What Is Consciousness? - Philip Goff | Modern Wisdom Podcast #272

Philip Goff is a Professor of Philosophy at Durham University and an author. Consciousness is the most evident of all phenomenons. It's the one thing we can actually be sure of, and yet we have a very limited understanding of what it is and why it's here. Expect to learn the main philosophical positions on consciousness, why Philip thinks the old proposals are insufficient to explain our awareness, what time racism means, why Deepak Chopra just won't leave me alone and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 3.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy Galileo's Error (UK) - https://amzn.to/3ixvxY7 Buy Galileo's Error (US) - https://amzn.to/3qyxCWu Check out Philip's Website - https://conscienceandconsciousness.com Check out Philip's Blog - https://www.philipgoffphilosophy.com Follow Philip on Twitter - https://twitter.com/Philip_Goff Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #consciousness #materialism #panpsychism - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Consciousness is not publicly observable. You can't look inside my head and see my feelings and experiences. We know about consciousness, not from observation experiment, but just from our immediate awareness of our feelings. If I'm in pain, I'm just directly aware of my pain. You can't get at it. Science is used to dealing with unobservable. But there's an important difference. In all these other cases, we postulate unobservable in order to explain what we can observe. The whole explanatory enterprise is explaining publicly observable data. In the case of consciousness, the thing we are trying to explain is not publicly observable. And that is just a totally different explanatory enterprise. And I think it really constrains our capacity to deal with it experimentally.

• 0:48Chris Williamson?

  We're only a couple of miles away from each other and yet have had to use the internet to communicate. If you reached out of your window, I could probably just shout shout the podcast to you, I think. Just stick a recorder in the middle of it.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  Oh, it's a crazy times we're living in. Some future time we'll have to get together.

• 1:03Chris Williamson?

  It is indeed. You're a philosopher. What are you doing talking about consciousness? Isn't this the job of a neuroscientist or a biologist? Like, why are you here?

• 1:13Speaker 00

  Excellent question. Yeah. So I guess, yeah, I mean, it's broadly agreed that there's some big profound challenges surrounding consciousness, you know. Despite our scientific understanding of the brain, we don't have even the beginnings of an explanation of how complicated electrochemical signalling could somehow produce this inner subjective world of colours and sounds and smells and tastes. So a lot of, most people are on board with that now, but in line with what you've just said, I mean, a very common reaction is to say, okay, there's a problem, but let's just plug away with our standard ways of investigating the brain and, you know, we'll crack it.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  So I don't think that's right. I don't think this is just another scientific problem. I think there's a number of ways in which the problem of consciousness is radically different from any other scientific problem. And that our current scientific approach is really not, on its own at least, fully equipped to deal with it. So should I say more about that?

• 2:22Chris Williamson?

  Why is it different?

• 2:24Speaker 00

  Okay, so here's, here's the most straightforward point. Consciousness is not publicly observable. Why, you can't look inside my head and see my feelings and experiences. We know about consciousness, not from observation experiment, but just from our immediate awareness of our feelings. If I'm in pain, I'm just directly aware of my pain. You can't get at it, uh, but I'm directly aware of it. Now, science is used to dealing with unobservables, right? Fundamental particles, for example, can't be directly observed. But there's an important difference in, in all these other cases. We postulate unobservables in order to explain what, what we can observe.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  So fundamental particles are postulated part of the standard model of particle physics that, you know, explains a huge lot of publicly observable data. So the, the whole explanatory enterprise is explaining publicly observable data. In the case of consciousness, the thing we are trying to explain is not publicly observable. And that is just a totally different explanatory enterprise. And I think it really constrains our capacity to deal with it experimentally.

• 3:39Chris Williamson?

  Is, is consciousness the only thing that we have that's in that category? Or is there anything else?

• 3:45Speaker 00

  I think so. I'd be interested to know if you think there are any others.

• 3:48Chris Williamson?

  No, that, uh, not that I can think of, but I wondered if there was a, an armchair philosophy experiment, thought experiment that had come up that had created something similar.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  Well, well, there are, I mean, I suppose there are other things that some philosophers think we need to make sense of that aren't straightforward scientific data. Maybe like the reality of free will or value, facts about value. A lot of philosophers think we need to somehow make sense of facts about right and wrong and good and bad. Or abstract objects like mathematicians talk about numbers and sets and lots of philosophers think, how do we, how do we fit, fit them into the world? But what's what's unique about consciousness, I think, and is makes it just so fascinating is in all these other cases, it's always an option to say, maybe the phenomenon doesn't exist.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  Right. Maybe we're not really free in the way we think we are. You know, maybe there aren't really facts about good and bad. Maybe it's just the way we sort of project our feelings onto the world. Uh, maybe abstract objects don't really exist. Maybe it's just a useful fiction. But with consciousness, you know, the idea that nobody's ever really felt pain or seen red. That just seems absolutely insane. And some philosophers do take that line. My good friend Keith Frankish um takes the line, we can't explain consciousness in conventional scientific terms. So it doesn't exist. It's just like fairy dust or magic, you know, we don't. But, you know, most philosophers think, you know, that that really is beyond the pale. So there's there is this datum

• 5:26Speaker 00

  that's that we need our theory to account for, but it's not unlike any other scientific datum. It's not a datum of public observation experiment. And so, you know, I mean, for a lot of the 20th century, consciousness was a sort of taboo topic. Uh, it wasn't sort seen as good, you know, proper focus for proper science. Uh, that perhaps the high point was the behaviorists in the 1940s who thought, you know, the only proper science of the mind is what is behavior, you know, what you can observe and measure and quantify. Uh, and you can understand, I think, in a sense, they were right to to think this isn't a normal scientific thing because it's

• 6:07Speaker 00

  you know, it's this kind of invisible thing we can't get at for observation experiment. Now, since I think the 90s, people have thought, no, it is science, you know, we've we've got to deal with it. But they've forgotten how radically different it is from any other scientific phenomenon. So we're in a kind of, I think we're in a phase of history, we're in a weird middle phase where people do want to deal with it scientifically, but haven't quite got to the point where they realize to do that, we have to really rethink what science is.

• 6:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I can't remember who it is, the quote I'm taking, but.

• 6:40Chris Williamson?

  I remember reading something that said, if it wasn't for the fact that we experience it, the universe would give us no clues that consciousness exists.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. That's very nice. I don't know who said that. It's a nice quote. So like, a lot of people think the job of science is to account for the data of observation experiment, right? Once we've done that, if we can have our grand unified theory that can account for all of observation experiment, that's it, job done. But if you take that religiously, you wouldn't believe in consciousness, because it's not known about in that way. Now, someone who's wonderfully consistent on that is Daniel Dennett, who, you know, says, science is about publicly observable stuff, consciousness doesn't fit in, so it doesn't exist. And, you know, he's wonderfully consistent. I think most people, you know, me and Dennett are at extremes. Most people, I think, are in a confused in the middle,

• 7:33Speaker 00

  where they do think, they don't want to say consciousness doesn't exist, but at the same time, they do want to say the only things we believe in and know about on the basis of experiment, those two things don't fit together. So I think either, you know, more and more philosophers are coming to this point, either you say consciousness doesn't exist, it's an illusion, like Dennett does, or Keith Frankish, or you say, we need to rethink science. So the subtitle of my book is Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. So I'm not doing science, but I think we need to rethink our scientific approach before we can start making serious explanatory theoretical progress on consciousness.

