What Is Consciousness? Philip Goff On The Nature o

The Rich Roll Podcast. We need to expand the task of science to construct a theory that can accommodate both the data of observation experiments, of course, but also this privately known reality of consciousness. My guest today is Philip Goff. Philip is an associate professor of philosophy at Durham University in the United Kingdom, with a focus on the nature of consciousness. But when we're trying to explain

consciousness, it's not about explaining behavior with mechanisms. It's about accounting for this invisible but undeniable, privately known reality of our feelings and experiences. He is a proponent of something called pan-psychism. Which is this really interesting theory that everything material in our universe has some element of individual consciousness. Which is a theory that he explores in his fascinating book called Galileo's Era, which I highly recommend. It's

consciousness that's fundamental, and the physical world arises from underlying facts about mind or consciousness. We explore pan-psychism, of course. We talk about the science of mind, the nature, of reality and consciousness, as well as the multiverse AI and spirituality. And it's coming right up, but first. Okay, it was really utterly fascinating talking to Philip, and this conversation is one that I must admit began to stretch

just past the boundary of my intellectual capabilities. And I mean that in the most enjoyable way possible. So, from the mystery, of my mind, to the mystery of yours, please enjoy this appearance in consciousness, my conversation with Philip Goff. Welcome to Los Angeles, welcome to the United States. I know that you were just in London and New York City engaging in debates on the nature of

consciousness. How did that go? Yeah, it was, it was great fun. It was brilliant. There was sold out theaters of the general public, first in London, then in New York. Just incredible, actually, see so many people interested in science and consciousness. It was unbelievable. And you know, great questions and, you know, hanging out chatting to people afterwards. And yeah, it was really, it was really fun.

It's pretty cool. Well, I'm delighted to have you here today. This is a long time in the making. I think it's been a couple years of us going back and forth. We were trying to do this before the pandemic, and it took a while, but here we are. We got there in the end. Yeah, thank you. So today, the intention is to tackle the hard problem

of consciousness. I think in order to engage in that discussion, we have to define our terms a little bit and set the context and the terrain. Before we even define consciousness, though, maybe it's worth explaining why it is a hard problem. Like we call it the hard problem. What is the, the kind of genesis of characterizing this in that form? Yeah, I think that is a

good place to stop because I think I'm going to have to explain this to you. I think so many people, in my view, misunderstand the nature of the problem. And I think that is one of the things that's really starting to block progress. So, I mean, the way this, maybe I can start with the way it's standardly set up. It's standardly characterizes a purely scientific problem.

You know, the challenge of explaining how brains produce consciousness. You know, how, how electrochemical signaling is able to bring about this in a world of colors and sounds that each of us knows. Every second of waking life. And the thought is generally, you know, we just need to plug away with our standard ways of investigating the brain and we'll crack it. But I would argue that

actually what we have at root here is a philosophical rather than a purely scientific problem. And I think until we... We can front that the philosophical underpinnings of the problem were not really going to make progress towards a solution. Right. And talk a little bit about your evolution to that realization that the answers that we seek lie in more of a philosophical exploration than a materialist

physics, hard science path. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is an old problem going back a few centuries. It's what's traditionally been known as the mind body problem. And I think the problem arises because we have two very different ways of accessing reality. Perception and introspection. So, through perception, we access the physical world around us, via our senses. And we've learned to do that more accurately and precisely

through science. And through introspection, we access consciousness via our immediate awareness of our own feelings and experiences. So the challenge of the mind body problem then is how to bring together these two seemingly very different things, consciousness and the physical world into a single unified picture of reality. And broadly speaking, there are three options. Option one, the materialist option is that the physical world that's fundamental

that we know through science and consciousness somehow arises from physical processes in the brain. Second option, the one I prefer, panpsychism turns that on its head. Right. So it's consciousness that's fundamental and the physical world arises from underlying facts. So, this is an old problem. Philosophers have wrestled with for hundreds of years. And it's essentially a philosophical problem because all of those three views are just

described are impossible. So, it's not an essence. Experiments are very important in ways we could talk about. But it's not an essence. A scientific problem. So I think it's almost like we've taken this ancient philosophical problem, labeled it science. And then we find science can't answer it. It's like maybe trying to solve a math problem, looking down a microscope or something. We need to understand what

the problem is. Wouldn't the materialist contend that we can solve it with hard science? We're just not at the point where we're capable of doing it yet. Yeah, yeah. So it's attempting thought. I mean, and that's, well, I was just debating in London a couple of nights ago, anal Seth, the neuroscientist. Really great neuroscientist, a good friend of mine as well as a philosophical enemy. We've

debated each other a couple of times now. And I think that's the only way to solve this. And this is his line. You know, we've, he makes the analogy to life. You know, we used to think life was this big mystery. Maybe we'd never give a scientific explanation without the supernatural vital spark or something. But then we plugged away with the science and the problem kind

of dissolved. And so he thinks the same is going to happen with consciousness. But I think that's not a good analogy because life was a purely scientific problem. It was just about accounting for observable data, what you can observe about the living functions of organisms. In other words, defining what constitutes being alive versus inanimate. Yeah, explaining what organisms can do, what they're made of, how they

behave, how they function, where they came from, that's where evolution comes in. But the distinctive thing about consciousness is that it's not publicly observable. I can't cut open your head and look in your brain and see your feelings and experiences. We know about consciousness, not from experiments. It's not something we discovered in a particle collider. We know about consciousness in a very different way, just from

our immediate awareness of our own feelings and experiences. If you're in pain, you're just directly aware of your pain. Now, you know, science is used to dealing with things you can't observe, like fundamental particles or quantum wave functions or even other universes, some physicists entertain. But there's a really important difference in the case of consciousness. In all these other cases, we theorize about things we can't

observe in order to explain what we can observe. That's the whole task of science explaining the publicly accessible data of observation and experience. But in the case of consciousness, that's not what we're doing. In the case of consciousness, the thing we are trying to explain is not publicly observable. And that's why it's a wholly different kettle of fish. Do you have that expression? Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. It's almost too difficult to even talk about because you can't tease out or parse consciousness from the thing, anything else, like it is the essence of being, right? There is no, there is nothing that is not conscious experience. Yeah. So you can't create a distance between yourself and the subject of the discourse, which is consciousness, because you are participating in it, right? Is that a

way? I don't know. It's a very strange thing. So before we even go any further, like, let's just define consciousness, like how you define consciousness, like, how you define consciousness. How you define it, how you think about it. So we know what we're talking about here. It's a good place to start, because it is such a slippery word that people use in all sorts of different

ways. But the way I would define it, which is pretty standard, I think, among both philosophers and scientists, is that your consciousness is just what it's like to be you. So right now, you're having a visual experience of this room, an auditory experience of my life. My voice speaking to you, if you pay attention, you can notice the tactile sensations of the chair and the body.

This is all aspects of what it's like to be you right now, all aspects of your consciousness. This is the classic kind of niggle definition. That's right, niggles. I find it to be not that satisfying. To me, it feels like it's similar to the Supreme Courts, definitely. It's the definition of pornography, like you know it when you see it. It's sort of like, what is it

like to be you is what consciousness? It feels circular. Like, defining consciousness as someone who is experiencing consciousness. Yeah. Well, I think you're right. I think it is circular, because I think what we're dealing with is essentially a primitive concept. You can't define it in other ways. Maybe it's like Louis Armstrong. He asked about, allegedly, ask what jazz was. He said, if you have to ask,

you'll never know. But for some people, that niggle term works. So niggles said, in his famous paper, what's it like to be a bat from the 70s? He said, something's conscious. If there's something that it's like to be it. So there's something that it's like for a rabbit to be cold or to be kicked. It takes a vivid example. But we tend to think there's nothing

that it's like for a table. To be cold or to be kicked or to be sawn in half. There's nothing that's like from the inside as it were. So for some people that works, I don't know how well it translates actually. And some people like yourself think, I mean, I find most people just when you say experience or subjective experience, they kind of get onto it

and you know teaching philosophy undergraduates. There's a lot of philosophical concepts they find it hard to get a grip on. But this one, people tend to, people tend to think, to get pretty easily. So there are some people who think there isn't a real concept here and we're playing language games and wasting our time. But most people on both sides of the debate tend to think

there is a notion we can get onto and work with here. So we have this materialist notion, which is that the nature of consciousness is something that can be deduced through the scientific method at some point. Then we have this dualist notion, which is a much more mystical notion, which is that there is the material world that we can study. Then there is this world of

consciousness that lives in a, in some kind of realm beyond matter that we don't quite understand. And to which the scientific method does not apply. Both of these are problematic from your perspective. Panpsychism is sort of the, you know, the best explanation from your point of view in a world in which nothing is quite adequate in terms of understanding or explaining the nature of what consciousness

is. Is that a fairer? Yeah. I think so. I think maybe dualists, contemporary dualists might push back a little at the way you describe the position there. Suppose we do tend to think of it as something kind of mystical and religious supernatural. But actually that probably the most famous contemporary dualist David Charmers, who was in the audience at the New York debate last night. I mean,

