What Is Consciousness? Philip Goff On The Nature of Reality & The Science of Mind

What is consciousness? Where does it come from? What happens to consciousness when we die? And what is the nature of reality? It’s time to ask the big questions and tackle the hard problems that have perplexed humanity since the dawn of inquiry. Our guide for today’s journey is Philip Goff, PhD, a modern philosopher who has devoted his life to better understanding the qualities of reality. Philip is an associate professor of philosophy at Durham University who specializes in the nature of consciousness. He is a proponent of panpsychism—the controversial theory that everything material in our universe is imbued with some element of individual consciousness—which he beautifully captures in his fascinating book, Galileo's Error. This is a fascinating, awe-inspiring conversation about the science of mind, the nature of reality and consciousness, the meaning of the multiverse, artificial intelligence, and spirituality. A conversation that I must admit began to stretch past the boundary of my intellectual capabilities—but in the most enjoyable way possible Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: InsideTracker: insidetracker.com/RichRoll LMNT: drinkLMNT.com/RICHROLL BetterHelp: BetterHelp.com/richroll Indeed: Indeed.com/RICHROLL Athletic Greens: https://www.athleticgreens.com/richroll Plant Power Meal Planner: https://meals.richroll.com Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:13Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:32Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:57Rich Roll?

  He is a proponent of something called panpsychism, 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 Error, which I highly recommend.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  It's consciousness that's fundamental, and the physical world arises from underlying facts about mind or consciousness.

• 2:24Rich Roll?

  We explore panpsychism, 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.

• 2:44Rich Roll?

  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.

• 3:11Rich Roll?

  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?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  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, it's incredible, actually, to see so many people interested in consciousness.

• 3:33Rich Roll?

  Interested in science and consciousness.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  It was unbelievable. And, you know, great questions and, you know, hanging out, chatting to people afterwards. And yeah, it was, it was really loads of fun.

• 3:42Rich Roll?

  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 of 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.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  We got there in the end.

• 3:56Rich Roll?

  Exactly.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Thanks for staying with it.

• 3:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, thank you. So today, the intention is to tackle the hard problem of consciousness. I think in order to, you know, 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?

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that is a good place to start, because 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, maybe I can start with the way it's standardly set up. It's standardly characterized as a purely scientific problem.

• 4:53Speaker 01

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

• 5:18Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  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 confront that the philosophical underpinnings of the problem, we're not really going to make progress towards a solution.

• 5:37Rich Roll?

  Right. And talk a little bit about your evolution to that realisation that the answers that we seek lie in more of a philosophical exploration than a materialist physics, hard science path.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  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

• 6:35Speaker 01

  and experiences. So the challenge of the mind-body problem then is how to bring together.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  These two seemingly very different things, consciousness and the physical world, into a single unified picture of reality.

• 6:54Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  And broadly speaking, there are, there are three options. Option one, the materialist option is that the, it's 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, it's consciousness that's fundamental and the physical world arises from underlying facts about mind or consciousness. Third option, dualism, which is the option that we take both consciousness and the physical world as fundamental, but different aspects of reality.

• 7:38Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  So this is, 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 I've just described are empirically equivalent, which means you can't do an experiment to distinguish between them.

• 7:59Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  So it's not, it's, it's not in essence, experiments are very important in ways we could talk about, but it's not in 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, you know, like trying to solve a math problem, looking down a microscope or something. We, we need to understand what, what the, what the problem essentially is.

• 8:25Rich Roll?

  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?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So it's a tempting thought. I mean, and that's, well, I was just debating in London a couple of nights ago, Anel Seth, the neuroscientist, really great neuroscientist, a good friend of mine, as well as a philosophical enemy. We, you know, we've debated each other a couple of times now. 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.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  But I think that's, that's, 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, the living functions of organisms.

• 9:32Rich Roll?

  In other words, defining what constitutes being alive versus inanimate.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  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. Right? 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.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  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 experiments. 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.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  And that's why it's a wholly different kettle of fish. Do you have that expression?

• 11:11Rich Roll?

  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's almost too difficult to even talk about. Because you can't tease out or parse consciousness from anything else. Like, it is the essence of being, right? There is no, there is nothing that is not conscious experience.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:33Rich Roll?

  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 it, how you think about it, so we know what we're talking about here.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  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 voice speaking to you. If you pay attention, you can notice the tactile sensations of the chair under your body. This is all aspects of what it's like to be you right now, all aspects of your consciousness.

• 12:38Rich Roll?

  This is the classic kind of Nagel definition.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  That's right, Nagels.

• 12:44Rich Roll?

  I find it to be not that satisfying, though. To me, it feels like it's similar to the Supreme Court's 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 is. It feels circular, like, you're defining consciousness as someone who is experiencing consciousness.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  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, when asked about, allegedly asked what jazz was, he said, "If you have to ask, you'll never know." But for some people, that Nagel term works. So Nagel said, in his famous paper, "What's It Like To Be A Bat?" From the seventies, 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, to take a vivid example.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  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 on to 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 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.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  But most people, on both sides of the debate, tend to think there is a notion we can get on to and work with here.

• 14:39Rich Roll?

  Right. 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, right? 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 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

• 15:21Rich Roll?

  in a world in which nothing is quite adequate in terms of understanding or explaining the nature of what consciousness is. Is that a fair?