• 8:15Chris Williamson?

  Going back to the why are philosophers here question I had earlier on, no matter how you create a theoretical framework around how we should view consciousness, that doesn't actually change what consciousness is. So the phenomenological experience, the way that it manifests, all of this stuff, it's still going to continue going on, whatever way it does, which we currently don't have a satisfactory explanation for. But no matter what you guys come up with, no matter how weird and wonderful and plausible the theories are, nothing's actually going to change about the way that consciousness works. So can we get a satisfying explanation of consciousness from a purely theoretical framework?

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a good point. So some people put the problem by saying it's a mystery what consciousness is. You often hear that. It's nobody knows what consciousness is. I don't like that way of putting it because I think nothing is more obvious and familiar than, you know, you know what pain is when you feel it. It's not a mystery what consciousness is. Uh, so, so what are we, I mean, let's come to the point, what are we trying to do here? What, what is the, what is the task, the explanatory task? So I, I think, I mean, the way I've spoken so far is almost as though science doesn't have a role to play. I don't, I don't think that's true. We have a robust and well-developed experimental science of consciousness and we have a interdisciplinary consciousness group here at Durham and I, you know, I work when you're a scientist all the time.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  But what, so, so how does that work? Um, well, you, you can't directly observe someone's feelings, but you can ask them, right? So you can ask them what they're feeling and what they're experiencing and you can scan their brains at the same time and with an FMRI scanner and you can start to establish correlations. Or sometimes you can stimulate a bit of the brain if we'll, and, and ask someone, you know, what did you feel then? So we start to establish these correlations and we can try and get systematic about it. In the early days and trying to put together a general theory of, you know, what in general is, is necessary and sufficient for conscious experience. So that, so that's the, the experimental task we're making progress on that

• 10:29Speaker 00

  consciousness is correlated with certain kinds of brain activity. And that's really important data, but that's not the full story because what we then want is an explanation. Why is, why are certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of feelings and experience? Why should that be? And I, I don't think you can answer that question with an experiment because consciousness is not publicly observable. So all you can do with experiments is just get more correlations. So at that point, I think we have to. Turn over to philosophers and just look at the the various proposals philosophers have offered for explaining why certain forms of brain activity go along with certain forms of experience.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  So that's what I see is is the is the task really explaining why? Why is it that brain activity goes along with experience? And there and there are various different proposals and we just have to try and assess them and try and work out which one works best.

• 11:27Chris Williamson?

  Give us the rundown then. What's the, I think you talked about three main approaches to answer the mystery of consciousness. Dualism.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay, so, yeah, when I studied philosophy, there were just two and I got very disillusioned and left for a little bit and then I discovered this third approach, which is the one I like. So dualism, um, so dualism is the is the idea that consciousness is non-physical outside of the physical workings of the body in the brain. And we tend to associate this with with religion or something spiritual. But actually, the most popular, the most well-known contemporary dualist, the Australian philosopher, David Chalmers, calls himself a naturalistic dualist because um, he wants to bring, he thinks consciousness is not physical, but he wants to bring it into the domain of science and think of it as a normal law-governed phenomenon.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  So so what he does is he thinks the aim of a science of consciousness, what, once we've got these correlations from neuroscience, we then postulate psychophysical laws of nature, linking up physical brain activity to conscious experiences. Right, so neuroscience tells us, you know, a certain kind of activity in the hypothalamus leads to a feeling of hunger. Chalmers would say, okay, so we postulate a law of nature saying, whenever you get that kind of um, brain activity, you get that kind of feeling. There's just a fundamental law of nature. So Chalmers thinks if there was just the laws of physics, there wouldn't be consciousness. We'd all just be sort of mechanisms.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  But because there are these special psychophysical laws connecting up the physical to consciousness, uh, that ends up in certain, with the result that certain forms of brain activity give rise to consciousness. So so that's one proposal. I guess the more familiar proposal, just to get two on the table, the materialist proposal says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's, there aren't two things here. Feelings just are.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  Patterns of neuronal activity. So like water just is H2O. Right. So I've got a pint of water here, you know, that there aren't two things in here. The water and the H2O. Water just is H2O. So, you know, if you consider your feeling of pain and the corresponding pattern of neural neuronal activity. The materialist says there aren't two things there that your feeling just is a pattern of neuronal activity. So you see, so you see that they're two different, very different ways of accounting for the same scientific data. You know, the scientific data is brain activity and experience goes together. Chalmers says they're different things tied together by natural laws.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  The materialist says they're just the same thing. Uh, so they're, they're the two, I guess, most popular options.

• 14:24Chris Williamson?

  What's the mechanism that Chalmers proposes is, is happening? Because there must be some sort of signal going neurotransmitters, chemicals, et cetera. Is it, is this where Deepak Chopra comes in and starts talking about quantum mechanics? I feel like this is where he, he begins going all woo woo about the, the energies and the vibrations.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  Uh, well, I mean, the first, first thing to say just before I answer the question is David Chalmers is the most unwoo person you can meet, you know, I mean, he's he's absolutely total atheist secularist. I once asked him, I think I said this in my book. You know, do you have any spiritual or religious feelings? And he said, only the universe, only that the universe is cool. Right. So

• 15:05Chris Williamson?

  What a G.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  Another contemporary duelist, Martina Niederrohman, who's passionately anti-religious and hates it being connected. So the, these guys, they don't believe in any transcendent spiritual reality. They just believe in feelings, pain, pleasure, and they think, you know, we need to account for this and we can't do it in the normal way. Anyway, but so what's the connection? So, yeah, what, again, when I was an undergraduate, we were taught the big problem with dualism. Was what's the connection, how to make intelligible.

• 15:33Chris Williamson?

  Must be a mechanism, right?

• 15:34Speaker 00

  How the mind, right. This was actually what Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia challenged Descartes on, you know, the most famous duelist historically was Descartes. And she said, oh, I'll, I'll, I'll try, I'll, I'll mess up the quote if I try to remember it, but she, she was just mystified by how something utterly non-physical could impact on the brain. And for a lot, a long time, people took that seriously. I don't think people take that worry seriously anymore for this reason that. Um, well, about a hundred years later, the great Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out that actually. When it comes to fundamental causal interactions or laws of nature. No one has any explanation. So take the, you know, take the laws of physics, you.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  I mean, to take a simple example, I, Newton's uh law of gravity, right? Newton came up with this law of gravity that um tells us that objects. There's a, attract each other with a force that's dependent on the distance between them and the, and the mass and gave us a nice bit of maths. And then people said to him, uh, okay, why does that happen though? And he famously said, hypothesis non fingo, you know, showing off in Latin. I don't frame hypotheses. So, you know, it's not the job of a, of a physicist to say. Why things happen, we just give mathematical laws that describe that it happens. Now, and you know, later Einstein gives a deeper explanation of gravity in terms of.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Matter curving spacetime and, and then, and then matter follows the simplest, the geodesics through spacetime. But he didn't explain, you know, why that happens. He gave the equations, took him a long time, 10 years, but he, he doesn't explain why matter curves spacetime. You know, when it gets down to the fundamental laws of physics, you just have to say, that's just the way it works. So the naturalistic duelist says, well, if you can do that, I can do that. I just think this is a basic law about our universe. If you're, if you're saying that's not fair, that you're applying, David Chalmers would say, a kind of double standard. You don't ask the physicists to explain why laws of physics hold, so why should I have to explain why?