I think he's probably the most secular, pro-science atheist guy I've ever met. And I once asked him if he was religious. And he said, I'll need in a sense that the universe is cool. But he calls himself a naturalistic dualist. So he thinks consciousness is not physical. It's separate from the brain. And it's separate, at least from the physical processes in the brain. But he wants

to bring it into the scientific story. He wants to expand science to incorporate this non-physical element. And so he postulates what he calls psycho-physical laws. These are special laws of nature over and above the laws of physics, which somehow connect up the physical world to consciousness. And he thinks then it's, it's an assigned to the world. So he wants to expand science. And with materialism saying

it's the scientific option, I suppose I would qualify that a little bit by saying the materialist tries to explain consciousness in terms of physical science, chemistry, physics, neuroscience, these kind of things. So that's the materialist position that I would call a naturalistic dualist. I ultimately think is inadequate. But science, science could be something a bit more general. Science doesn't have to be tied to physical science

understood as chemistry and neuroscience and so on. So I guess all of us would want to say, you know, we're not giving up on science. It's just some of us like David Charmers from his perspective, his dualist perspective, me from my panpsychis perspective. Want to have a slightly more expansive conception of what science says. That expansive notion of it would consider things like particle physics or

string theory. When you sort of think about what we don't understand about physics and science, we think of things like dark matter, etc. These mind-blowing concepts that, you know, me as a non-scientist, you know, have a difficult time just understanding. The idea of alternate realities and parallel, all these sort of things that, you know, I mean, I think that's a very important thing. That quantum physics

contemplates. Perhaps there is some explanation or path to clarity that can be gleaned from those disciplines that we haven't quite mastered at this point. Yeah. So it's, you know, I'm not here to tell scientists not to do their job or to do it differently. It's about having a more expansive conception of what's going on. So, what science is, because the way we currently think about science,

the whole task is accounting for the data of observation and experiments. That's the job. Once we've done that, if we could have some grand unified theory that accounts for the data of observation and experiments, that's job done. We can pat ourselves on the back and go home. But I want to say that's not all that we need to explain. Because there's this other thing we know

about. This other thing we know to be real, that's not known about for observation experiments, namely consciousness, something we know about in a quite different way, just through being immediately aware of it. And so we need to expand the task of science. And we need to be aiming to construct a theory that can accommodate both the data of observation experiments, of course. But also this private

and private reality of consciousness. So, I mean, in Galileo's era, I frame that as expanding science, these days, I guess I would say more about it's just about appreciating that we need to do philosophy as well as science. We need to understand that philosophy has a distinctive and ineliminable role to play in this project of finding out the nature of reality that we're all aiming at.

And that's both this goes both to the error that Galileo made from your estimation, but also to the correctness of his assessment that there are things that can be physically measured through scientific tools. And then there are other things that are not that require a different toolkit, I guess, to better understand. So explain why you made this the title of the book. And where that bifurcation

has led science in terms of how we think about consciousness. Perhaps wrong-headedly. Yeah. I mean, it's a somewhat provocative title. I actually am a huge fan of Galileo. It is a click-mating kind of thing. There was an earlier book by Antonio DiMazio called Descartes' era. And I guess I'm a bit sick of everyone bashing Descartes' thought. I'll provoke a little by having Galileo's era. But no,

I think Galileo in many ways had a much better understanding of these issues than we do now. And what Galileo essentially wanted to do was have science to be purely mathematical, which is something we kind of take for granted now. But this was a really radical, unusual step for Galileo in 1623 to declare right from now on what he called natural philosophy. I guess what we

now call physical science. It's going to be purely mathematical. I have this purely quantitative language. But I think Galileo appreciated that you can't capture the qualities of conscious experience in these terms. That deep-red you experience as you watch the setting sun, the smell of coffee, the taste of chocolate. You can't capture these qualities in the purely quantitative language of physical science. You can't even articulate them.

So Galileo essentially says, well, if we want a mathematical science, if we want a purely quantitative science, we need to take consciousness outside of the domain of science. So Galileo's worldview, you have this division between two domains. You have the domain of science, the physical world with its purely mathematical quantitative properties. And the domain of consciousness, consciousness with its qualities, colors, sounds, smells, tastes. And that,

you know, that's gone really well. And I think we're now at a point where people think, oh, it's gone really well. It's gone so well. It's going to explain consciousness. But the irony is, it's, it's the project of physical science has gone so well since and arguably because Galileo put consciousness outside of its domain of consciousness. So the fact that physical science is done incredibly well,

once we take consciousness out, doesn't really, isn't really going to give us confidence that it's going to be able to deal with consciousness itself. That's the right. And the tricky thing here, you know, at the risk of sounding like this is going to take a turn into like, wrong head philosophy is that science can explain, to extend the chocolate metaphor like science can explain what chocolate

is, the chemical composition. So the composition of chocolate, what happens, you know, to your nervous system when that chocolate hits your taste buds, et cetera. But what it can explain for or account for is the experience of enjoying chocolate like that. You know, that is like an incalculable thing that exists beyond language or the ability for the traditional scientific method to adequately explain. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So, I think that's the right thing. Don't get me wrong. Science is crucial for dealing with consciousness. But in relation to the mind body problem, I think the primary thing science can help us with is working out which kinds of brain activity go along with which kinds of conscious experience. So you can't access consciousness through perception. You can't look inside someone's head and see their feelings.

You can access brains through perception and you can scan people's brains and you can ask them into human being. You can ask them what they're feeling as you scan their brain or maybe look for external markers of consciousness. And in this way, neuroscientists try to work out which kinds of physical activity in the brain go along with which kinds of conscious experience. Or more generally, what

in general, what kinds of physical activity in general? Are necessarily insufficient for consciousness. And that's really important data. But that's not the complete story of consciousness. What we ultimately want is an explanation. Why? Why does certain kinds of brain activity go along with conscious experience? Why should that be? And it's then that the philosophy kicks in. Then we're at the mind body problem. Because that then

what you need is a theory of ultimate reality that explains why. Consciousness appears in the physical world at all. And that's where the experiments can't settle the matter. Because consciousness is not a publicly observable data. And that's never been what physical science has been aiming at as I think Galileo understood. Yeah. And it's also very difficult. It's, I don't know if I would call it counter

intuitive, but it's very difficult. Like our intuition around what consciousness is. It does not matter. It doesn't really kind of land at the bull's eye, right? Which makes this hard to talk about and hard to kind of even wrap our brains around. But essentially, you know, what you're saying, and please again correct me if I'm wrong, is that the traditional modality for understanding consciousness has more

to do with consciousness arising out of matter. And the panpsychists would say that matter arises out of consciousness, which is a way of saying that consciousness is fundamental to reality and to matter itself. And that it is at the baseline from which everything, the gen, from which the genesis of everything else emerges. Yeah. Yeah. We have this essentially philosophical choice that we have to confront. It's

not a scientific choice that you can settle with an experiment. It's a philosophical choice. Do we start with matter? Do we start with the physical universe and try and get consciousness out? Or do we start with consciousness and try and get the physical universe out? Or do we start with both? That's the, that's the, that's the two list option. And I mean, as far as I'm

concerned, if we think about the materialist option of, I'm trying to get consciousness out of physical processes in the brain, we find that there has been absolutely no progress on trying to make sense of that. Nobody has ever managed to do that. Make sense of how you could get consciousness out of purely physical processes in the brain. The science has gone really well, you know, of

telling us which kinds of brain activity go along with conscious experience. But no one's ever come up with an explanation of how, how you could get consciousness out of physical brain activity. Whereas when you come to panpsychism, I would argue actually we've already worked out how this can be done. The problem is essentially solved. And I guess we can get on to this. But here I

think Bertrand Russell should be seen as the Darwin of consciousness. In the 1920s, he essentially worked out how we could account for physical reality in terms of underlying facts about mind and consciousness. So here's our choice. The materialist explanatory project that no one has ever made any progress on. All the panpsychist explanatory project, which is already done. It's not complete. So my mind is kind of

a no brainer. Right. All right. So so much unpack here. But explain to me how you arrived at this perspective yourself. I mean, you're somebody who by your own admission, like has been obsessed with consciousness from a very early age. You've been thinking about this for a very long time. And panpsychism wasn't your initial, you know, knee jerk default perspective on all of this. Absolutely not.

No. So when I studied, philosophy in the dying embers of the 20th century, we were just given these two options. No one told me about panpsychism. We were given, I didn't, I didn't even read David Charmers. Actually, as an undergraduate in my, I had philosophy of mind every year in my degree. And I didn't read David Charmers. But anyway, we had these choices. Are you a

materialist, explain it in terms of physical processes in the brain? Or are you a dualist? Somebody thinks consciousness is outside of the body in the brain. And I wanted to defend the material. This option, I thought this is the, you know, this is the scientifically credible option, not like all that superstitious religious stuff, which I now think is a bit unfair on the, on the dualist.

