Philip Goff: Panpsychism as a Theory of Consciousness

Speaker A: Hey, it's been a few weeks. Today I spoke with Philip Gough, who is probably one of the more prominent proponents of the theory of consciousness known as panpsychism. If you haven't heard about it before, the basic idea is that mentality or consciousness is the fundamental ubiquitous unit in the natural world. Another way of understanding that is the consciousness that you and I experience is somehow also present in other natural bodies. You might think of trees, for instance, or the entire universe. An often stated advantage of the view is that it avoids issues with both dualism, where mind and matter are separate, and physicalism, which seems to be kind of unable to explain the emergence of human and animal consciousness. If you want some early primary sources on this, I think Margaret Cavendish and her work on panpsychism and vitalism is super interesting. I'll also say that this conversation did get a little bit wonky. That said, I think it should be accessible enough. So I hope you enjoy. And here's Philip Gough. Where I wanted to start was with a, um, meta level question for you, or perhaps a question about meta level questions. And this begins when I was listening to a debate you had with Sean Carroll. And I think you've done a couple of these. And I had a lot of questions as I was listening. But I think the. The main thing that was going on for me as I was listening to you two kind of go back and forth is there were a number of points where you did clash. But also at the same time, I felt like there were a lot of places where you were more or less talking past one another. Like, for example, in one place you'll talk about the knowledge argument and the way that Sean's version of it isn't exactly what you're talking about. And Sean will also call out that he has a different definition of, of what it means to explain something, and that this is actually the main point of tension between your views. And so I see this kind of meta level argument going on and no agreement at the meta level. So at some point do we have to hash out the meta level before we can have the actual debate? And it feels like you two don't quite get to an answer on the meta level. And so my question there is, how do you experience these debates? In my head, I imagine they kind of force you both to refine your arguments. But there's also a sense in which I feel you're kind of going in circles, and I wonder how you think about it.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really, really interesting way of setting things up. And thanks, Daniel, for having me on. I know I've had to reschedule a few times, so I'm glad. Thanks for being patient with me. So I've got a lot of respect for Sean Carroll. I mean, we disagree on a lot of stuff, but one thing we do certainly agree on is the importance of philosophy. Right. You can't always just do the experiment and get the answer. There's very often areas where there's a kind of judgment call, a philosophical judgment call on how we interpret the evidence or how we interpret our evidential, uh, situation. So, I mean, you know, he's strongly pressed for this with. With quantum mechanics, that there are these different ways of interpreting what's going on with that theory. And we have to do some. Engage in some philosophical judgment. So. So that's the starting point we agree on. And I think we have managed to sort of make some progress and develop our views in interaction with each other. But, um. Yeah, on the debate we had. God, it's over a year ago now. Um, I guess I think. I feel like even though Sean does have a deep respect for philosophy, uh, I think when it. When push came to shove with that debate, it. And he's saying he. We disagreed on what it requires to have an explanation. I think he basically was saying, look, if it doesn't make a difference to the experiments, it doesn't matter. And, um, you know, I mean, I just think with consciousness, we're in. We're in a very unique position because consciousness is not publicly observable. Right. I can't look inside your brain and see your feelings and experience experiences because of that. We're really constrained in what we can do experimentally. So there are things we can do experimentally because if you're dealing with another human being, you can't observe their conscious experiences, but you can ask them what they're feeling and experiencing. And if you do that while you scan their brain, you can start to correlate with which kinds of brain activity go along with which kinds of conscious experience. And that's really a really important scientific task. But experimentally, I don't. I think that's the limit of it with consciousness, because it's not publicly observable. And it's. It's the one case, I mean, that, uh, there are, you know, science deals with unobservable things, you know, like fundamental particles or whatever. But. But with consciousness, it's the unique case where the thing we're trying to explain is not publicly observable. In all other cases, we. We theorize about things we can't explain in order to. To, sorry, in all of the cases we theorize about things we can't observe in order to explain what we can observe. Ultimately it's about, you know, experimental observations. But in the unique case of consciousness, the thing we're trying to explain is not publicly observable. So we're just limited experimentally to these correlations. This kind of brain activity goes with this kind of experience. And that leaves open a lot of philosophical options. You know, does, uh. Does the physical world come first and consciousness pop out? Does consciousness come first and the physical world emerges from that? That's the position I go for. Are they both fundamental but radically different? You know, the scientific data and consciousness, because it's not publicly observable, just leaves open all these options. So we have to turn to philosophy. We have to just try and seriously evaluate these different options that can't be settled than experiment. And, um, as I say, Sean has a lot of time for that. But I think at the end of the day, he was just like, well, if it's not making a difference, the experiments, I don't care. And, um, you know, so it. I