• 17:45Speaker 00

  And you know, why the psycho-physical laws hold, they're just basic. Fundamental facts about our universe.

• 17:51Chris Williamson?

  Okay, what are the main criticisms or what are the reasons why you find dualism and materialism unsatisfying?

• 18:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, what do you want to do on first? Should we go for dualism first?

• 18:03Chris Williamson?

  Let's go for dualism first.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so a lot of people think there are just straightforward scientific empirical worries with dualism. And the thought is something like, if there was, you know, non-physical consciousness impacting on the brain every second of waking life, that would really show up in our neuroscience. You know, there'd be all sorts of things happening in the brain that had no physical explanation. It'd be like a poltergeist was playing with the brain and we just don't seem to find that. And so that that builds a kind of disconfirmation of dualism. Actually, the more I talk to neuroscientists, I, I, the less I think we're actually in a, in a position to assess that.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  Because, you know, the more I figure, I find out actually we really don't know that much about how the brain works. And, you know, people get very excited about brain scans, but, um, you know, what you have to remember, brain scans is every pixel, the tiniest pixel corresponds to 5.5 million neurons. And, um, you know, so I think, I think what we've got to, here's how I think the current state of our scientific knowledge is that, you know, I think we understand the basic chemistry, how neurons fire and various kinds of neurotransmitter. And we understand a fair bit about, so that's the bottom stuff. And a fair bit about the top stuff, like what large scale bits of the brain do, their functions.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  What we all know almost nothing about, very little about is how those large scale functions are realized at the cellular level. How it works, basically. And I think until we, you know, to make, to put it in perspective, we're about 70% through putting together a connectome for the maggot brain, which is, you know, smaller than the dot on an I, you know. We're just so far from, you know, really understanding the workings of the eighty five billion neurons in the brain. So I'm not, I don't know, the more I talk to neuroscientists, this is the objection I've always made to dualism, but I'm, I'm maybe less sure that, I think we'd have to know a lot more about the physical workings of the brain before we could really be in a position to

• 20:15Speaker 00

  assess whether there's non-physical influences or not. But anyway, uh, so I'm kind of more agnostic about that the more I go on, but the most straightforward worry is as scientists or philosophers, you want as simple and unified a theory as possible. In dualism, you've got this radical division in nature between the physical things and the non-physical things and uh, it's very ugly and disunified. If that's what we end up with, that's what we end up with, but all things being equal, it's nicer to go for a more simple and unified theory of reality. And I think there are alternatives.

• 20:49Chris Williamson?

  Got you. Materialism. Why are you not happy with that?

• 20:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I mean, I guess I, I, you know, being a sciencey kind of guy, I initially wanted to be a materialist and just eventually came to the conclusion that this is, this is, this is a non-starter really. Um, and was a bit lost for a long time.

• 21:08Chris Williamson?

  That was like me when I tried to enjoy Take That's music when I was about eleven. I was like, everyone else seems to think that this is cool, but I just, just can't get into it, man.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  I had a thought when I was a little bit younger with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I just, when they first came on and I thought, this is just absolutely ridiculous.

• 21:24Chris Williamson?

  Did you get biker mice from Mars? Was it, was that your thing?

• 21:28Speaker 00

  Biker mice from Mars. That was, I think that was a bit later. Um, but then, but then it ended up, all my friends were into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and I was really left out, afraid as no, and then I, I sort of pretended.

• 21:39Chris Williamson?

  Don't conform.

• 21:40Speaker 00

  I did, I'm afraid. I pretended I'd, I liked them all along. And anyway, that was a long time ago. What we're talking about materialism. Um, yeah. So I think the core, it's a big debate, but the core of the issue is that.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  Physical science works with a purely quantitative vocabulary. Whereas consciousness is an essentially quality involving phenomenon. If you think about, you know, the redness of a red experience, the smell of coffee, the taste of mint. You just can't even describe those qualities in the purely quantitative vocabulary of physical science. And so as long as your description of the brain is framed in that, in the purely quantitative vocabulary of neuroscience. You're essentially just leaving out those qualities and, and it's really just leaving out consciousness itself. And, you know, so what, and what I've tried to press. My, you know, the reason for the title of my book, Galileo's Error, is that, you know, we shouldn't be surprised.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  That our standard scientific approach can't account for consciousness because our standard scientific approach was designed explicitly to exclude consciousness. So in sixteen twenty-three, key moment in the scientific revolution, Galileo, the father of modern science, says. Right, if we're going to make progress here, we need a purely mathematical science, right, purely quantitative. Put up all this kind of fuzzy, unclear, imprecise stuff. We just want it all to be in maths. But he understood quite well from the start that you can't capture the qualities of experience in these terms. You know, you can't capture an equation, the, you know, the, the redness of a sunset, that experience, the quality in your experience.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  So he said, right, well, if we want a quantitative science, we need to take consciousness outside of the domain of science. So Galileo set up this worldview in which there's this radical division between the quantitative domain of science. And the qualitative domain of consciousness, consciousness with its colors and sounds and smells and tastes. Uh, and that, that was the start of mathematical physics. It was only once consciousness with its qualities was out of the way that mathematical physics is possible. So I think just, just finally, I think this is so important because I think what really. Motivates people to materialism, I think is this sense that, look, physical science is great. Look, it's done such amazing things. Of course, it'll one day explain consciousness.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  I think that's rooted in a misunderstanding of the history of science. Physical science is amazing, but it's been amazing precisely since Galileo designed it to exclude consciousness, right? And the fact that it's done well, since it put consciousness on one side, doesn't mean it's going to do well when we bring consciousness back in. So, yeah, so, so physical science alone just wasn't designed. It's all part of that thing that it's, it's it wasn't designed for this explanatory task. It was designed for dealing with publicly observable phenomena with mathematics. It was designed for this thing that's, this thing that's not publicly observable, that involves qualities and trying to explain

• 24:44Speaker 00

  these unobservable qualities of consciousness. It's a totally different explanatory task.

• 24:49Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. I'm trying to think about, since reading the book, I was, I was trying to sort of consider my position. I think I probably came into this as what would be classed as a materialist. And presuming that an emergent quality of a bunch of different neurons firing can be the phenomenon of experiencing something more than just the neurons firing. In the same way as when you get a color wheel, and you got all the colors of a rainbow, and you look at them, and you're like, okay, this is a bunch of things. But then if I spin it, something inherent changes. It's no longer individual colors, it turns white. Does it turn white? I haven't done this experiment since I was about seven. I'm going to be abused

• 25:31Chris Williamson?

  on the internet for not knowing something a seven year old knows. Yeah, it turns white. So perhaps individually, if you were to look at the makeup of the brain, this is what it is. But when things combine together, there is an emergent property, something that is a phenomenon of being that particular connection of things. Is that insufficient?