But anyway, that's how I was thinking as a young man. And you know, I defended them. Terious option. But I slowly came to think for some of the reasons we've just been talking about that you just can't explain consciousness in these terms. You can't account for the, the qualities of experience, the redness of a red experience, for example, in the purely quantitative language of neuroscience. And

so I thought, well, I still want to be materialist. So I decided I was going to deny the reality of my own, my own conscious experience. This is what's become known as the illusionist position defended, for example, by my co-host on my podcast, mind chat, Keith Frankish, who denies the reality of consciousness, on, under a certain understanding of that word, at least. So I, so I

bravely tried to embrace this, you know, and defended it. And, but then I, I think I lasted about three months. And then I just remember just kind of sitting in a bar. I don't know, enjoying a drink and a cigarette you could smoke in bars in those days and feeling the music a bit of adrenaline and just, just couldn't do it anymore. I just could, the

reality you were having such a, such a palpable experience. It's obvious. Yeah. It's not an illusion, is it? It's hard to make sense of what an illusion would be without consciousness. And so, but after that, I, I, I think I was a sort of closet ju list. So I sort of thought, I had problems of juilless. And but thought that seems to be the only problem.

And I actually wrote my end of degree dissertation, arguing that the problem is irresolvable. And I just tried to forget about it. I lived in Poland for a bit. Try to, right. Just get it yourself in this obsession with consciousness. Read about science. So people think, people think I like mysteries because I'm defending puns like this. But I don't, I don't like mysteries. I hate miss.

I want to get rid of mystery. And so this was, so, you know, try to focus on reading about science that was more tractable. But then I just happened across, well, actually, and another article by Thomas Nagel. I think he was a kind of a pioneer. He had an article. Tent very tentatively defending puns like his in the 70s. And it was almost apologetic. He was,

he was sort of giving an argument. Like, of course, this is ridiculous. But it's something to the argument. But, and I just read it. And I just thought, oh my God, that just it just avoids all the problems, the problems of dualism on the one hand, the problems in materialism on the other. And it just gave me a kind of deep sense of intellectual peace, you

know, that I, that there's something that can accommodate both the scientific truth. But also the undeniable lived reality of conscious experience. And so that just was transformational really. And then I just tried to find probably the only philosophy department in the UK then that had a pun psychist professor, Galen Straussen at the University of Reading. And so I started graduate study and turned out okay. Yeah.

So I think that I find myself wanting to be true, which is not, you know, a sort of place of integrity to, you know, kind of look objectively at a situation and try to understand, understand the nature of it. But I can't help it. It's like, I just think like the world would be cooler. If, if consciousness is the fundamental kind of base layer of everything

that exists, whether you're, whether you, you are a complex organism, like a human being. All the way down to inanimate objects. I just think that that it colors everything about how you understand the nature of reality. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm, and I'm right with you that I always say, little catchphrase of mine. We should ultimately be interested. Not in the view we'd like to be true,

but the view that's most likely to be true. And, you know, in Galileo's era and in the new book I'm working on now, you know, I want the truth, you know, but I was, I was fine when I'm arguing with somebody who disagreed with, I can't deny that there's a bit of me that wants them to be wrong. But there's also a big, a stronger part

of me think, wondering, are they right? I want to know if they're right. I want to know. You know, I really, I really do have a deep thirst for the truth. You know, we'll never know for sure, but to have our best guess. And so, yeah, in Galileo's era and in the book I'm currently working on, you know, most of it is just the cold-blooded case,

the evidence, the arguments. But then we do also want to think about the implications for human existence. So I tend to have a final chapter. Yeah. What, what does this mean to live this out? And I, you know, so the great thing about pan-psychism is I think we've got good reason to think it's probably true. But also I think it's, it's slightly better for our mental

and physical health, I think, because it, you know, this isn't, this isn't just an abstract intellectual puzzle. Consciousness is at the root of human identity. It's the arguably the source of everything that matters, you know, from deep emotions, subtle thoughts, beautiful sensory experiences. And yeah, I'm inclined to think our official scientific world view, materialism, is actually just inconsistent with the reality of consciousness. If it was

true, there wouldn't be consciousness. If all there was was the purely quantitative story of physical science, there wouldn't be qualitative experience. And so if, if I'm right about that, which is, of course, a little bit controversial, then we're at a very odd period of history where our official scientific world view denies the existence of the thing that's most evident and the thing that gives life meaning.

And, you know, in a way, that's wackier than any religious. It's the craziest thing ever. Like, think of it, right? Think of the craziest religious doctrine. I don't know, heaven hell, whatever. I think we'll look back in history to this time when people had this world view that denied their own conscious feelings experiences. And I think, what the, how did they get in that mindset? And

I, I think, I think it's something to do with being blown away by the success of physical science and the incredible technology, which is, you know, which is incredible, which is rightly celebrated. But it leads us to think, this is the truth. We found the way of getting to the truth. But I think again, the irony is physical science has been so successful. Precisely because it's,

it's focused on something quite specific, you know, roughly understanding how stuff behaves. And once you understand how stuff behaves, you can, create technology, right? You can manipulate the world. But when we're trying to explain consciousness, that's not what we're trying to do. It's not about explaining behavior with mechanisms. It's about accounting for this invisible, but undeniable, privately known reality of our feelings and experiences. Right. This

cornerstone idea that we, when it comes to hard science, we understand matter through the lens of how matter behaves. Yeah. But that doesn't account for what matter actually is. Yeah. So the thesis is that matter is composed of the, the base elements of consciousness somehow, somewhere. Yeah. And that this is, this is, this is like at the, you know, at the basement floor of everything that

is real, it is infused with consciousness, whether it's a rock or whether it's a human being. And that conscious experience is something that is binary, something is either conscious or it isn't. But the complexity of that conscious experience toggles up with the complexity of the organism. Yeah. Is that a fair? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just, I don't think panpsychists necessarily have to think that literally everything

is conscious. I think I watched your chat with our friend, Anika Harris. And I think, her person, a panpsychism would think that literally everything is conscious. I know she's a bit agnostic on where it's true. I mean, her book was my introduction to this notion. We talked about it briefly in that podcast. But that's what led, you know, that's what led to this conversation, obviously. Yeah.

It's, it's been great that she's managed to really done a lot to get the idea out there. But I don't think panpsychists necessarily have to think that, as you say, the basic commitment is that the fundamental building blocks of reality have some kind of very, very rudimentary conscious experience, maybe fundamental particles, or maybe universe wide fields. Many theoretical physicists inclined to think that reality is made

up of fields rather than particles. But just sticking to particles for the sake of simplicity, just because the particles are conscious, it doesn't mean that every random arrangement of particles has consciousness in its own right. So it doesn't mean your socks or rocks or tables and chairs are conscious. It just means that the smallest building blocks they're made up of have consciousness. So I'd be more

inclined to think the conditions under which conscious particles combine to form a conscious system that is conscious in its own right are comparatively rare and natural select as a question as it were discovered this and exploited it. So probably the, the natural world is filled with consciousness. But more generally in the universe, more generally, it's probably confined to the level of fundamental physics. But, you know,

this is an open empirical question. We need to look to neuroscience to try and pin down and make systematic where we get consciousness at the macro level of reality. So it's, you think that neuroscience has came forward doing that? I hope so. I hope so. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not a problem. It's, it is hard because consciousness is not publicly observable. You know, the

neuroscientist, Christoph Koch, Bet David Sharmers, 25 years ago that it would all be wrapped up by now. He bet him a crate of fine wine. But I think it's, it's time to pay up because there are, you know, at least four or five different theories, we're just talking the neuroscientific theories. And there's really no consensus. But I don't know. I still have hope that we can,

work with the human case and, and organisms similar to ourselves and try and work out some kind of systematic theory of, of, of what kind of systems do and don't have consciousness. I still have hope in that project. Yeah. But it's, it's not easy at all. Yeah. I think it's interesting that, first of all, we're even having this conversation. Like what you're proposing is, is quite

radical. It, it's still, I don't know if it's on the fringes of how we're thinking about consciousness. But if it is less so than it used to be by dint of your book and Onika and other people who are, you know, thinking about this a little bit more deeply, then we have in the past. And I think we're at an interesting kind of juncture in terms

of how we're grappling with the nature of consciousness. But I would say, I'm interested in from your perspective, you know, most people are probably still quite dismissive of what you have to say. And to straw man, your argument would be, you know, would be to say that there is no scientific or objective evidence to support any of your thesis. I agree with you. I agree with

you. I, I, I don't think you can scientifically prove the particles have consciousness because consciousness is not publicly observable. You can't, you can't look inside an electron to save its conscious. Just as I can't look inside your brain to save your consciousness. So, so this is, I don't know, I mean, this is why what, how more and more what I try to press is just getting

people to say, look, this isn't just a scientific issue. There's a philosophical puzzle here that we have to address as a philosophical puzzle. And that, that puzzle arises because this, the puzzle would not arise. If the only way we knew about reality was through experiments. Then we just do science. And some philosophers like Daniel Dennett seem to think that is all, all we know. We know

about reality. You know, we just, just, just through experiments. But I think most people think, now there's another way we know about reality. We know about consciousness through our immediate awareness. Now as soon as you accept that, then you've got this philosophical challenge. How do we bring these things together? What we know through our senses, the physical world, what we know through directly our direct awareness

of our consciousness. How do we bring them all together? Now that's not a scientific question. It's a philosophical question. So, more and more, before, you know, before we get on to pan-psychism, I just want to try and persuade people of that essentially philosophical challenge. And the only way you can avoid it is the way Daniel Dennett does. Daniel Dennett is incredibly consistent. He wants to think,