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. I think maybe dualists, contemporary dualists, might push back a little at the way you describe the position there. I suppose we do tend to think of it as something kind of mystical and religious, supernatural. But actually, probably the most famous contemporary dualist, David Chalmers, 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, "Only in the sense that the universe is cool." And that's the sort of... But he calls himself a naturalistic dualist.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  So he thinks consciousness is not physical. It's separate from the brain and the... 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 psychophysical 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 then a scientific question. We need to work out what these laws are. We should look to neuroscience.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  So he wants to sort of expand science and even with materialism saying it's the scientific option. I suppose...

• 17:06Speaker 01

  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 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, 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 Chalmers from his perspective, his dualist perspective, me from my panpsychist perspective, want to have a slightly more expansive conception of what science is.

• 17:50Rich Roll?

  And that expansive notion of it would consider things like particle physics or string theory. You know, when you sort of think about what we don't understand about physics in science, we think of things like dark matter, et cetera, you know, like these mind-blowing kind of concepts that, you know, me as a non-scientist, you know, have a difficult time just understanding. The idea of, you know, alternate realities and parallel, all these sort of things that quantum physics contemplates, perhaps there is some explanation or path to clarity that

• 18:30Rich Roll?

  can be gleaned from those disciplines that we haven't quite mastered at this point.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  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 science is because the way we currently think about science... The whole task is accounting for the data of observation and experiments. That's, 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, that's, that's not all that we

• 19:20Speaker 01

  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 fit, to construct a theory that can accommodate both the data of observation experiments, of course, but also this private, privately known reality of consciousness. So, I mean, in Galileo's error, I, I, I frame that as, as expanding science. These days, I guess I would say more

• 20:02Speaker 01

  about it's just about appreciating that we need to do philosophy as well as science.

• 20:07Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:19Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. And that's both, this goes both to the error that Galileo made from your estimation, but also to the sort of 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 sort of toolkit, I guess, to better understand. So explain why you made this the title of the book.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:45Rich Roll?

  And where that bifurcation, you know, has kind of led science in terms of how we think about consciousness, perhaps wrongheadedly.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a somewhat provocative title. I actually am a huge fan of Galileo.

• 21:00Rich Roll?

  It is a clickbaity kind of thing.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. There was an earlier book.

• 21:05Rich Roll?

  How dare you?

• 21:05Speaker 01

  By Antonio Damasio called, called Descartes' Error. And I guess I'm a bit, bit sick of everyone bashing Descartes, so I thought I'll. Provoke a little by having Galileo's error. But no, I think Galileo in many ways had a much better understanding of these issues than we do now. 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

• 21:46Speaker 01

  now on, what he called natural philosophy, I guess what we now call physical science, is going to be purely mathematical, have this purely quantitative language. But, but I think Galileo appreciated that you can't capture the qualities of conscious experience in these terms, the, 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, you know? So Galileo essentially says, well, you know, if we, if we want a mathematical science,

• 22:31Speaker 01

  if we want a purely quantitative science, we need to take consciousness outside of the domain of science. So, so in 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, colours, sounds, smells, tastes. And that, that, you know, that, 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,

• 23:16Speaker 01

  and arguably because Galileo put consciousness outside of its domain of inquiry. So the fact that physical science has 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 uh...

• 23:34Rich Roll?

  Right. And the tricky thing here, you know, at the risk of sounding like this is gonna take a turn into like bong hit philosophy, is that science can explain, to extend the chocolate metaphor, like, science can explain what chocolate is, the chemical composition of chocolate, what happens, you know, to your nervous system when that chocolate hits your taste buds, et cetera. But what it can't explain for or account for is the experience of enjoying chocolate. Like that, you know, that is like a incalculable thing that exists beyond language or the ability for the traditional scientific method to adequately explain.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, 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, but you can access brains through perception and you can scan people's brains and, and you can ask them, if it's a human being, you can ask them what they're feeling as you scan their brain or maybe look for

• 25:04Speaker 01

  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 necessary and sufficient for consciousness? And that's really important data, but that's not the complete story of consciousness. What we ultimately want is an explanation. Okay, 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

• 25:46Speaker 01

  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 datum. And that's never been what physical science has been aiming at, as I think Galileo understood.

• 26:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and it's also very difficult, I don't know if I would call it counterintuitive, but it's very difficult. Like, our intuition around what consciousness is, 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 panpsychist 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

• 26:56Rich Roll?

  it is at the baseline from which everything, from which the genesis of everything else emerges.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  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 dualist option. And, I mean, as far as I'm concerned, if we think about the materialist option of trying to get consciousness out of physical processes in the brain...

• 27:41Speaker 01

  We find that there has been absolutely no progress on trying to make sense of that. Nobody has ever managed to 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

• 28:25Speaker 01

  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, or the panpsychist explanatory project, which is already complete. So in my mind, it's kind of a no brainer.

• 28:52Rich Roll?

  Right. All right. So so much to 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?