• 25:51Speaker 00

  That's a, it's a very nice analogy. Yeah, yeah. So that's, that sounds like the materialist position. But, well, I don't know. So the word emergence is, is a bit slippery. So I like to distinguish.

• 26:03Chris Williamson?

  Feeling like Deepak Chopra again. Deepak's ears are burning tonight.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta precisely define these things. So there's strong emergence and weak emergence. So so strong emergence is, to David Chalmers' view, that, yeah, he thinks consciousness emerges in the physical, but only because of these extra laws of nature that bridge the gap. Whereas weak emergence is, you don't need extra laws of nature, you just, you know, it's just like water, the liquidity of water, you know. So I think if it, I, I, I would, if you're going for that weak emergentist materialist position, what's the problem? So I think what we'd need is, is, is an explanation.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  We'd need an explanation of the qualities of consciousness in terms of the purely quantitative story of electrochemical signalling, of the kind, to take an analogy, the kind of explanation we have about the boiling point of water, right? If you study the chemistry of water, you have a totally satisfactory explanation of why water boils when it does. We want that kind of explanation. Right? Now, but I think to do that, if you were to come up with that kind of explanation, you'd have to be able to describe the qualities of experience in your theory. So say you give me your theory explaining the redness of red experience in terms of electrochemical signalling.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  Your theory would have to describe in the language of physical science, the redness of the red experience, and then account for it in more fundamental terms. And I, and I just don't think you could do that. I don't, it's, it's, it's the wrong.

• 27:47Chris Williamson?

  Do we even have a language at the moment that you could do that in?

• 27:52Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, it's, it's, it's famously kind of ineffable, isn't it? Meaning you, you can't, you, you have to have the experience to be able to do it. You can't, so, yeah, if we, if we, if we could do that, you could convey to a. A blind since birth neuroscientist, the character of a red experience. And you can't do that. You have to actually have the experience. So, so, so it's a kind of two stage thing. I think there's an expressive or descriptive limitation to physical science that it, it can't even describe these qualities. And I think that entails an explanatory limitation because I think if we were to explain the qualities, we'd have to be able to describe them first in the theory. And we can't even do that. So it's not just, oh, we haven't worked it out yet.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  It's, it's in principle, this couldn't be done because they're just totally different kinds of

• 28:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  concept. And, and more, and just to make the point one more time that this was never what physical science was in the business of. It's, it's never been the point of it. I think, yeah. So I think we're going through a phase of history where we're so blown away by how well it's gone.

• 28:54Chris Williamson?

  Look, we're winning, we're just continuing to win every single match that we enter. It's 10-0, 10-0, 10-0. And then you come up against an opponent you can't even hit the goal against.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, we want to say it can do everything, you know, it's, it's, oh, this is it. And it gets into people's identity, this sense of we've found the way, we've found the truth. But, you know, I think it's, it's gone so well because Galileo essentially gave it a limited focused task that isn't applicable to, you know, to absolutely everything. Yeah. Anyway, that's, that's the thought.

• 29:24Chris Williamson?

  I think my view of the human brain and consciousness was informed quite heavily by getting into a lot of evolutionary psychology last year. Um, and I realised upon reading your book that I've been asking myself the wrong questions. Or I've been giving myself a explanation of consciousness which is satisfactory for how it feels phenomenologically, but insufficient to explain why it is the way it is. So for instance, learning a lot about pair bonding and the reason that we have reciprocal altruism, or the reason that pain feels like pain, or the reason that we have abstract thought.

• 30:05Chris Williamson?

  Like one of the um explanations which I'm sure you're familiar with, the reason that we have abstract thought is so that we can plan. Doing a thing and see the potential outcomes without having to do it. It also means that we're able to predict what us saying a thing to another person, which would have been we're highly social species. I can predict what Philip's response to me saying this thing will be. And then I'm able to gauge this theory of mind, right? I'm able to gauge how I should this sort of metacognizant game. I can play this persona and I can cultivate myself toward it. But it seems like that that can all be fine. And also, based on evolutionary psychology, doesn't seem to massively be debated about

• 30:49Chris Williamson?

  why we have those particular like it makes sense. It's a fairly satisfactory explanation that by having those particular abilities for abstraction, we're able to do these things. And everybody knows what it's like to make a plan and to think about how it might go or how it might fail and et cetera, et cetera. But that that doesn't actually seem to be the same question that we're talking about here. And that kind of was uncomfortable and interesting for me to see at the same time. I was like, I've answered the wrong question correctly.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  That I wouldn't say it's the wrong question. That's really, I think these are just different questions. It depends what you're interested in and what you're trying to do. That stuff you can talk about is all great and important. My colleague Kiara Brazza is interested in, you know, how the brain, you know, constructs a theory of mind. That is to say, an understanding of the mental states of others and the role of mirror neurons and what mirror neurons tell us about. And it's quite good. We teach together, so I, she does the more grounded sciencey stuff and I'm more sort of the more abstract philosophical. So, you know, cater to both preferences among the students. But I mean, that these, it's not either or it depends what you, so it depends what we're trying to do. So one way of explaining consciousness is a sort of historical explanation is, you

• 32:09Speaker 00

  know, why the kinds of consciousness, the kinds of mental state we have are adaptive and good for survival. And that's why they've, they've, they've evolved. So that's a different kind of explanation to that sort of historical explanation is different to what Thomas Nagel calls a constitutive explanation, which is just, you know, right now.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  What is it that makes the stuff in my brain right now produce feelings and experiences? So that's not a historical question about how we got here. It's just, you know, what's, what's going on when I wake up in the morning? That, uh, how do we bridge that explanatory gap between the purely quantitative story of the brain and the qualities we immediately apprehend in our experience? It's just, it's just a different task. And, you know, talking about evolution, I think early on after Darwin, many philosophers and psychologists actually saw the connection to, um, well, the view we haven't got on to that I defend panpsychism, um, people like William James saw it fitted very well with

• 33:18Speaker 00

  a Darwinian framework. So if you know, if you're not a panpsychist, you have to think, and this might be a good way to sort of enter the view, you just have to think there's just utterly non-conscious stuff getting more and more complicated. And then suddenly a miracle happens, consciousness appears. Whereas if you're a panpsychist, the idea would be what there was before life would unimaginably simple forms of experience and then natural selection molds them into more complicated forms of experience. Uh, so, you know, the, these aren't competing stories at all.

• 33:51Chris Williamson?

  Before we get on to panpsychism, I learned the terms chronological chauvinism and time racism from you. I can't believe that that's even a thing.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  Oh, you've, you've definitely, you've read my book.