the only thing we, the only things we know about reality are through experiments. He knows, I think, that's the only way we can avoid it. I think that we don't know about our first person conscious experience in that way. So, he denies its existence. My good friend Keith Frankish does the same. So, that's one option. Daniel Dennett's consistent, I think I'm consistent. But I think most

people are sort of in this confused middle ground where they, of course, accept the existence of consciousness. But then they don't follow the implication of that. That there's something we know about reality. That's not from experiments. And so, we need to engage with a bit of philosophy. If you just zealously follow this line that, no, the only way we know anything is through experiments, then consciousness

is out the window. So, you can't have you cake and eat it. You've got to... Sure. It's the philosophical zombie problem. And I feel like this field of consciousness is gaining in kind of mainstream popularity because we're all paying attention to the advent of artificial intelligence. We're watching as AI starts to come online. And we're all grappling with that Rubicon, at which point it becomes, quote,

unquote, conscious as we understand it. So, we've seen these experiments where computer scientists are engaging in dialogue with these AI's and they seem to be mimicking human behavior almost perfectly. So, is that consciousness? I think we would all agree at this phase, it probably isn't. It is a sort of philosophical zombie situation. But at what point does it become conscious? And to take your perspective on

panpsychism in that everything on some level is rooted in some form of consciousness, it's not a stretch to then say that AI has some form of consciousness. It may not be a problem. It may not be the kind of consciousness that we think about or that we experience, but there is consciousness baked into that. And at some point, that consciousness will mature to be indistinguishable from

how we think of our own lived experience. Yeah. Which is a really tricky, fascinating, and also kind of terrifying thing to think about. Yeah. I mean, you probably... Again, another reason this isn't just a... an intellectual game. There are very real world implications. Whether AI is conscious, does that mean we have to have... Think start to think about the ethics of artificial systems. Which animals are

conscious? Forget computers. Which animals are conscious? And what does that imply about our moral responsibilities? Our plants conscious? People with... I mean, Anika talks about that in her book, the whole thing with the fungal networks. So... So entries. But... But actually, I don't think panpsychism necessarily settles any of these issues. Because as I say, as a panpsychist, you don't have to think every arrangement of conscious

particles forms a system that's conscious in its own right. So for that question, actually, I would just look to the neuroscience. I'm quite partial to the integrated information theory of consciousness. And if that turns out being right, actually computers of anything like the kind we have at the moment are not conscious and will not be conscious. Because... I mean, the way computers work, you... In contrast

to the brain, the brain, stores information in a way that's highly dependent on connections and integration. And that's the mark of consciousness for the integrated information theory. But the way computers set up, that's not the case. It's a... You know, you can see that... You can remove a few transistors, you don't take away too much information. So... So actually, I think, you know, we can distinguish

these philosophical and scientific questions. And I might give the same answers as a materialist or a dualist. So there needs to be a marriage here between science and philosophy. But... Yeah, can I just come back to maybe... Just pinning down like, why we should believe this? Yeah, so just... I think the core of it is, as you say, of course... It's not about science. It's not

about proof. You can't scientifically prove the electrons are conscious. What is attractive here is the beautiful form of explanation that Bertrand Russell came up with in the 1920s. That was, you know, forgotten about for so long, but has recently been rediscovered. And that's why there's so much buzz about panpsychism, surprisingly, in anglophone philosophy. So I think what Russell was doing... In the 1920s was thinking really

hard about the fact that our fundamental science is purely mathematical. Mm-hmm. That's due to Galileo again. And, you know, that's really useful if you're a working scientist. You can have really precise predictions. But what does it mean as a philosopher interested in the ultimate nature of reality that our most fundamental science is pure math? And what Russell realized is what it means is... Science isn't really

telling us that much about fundamental reality. It's merely describing it in terms of its abstract... How it behaves. Exactly. It's abstract mathematical structure. So really, ultimate reality could be anything. As long as it does, it has the right behavior, has the right mathematical structure. So the way this leads into panpsychism, so the panpsychist story is... What's at the fundamental level are networks of incredibly simple conscious

entities behaving in very simple, predictable ways because they have very simple consciousness. Mm-hmm. Through their interactions, realizing certain mathematical structures and patterns. And then the thought is, those mathematical structures and patterns are what we call physics. So we get physics out of underlying facts about consciousness. Absolutely beautiful. So just to sum it up, you can't get consciousness. That's a total lie. You can't get consciousness out

of physical matter. But you can't get physical matter out of consciousness. We know it can be done. So that is why this is such an attractive theoretical story. You know, to my mind, it just solves the problem. And that's the case for believing it. So there's believing it and understanding it from a theoretical point of view. Do you think that the human animal is capable of

understanding it beyond theory to really truly understand it? Or is that something that alludes our capacity and our limited faculties? It might not be possible to fill in all the gaps. I was talking to Rebecca Goldstein, who was in this debate in New York last night, who said it on the stage in her youth. She was sympathetic to panpsychism. But she now thinks, you know, there's

going to be so much we could never know. For example, what is it like to be an electron? Okay. Say we accept the something that's like to be an electron. What is it like to be an electron? I mean, as Nagel pointed out, we don't even know what it's like to be a bat. Oh, we ever going to be able to... And then we're going to

be able to... I mean, think about our own experience that so many different kinds of qualities, all the different colors and the difference between color and sound and proprioception. You know, that's your awareness of where you're bodily parts. All of these qualities that seem to have nothing to do with each other, you know. You seem like, what does color have to do with sound that seems

to radically different kinds of quality? Are we ever going to be able to have some theory that can predict the very precise quality of human experience from the kind of consciousness of the level of particles that it emerges from? Can we... Will we ever be able to... I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe we won't be able to fill in all the details. Just because to

understand something's consciousness, you have to be able to adopt its perspective. You have to be able to as it were, look out of its eyes. We can't adopt the perspective of a creature that echolocates its way around. So maybe we won't be able to fill in all the details. But actually, I think that in very broad terms, that explanatory story Russell tells. I think it's pretty

explicable, actually. I think it makes perfect sense. And so I make the analogy to natural selection, right? There's the basic genius insight Darwin had, or Wallace, rather. You know, there was the other guy Wallace who had it at the same time and I always feel a bit sorry for him. Anyway, that genius idea of evolution by natural selection that just made so much sense. So you're

so intelligible how you could get complex organisms emerging without design. And then, you know, you have to fill in the details and it takes a century to get to DNA. That's why I think, you know, the story Russell told about how you can get the physical universe out of more fundamental facts about consciousness. You can do it because physics is purely mathematical. So as long as

the consciousness stuff gives you the right mathematical structures, you got physics. I think that makes perfect sense. So the Eureka moment to me read about this stuff. But whether the way we filled out the Darwinian project and continue to do so, whether we can ever do that with something like consciousness that's not publicly observable, I don't know, but we can have a good go. Well, I

think that, you know, to your point about, forget about, you know, trying to understand what it's like to have the experience of being a bat, let alone an electron. I think that our instincts around our own conscious experience are not great, right? Like we know that we're having a conscious experience, but I don't feel like we're very astute in understanding the parameters of what that is,

right? And so, for example, if you're to do Sam Harris's meditations and waking up a lot of the props in his meditations are around trying to qualify that for you, trying to get you to understand that you're not being made aware of consciousness. But that you are aware as consciousness that everything that you are experienced from the probe, what is it? Pro perception? Yeah. To, you

know, every thought that occurs to you, the, you know, extent of your visual field, what you're hearing, everything is but an appearance in consciousness, right? And to kind of break that illusion of the observer of your conscious experience. Like I had always thought of it as, you know, I know my mind is running a loop and I can have distance between what I would call my

higher consciousness and, and like, the rumination of my, you know, running mind to say, oh, it's interesting that I'm feeling that way or I keep thinking this. I should stop doing that. There seems to be a dualistic kind of like relationship there. Sam would say, no, this is an illusion. It is all just appearances in this field of consciousness. Consciousness, that is everything so much so

that you can't even find the locus of it. Like we have this instinct that it lives in our head, right? Like who we are, our identity is this thing behind our face. All my instincts tell me that that's true. And, you know, Sam's position would be to disabuse you of that notion to get you to understand that that is just part of the conscious experience, but

it is not rooted in true reality. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, this is, again, what an unusual phenomenon this is that to understand it, you can't go and look down at microscope to understand it. You've got to turn your attention on yourself. And as you say, part of that is breaking through our preconceived ideas about our own consciousness even, ways in which we can even get

our own, our own consciousness wrong. I mean, a lot of evidence comes out of that from neuroscience, but also through meditation having a deeper understanding of what's going on there. Yeah. I'm sort of, I guess, more agnostic on the self than Sam and Annika are. Maybe I need to meditate a bit more, but I mean, one thing that makes me hesitate is, I do think there

is a deep unity to conscious experience. So, if you, right now I'm having a multitude of different experiences, colors and sounds and tactile sensations, but they're not just existing in isolation from each other. They exist as aspects of a single unified field of experience, if you like. So, there's something unifying the diversity there. And I think that's traditionally, so philosophers of I've plugged the self in

there, the eye there as the thing. Maybe it's very different to how we ordinarily think about it, but there's something there which is passeling off, which is bringing unity to the diversity, which we might call the self. I mean, it's a further question. Does this thing persist for long periods of time? My PhD mentor, Gail and Strausson has a book, Selves, where he defends the idea