• 29:16Speaker 01

  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 Chalmers, actually, as an undergraduate in my, I had philosophy in mind every year in my degree, and I didn't read David Chalmers. 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 who thinks consciousness is outside of the body and the brain? And I wanted to defend the materialist 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 dualist.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  But anyway, that's how I was thinking as a young man. And, you know, I defended the materialist 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 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 a materialist. So I decided I was going to deny the reality of 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,

• 30:44Speaker 01

  who denies the reality of consciousness, under a certain understanding of that word at least. 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 couldn't, the reality of my own conscious experience.

• 31:17Rich Roll?

  You were having such a palpable experience.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's not an illusion, is it? It's, it's hard to make sense of what an illusion would be without consciousness. And so, but after that, I, I think I was a sort of closet dualist. So I sort of thought, I had problems with dualism, 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, tried to.

• 31:45Rich Roll?

  Distance yourself from this obsession with consciousness.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Read about science that was... Yeah, so people think I like mysteries because I'm defending panpsychism, but I don't like mysteries. I hate mysteries. I want to get rid of mystery. And so this was, so I tried to focus on reading about science that was more tractable. But then I just happened across, well, actually, another article by Thomas Nagel. I think he was a kind of a pioneer here. He had an article very tentatively defending panpsychism in the 70s. And it was almost apologetic. He was sort of giving an argument, but he was like, of course, this is ridiculous, but there's something to the argument. And I just read it and I just thought, oh, my God, that just, it just avoids all the problems,

• 32:32Speaker 01

  the problems of dualism on the one hand, the problems of materialism on the other. And it just gave me a kind of deep sense of intellectual peace, you know, 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 panpsychist professor, Galen Strawson, at the University of Reading. And so I started graduate study and it turned out okay.

• 33:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 33:18Rich Roll?

  It's something 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 the nature of it. But I can't help it. It's like, I just think like, the world would be cooler if consciousness is the fundamental kind of base layer of everything that exists, whether 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.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, I'm right with you that I always say, it'll catch phrase 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 error and in the new book I'm working on now, you know, I want the truth, you know, but I always, I always find when I'm arguing with somebody who disagree 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 do have a deep thirst for the truth. Well, you know, we'll never know for sure, but to have our

• 34:43Speaker 01

  best guess. And so, yeah, in Galileo's error 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, you know, what does this mean to live this out? And I, you know, so the great thing about panpsychism 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

• 35:23Speaker 01

  puzzle. Consciousness is at the root of human identity. It's arguably the source of everything that matters, you know, from deep emotions, subtle thoughts, beautiful sensory experiences. And yet I'm inclined to think our official scientific worldview, 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 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 worldview.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:20Rich Roll?

  It's the craziest thing ever. Like, when you think of it, right?

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Think of your 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 worldview that denied their own conscious feelings and experiences. And we think, what the, how did they get in that mindset? And I, 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've 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.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:30Rich Roll?

  Right. This cornerstone idea that we, when it comes to hard science, we understand matter through the lens of how matter behaves.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:43Rich Roll?

  But that doesn't account for what matter actually is.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:47Rich Roll?

  So the thesis is that matter is composed of the, the, the base elements of consciousness somehow, some way.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:58Rich Roll?

  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.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:27Rich Roll?

  Is that, is that a fair?

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Sounds, 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 Annika Harris, and I think her person of panpsychism would think that literally everything is conscious. I know she's a bit agnostic on whether it's true.

• 38:51Rich Roll?

  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.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's been great that she's managed to really done a lot to get the idea out there.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  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 selection, as it were, discovered this and exploited it. So probably 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.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  And make systematic where we get consciousness at the macro level of reality.

• 40:36Rich Roll?

  So it's Do you think that neuroscience is capable of doing that?

• 40:39Speaker 01

  I hope so. I hope so. It's, it's, it is hard because consciousness is not publicly observable. You know, the neuroscientist Christoph Koch bet David Chalmers 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

• 41:20Speaker 01

  systematic theory of, of, of what kind of systems do and don't have consciousness. I'm, I still have hope in that project.

• 41:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  But it's, it's not easy at all.

• 41:28Rich Roll?

  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'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 Annika and other people who are, you know, thinking about this a little bit more deeply than 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.

• 42:09Rich Roll?

  And to straw man your argument would be to say that there is no scientific or objective evidence to support any of your thesis.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  I agree with you. I agree with you. I'm, I don't think you can scientifically prove the particles have consciousness because consciousness is not publicly observable.

• 42:33Rich Roll?

  This is the hard problem.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  You can't look inside an electron to see if it's conscious, just as I can't look inside your brain to see if you're conscious. So this is, I mean, This is why, 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 puzzle arises because... The puzzle would not arise if the only way we knew about reality was through experiments. Then we'd just do science. And some philosophers like Daniel Dennett seem to think that is all we know about reality, you know, just through experiments. But I think most people

• 43:16Speaker 01

  think, "No, 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. You can answer with an experiment. It's a philosophical question. So, more and more, before we get on to panpsychism, 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

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Dennett is incredibly consistent. He wants to think the only things we know about reality are through experiments. He knows, 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...

• 44:40Speaker 01

  There's something we know about reality that's not from experiments.

• 44:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  And so we need to engage with a bit of philosophy. You know, if, if you just zealously follow this line that, no, the only, the only way we know anything is through experiments, then consciousness is out the window. So you can't have your cake and eat it. You've got to.

• 44:59Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  You know.

• 45:00Rich Roll?