• 34:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, well, I guess, I guess I came up with that actually teaching philosophy of time and trying to sort of get it across in a vivid, jokey way for the students. So, uh, yeah, I mean, there's, there's, well, this is kind of a tangent, but in philosophy of time, I guess there broadly speaking, two views. One is which, one, one of which is only the present moment exists. You know, the past has ceased to be, the future's not yet here. It's sort of common sense view. So on that view, there's something really special about 20, I was gonna say 2020, 2021. It's the only year that actually exists. Whereas the other, sometimes called four dimensionalist view is that.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  All moments of time exist equally, you know, the people fighting the Battle of Hastings in 1066, people setting up colonies on Mars in 4000, you know, it's all, they're all, their bodies are equally solid, their experiences are equally real. And then the thought be on that view, if you think there's something special about 6th of January 2021, you're kind of time racist, this is chronological showmanship, you think there's something special about your time.

• 35:20Chris Williamson?

  I love those terms so much, man. I love those terms.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  It's not an actual thing in the sense that, you know, people are kicking up a fuss about this and demanding their right, people in the past are demanding their rights. I think it was just a jokey way I sort of thought.

• 35:33Chris Williamson?

  I love it. And if, if you are listening, Carlo Raveli, please reply to my emails because I want to get you on to talk about the philosophy of time from your perspective.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  Oh, he's, he's writing and he's contributing to, I've got a special issue of academics, scientists, especially issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, responses to my book, and he's one of, one of the contributors.

• 35:53Chris Williamson?

  No way. That's cool. That guy's, that guy's an animal.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  I, I think he'll be slightly critical.

• 36:01Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so we've, we've sort of skirted around it and we've, we've laid the landscape. We have two popular, but as far as you're concerned, insufficient theories or just incorrect theories. What do you propose?

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, so

• 36:19Speaker 00

  the panpsychist view I propose is, it's a very specific form of panpsychism. And so there's been a resurgence of interest in this view.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  You know, I guess for a lot of the 20th century, it was kind of laughed at insofar as it was thought of at all. But in academic philosophy, there's been a real resurgence of interest in the last five or 10 years, largely due to the rediscovery of Certain important work by, from the 1920s by the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the scientist Arthur Eddington, who was incidentally the first scientist to experimentally confirm Einstein's theory of general relativity after the First World War. So, yes, as I often say, I'm inclined to think these guys did for the science of consciousness in the 1920s what Darwin did for the science of life in the 19th century.

• 37:07Chris Williamson?

  I've heard you say, I've heard you say before, it was lost and people didn't, like, what, what do you mean it was lost?

• 37:13Speaker 00

  Well, it just, it just was almost totally forgotten about for, I guess, I mean, look, you've got, it was 1927, 1928, and then you've got, you know, this was a real heyday, I think, of really interesting philosophy connecting up science and philosophy. And then we have, what, the Great Depression, Second World War, people have a lot on their minds after the Second

• 37:34Chris Williamson?

  So it's not as if it was like physically lost?

• 37:37Speaker 00

  Oh, no, not lost.

• 37:38Chris Williamson?

  Books that were then recent, it was just something which didn't land with the academic community, didn't get absorbed, didn't get developed?

• 37:44Speaker 00

  After, after the, after the war, Second World War, I think you've got a real kind of anti-philosophy zeitgeist. People like the logical positivists who thought, who tried to have this idea where that any question that can't be answered by an experiment is meaningless gibberish. And so this dominates for a long time in a very kind of hard materialist viewpoint. And then, and as I said, consciousness was not really seen as a serious scientific stuff. So I think it's only once people, people dealt with consciousness by pretending it didn't exist. And then I think from the end of the 20th century, people start to think, hold on, it does exist. I feel pain, you know, this. And so we, we start to get a resurgence

• 38:27Speaker 00

  of interest and people have eventually found their way, I think because of finding deep difficulties with these conventional options of dualism and materialism. And there's been a lot of excitement that this is a, a middle way that sounds a bit wacky, but that avoids the difficulties of these two traditional options. Okay, should I, should I describe? So the, the starting point of Russell and Eddington was that

• 38:50Speaker 00

  Physical science doesn't really tell us what matter is. And I thought that was just the most absurd thing I'd ever heard when I first heard it. Because you know, you you read a physics textbook, you seem to learn all these incredible things about the nature of space and time and matter. But actually, on on reflection, it turns out that for all its richness, physics is confined to telling us about the behaviour of matter. What it does, you know, physics tells us, for example, that particles have mass and charge, and these properties are completely defined in terms of what they do. Things like attraction, repulsion, resistance to acceleration, it's all about behaviour. What stuff does. Um, so, so what's wrong with that?

• 39:35Speaker 00

  So that intuitively at least, there's there's more to what something is than what it does. So I like to give a kind of chess piece analogy, right? If you're playing chess, you're interested in what the pieces do, right? You're interested in the moves you can make, the pieces you can take. But if you're, suppose you're someone who collects high-end luxury chess pieces, then you're interested in the substance of the pieces themselves, your pieces made of gold or silver rather than plastic or cheap metal. Uh, so this is what Floss is called, the intrinsic nature of a thing, you know, what what it is. In what it is considered independently of what it does. So now think about fundamental particles.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  Like an electron, you know, you might very well be interested in what physics tells us about about the behaviour of an electron, what it does. But you might also be interested in the intrinsic nature of electron, what an electron is considered independently of what it does. And about this, physics just has nothing to say. So the thought is, there's actually this huge hole in our standard scientific theory of the universe. Physics gives us this rich information about what stuff does, but tells us nothing about its intrinsic nature. So what's this got to do with consciousness? So I think the genius of Russell and Eddington was to bring together two problems.

• 40:59Speaker 00

  The problem we've just been discussing, the problem of intrinsic natures, the physics doesn't tell us the intrinsic nature of stuff, and the problem of consciousness, to bring them together and to see that they can be given a unified solution. So, so problem number one,

• 41:14Speaker 00

  physical science tells us a purely quantitative story of the brain and leaves out the qualities we know in experience. Problem number two, physical science just describes the behaviour of matter and doesn't tell us anything about its intrinsic nature. So,

• 41:32Speaker 00

  the unified solution is given by the hypothesis that maybe the qualities of experience are the intrinsic nature of matter. So we answer, we solve both problems at once, so we, we find a place for consciousness, for those qualities that physical science leaves out, and we have an answer to the question, what is the intrinsic nature of matter? Um, so, so this is, it's, it's a beautifully, to the idea, it's a beautifully simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific story. It's not dualism, right? This, this is just matter, just particles or fields, but matter can be described from two perspectives. Physics describes it, as it were, from the outside in terms of what it does,

• 42:16Speaker 00

  but matter from the inside in terms of its intrinsic nature is constituted of the qualities of consciousness. So, that's the basic idea.

• 42:26Chris Williamson?

  How does that manifest? How does the internal state manifest? It, it can't be any more than can be described in a materialistic worldview, no?