that there are unified self. But they just last a couple of seconds. So, there's these sort of chains of little unified selves that pop up and disappear. Or another alternative that some people have defended is that the unified self lasts as long as a period of waking consciousness. But when you had dreamless sleep or general anesthetic, that self ceases to be. And another one pops up

when you wake up. Yes, I recently had a, I've been small operation, a general anesthetic. I was terrified thinking, who's going to wake up? Is it going to be some different person with, with all my memories? But, so I, I'm, I'm very agnostic on all this stuff. I'm not as, uh, some anatic as seem, seem pretty confident. Maybe I just haven't meditated. Well, I mean, that

goes in, yeah, the nature of self and identity. And then of course, you know, the implications for, for free well and choice that come with that. I mean, I think it's pretty, fascinating to assume the pan psychic perspective, begs questions of self and identity, right? If, if consciousness is the base layer to everything and it pervades everything, you know, what are that? What are the implications

for identity? You know, this sense that we're always evolving. We're always changing that, that consciousness is this on some level, like independent of who we are in this sense of personhood. And as we grow older and we look different when we look in the mirror, there's this, you know, uniformity that we are the same person and have always been the same person. Even if we undergo

surgery or go to sleep at night, we wake up and we have those memories and, you know, there is a, you know, an unbroken kind of chain of essential experience that we consider to be part and parcel of who we are. And so does pan psychism up end that or change how we think? Think about identity in that regard. Possibly depends, it depends what direction you

take it and I think. So I guess there are connections between pan psychism and certain forms of Buddhist thinking or the Advaita Vedanta tradition in Hindu mysticism. My friend, the Australian philosopher Miriel Bahari, defends a sort of Advaita Vedanta inspired sort of, mystical philosophy rooted in that tradition. And it's just interesting because she defends it with the tools of our philosophical tradition, analytic philosophy and this

sort of dry, rigorous, cold, blurted way. And but you're she's defending this kind of mystical philosophy. On the basis that she thinks we should, we should take the testimony of expert meditators as, as a sort of expert, does me like, you know, I don't, I believe the universe is 14 billion years old. Is it 14, 13, something like that? I don't know all the science, but

I trust the experts. So she thinks we should think the same about expert meditators. But that's one. I mean, that, and you know, but on the other hand, another great pan psychist philosopher who was in the audience of this debate in New York last night, Luke Rolofs, who is a pan psychist because he wants to explain consciousness, but he has no mystical or any kind of

spirit. He's a natural tendency. And so far as that takes you beyond the regular scientific picture, that's not fun. And so he's lacking the fun part. He's a lovely guy. He's a fun guy. But so I don't, so the way I normally tend to say is, you know, it's, there's no necessary connection between pan psychism and I think spiritual. But maybe pan psychism is more consonant

with those sort of spiritual views. So you, you know, if you, if you're a materialist, it's hard to take mystical experiences seriously as revealing to you. Something about ultimate reality, because ultimate reality, even materialist, is what you get from physics. And there doesn't seem physics, physicists aren't telling us about this unconditioned consciousness of the root of things. But if you, or if you're a pan psychist

and you already think there's fundamental consciousness at the base there, then, you know, it's not too much of a leap to move to those views. I don't know. Again, I'm agnostic. You know, in the case of pan psychism, that Russell story, I really find that persuasive. But here, if Mary or Annika are telling me, you know, trust meditators, I mean, there are different meditators in different

traditions. There does seem to be in each tradition, something about, in some sense, transcending the self and some deep oneness. But different traditions interpret that in different ways. You know, the, the Buddhists say the self doesn't exist. The Hindus say, it's, it does exist, but it's identical with the sort of divine mind or something. The Abrahamic traditions think it's about understanding our unity with the divine

and so, so I don't know. I think maybe there's something there that's interpreted in different ways in different traditions. So I'm not so confident that the, the self doesn't exist as yet. But even the best among us failed to hit that super pure whole food bullseye every single day. Myself definitely included, which is why it's wise to back pocket a nutritional insurance policy. For the last

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ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. What it brings up for me is this idea of of connectivity. Like if consciousness pervades everything and we don't live in a vacuum and there are billions of atoms separating us as we talk today. On some level, we're connected and there's a consciousness that is part of that connectivity. And when you think of it

from that perspective, you can't help but think of the nature of a unified consciousness. Or almost like it brings up the question of like a hive mind consciousness. Like if you're, I'm sure when you flew here from New York and you were, you know, descending over Los Angeles and you're looking down at the urban sprawl and the cars and all of that, it does look like,

you know, either like the the semiconductors of a computer. Or the, you know, the veins and arteries and organs of some kind of super organism in which human beings are participating and and performing some sort of function without their conscious awareness, because we're all sort of operating under some broader consciousness that isn't part of our conscious awareness, but his consciousness nonetheless that's driving our behaviors and

our decisions in some kind of macro way in the same way that ants construct an ant hill or birds, you know, know how to flock together to, they're not making conscious decisions. They're just operating under some kind of instinctual impulse that perhaps has something to do with the consciousness that pervades everything. Yeah. I don't know. He's an all the like entertain that as a thought experiment.

I think it's interesting. I think there's definitely in puns like is and there's a picture of the universe we fit into. Much more, you know, where conscious creatures and a conscious universe, it's a universe that somehow welcomes us more. And certainly going a bit further than that, there does seem to be something consistent. You know, you give people psilocybin, they, they talk about some deep connectedness,

some deep oneness, they talk about some living presence, pervading all things. And I take that very seriously and some people might say, well, maybe that's just, you're brain doing funny things. But I always come back to the, you know, to that challenge, I always come back to the response of William James in his great book in the 19th century, the varieties of religious experience. When you

say, or why should, why should the mystic trust their experience, trust that it's telling them something about ultimate reality, he says, well, you can't know, but it's, it's the same with ordinary sensory experiences. Right. I've got this experience at this table here. I can't get outside in my consciousness and check. You just trust that your ordinary sensory experiences are connecting you with reality. So, so not

Russell in this case, William James says, if you say it's, it's okay for ordinary people to trust their sensory experiences, but it's not okay for a mystic to trust their mystical experiences. There's a sort of double standard there. Right. I think all knowledge is rooted in just the decision to trust experience. But so, but it's something that I take seriously, but there's just such diversity in

how that's interpreted in different. But what does it mean to trust experience? Right. If everything is an appearance and consciousness, and when we put our hand on this table, we feel it, we know our hand is here, but actually that sensation isn't occurring in the hand. It's occurring in the brain in the same way. Pain isn't, you know, if I cut my finger, the pain isn't

happening. It's happening in the finger. It's happening in the brain. And if that's just an appearance in consciousness, it's not that much of a leap to then wonder, are we, you know, in this simulation experience? Like, how do you think about the notion that perhaps we're in the matrix or that we're all, you know, operating in accordance with some kind of hive mind consciousness that's driving

us towards the innovation of an artificial intelligence that will ultimately supplant us. Wow. I mean, maybe this comes to maybe the difference between me and Donald Hoffman, for example, you know, there's certainly something very close about these views that they have consciousness at the base and everything else flows from that. But Donald has this idea, I guess, that in some sense, the physical world doesn't really

exist. It's just tools on our interface icons on our interface rather. And I don't really feel the need to go that far. I'm not seeing the compelling reason to go that far rather than just saying the physical world is very different to what we thought. Hey, it turns out it's made up of consciousness. But I don't see why that's just a surprising theory about the nature

of physical reality. Doesn't mean we have to say physical reality doesn't really exist. So maybe there's this, I mean, there's another view on the table here, idealism. Which I think Donald Hoffman, I don't think he calls himself an idealist, but I think it would fit into that camp that in some sense, the physical world is an illusion or it's not fully real or it's, it's undergirded

by more fundamental facts about mind and consciousness. Whereas the pan-psychist tends to say, another physical world is real. It's really out there. It's just made up of consciousness. So maybe these are just two slightly different takes on the same idea. Yeah, no, I get it. I mean, I think, another cool aspect of contemplating pan-psychism is this sense of unity. Like if everything is consciousness, that helps

us to really grok that we're all in this together. Right? So whether, you know, when we're facing these existential threats to the health of the planet and the future of humanity, climate change, et cetera, it does put you in a more competitive environment. I mean, I think it's a very passionate mindset of cooperation, right? Like, yeah. There is an interconnectivity between everything. We are interdependent and

linked in ways that, you know, perhaps we haven't fully contemplated previously. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in my book, Galileo Zera, I do kind of speculate about what it'd be like to be a child raised as a pan-psychist, you know, and raised to see the movement of the planet. And of a planet is in some way expressing its desires, its inclinations. Because I mean, our official scientific

world view tells us that a tree is just a mechanism. And it's sort of ridiculous to hook a mechanism. It's sort of what, you know, that's why we think of tree hugging is kind of idiotic or some people do. And if you think of a tree as a mechanism, then it's, it has no moral significance in its own right. It's just important because of looking nice

or what it can do for us. Whereas if you think of a tree as a conscious organism in its own right, then the tree has a moral status in its own right. And, you know, see these terrible burning of forests in Brazil of late, hopefully changing now. You know, if you see that as the burning of conscious organisms, it really, it really fires up your environmental

