thinks

the way these psychophysical laws work, they hook onto the computational or organizational

features of matter. So he thinks, you know, I think he thinks you could upload your consciousness.

I tend to think not. So in that sense, we're not living in simulation

in the sort of specific computational view of things in that substrate matters to you.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. And in that, you agree, Sean Carroll, that physics matters.

Yeah, physics is our best way of capturing what the stuff of the world does.

Yeah. But not the whatness, the being of the stuff. Yeah, the isness.

The isness, thank you. Russell Brand, I had a conversation with Russell Brand,

and he said, oh, you mean the isness? I thought it was a good way of putting this.

The isness. The isness. Russell's great. The big ridiculous question. What do you think is the

meaning of all of this? You write in your book that the entry for our reality in the Hitchhiker's

Guide might read a physical universe whose intrinsic nature is constituted of consciousness

worth a visit. So our whole conversation has been about the first part of that sentence.

What about the second part worth a visit? Why is this place worth a visit? Why does it have meaning?

Why does it have value at all? Why? These are big questions. I mean, firstly,

I do think panpsychism is important to think about for considerations of

meaning and value. As we've already discussed, I think consciousness is the root of everything

that matters in life from deep emotions, subtle thoughts, beautiful sensory experiences.

And yet, I believe our official scientific worldview is incompatible with the reality of

consciousness. I mean, that's controversial, but that's what I think. And I think people

feel this on an intuitive level. It's maybe part of what Max Weber called the disenchantment of

nature. They know their feelings and experiences are not just electrochemical signaling. I mean,

they might just have that very informed intuition, but I think that can be rigorously supported.

So I think this can lead to a sense of alienation and a sense that we lack a framework for

understanding the meaning and significance of our lives. And in the absence of that,

people turn to other things to make sense of the meaning of their lives, like nationalism,

fundamentalist religion, consumerism. So I think panpsychism is important in that regard,

in bringing together the quantitative facts of physical science with, as it were, the human

truth, by which I just mean the qualitative reality of our own experience. As I've already

said, I do think there are objective facts about value and what we ought to do and what we ought

to believe that we respond to. And that's very mysterious to make sense of, both how there

could be such facts and how we could know about them and respond to them. But I do think there

are such facts and they're mostly to do with kinds of conscious experience.

So they're there to be discovered and much of the human condition is to discover those

objective sources of value?

I think so, yeah. And then, I mean, moving away from panpsychism to the, you know,

at an even bigger level, I suppose I think it is important to me

to live in hope that there's a purpose to existence and that, you know, what I do

contributes in some small way to that greater purpose. But, you know, I would say I don't

know if there's a purpose to existence. I think some things point in that direction,

some things point away from it. But I don't think you need certainty or even high probability

to have faith in something. So take an analogy. Suppose you've got a friend who's very seriously

ill, maybe there's a 30% chance they're going to make it. You shouldn't believe your friend's

going to get better, you know, because they're probably not. But what you can say is, you know,

you can say to your friend, I have faith that you're going to get better. That is, I choose to

live in hope about that, about that possibility. I choose to orientate my life towards that hope.

Similarly, you know, I don't think we know whether or not there's a purpose to existence,

but I think we can make the choice to live in hope of that possibility. And I find that

a worthwhile and fulfilling way to live. So maybe as your editor, I would

collaborate with you on the edit of the hitchhiker's guide entry that instead of worth a visit,

it will insert hopefully worth a visit or the inhabitants hoped that you would think

it's worth a visit. Philip, you're an incredible mind, an incredible human being, and indeed are