• 42:36Speaker 00

  So,

• 42:39Speaker 00

  so let's start with, so coming, you know, thinking about fundamental particles, so, so the, the view is that fundamental particles have some kind of very, very, very simple experience. Now, when people hear that, they always interpret it dualistically. So they always think, oh, the electron has its physical properties, that's science studies like mass, spin and charge, and then these weird consciousness properties. The, the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder had a recent, a blog, oh, it's about a year ago now probably, a blog post criticizing panpsychism, but she was interpreting it in this dualistic way, and she was saying physics doesn't show any sign of these weird, non-physical properties. But that's, that's not the view. The view is

• 43:21Speaker 00

  that mass, the physical properties, mass, spin and charge are forms of consciousness.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Because, how do we make sense of that? Because physics doesn't tell us what these properties are, it just tells us what they do. Uh, and so that leaves open the theoretical possibility that they are forms of consciousness. So coming up to take your pain at the level of the brain, your pain and the pattern of neuronal firings that corresponds to it, the idea is that in a sense, they're just the same thing. When, when, when the, when the neuroscientist studies your brain, it's just, it's, it's, she's not really studying what it is, she's just studying what it does and what its parts do. When you attend to the qualities of your experience, that is the intrinsic nature of your brain, the intrinsic nature of the brain states.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  So they're just two sides of the same coin. So, I mean, let me come back to you. Your question was, how does it manifest itself? Well, it manifests itself as the behaviour that physics studies.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  Ma- what matter is what consciousness does, right? There's just consciousness, that there's nothing but consciousness. But physics describes what consciousness does. That's the view. So there aren't two things.

• 44:41Chris Williamson?

  What is the bottom rung for consciousness in your, in your opinion then? Do, does the soil have consciousness? Do plants have consciousness? What about a rock? What about a, a tree that's now being chopped down? What about a tree that's about to die?

• 44:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, I mean, one common misunderstanding, it doesn't literally mean that everything is conscious, despite the etymology of the word, you know, pan means everything, psyche means mind, everything has mind. But the basic commitment of panpsychism is that the fundamental building blocks of reality have incredibly simple forms of experience. So it could be fundamental particles, that's the way I guess it's conventionally, standardly talked about it. But actually, many, many physicists, many theoretical physicists tend to think that actually the fundamental. Entities are not little particles, but universe-wide fields. And then particles are understood as sort of local

• 45:42Speaker 00

  excitations of fields. So if you interpret that kind of view in a panpsychist way, then the the fundamental forms of consciousness would be the intrinsic nature of those universe-wide fields. So that's the basic commitment of the view. And the idea would be that the consciousness of the human or animal brain is somehow derived from those more fundamental forms of consciousness. But your question you asked was which other things are conscious? So so the fundamental things are conscious, whether they're particles or universe-wide fields or whatever. Humans and animals are conscious. What other things are conscious? I I think that's an an open scientific question that we're in the very early days. And I don't think it's a question for philosophers like me to answer. I think it's a question for scientists to answer. And how do they do that? By

• 46:26Speaker 00

  studying the correlations between brain activity and consciousness and trying to get systematic. There are a couple of proposals. The integrated information theory or the global workspace theory that we could perhaps talk about. But I mean, to be honest, I think it's such early days that we're really, you know, in the dark at the moment. So it's it's an open empirical question. Uh. So I I guess I'm inclined to think, you know, like anybody else, that tables and rocks probably aren't conscious, but that just that they're made up of little things that probably are conscious.

• 47:01Chris Williamson?

  What are the strongest criticisms that you see of panpsychism?

• 47:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, good question. So so I guess the um what's what's generally seen as, there are a lot of different things, but what's generally seen as the biggest problem? The so-called combination problem. Which, I mean, there's a couple of different ways of making this precise, but the basic idea is, you know, the panpsychist wants to account for my consciousness in terms of the consciousness of the particles ultimately making up my brain. How how does that work? You know, we feel like we understand how you put together parts of a car engine and you get a functioning car engine, we have a grip on that. But how do you put together lots of little minds and make a big mind? That seems hard to make sense of. It seems almost unintelligible.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  You can't build a mind in the way you can build a house. Um, so there are various, um. You know, I I'd say that the energies of the contemporary panpsychist research programme are are focused on, you know, I could I could run you through through some options and my own favoured view. But I mean, I would say, I guess I say like, nobody's got a total complete theory of consciousness. It's such early days, but it seems to me that the the problems facing the panpsychist are more tractable than the problems facing these other views. You know, if you're a materialist, you've got to bridge the gap between the purely quantitative properties of physical science and the qualities, the subjective qualities of experience.

• 48:35Speaker 00

  If you're a panpsychist, did I say panpsychist the first time? If you're a panpsychist, you've got to, you've just got to bridge the gap between simple forms of experience and more complex forms of experience. And, you know, I could talk about some of my favourite solutions and the different approaches people take, but I think it's a problem we can potentially make progress on and are in the business of making progress on, in the process, sorry, of making progress on.

• 48:57Chris Williamson?

  Is your view of panpsychism compatible with consciousness emerging from artificial general intelligence if and when we manage to create it?

• 49:08Speaker 00

  It's certainly compatible with artificial consciousness.

• 49:12Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean?

• 49:14Speaker 00

  Well, just man-made, human-made things becoming conscious. You know, so as I say, I think it's an empirical question. We're trying to work out what kinds of physical activity bring about emergent. So I think there's always consciousness at the fundamental level, but I don't think there's always consciousness at the emergent level. So it's an empirical question. If we can work out, I think we're a long way from doing so, but if we can work out what is necessary and sufficient. For consciousness, then we can maybe build a thing that has that. That's, you know, that this. Now, this is why the the Panpsychist is maybe much closer to.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  You know, we don't believe in souls or something, you know, extra like that. But I, I mean, you, the way you phrased it, though, you said artificial general intelligence. So I mean, I guess I would want to sharply distinguish consciousness from intelligence, at least the way that's standardly understood in AI. Is um something functionally defined uh in in terms of certain kinds of sophisticated behavioral response. So I think that's not necessarily anything to do with consciousness. You could have a computer with very high levels of intelligence. In that sense, without having any kind of inner conscious experience at all. So there's two different questions, you know.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  Wh- what is required for something to be intelligent and what is required for something to be sentient or conscious? But yeah, I mean, I I certainly, I I think Panpsychist would probably say all the same things as a as a materialist. Or probably even a dualist about um artificial consciousness, the possibility of.

• 50:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that, I mean, that question of whether or not consciousness comes along for the ride, so to speak, and it's just. There is some sort of point that you get to where there's enough intelligence or or enough processing going on. Um for it to happen. That's the switch that you were talking about before, right? It's like either. Is it a gradation of levels of con of slightly less conscious to slightly more conscious? Or is there a a point, something that you hit? Are we going to get a point where the internet is so big that it becomes conscious? There's simply so much information processing around. Uh and these questions from Nick Bostrom and the other guys at the Future of Humanities Institute have been something I've really enjoyed. Thinking about ever since I read Superintelligence. Um I'm just trying to.

• 51:36Chris Williamson?

  I'm making a pig's ear of it, but I'm trying to work out how this maps on to what you do.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  Good, okay, I get what you're saying. So, yeah, I mean, well, just in terms of the internet being conscious is a slight digress. I mean, the integrated information theory, one of the dominant neuroscientific models that connects. I mean, a basic idea is that consciousness corresponds to the level at which you have most integrated information. So in this view, this cup of tea isn't conscious probably because there's more integrated information in the individual molecules than there is in the liquid as a whole. In the brain, there's consciousness because there's much more integrated information in parts of the brain than in the in the individual neurons.

• 52:19Chris Williamson?