desires to make, to solve the environmental problem even more significant. But yeah, I managed to persuade my kid. I was trying to ask my kids if they think trees are conscious. And my daughter said, no, they're outside. So the, so I don't know what you can only be conscious if you're indoors. Actually, my daughter says some greatest to me though, my five year, we were on

the bus. And I said, actually, Anakin Sam wouldn't like the sentiment here, but we were on the bus. I said, do you think the bus is conscious? And she said, no, it's just a machine. And I said, well, aren't you a machine? And she said, no, I've got, I'm a person, which means I don't have things inside me that make me move. I thought that was,

that I was, as we kind of a, does the free will free will, yeah, sense though, wasn't there, that it's, you know, there's not, I'm not a mechanism against, but anyway, do with what that, what you will. Yeah, I do love the idea of, of, you know, really understanding the conscious, you know, aspects of ecosystems. We think of a tree as a tree. It's an independent

entity, but then to really understand it is to know that there are, you know, this, this complexity of underground root systems that interact with mycelium and the communication that exists between trees among trees that partition so much as to like, take care of progeny of trees, like, understanding, oh, this is, this tree came from me. So we're going to, and the way they share resources, et

cetera, like, it's, the more you learn about that, the easier it is. To take that leap of, of philosophical faith, yes, into this realm. And it is, like, again, like calling myself out, like, I want it to be true, because I just think it's beautiful. And it allows me to inhabit a space of awe and wonder that I think it's just a, you know, a better

way of living quite frankly. So, yeah, I mean, on the trees, I do, I do try and encourage my kids to think about, which is just science now. It's not, nothing to do, pan-psychism, that, that, the, so-called wood-wide web, the interconnections of trees under the ground, sharing across species, you know, human beings struggle to cooperate between ethnicity sometimes. You know, these trees help each other out

across the, so that we should, yeah. Exactly. There is a buzzing, blooming community underneath our grounds, as we're walking through the forest. We're just, we're just seeing these things that stick out of the ground. But, you know, you, you keep coming back, rich to, you want to believe it. But I think, you know, sometimes we, we don't always have to think, you know, is this true

or is this not true? Is this true or is it bullshit? You can, you can engage with something, can't you? You can engage with a possibility as a possibility. You can, um, work with a possibility. You know, I think, if you're thinking about spiritual experiences or experience of the transcendent or something, I think people, people think, either, either, you think they're real or you think it's

just bullshit, something new brain, something going wrong with your brain. But there's a middle way option of engaging these kinds of experiences and working with them in a spiritual practice or whatever without, definitely deciding. I mean, who the hell knows what's going on, you know, you can, you can engage with experiences whilst remaining agnostic about. So here you are taking this middle path again. Right. I

hate that I cut to me. You know, it's always the dichotomy is like, are you a US capitalist or a Soviet communist? You know, are you a matured? It's okay. It's long. Let's merge these worlds because, yeah, it is, it is natural to go from where we just were into this, into this realm of spirituality, religion, what is God? Like when you think of consciousness, purvading

everything, is that not God or could you not perceive that as, you know, some definition of, you know, of God in that, in perhaps a secular sense? Spinoza is God, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. So if, so we've been talking about panpsychism as the little particles being conscious, but as we've also said, theoretical physicists tend to prefer the idea that, you know, that it's universe-wide fields that

are the fundamental building blocks and particles are just kind of local excitations in fields. If you combine that with panpsychism, then it's the universe-wide fields that are the fundamental forms of consciousness. And hence, the fundamental conscious entity, if there is one, is the bearer of those fields, IE, the universe itself. And I actually, I actually think that's a, that's a more attractive philosophic conceptual conception of

panpsychism as well. Sometimes called cosmocycism, you know, that the universe is the fundamental conscious entity. So there's a macro field of energy that that innervates the subatomic particles that comprise the nature of consciousness. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. So the fundamental thing is this universe-wide mind and everything else, so just aspects of that universe-wide consciousness. I actually defended something like this in my academic book.

So I first wrote an academic book, consciousness and fundamental reality, which is probably a bit impossible to make sense of if you haven't done some graduate philosophy study. But that was the direction I took that in my academic book. So yeah, but then is that, it's a further question, do we want to call that God? I mean, you might just think... I mean, we could use

a different word. God is a problematic word. It's just, you know, fraught, so we use a different word. Yeah. Yeah. You might just think it's the contrast even if the universe is conscious, maybe its experience is just a meaningless mess. It doesn't mean it's... it doesn't mean it's got intelligence or gold erectedness. You know, our consciousness is the result of millions of years of evolution. But

it could be that the universe is conscious, but it's just kind of this messy, meaningless consciousness. Although I have also explored, if you start from that cosmic psychic position and bring in other kind of data like the fine-tuning of physics, that might push you towards something more like a gold erected conscious entity rather than just a sort of meaningless mess. So again, you know, pun psychism

doesn't entail anything spiritual or anything in that direction. But it can lead you there if you bring in other considerations, I think. And what is your relationship personally with the spiritual and the mystical and all of this? Yeah, well, this is, I guess, the new book I'm working on at just last week signed a contract with Oxford University Press. So my first book was an academic

book. My second book was aimed at general audience. So I want this to be both. So it's with an academic publisher, but they're going to market it as a... as a... as a trade book and each chapter has a more accessible bit and then a digging deeper bit to try and take you into the more technicalities. But what I'm exploring is the middle way between... the

middle ground between God and atheism. That's the pitch, really. It's... You know, again, it's all these dichotomies. You know, it's like... Who's team are you on? Richard Dawkins or the Pope, you know? I find like when you talk into people, it's like they're trying to work out which side you're on. And I just... As the case... As in the case of materialism and dualism, I just

came to find actually both the classical Theistic, religious position and the classical, the classical kind of atheist, meaningless universe position are pretty implausible. For different reasons, I think there's things... The traditional atheist picture can't explain. There's things, the traditional religious picture can't explain. And there's just a huge range of under-explored positions in between. So that's where I'm currently engaged at the moment in trying to... And

so what does that look like specifically though? Like how would you characterize that for yourself? Not atheist, but not... you know, not the Pope or whatever. Maybe it's not a... you know, a perspective that is dogmatic in a religious sense, but perhaps strains of spirituality... Prevade this? Like what does that specifically mean? Like what does that look like? Yeah, so what I mean... The one thing

that motivates me here is the discovery of recent decades that physics, the laws of physics seem to be fine-tuned for the possibility of life. In the sense that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall in an incredibly narrow range, such that it looks... It looks incredibly improbable, but just by chance our universe would have ended up just by chance with the

right numbers for life. So I think the example that says... It seems to puzzle physicists the most is the cosmological constant. So this was... You know, we discovered in the 1990s that the universe is actually accelerating in its expansion. And so there is postulated a kind of repulsive force, which we refer to as dark energy. And the strength of this force is measured by the cosmological

constant. And what you hear how profile physics is saying is... It's just what that number turned out to be was incredibly surprising, because it's not zero, but it's a really, really tiny number. It's like... I can't remember the exact number now, but it's like 0.38 zeros, 1,38 or something. It's like tiny number. But it's not zero. And you know, physicists like Brian Green's saying, you don't

find these kinds of numbers in physics. And it didn't seem to fit with other things we know about. But it's fortunate we did have a number, that kind of number, because if it was a little bit bigger, so if this repulsive force was a bit stronger, everything would have shot apart too quickly for gravity to clump things together into stars, planets who wouldn't have had any

kind of structural complexity. Whereas if it had been less than zero, then it would have been an attractive force rather than a repulsive force. It would have added to gravity rather than countering it, and everything would have collapsed in on itself within a split second of the start of the universe. So to have any kind of structural complexity or life, that number had to be in

this incredibly narrow range. So that's like the god number. Right? Like that's where you're like, this had to be the result of some kind of higher intelligence or divinely inspired design. I would put it slightly more generally than that. I would say, look, we face a choice. Either it's just chance that those numbers are right for life, or we have the numbers right for life because

they are the right numbers for life. In other words, that there's some other kind of gold directedness, some kind of gold directedness at the fundamental level. So I consider a lot of different. So some people would say, oh, that's god. But I don't like that hypothesis. But for a familiar reason, I just think it's really implausible that a loving or powerful god could create anything, would

create a universe so full of suffering and seemingly preventable evil. So to my mind, you know, that's like the sort of anthropomorphized god. Right? The god in the god defined as some kind of human-like intelligence. That has a moral compass and a code of ethics and marching orders for what the world should look like or the universe should look like as opposed to some kind of

intelligence that doesn't adhere to that limited structure of intelligence. Yeah, absolutely. So what I'm rejecting is the very traditional western idea of god as philosophers call it the Omni-God. Omni-potent. All Omniscient. Omni-benevolent. I, all knowing, all powerful, perfectly good. So I think there's this data that that that view can't handle, suffering, evil. But there's also data that the traditional, meaningless universe picture can't handle. Right? Namely

the fine-tuning and sort of certain other philosophical considerations. So, but yeah, as you say, that's just that maybe the very traditional idea of god. But I consider a range of hypotheses in between. So, basically, I consider kind of three, three different options. Firstly, kind of non-standard designers. So you might have a bad designer and in different designer, a limited designer, or maybe the simulation hypothesis. Maybe