  It's, it's the, it's the philosophical zombie problem, right? And I, I feel like this, this field of consciousness is gaining in kind of mainstream popularity because we're all paying attention to the advent of, of artificial intelligence. We're, 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 AIs and they seem to be mimicking human behavior almost perfectly at times. So is that consciousness?

• 45:45Rich Roll?

  I think we would all agree at this phase, it probably isn't. It is a, it is a sort of philosophical zombie situation. But at what point does it become conscious? And to take your, your, your perspective on panpsychism in that everything on some level is, is, is rooted in some form of consciousness. It's not a stretch to then say that, that that AI has some form of consciousness. 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.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:29Rich Roll?

  Which is a really tricky, fascinating and, you know, also kind of terrifying thing to think about.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you're right. This, this, again, another reason this isn't just a, an intellectual game. There are very real world implications. Whether AI is conscious, does that, does that mean we have to have, think, start to think about the ethics of, of artificial systems? Which animals are conscious? Forget, you know, forget computers. Which animals are conscious? And what does that imply about our, our moral responsibilities?

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Are plants conscious? People with...

• 47:07Rich Roll?

  Annika talks about that in her book, the whole thing with the fungal networks and fir trees.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  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, if that turns out to be 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, the way computers work, you, in contrast to the brain, the

• 47:58Speaker 01

  brain stores information in a way that's highly dependent on, on connections and integration. And that's the mark of consciousness for the integrated information theory. But the way we, the way a computer's set up, that's not the case. It's, 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, um, yeah, can I just come back to maybe just pinning down like, why we should believe this?

• 48:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  So just, I think the core of it is, as you say, of course, it's not, it's not about scientific proof, it's not about proof, you can't scientifically prove that electrons are conscious. What, what is attractive here is the beautiful form of explanation that Bertrand Russell came up with in the, in the 1920s, that was, you know, forgotten about for so long, but has, has recently been rediscovered. And that's why there's so much buzz about panpsychism, surprisingly, in, in Anglophone philosophy. So I think what, what Russell was doing in the 1920s was thinking really hard about the fact that our fundamental science is purely mathematical.

• 49:21Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  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.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  And what Russell realizes 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.

• 49:51Rich Roll?

  How it behaves.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  How it behaves, exactly. It's abstract mathematical structure. So, 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. Through their interactions,

• 50:30Speaker 01

  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, you can't get consciousness.

• 50:51Rich Roll?

  Total mindfuck.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  You can't get consciousness out of physical, out of, out of physical matter. But you can 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, and that's, that's the case for believing it.

• 51:08Rich Roll?

  So there's believing it and understanding it from a theoretical point of view. Do you think that, that the human animal is capable of understanding it beyond theory, to really truly understand it? Or is that something that eludes our capacity and our limited, you know, faculties?

• 51:28Speaker 01

  It might not be possible to fill in all the gaps. I was talking to Rebecca Goldstein last night, who was in this debate in New York last night, who said it on the stage in her youth, she was sympathetic to panpsychism. And but she now thinks, you know, there's gonna be, there's gonna be, there's so much we could never know. For example, what is it like to be an electron? Okay, say, say we accept there's 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. Are we ever gonna be able to? And then think about our own experience, that so many different kinds of qualities,

• 52:11Speaker 01

  all the different colors and the difference between color and sound and proprioception, you know, that's your awareness of where your bodily parts are. All of these, these qualities that seem to have nothing to do with each other, you know, you seem like, what, what does color have to do with sound? It seems such radically different kinds of quality. Are we ever gonna be able to have some theory that can predict the very precise quality of human experience from the kind of consciousness at the level of particles that it emerges from? Can we, will we ever be able to do that? 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.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  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, I think that in very broad terms, that explanatory story Russell tells, I think is pretty explicable, actually. I think it makes perfect sense. And so I make the analogy to natural selection, right? There's the, 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 intelligible

• 53:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  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've got physics, I think that makes perfect sense. And that was, you know, the eureka moment to me, reading about this stuff. But whether the way we've 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, we can have a good go.

• 54:22Rich Roll?

  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 prompts in his meditations are around trying to qualify that for you, trying to get you to understand

• 55:03Rich Roll?

  that you're not being made aware of consciousness, but that you are aware as consciousness, that everything that you are experiencing, from the pro, 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 like, I know my mind is running a loop, and I can have distance between what I would call my higher consciousness and like the ruminations of my, you know,

• 55:48Rich Roll?

  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 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

• 56:33Rich Roll?

  in true reality.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  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 a 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, of what's going on there.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm sort of, I guess, more agnostic on, on the self than, 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.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  And I think that's traditionally philosophers have plugged the self in there, the I there as the thing. Maybe it's very different to how we ordinarily think about it, but there's something there which is parceling off, which is bringing unity to the diversity, which we might call the self. And I mean, it's a further question, does this thing persist for long periods of time? My PhD mentor, Galen Strawson, has a book, selves, where he defends the idea that there are unified selves, but they just last a couple of seconds. So there's these sort of chains of little unified selves that pop up and disappear.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  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 have dreamless sleep or general anesthetic, that self ceases to be and another one pops up when you wake up. Yes, I recently had a small operation with general anesthetic. I was kind of terrified thinking, who's going to wake up? Is it going to be some different person with all my memories? But so I'm very agnostic on all this stuff. I'm not as, Sam and Anika seem pretty confident. Maybe I just haven't meditated enough.