  I really like that. I really like that distinction. I think that's really useful.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  So if you could one day have, if there becomes so much integrated information in the internet that there's more in the internet than the human brain, this theory predicts, we don't know if it's true or not, but it predicts, it has some empirical confirmation that the internet, we'd be absorbed into sort of an internet mind and we'd cease to be conscious in our own right. But how does it connect to Boston? I guess Boston is very much a materialist and so as an, I don't think consciousness arises from

• 53:02Speaker 00

  just, you know, intelligence and information processing. Because I think that's the materialist story, that it's the purely quantitative story of information processing. I don't think you can get consciousness out of that because I think consciousness is something qualitative. It's to do with the underlying intrinsic nature of matter. But it could be, just as a matter of empirical fact, that you know, the two could end up going together. It could end up, it's just a scientific question that it could be that certain types of sophisticated

• 53:32Speaker 00

  information processing do give rise to emergent consciousness, but in my view, that wouldn't be because of the information processing per se, but because of the intrinsic nature of matter underlying that information processing, if that makes sense.

• 53:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it does. No, it does.

• 53:50Speaker 00

  It's yeah, it's whether you think consciousness is, I think consciousness is sort of the stuff of matter. It's the kind of intrinsic, it's real, concrete, you know, if you vivid example, you know, if you smell a really bad smell. That horrible smell is the stuff of your brain at that moment. So it's that, it's a real concrete. Uh, it's not just some kind of more abstract notion of information processing. It's the stuff of the world. I should say that more often. Do that same time. People will start thinking I'm profound.

• 54:23Chris Williamson?

  You are, mate, you need a, you need a skull or a bust. Need a bust in your hand. Um, why, so, so wrapping all of this up, why does this really matter? Like, how does consciousness relate to the meaning of life for us?

• 54:36Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 54:38Speaker 00

  Okay, nice, simple question to finish with. Um, yeah, so, yeah, I mean, the final chapter of the book, the first four chapters are sort of building the

• 54:48Speaker 00

  cold-blooded scientific philosophical case for this view. The final chapter explores the kind of meaning of life, implications for human existence and um, I mean, you know, the first reason this matters, the most straightforward reason this matters is I think it's intrinsically important to try and work out the ultimate nature of reality. Not for everyone, but it's, I think it's, it's important that some people are doing that, trying to have our best guess of what reality is like. I guess most people think that's a purely scientific question. I, I disagree with that slightly. I think there's a real role for philosophy, especially in the case of consciousness. But so that's just important. But, but I do think this isn't, it's more than that with consciousness. It's not just an abstract puzzle.

• 55:30Speaker 00

  Because, you know, consciousness is at the root of human identity, I think. Fundamentally, we relate to each other as creatures with feelings and experiences. Consciousness is sort of the basis of everything, I think, that's important and of value in human existence. And yet, I believe, I would argue, our official scientific worldview. Doesn't have a place for it. So, and you know, to see that just, if you just consider for a moment, what it's like to be you right now, the colours, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, those qualities. You know, our official scientific worldview tells you, tells us that all that's really going on in your head is the purely quantitative story of electrochemical signalling.

• 56:14Speaker 00

  I think that's just equivalent to saying those qualities you encounter in your experience don't really exist. And that's just kind of crazy. I think nothing is more evident than the qualities of experience, the pleasure, the pain. And so I think we're in a crazy period of history where our official story of reality denies the existence of the one thing that's most evident and the one thing that is, gives value to human life. And I think, you know, at some kind of subconscious level that, I think that does lead to a profound sort of alienation and

• 56:51Speaker 00

  sense that we don't belong to the world, we don't fit in, um, part of what Max Weber called the disenchantment of nature. So I mean, you know, there's a lot of crazy stuff going on at the moment and there's lots of different reasons for that. But I think this is a small part of it. And so, you know, I think the attraction of panpsychism is that, you know,

• 57:12Speaker 00

  it accommodates both what we know about the world scientifically through public observation experiment and what we know about ourselves through our immediate awareness of our feelings and experiences. It brings both together in a single elegant picture of reality. So I think it's a worldview that's, um, it's both healthier and more true conception of reality. Um, yeah.

• 57:41Chris Williamson?

  I've got a theory that I've been working on for the last year or so about why we're seeing the sort of increase of

• 57:51Chris Williamson?

  I would go as far as to say sort of pettiness and existential angst. So all of the abstract problems that people make for themselves. And given the fact that for the first couple of million years of our evolution, all of the bottom things of Maslow's hierarchy of needs were super, super important and yet unfulfilled, meant that we didn't have, like oddly, an existential crisis is a very luxurious bourgeois position to be in. Like, you can only afford to have an existential crisis if all of the bottom levels of that hierarchy of needs are already met. And now we've got the Amazon Prime, the TV to watch the world's best shows on Netflix while you deliver a Michelin star steak to your

• 58:34Chris Williamson?

  house. Like, we have so much luxury and abundance that we're actually afforded the opportunity to the bliss to have an existential crisis and wonder, why am I here? What am I doing? What is my purpose? Why do I feel the things I feel? Why do I think the things I think? If you're being chased down by a tiger or a lion, you don't really have the opportunity to do that.

• 58:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah. I mean, look, I'm, I'm sure that that is a part of it. I mean, I think there's lots of different reasons. I mean, what I feel, what I do feel comfortable about that historians of the future, looking back, one thing that will be obvious to them is there was this huge crash in 2008 that brought the world to its knees. And then the longest period of waste squeezed since the Napoleonic War. And then all sorts of crazy politics, you know, no shit. It's fucking obvious. Sorry.

• 59:25Chris Williamson?

  As we're doing this, I need to say, as we're doing this, Trump is leading a protest to Capitol Hill, like as we're talking right now. And I've got, I don't know whether he's actually there. I think he was trying to flee to Scotland and Nicholas Sturgeon said, like, piss off. I don't want you here. But yeah, like, I've just got this image of him with the MAGA hat on and a like a flag over his shoulder, marching, marching down like Melania in arms. So yeah, you're right. There are a lot of crazy things going on.

• 59:58Speaker 00

  But yeah, I mean, it's since the crash. And, you know, I mean, if you just go back a bit further, 20, you know, after the war, we had. Thirty years where we had very controlled capitalism, we put high taxes on the wealthy and we had thirty years where society got more prosperous, got more equal. We had the sixties and then the eighties onwards, we had Wild West capitalism, cut all the taxes on the wealthy and, you know, gross inequality, the bottom fifty percent in developed countries, their percentage of national incomes gone from, you know, twenty-five percent to twelve percent in the US. You know, it's, it's, when the centre-left parties haven't responded to that, I think, I think, you know, to an extent that there are straightforward economic causes, but yeah,

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  I mean, there are all sorts of different things going on here, you know, we don't know the loss of religion, we don't know what the hell we're doing, what it's all about.

• 1:00:51Chris Williamson?

  I think that's a huge, a huge part that in some circles feels trite to say and then in other circles feels novel, like depends on who I'm speaking to. But that's in a compulsion that people have to be connected to something greater than them, to give themselves a sense of scale and wonder, you know, it's why you're seeing a resurgence of minimalism, I think, you know, like Diogenes the cynic, two and a half thousand years ago was living out of a pot with a robe to wear. And twenty twenty, one of the most popular YouTube channels on the internet is the minimalists, the guys from the minimalists. Like, what is that if it's not like a modern day reincarnation of what Diogenes was doing?