we're in a computer simulation and are created by the engineers and any kind of god-like being at all. It's just some guy, some scientist in the next universe up. So they're kind of close to god in that they're still designers, just a bit tweaked. But it's not obvious to me actually, this is why I kind of qualified what you said a bit. It's not I think

the fine-tuning is evidence for gold erectedness. But it's not actually obvious to me you need a kind of mind behind gold erectedness. So we're back to Thomas Nagel. He had this book in 2012, mine in Cosmos where he defended the idea of what he called teleological laws. So, teleology just means the Greek for purpose or goal. So he had this idea of laws of nature. So

not a personal designer, just laws of nature with goals built into them. So, you know, the standard way we think of laws of physics, they kind of work from past to future. You know, you take what's happening. And that determines what's going to happen at the next moment, the next moment, the next moment. But the, but Nagel's teleological laws are aiming at some goal, sort of

work from future to past. They're aiming at some goal in the future and impacting on the present moment to bring us closer to those goals. So maybe there's just a law of nature that has to kind of fit in with the standard laws of physics, but which is in some way inclining the universe towards life. And the third hypothesis I consider which fits with my earlier

work on panpsychism is Cosmosychism. Right? If you've, if you're already, if you've already got a conscious universe, then maybe this gold erectedness is just the gold erectedness of the conscious universe, maybe in some sense, the conscious universe fine tuned itself. So, you know, right. But it begs the question of who designed the consciousness in the universe. There's always, you know, there's always another veil to step

behind. With this. Yeah. Well, I mean, every, every, Vic and Stein said, explanations have to end somewhere. Everyone has to stop somewhere, you know, the theostops with God, the atheist stops with the big bang or the laws of physics. The question is, is it an acceptable stopping point? To my mind, stopping with the fine tuning is not an acceptable stopping point because it's just at least

in the physics as we look at the understanding now, it's just so wildly improbable that we'd have the right numbers for life by chance. So we can't stop there. But I think we could stop with teleological laws, I don't know, or some kind of non-standard design. Of course, other people stop with the multiverse. That's, I've got other problems with that. I bother. So I used to

go for the multiverse myself, but I've been persuaded by philosophers of probability that there's some fallacious reasoning going on in the, that whole multiverse. That's interesting. I mean, now, I could be a whole other podcast. I mean, because when you get into, I mean, does not an exploration of quantum physics bring this up, like it conjures dimensions beyond the perceptible three dimensions to which we experience

reality, right? And yeah. And that means that there are alternate realities occurring theoretically, right? That the math can prove out. All right. So you'd link in that to the multiverse, you mean? Sure. So if that's the case, is that not an argument for the existence of A or the multiverse? Yeah. There's a great philosopher of physics at a Birmingham University called Al Wilson, who takes the

multiverse in that direction. And so I mean, standardly, when physicists or philosophers try to explain the fine tuning in terms of a multiverse, the inflationary cosmology models where we have this sort of vastly expanding mother universe, mega universe, and then these smaller bubble universes slow down within it. And we're one of those. But what is less explored, but which has been explored by Al Wilson, for

example, is, is the taking the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and trying to work on that multiverse to explain fine tuning. But you need to, you need to at least tinker a bit because so that the many worlds doesn't give you every logical possibility. It gives you every possibility consistent with the laws of quantum mechanics. But as physics is right now, the laws of quantum

mechanics are fine tuned. So, so you're going to have to somehow get to possibilities that are where the constants vary. And so that you're going to that's that's moving a little bit beyond just just the many worlds interpretation. You could try and justify that with as the you could try and justify that with the need to explain the fine tuning. But this is where I think

there's this fallacious reasoning comes in tonight. Yeah, go. Yeah, please. It is moving beyond my ability to understand what's actually happening. So this, well, this, this is one of the things I'm so I used to think the multiverse was the obvious explanation of fine tuning for a long time. I feel kind of stupid. I feel silly defending this cosmic purpose stuff. But I was just persuaded

by philosophers of probability that there's some very dodgy reason in going on here. And you know, I, I just really believe in that enlightenment aim of, you know, trying to follow the evidence of the arguments where they go. And this is, this is where it's taken me. And this is what one of the things I'm really excited about with this book actually, this is not my

own idea. It's been in the philosophical literature for decades. But it's not my own idea. It's been in the philosophical literature for decades. It's a typical example of academics talking to themselves. Nobody knows about it outside of academic philosophy. Despite huge interest in this fine tuning stuff, you know, from physicists or theologians or whatever. All right, well, I just, I'll just run you through the basic

idea. There's a huge discussion here. But I've got an article in scientific American making the basic case. So the, the charge is that this inference from fine tuning to the multiverse commits what's called the inverse gambler's fallacy. Okay. So let me, let me try and give you, give you an analogy. Right. So suppose you and I go to a casino, right. And we walk in. And

with the first, the first thing we see is this guy having an incredible run of luck. Right. He just keeps winning and just this incredible run of luck. He's rolling double sixes all the time. So I, and then I say to you, wow, there must be loads of people playing in the casino tonight. And you said, what? Why do you mean? What do you think we've

just seen this one guy? And then I say, well, look, if there's just one person in the casino, then it's incredibly improbable that someone would have such an incredible run of luck. But if there's lots of people playing in the casino tonight, then it's not so surprising that one of them's going to have an incredible run of luck. Now, I think you'd rightly say to me,

that's a fallacy. You know, we've only seen this one guy. And no matter, that's our evidence, this one guy and no matter how many other people are playing in the casino, it has no bearing on whether this one guy is going to play well. And everyone agrees that's a fallacy. So that's the inverse gambler's fallacy. Everyone agrees on that. It looks like the multiverse reasoning is

strikingly similar, at least in so far as they're explaining fine tuning. So they say, oh, wow, look, you know, it's so improbable that physics is fine tuned for life. Has the right numbers for life? We won the cosmic lottery. So there must be loads of other universes where the numbers are already crap. But it's the same fallacy because all we've observed is this one universe. And

no matter how many other universes there are out there, it doesn't make it any more likely that this universe, the only one we've ever observed, has numbers fine tuned for life. So there's all sorts of discussion and responses and selection effect. But, you know, I think I've just pretty persuaded that this is just not an option. And so weird as it is, we have to try

and make sense of some kind of gold erectedness at the fundamental level of reality. Doesn't need to be the traditional God, but it's going to be pretty different to how we normally think of science. Yeah, it's, I'm sort of resisting the temptation to just continue to dig this whole deeper in here. I don't know. We're going to end up with it, but I feel like, you

know, that those statements require you to define life in a certain way. Yeah. We have this decimal number and laws of physics and our understanding of what life is and a confluence of circumstances that have allowed us to, you know, flourish essentially. But perhaps if that decimal number was different and the role of the dice to extend the gamblers metaphorically, or was a little bit different

and the universe is either expanding or contracting at a different rate, that that would have produced a form of life that is something we have no understanding. Yeah, I see. Yeah. Yeah. So is it just, so yeah, this is a, you know, this is an important response to these arguments. Are they relying on just our kind of life or carbon-based life or something? Some of the

fine tuning is to do with carbon, although even there, you know, it's, it's not carbon isn't just the stuff we're made of. Carbon is incredibly versatile as a chemical element. The number of things it can combine with, I can't remember the details, I fan. And, you know, you need to get stars going and to get carbon out of them. But I think a lot of the

fine tuning or at least some of the fine tuning, it's not just to do with carbon-based life or our kind of life. It's just, you know, to do with any kind of structural complexity at all, any kind of chemistry at all. So, you know, take the cosmological constant example. Either the universe expands so quickly that no two particles ever meet or everything collapses back on itself

in a split second. It's, you know, it's, that's not, you're just not going to get any kind of, it seems even without being able to pin down exactly what life is. I think we can say in over those possibilities, you're not going to get anything we could call life. That would be a lot. Yeah, I understand, I understand. I, I, I think where my mind goes

is this idea of taking a step back and having an honest sort of accounting of the capacity of the human mind to understand things, right? And I think we, we are, heuberetic as a species in terms of what we think we can and can't do. Like, I think that we, we can operate with this sensibility that there is nothing beyond our grasp in terms of understanding,

it's just a matter of time before we figure it all out. But I think that that is qualitatively incorrect. Like, if you look at your pet or let's say you have a snake, you could, that snake is never going to understand the human language. Like, it just, it doesn't have the neural capacity to do that. So, why do we think that our neural capacity is complete?