• 59:20Rich Roll?

  Well, I mean, that goes in, yeah, the nature of self and identity. And then, of course, you know, the implications for free will and choice that come with that. I mean, I think it's pretty fascinating to assume the panpsychic perspective begs questions of self and identity, right? If consciousness is the base layer to everything and it pervades everything, you know, what are the implications for identity? You know, this sense that we're always evolving, we're always changing, that consciousness is this, on some level, like independent of who we are in this sense of personhood. And as we

• 1:00:03Rich Roll?

  Grow older and we look different when we look in the mirror. There is 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.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:00:14Rich Roll?

  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 panpsychism upend that or change how we think about identity in that regard?

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Possibly. Depends, it depends what, what direction you take it in, I think. So I guess there are connections between panpsychism and certain forms of Buddhist thinking or the Advaita Vedanta tradition in Hindu mysticism. My friend, the Australian philosopher, Miri Albhahari 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 in this sort of dry, rigorous, cold-blooded way.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  And she's defending this kind of mystical philosophy on the basis that she thinks we should take the testimony of expert meditators as, as a sort of expert testimony, 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 panpsychist philosopher who was in the audience at this debate in New York last night, Luke Roloff's, who is a panpsychist because he wants to explain consciousness, but he has no...

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Mystical or any kind of spiritual tendencies in so far as that takes you beyond the regular scientific picture. That's no fun. And so. He's lacking the fun part. He's a lovely guy. He is a fun guy. But so the way I normally tend to say is, you know, it's there's no necessary connection between panpsychism and anything spiritual. But maybe panpsychism 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 for the materialist is what you get from physics. And it doesn't seem physics physicists aren't telling us about this unconditional consciousness of the root of things. But if you are if

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  you're a panpsychist 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 panpsychism, that Russell story, I really find that persuasive. But here, if Miri or Anika or Telamino trust meditators, I don't, 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 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

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  it's about understanding our unity with 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.

• 1:03:53Rich Roll?

  What it brings up for me is this idea of connectivity. Like if consciousness pervades everything and we don't live in a vacuum and there are, you know, 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, right? 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

• 1:04:35Rich Roll?

  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 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 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 is consciousness nonetheless that's driving our behaviors and our decisions in some kind of macro way, in the same way that ants construct an anthill or birds, you know, know how to flock together to, they're

• 1:05:20Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:34Rich Roll?

  I don't know if that makes any sense at all, but like to like entertain that as a thought experiment, I think is interesting.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  I think there's definitely in panpsychism, there's a picture of the universe we fit into much more, you know, we're conscious creatures in 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 your brain doing funny things. But I, I always come back to the, you know, to that challenge.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  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, well, why should, why should a 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 of my consciousness and check. You just trust that your ordinary sensory experiences are connecting you with reality. So, so, um, not Russell in this case. William James says, if you say it's, it's okay for ordinary people to trust their sensory

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  experiences, but it's not okay for a mystic to trust their mystical experience. There's a sort of double standard there.

• 1:07:13Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  I think all knowledge is rooted in just the decision to trust experience. But so there's something there I take seriously, but there's just such diversity in how that's interpreted in different spiritual.

• 1:07:25Rich Roll?

  But what, what does it mean to trust experience? Right? If, if everything is an appearance in 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 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

• 1:08:06Rich Roll?

  that's driving us towards the innovation of an artificial intelligence that will ultimately supplant us?

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  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

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  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 panpsychist tends to say, "No, the physical world is real. It's really out there. It's just made up of consciousness." So maybe these

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  are just two slightly different takes on the same idea.

• 1:09:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, no, I get it. I mean, I think another cool aspect of contemplating panpsychism 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, you know, health of the planet and the future of humanity, climate change, et cetera, it does put you in a more compassionate, you know, mindset of cooperation, right? Like, there is an interconnectivity between everything. We

• 1:10:24Rich Roll?

  are interdependent and linked in ways that, you know, perhaps we haven't fully contemplated previously.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, in my book, Galileo's Error, I do kind of speculate about what it'd be like to be a child. Raised as a panpsychist, you know, and raised to see the movement of a plant as in some way expressing its desires, its inclinations and because I mean, our official scientific worldview tells us that a tree is just a mechanism. And it's sort of ridiculous to hug a mechanism. It's sort of what, you know, that's why we think of tree hugging as kind of idiotic or some people do. And if you're thinking of a tree as a mechanism, then it's, it has no moral significance in its own right.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  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, you 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 make, to solve the environmental problem even more significant. But yeah, I haven't 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, you can only be conscious if you're indoors.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  Well, actually, my daughter said something great to me, my five year old. We were on the bus and I said, actually, Annika and Sam wouldn't like the sentiments 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, I don't know, it's this real kind of a She does though. Free will, free will sense there, wasn't there? That it's, you know, there's not, I'm not a mechanism, I guess, but yeah, anyway.

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  Do with what that, what you will.

• 1:12:35Rich Roll?