• 1:01:32Chris Williamson?

  Or people that decide to go and live out in the woods, or people who decide to go and have transcendent experiences with psychedelics in the middle of the Amazon jungle, people who go and lie on the, a darkened night and look at the sky. What are we doing? We're trying to give ourselves a sense of scale and connection and reminding ourselves that we are insignificant but also somehow connected. Is that simply just the physical processes? Is that just us looking at the night sky in a way that our ancestors would have done? Therefore, it makes us feel good? Or is there something more going on? All of this stuff is what I like spending time thinking about and it's so satisfying, even though you always come away with more questions than you do answers, it feels very satisfying to think about somehow.

• 1:02:16Speaker 00

  And, you know, there's the question of spirituality, but also that the social structures religion used to provide to bring communities together, mark the rites of passage, uh this mark the seasons, you know, bring together people, you know, not just because you live near each other, not, you know, so I'm actually, well, this is something I'd like to write on, totally different topic, write more on, I'm, I describe myself as a non-believing Christian.

• 1:02:41Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so you like the tradition and you like the ritual.

• 1:02:44Speaker 00

  You know, and I, I attend church and I mean, like so many Jewish people I know, you know, might attend synagogue, you know, with, even though they're not uh believers in the traditional sense. And um people think that's not an option for Christian. I think Christians, you know, it's supposed to be, you know, it's just this radical, do I believe these propositions? Do I? So, you know, I, I value the um, yeah, the, the, the tradition and the, the community and the marking of the rites of passage and the connecting to some kind of higher reality. And um, you know, I think in some ways it's um, a modern corruption, I think, the, the total focus on, on belief. Uh Karen Armstrong's written about this, that it's um, the change

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  of the ma- the meaning of the word belief. So the, the Greek word pistis that we translate as faith or belief, um, didn't mean belief in the modern sense. It meant something like commitment, engagement, having your heart in something. And when the Bible was first translated, uh, is it sixteenth, seventeenth century? I can't remember now. The word belief meant something kind of similar. Um, she quotes Shakespeare play where the character says, believe not thy disdain, which means like, don't have your heart in your disdain. It was closer to the German word belieben, meant sort of, you know, engagement, um, having your heart in something. And then with the scientific revolution, the word beliefs changed meaning and it now sort of means a kind of cold-blooded hypothesis about reality.

• 1:04:12Chris Williamson?

  Much more absolutist, right?

• 1:04:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. So now you read the Bible and you think Jesus really cared about what you, what theory of reality you have and, and um, you know, your, that salvation depends on it. Whereas actually, I mean, I've.

• 1:04:27Speaker 00

  It's good textual analysis, looking at, you know, the way Jesus actually uses the word

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  faith is much to do, much more to do with commitment and engagement. It's always when people have gone the extra mile. So it's not really belief in the, in the modern sense. It's more about sort of a commitment to a possibility.

• 1:04:46Chris Williamson?

  I went to, last year for my birthday, I went to Rome and I did the Colosseum and the Roman Forum, day one, and I did the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican, day two. And man, like I've, I've not been many, I've travelled a lot and I've not been to many places that gave me the same sense of grandeur and perspective and wonder and beauty and awe and like all of the things that make the phenomenological experience of being human and being conscious like beautiful. And I was like, if this is the front end of the funnel for Christianity, like sign me up. Like it's so nice. And you just think like this is, how could this not have inspired someone's

• 1:05:28Chris Williamson?

  belief, commitment, you know, in the more traditional sense of the word. Cause it was just so, it was so gorgeous. Like it was a beautiful experience to be in there. Every time I go to Durham Cathedral, you know, that's the closest one to me and I go with my mum like regularly and these high ceilings and the pillars and the, that kind of like the echoes and the sound of everyone, the shuffling feet on flagstones. It's just beautiful. And it is, it is a shame that we, you have to kind of take it wholesale rather than piecemeal.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  And wrapping up your life in, in, in something of that grandeur. You know what, I always think of, you know, the secular world has adopted Christmas and that's fantastic. You know, a beautiful celebration of light and joy in the middle of winter. But what it hasn't have taken on is Easter. And I, you know, I think there's something wonderful about Easter that it's a sort of... A celeb- a festival of misery, followed by, followed by, followed by a spring festival of hope, you know, that, you know, period of dwelling on the horror of the world and, and then turning to hope and, you know, and that those kind of marking of the seasons. And yeah, I think, um, I don't know, it's something about the, the human condition that that's really important. But, you know, yeah, when I, when I first returned to religion

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  actually, and I, um, I went to Liverpool Cathedral around Christmas, and, you know, it's absolutely beautiful music and wonderful choir and speaking to the vicar afterwards and, you know, saying, I just don't know how literally I take these things. And, and he said, well, I'm a pretty traditional believer, you know, I, I think Jesus rose physically from the dead, but there are other ways of understanding it. And he gave me books by kind of really liberal Christians like Marcus Borg and Karen Armstrong, who, who believe in some kind of reality, higher reality, but take everything else non-literally. And, and so that just kind of blew me away because I was kind of raised Catholic. And I thought, you know, the first thing is, do I believe these things? But he just, you know, said, you know, different ways of doing it. So, um, yeah, I think, yeah, maybe it's something

• 1:07:29Speaker 00

  to do with the Church of England. It's, sorry, we've gone wildly off topic of my, uh, you know, maybe because it was set up because the king wanted a divorce. Yeah, maybe it doesn't have that heavy ideology. So such a broad, you know, there's some very conservative wings and there's some incredibly liberal wings. And yeah, anyway, I didn't mean to get on to Jesus.

• 1:07:49Chris Williamson?

  No, I, it's, it's good, man. It's something I think about an awful lot. Look, Philip, today's been like really, really fun. Galileo's error now in paperback.

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  The US paperback's just come out, but, uh, the, the UK has always been paperback, actually.

• 1:08:04Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. That will be linked in the show notes below. Go and pick your copy up from Amazon. If you do use the link below, you will be supporting the podcast at no extra cost to yourself because they have to pay me a little, a little kickback. Um, where else do you want to send people? Any other stuff you want to plug?

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  Um, I'm on Twitter, Philip underscore Goff, Philip with one L, G O F F. Uh, I spend a lot of time arguing on Twitter, too much. Uh, my website, philipgoffphilosophy.com. I've also got a blog with the horrible title, Conscience and Consciousness, which is, but anyway, linked to my website, um.

• 1:08:39Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, that's about it, probably.

• 1:08:41Chris Williamson?

  Awesome, man. Look, today's been really, really fun. I'm going to ask you for some book suggestions when I get off and I'll, I'll post those on my Instagram or probably in an upcoming newsletter at some point. So make sure that you've signed up to that. Philip, I really, really enjoyed this. It's fried some brain cells, but kind of built some as well at the same time. So thank you.

• 1:08:57Speaker 00

  Thanks a lot, Chris. It's been a great discussion.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

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