Like, we're just missing a lober to that would make so many of the questions that we grapple with completely obvious. Yeah. But it just alludes our ability to understand because of our inherent physiological limitations. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've, I've got a lot of time for that, for that kind of position. In fact, this is the, the position, Rebecca Goldstein was defending in this, the beta

was in last night. I guess it's what philosophers called the mysterious position, at least in the context of consciousness that maybe this is just beyond us. You know, dogs can't do mathematics. There's just don't have the right brains. Maybe solving consciousness or fine tuning is, is, is just beyond what humans are able to do. Maybe some higher alien species would, would manage it more easily. But,

um, while we've got explanations that as far as we can see, would do the job. Then I think the rational thing to do is to take those explanations seriously. I think the thing with the reason people feel nervous with fine tuning is not because we can't think of an explanation. It's because the explanations don't fit with how we've got used to science. I think it's the

same situation. As in the 16th century, when we first started getting evidence that the Earth wasn't in the center of the universe. You know, and people couldn't handle it. So they postulated little, extra orbits of the planets, epicycles, in addition to their basic orbits around the Earth. So the idea of everything we're in there. Crazy mental gym now. Yeah. And then that didn't work. So it's

epicycles upon epicycles. And, you know, of course, all of that was eventually blown away by Copernicus's simple idea that the Earth isn't in the center, the Sun's in the center. And we think now, I think we think, oh, they were so stupid, you know, stupid religious people. We're so enlightened now. But every generation absorbs a world view that they can't think of. And beyond. And I,

you know, you start talking about cosmic gold erectedness with philosophers or scientists, they're going to start laughing at you. As I'm sure, you know, people will have to only started saying, you know, maybe the Earth is going on the Sun. I just think there's always that cultural baggage that it's hard to get beyond. But I think we've just got a cling to that enlightenment goal of

following the evidence where it leads into my mind, you know, in our standard way. The ways of thinking about evidence, it's the fine-tuning seems to be suggesting some kind of gold erectedness at the fundamental level. And we've just got a weird as that is face up to it. And I think we can formulate possible explanations. They might be wrong. We can never guarantee that they're the

right explanations. But while we can come up with explanations, we should take them seriously. Yeah. Assuming panpsychism to be true consciousness. Exists at the fundamental level of matter and reality. What is your sense of what that tells us about the nature of human consciousness at death? Do you have a theory as to where that goes or what happens to that? Wow. It's a big question. So

I mean, again, there are no obvious implications that I mean panpsychism is structurally very similar to materialism. And that's part of the reason I think it's quite attractive that it in terms of the causal structure of reality, in terms of what stuff does, we say physics gets that right. It's just that those structures are filled out in some sense with consciousness. And so, you know, insofar

as that our best science tells us that the, you know, the matter making me up is going to come apart and cease to be then. It looks like materialists and panpsychists are going to be in the same way. I mean, except, and I very speculatively explore this in the final chapter of my book, these more mystical suggestions that experience meditators in, in higher states of consciousness

somehow become a word that there is something at the core of each conscious mind that is beyond all that change and it's in some sense timeless or unconditioned or something like that. Insofar as we take those ideas seriously, that might afford some kind of impersonal, non individual survival after death. I think maybe that's the best thing. The individual, like the sense of, of individuation in the

sea of consciousness gets absorbed by the greater ocean of consciousness. Yeah. And gets recapitulated or somehow assimilated into the consciousness of everything. Yeah. And, you know, for people who you think of Buddhists or Advaita Vedanta Hindus who try to struggle to get back to that being absorbed into unconditioned consciousness or whatever, they try to get rid of the calm, the bad karma. But, but there's a

past life, you know, sort of reincarnation piece to all of us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But suppose that's not true. The reincarnation bit and the karma bit. Well, maybe a death just everyone gets enlightened because, you know, the outer layers peel off and you just get absorbed into that unconditioned consciousness at the core. I just want to be clear, I don't believe this. I, I take

the idea seriously. On the basis that it's fairly commonly reported experience of people who have explored consciousness in a very deep way. So I, I don't think I'd say, you know, I'm confident that's true. But I take it seriously. And you can do as a pan-psychist. I think if you, if you're a materialist, you have to say, that can't be true. It doesn't fit with my

worldview. But as a pan-psychist, it fits with my worldview. I take the possibility serious. I think it's a great idea. But I don't know, I don't know. I'm, I'm also open to life being pretty horrific and tragic. And so who knows? But that's what I'm saying. You know, you can, you don't have to, nobody knows what's going on. You don't have to, we don't have to

make decisions to, you know, to engage with these possibilities and to, in one spiritual practice. I like the idea of starting with nobody knows what's going on. Like, it nobody knows what the hell is going on. It kind of really is true, right? Like, how much do we really know? And the more you learn, the more you realize how little we actually know about all of

the things that we know, the more diverse stuff. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, and so listen, so if you're asking me about spirituality, one thing that is important, that has become important to me in recent years is living in hope that, that there is a purpose to existence. And thinking of the thing, the good I do as contributing in some tiny way to some greater purpose. Now

I don't, I don't know whether there is ultimately a purpose. I think, you know, there are these suggestive suggestive reasons to take the idea seriously. But even if there is kind of cosmic purpose, maybe the purpose is done already, or maybe it's not a great purpose. But I think it's, I think it's reasonable to live in hope that there is some greater purpose that's still unfolding.

And I find that idea motivates me and it keeps my ego in check. You know, stops me thinking about my own narrow self interests. And it gives me a deep sense of meaning and purpose. And if it turns out I was completely wrong and it's all bullshit, you know, I still think I've gained much and lost nothing from living in hope of, of a greater purpose

to things. So, so that's part of what I want to advocate in this new book of that, that possible way of living in that kind of hope and that there is grounds to take, to take that possibility seriously, even though nobody knows what the hell's going on. Right. Right. I mean, I do like that. So, I think that's the idea, you know, to presume the existence

or the possibility of panpsychism is to embrace a qualitatively different, but perhaps more expansive sense of what reality is that makes you feel like there is, I don't know if an intelligence or a purpose is the right word, but at least at a base level, at a minimum, a connectivity amongst, you know, our fellow organisms. That like, I don't know, just gives me a, what's the

right word? Not necessarily purpose, but collectivism, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's, I think there is a need for something like that. I mean, there are so many powerful forces in the modern world, you know, consumerism and global capitalism and national sentiments. And I think that does need to be. Could you do that all collectively? I think to counterbalance that and some, something we

can, we can build on for a more hopeful picture of things. I think the idea that we can all just be rational and enlightened and, you know, we can all just, just through plain rational thinking, we can all learn to be nice and respectful. I think maybe that's not an inspiring enough vision to motivate people to counter these more, more negative influences in life. I mean,

things are, things are pretty messed up. I think there's a lot of ways at the moment. I think we need to maybe think of a world view, I think in the absence of a world view that gives, in which people can understand the meaning and significance of their lives, I think people turn to other ways of making sense of the meaning of their lives, you know,

sort of nationalism or consumerism and so on. And so I think there is this need to, which is, which has always been part of what philosophy is all about building a world view, a way of seeing the world that makes sense of the meaning and significance of your life. So I think that is essential part of the human condition. Yeah, that's beautiful. And I think just

to kind of, you know, end this or, you know, kind of land this conversation. I mean, that seems like a beautiful takeaway from your work and from the book. But if there's anything else that you want, people to really kind of understand about how philosophy can operate as a positive animating force in our lives. Whether it's panpsychism or otherwise, we sort of think of philosophy as

an academic pursuit. But honestly, they're operating systems for living, right? They're meant to be practiced. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think in many ways, the religion of our times is, scientist, you know, the idea that the only things you're allowed to believe in are those that can be demonstrated on the basis of observation experiments. Now, if you zealously clung to that, as we've discussed, you wouldn't

believe in your own conscious mind, because that's not something that can be known about in that way. You wouldn't believe in value. You wouldn't believe in the can of truth. Mathematicians come up with, which don't seem to concern the physical world of space and time. So I think, I mean, my conception of philosophy, the task of philosophy is synthesis. It's a matter of taking all the

things we need to do. We need to know to be true in different ways. Of course, scientific truth, some experiments, but also the reality of our own consciousness, the reality, perhaps a value, and the kind of mathematical truths that we know about through mathematical intuition, taking all these things we know and bringing them together, synthesizing them into a world view. That's the ancient noble task of

philosophy that I think we've lost sight of. And we need to come back to and hopefully out of that act of synthesis will emerge a picture of reality that in which we can find a place, in which we can live our meaning out in a way that's rationally acceptable, scientifically plausible, but also good for our mental and spiritual health. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you coming to

talk to me today. Thanks a lot for it. I'm sure you didn't get any cover. What else do we do? What do we miss? I think we covered a lot of stuff. Free will, we didn't do free will. Free will is a whole other. Yeah. I mean, that's two hours in the other direction. We can do that next time. Let's say when the new book was

the new book, going to be called again, it's got the very humble title, the purpose of existence. Between God and atheism. So, yeah, very host. I'm very finished that the end of this month. I don't know whether that's going to come out. Very good. But sometime next year is the plan. Well, in the meantime, everybody go check out Galileo's error. It's really has provoked me and

made me think deeply about things that are counterintuitive and has given me kind of an expansive perspective on not just consciousness, but this sort of how to think about life. I think that does as an operating system trickle down into what we're doing. How we make decisions and how we prioritize how we invest our time. So, thank you for that. I think the work you're doing

is super fascinating. And you're always welcome to come back to continue the conversation. Oh, thanks a lot, Rich. And I'm glad we finally managed to have this conversation. Yeah. Years of making. Glad to have made it happen. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, we didn't we didn't we didn't solve all the world's problems, but maybe next time we can do that. A few loose ends to tie

up. Great. Thank you. Cheers. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page. And you can find the link to the page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch, my books, finding ultra, voicing change

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