  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 gonna, and the way they share resources, et cetera, like, it's, the more you learn about that,

• 1:13:15Rich Roll?

  the easier it is to take that leap of, of philosophical faith into this, 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 is just a, you know, a better way of living, quite frankly. So.

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, on, on the trees there, I do, I do try and encourage my kids to think about, which is just science now, it's not, nothing to do with panpsychism, 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 ethnicities sometimes, you know, these trees are helping each other out across.

• 1:14:01Rich Roll?

  An example that we should, yeah, exactly.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  There is a buzzing, blooming community underneath our grounds as we're walking through the forest. We just, we're just seeing these things that stick out of the ground. But, you know, you, you keep coming back, which to, you wanna 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 work with a possibility. You know, I think some, 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 in your brain, something

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  Definitely deciding. I mean, who the hell knows what's going on? You know, you can engage with experiences whilst remaining agnostic about.

• 1:15:05Rich Roll?

  So here you are, taking this middle path again, right?

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  I'm always, I hate the dichotomies, you know, it's always the dichotomies like, are you a US capitalist or a Soviet communist, you know, are you a materialist or a dualist?

• 1:15:17Rich Roll?

  Let's all get along, 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 pervading 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?

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  Hmm, Spinoza's 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 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 view with panpsychism, then it's the, 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, i.e. the universe itself.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  And I actually, I actually think that's a, that's a more attractive philosophical conception of panpsychism as well, sometimes called cosmosychism, you know, that the universe is the fundamental conscious entity.

• 1:16:38Rich Roll?

  So there's a macro field of energy that enervates the subatomic particles that comprise the nature of consciousness? Is that what you're saying?

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the fundamental thing is this universe-wide mind and everything else are 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, in my academic book. And so, yeah, but then is that? It's a further question, do we want to call that God? I mean, you might just think-

• 1:17:28Rich Roll?

  I mean, we could use a different word. God is a problematic word. It's just fraught, so we use a different word.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, you might just think it's the- 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 goal-directedness. 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 cosmosychist position and bring in other kind of data, like the fine-tuning of physics, that might push you towards

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  something more like a goal-directed conscious entity, rather than just a sort of meaningless mess. So, again, panpsychism doesn't entail anything spiritual or anything in that direction, but it can lead you there if you bring in other considerations, I think.

• 1:18:36Rich Roll?

  And what is your relationship personally with the spiritual and the mystical and all of this?

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, this is, I guess, the new book I'm working on. I 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 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. You know, again, it's all these dichotomies. It's like, whose team are you on? Richard Dawkins or the Pope?

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  And I often find like when you're talking to people, it's like they're trying to work out which side you're on. And I just, as in the case of materialism and dualism, I just came to find actually both the classical theistic religious position and the classical 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 underexplored positions in between. So that's where I'm currently engaged at the moment in trying to map out.

• 1:20:06Rich Roll?

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

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so 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 incredibly improbable that just by chance our universe would have ended up, just by chance with the right numbers for life. So I think the example that 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.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  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 high profile physicists saying is, it's just what that number turned out to be.

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  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 point thirty-eight zeros, one, three, eight or something. It's like tiny number, but it's not zero. And you know, physicists like Brian Greene saying you just, you don't find these kinds of numbers in physics. And it didn't seem to fit with other things we know about physics. But it's fortunate, we did have that kind of number because if it was, 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, we wouldn't

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  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. So 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 and life, that number had to be in this incredibly narrow range.

• 1:22:44Rich Roll?

  So that's like the god number, right? Like that's the number you're like, this had to be the result of some kind of higher intelligence or divinely inspired design.

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  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

• 1:23:17Rich Roll?

  Some other type of life would have

• 1:23:19Speaker 01

  Some kind of goal directedness. Some kind of goal directedness at the fundamental level. So, and I, you know, I consider a lot of different, so some people would say, oh, that's God.

• 1:23:28Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  But I don't like that hypothesis either. For a familiar reason, you know, I just think it's really implausible that a loving or powerful God

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  That could create anything would create a universe so full of suffering and seemingly preventable evil and so so to my mind.

• 1:23:51Rich Roll?

  That's that's like the sort of anthropomorphized God, right? The God and the God defined as some kind of human like.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 1:24:01Rich Roll?

  Intelligence that has a moral compass and a and a code of ethics and.

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:06Rich Roll?

  You know, marching orders for, you know, what 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 of intelligence.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So what I'm rejecting is the very traditional Western idea of God as we philosophers call it the Omni God, you know, omnipotent, all omniscient, Omni benevolent, i.e. all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good. So I I think this this 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.

• 1:24:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Namely, the fine tuning and certain other philosophical considerations. So but yeah, as you say, that's just the maybe the the very traditional idea of God. But I consider a range of hypotheses in between. So so basically, I consider kind of three, three different options. Firstly, kind of non-standard designers. So you might have a bad designer, an indifferent designer, a limited designer, or maybe the simulation hypothesis, maybe we're in a computer simulation and our creator isn't any kind of godlike being at all, it's just some some guy, some scientist in the in the next universe up.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  So they're 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, it's not, I think the fine tuning is evidence for goal directedness. But it's not actually obvious to me, you need a kind of mind behind goal directedness. So we're back to Thomas Nagel. He had this book in 2012, Mind and 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, not a personal designer, just laws

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  of nature with goals built into them. So, 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 now and that determines what's going to happen at the next moment, and the next moment, the next moment. 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, to, to bring us closer to those goals. So maybe there's just a, 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, and the third hypothesis I consider,

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  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 goal directedness is just, the goal directedness of the conscious universe. Maybe in some sense, the conscious universe fine tuned itself. So, you know.

• 1:27:17Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, every, every, Wittgenstein said explanations have to end somewhere. Everyone has to stop somewhere, you know? The theist stops 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 understand it 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

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  design. Of course, other people stop with the multiverse. That's, I've got other problems with that hypothesis. 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 that whole multiverse explanation.

• 1:28:25Rich Roll?

  That's interesting. I mean, that 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?

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:43Rich Roll?

  And that means that there are alternate realities occurring theoretically, right? That the math can prove out.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  I see. All right.

• 1:28:55Rich Roll?

  Is that not the case?

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  So linking that to the multiverse, you mean?

• 1:28:58Rich Roll?

  Sure. So if that's the case, is that not an argument for the existence of a or the multiverse?

• 1:29:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a great philosopher of physics at 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, it's 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 the, taking the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and trying

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  to work on that multiverse to explain fine tuning. But you need to, you need to at least tinker a bit because, so 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 gonna have to somehow get to possibilities that are, where the constants vary. And so that you're gonna, that's, that's-

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  Moving a little bit beyond just the many worlds interpretation. And you could try and justify that with, you could try and justify that with the need to explain the fine tuning. But this is where I think this fallacious reasoning comes in. Should I?

• 1:30:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, go. Yeah, please. It is moving beyond my ability to understand what's actually happening.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  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 reasoning going on here. And, you know, I, I just really believe in that enlightenment aim of, you know, trying to follow the, the evidence or 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 a typical example of academics talking to themselves.

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  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 as well. 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?

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  And you say, "What? What do you mean? What are you talking about? 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 gonna 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 there are playing in the casino, it has no bearing on whether this one guy is gonna play well." And everyone agrees that's a fallacy. So that's the inverse gambler's fallacy. Everyone agrees on that.

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  But it looks like the multiverse reasoning is strikingly similar, at least insofar as they're explaining fine-tuning. 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."

• 1:33:28Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  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'm 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 goal-directedness at the fundamental level of reality. Doesn't need to be the traditional god, but it's gonna be pretty different to how we normally think of science.

• 1:34:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It's, uh...

• 1:34:16Rich Roll?

  I'm sort of resisting the temptation to just continue to dig this hole deeper in here. I don't know where we're gonna end up with it.

• 1:34:22Speaker 01

  Go for it.

• 1:34:23Rich Roll?

  But I feel like, you know, that, those statements require you to define life in a certain way.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:31Rich Roll?

  So 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 roll of the dice, to extend the gambler's metaphor, 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.

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I see, yeah.

• 1:35:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  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, 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 offhand. And, you know, you need to get stars going and to get carbon out of them.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  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 to do with any kind of structural complexity at all, any kind of chemistry at all. So, you know, take the cosmological constant example.

• 1:36:02Speaker 01

  Either the universe expands so quickly that no two particles ever meet or everything collapsed back on itself in a split second. You know, that's not, you're just not gonna get any kind of, it seems, even without being able to pin down exactly what life is, I think we can say, in either of those possibilities, you're not gonna get anything we could call life.

• 1:36:24Rich Roll?

  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 hubristic as a species in terms of what we think we can and can't do. Like, I think that we 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 gonna understand the human language.

• 1:37:09Rich Roll?

  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 lobe or two that would make so many of the questions that we grapple with completely obvious.

• 1:37:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:37:26Rich Roll?

  But it just eludes our ability to understand because of our inherent physiological limitations.

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  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 debate I was in last night. I guess it's what philosophers call the mysterian position, at least in the context of consciousness, that maybe this is just beyond us, you know? Dogs can't do mathematics, they 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 while we've got explanations that, as far as we can see, would do the job...

• 1:38:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:38:33Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  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 went around the earth.

• 1:38:56Rich Roll?

  All these crazy mental gymnastics.

• 1:38:58Speaker 01

  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 worldview that they can't think beyond. And I, you know, you start talking about cosmic gold directedness with philosophers or scientists, they're gonna start laughing at you. As I'm sure, you know, people laughed when he started saying, you know, maybe the earth is going around the sun. I just think there's always that cultural baggage that it's hard to get beyond.

• 1:39:39Speaker 01

  But I think we've just got to cling to that enlightenment goal of following the evidence where it leads. And to my mind, you know, in our standard ways of thinking about evidence, it's the fine tuning seems to be suggesting some kind of gold directedness at the fundamental level. And we've just got to, 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.

• 1:40:12Rich Roll?

  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?

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  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 that, those structures are filled out in some sense with consciousness. And so, you know, insofar as that our best science tells us that, you know, the matter making me up is gonna come apart and cease to be, then it looks like materialism and panpsychism are gonna be in the same boat.

• 1:41:19Speaker 01

  I mean, except, and I very speculatively explore this in the final chapter of my book, these more mystical suggestions that experienced meditators in higher states of consciousness somehow become aware that there is something at the core of each conscious mind that is beyond all that change and is 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 you're gonna go.

• 1:42:02Rich Roll?

  That the individual, like the sense of individuation in the sea of consciousness gets absorbed by the greater ocean of consciousness.

• 1:42:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:14Rich Roll?

  And gets recapitulated or somehow assimilated into the consciousness of everything.

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, and.

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  You know, for people who you think of Buddhists or Advaita Vedanta Hindus, who try to struggle to to get back to that being absorbed into unconditioned consciousness or whatever, they try to get rid of the calm, the bad karma.

• 1:42:43Rich Roll?

  But there's a there's a past life, you know, sort of reincarnation piece to all of that.

• 1:42:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But suppose that's not true, the reincarnation bit and the karma bit. Well, maybe at 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've explored consciousness in a very deep way. So I don't think I'd say, you know, I'm confident that's true, but I take

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  it seriously. And you can do as a panpsychist. I think if you're if you're a materialist, you have to say, that can't be true. It doesn't fit with my worldview. But as a panpsychist, it fits with my worldview. I take the possibility seriously. But I don't know. I don't know. 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.

• 1:43:59Rich Roll?

  I like the idea of starting with, nobody knows what's going on. Like

• 1:44:03Speaker 01

  Nobody knows what the hell is going on.

• 1:44:04Rich Roll?

  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 this stuff.

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. You know, and so listen, so if you're asking me about spirituality, one thing that is important, has become important to me. In recent years is living in hope 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, or, but I think it's, I think it's reasonable to live in hope that there is

• 1:44:58Speaker 01

  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, to take that possibility seriously, even though nobody knows what the hell's going on.

• 1:45:39Rich Roll?

  Right, right. I mean, I do like that idea, you know, to presume the existence or the possibility of panpsychism is to embrace a qualitatively different, but perhaps more expansive sense of, 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?

• 1:46:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  I think there does need to be

• 1:46:41Rich Roll?

  We could use a little collectivism right now.

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  Something to counterbalance that and some something 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 negative influences in life. I mean, things are, things are pretty messed up in a lot of ways at the moment. And I think we need to maybe think of a worldview, I think in the absence of a worldview 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.

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  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 worldview, a way of seeing the world that makes sense of the meaning and significance of your life. So I think that is an essential part of the human condition.

• 1:47:48Rich Roll?

  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, like whether it's panpsychism or otherwise, we sort of think of of philosophy as an academic pursuit, but, but honestly, they're operating systems for living, right? They're meant to be practiced.

• 1:48:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think in many ways, the religion of our times is scientism. 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.

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  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 kind of truths 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 know to be true in different ways. Of course, scientific truths, some experiments, but also the reality of our own consciousness, the reality, perhaps, of value and the kind of mathematical truths that we know about

• 1:49:27Speaker 01

  through mathematical intuition. Taking all these things we know and bringing them together, synthesizing them into a worldview. 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, live our meaning out in a way that's rationally acceptable, scientifically plausible, but also good for our mental and spiritual health.

• 1:50:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, I appreciate you coming to talk to me today.

• 1:50:08Speaker 01

  Thanks a lot, but I'm feeding the jet lag.

• 1:50:10Rich Roll?

  Is there anything we didn't cover? What else? What did we miss?

• 1:50:13Speaker 01

  I think we've done it all, haven't we?

• 1:50:15Rich Roll?

  I think we covered a lot of stuff.

• 1:50:16Speaker 01

  Free will, we didn't do free will.

• 1:50:19Rich Roll?

  Free will's a whole other. I mean, that's two hours in the other direction. We could do that next time.

• 1:50:24Speaker 01

  Let's save that for next time.

• 1:50:26Rich Roll?

  What's the new book gonna be called again?

• 1:50:28Speaker 01

  It's got the very humble title, The Purpose of Existence.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  Between God and atheism.

• 1:50:37Rich Roll?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:50:38Speaker 01

  So I'm supposed to finish that the end of this month. I don't know whether that's gonna happen.

• 1:50:42Rich Roll?

  That's coming up soon.

• 1:50:43Speaker 01

  Very good. But sometime next year is the plan.

• 1:50:46Rich Roll?

  Well, in the meantime, everybody go check out Galileo's Error. It's really, it really has provoked me and made me think deeply about things that are counterintuitive and has given me kind of an expansive, you know, perspective on not just consciousness, but the sort of how to think about life, you know? And I think that does, as an operating system, trickle down into how we make decisions and, you know, how we prioritize, how we invest our time. So, thank you for that. And I think the work you're doing is super fascinating and you're always welcome to come back to continue the conversation.

• 1:51:27Speaker 01

  Oh, great. Thanks a lot, Rich. I'm glad we finally managed to have this conversation.

• 1:51:30Rich Roll?

  Years in the making. Glad to have made it happen.

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:34Rich Roll?

  And, uh, yeah. I mean, we didn't, we didn't, I mean, we didn't solve all the world's problems, but maybe next time we can do that.

• 1:51:42Speaker 01

  A few loose ends to tie up.

• 1:51:44Rich Roll?

  Great.

• 1:51:44Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:51:45Rich Roll?

  Cheers.

• 1:51:58Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com.

• 1:52:29Rich Roll?

  If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering

• 1:53:11Rich Roll?

  by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and A.J. Akpodiette. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.