mean, it can be frustrating. I get you. Sean is much better than others, but it can be frustrating. There's still a big taboo about philosophy, and you can, you know, you can kind of understand it, can't you? Because we. We have done so well with experiments, and it's produced incredible technology. And it. It sort of feels frustrating if you can't settle something with an experiment, you know, And I, uh, mean, it must be frustrating for, like, real experimental scientists who spend all the time doing these very tangible experiments and then you sitting there thinking about stuff. But unfortunately, you know, we can't. We can't do without philosophy. We tried in the early 20th century with logical positivism to do without philosophy. Pretty much everyone agrees that failed. Unfortunately, some scientists didn't get the memo. But there's always going to be these areas of science where there's this room, need for judgment call in how we interpret the evidence. And, um, I think we're getting back to realizing that. Especially with the troubles of consciousness and quantum mechanics as Sean works on. Um, but, yeah, it's frustrating, but I like a challenge. I like a challenge. I feel passionate about this stuff, so I enjoy pressing it. Especially with someone like Sean or Annals Seth, who are very friendly and courteous and we can have a respectful interaction.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a worthwhile challenge. And I feel like in that domain, I always find myself Asking people what is it that you look for in a theory and why do you look for those things? And I think in your case I've heard you talk about preferring the more Occam's razor style theory. So things that are simple and that have a lot of explanatory power. And I think that in and of themselves it does kind of make sense to prefers those two, prefer those kinds of theories. But you know, I always wonder how our commitments kind of influence this. And I think at the same time there are people who have very different conceptions of how should we put different theories of consciousness on what waiting given that we have to kind of navigate this weird interpretive space. So for example, there's a pretty recent paper by Keith Frankish that not to say that I'm really in favour of illusionism as a theory of consciousness, but he does argue that, that with respect to some of your kind of post Galilean theorizing that we might be able to talk about later, he feels that we should put illusionism on an equal footing with panpsychism in terms of what are the kind of potential options available to us. Which he has kind of a full argument for this, which for sake of time I won't go through entirely now. But it makes me kind of wonder how you think about justifying the ways in which you interpret and evaluate theories.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really good question. It's uh, it's very difficult. It's very difficult is. This is the starting point. It's, it's nice when we can take some of the theoretical tools we use in science and bring them to philosophy. So even even though with philosophy we're not dealing with things, we can settle with an experiment. Nonetheless, sometimes you can use some of the tools of science, like as you said, Occam's razor. Let's go for the simpler option. So I think that casts doubt on the dualist theory of consciousness where consciousness is in the soul outside of the body and the brain because you're believing in more things than you need to. If you can do without two kinds of thing, you know, the physical world on the one hand and the non physical soul, um, so much the better. So that's, that's one option. Or we can look at what the, the explanatory aspirations of a theory. What is it trying to explain or what is it internally committed to explain and how well does it do at those explanations. So we can judge it sort of internally in terms of its own aims. I mean in the, in the case of illusionism, I suppose. And, um, you know, Keith is a very close friend of mine. We do a podcast and YouTube channel together called Mind Chat, and we're trying to very much model in our polarized times, constructive disagreement. Um, but I suppose I do just think, I mean, in some sense, in terms of starting points, I agree with Descartes that the mind is better known in the body, that there's something we have certain access to. You know, when you, when you're in pain, you're just directly aware of your pain and you're aware of its existence with something close to certainty. You know, I'm much more. I feel I'm much more certain of the existence of my pain than I am of the external world. So there is that special evidential starting point. I don't agree with much of Descartes after that, by the way, but the first couple of meditations where he establishes those epistemic starting points. Um, and, you know, maybe Keith will disagree. I mean, he, he says he believes in consciousness in some sense, but not others. And it gets quite complicated, but maybe he'll just disagree. You know, he says to me, why are you trusting your intuitions? And. But I suppose, uh, at the end of the day, I think you just have to start with what seems most evident. What, what else can you do? And the reality of my consciousness, and it's being roughly the way I normally think about it when I'm at least careful and attending to it. Um, yeah, I might be making all sorts of mistakes, but roughly, I could be more precise about what I mean here, but roughly the way I think about it, the reality of that seems one of the things that is most evident. So, I mean, I'm open to Keith's view and he's, he's persuaded me it's a, It's a genuine possibility. And so I do ascribe some probability to it. But I'd want very, very strong reasons, um, before I give up, one of the things that seems to be almost as evident as mathematics, the point you're

Speaker A: making here about, and this is kind of, um, a spoiler term, but the kind of transparency of things like pain to us in some way. The fact that I can recognize the pain I'm having, and this sort of reveals to me what it is to have pain, something like this, you leverage this point in some really interesting ways. So your curiosity, grounding essence in the knowledge argument paper, I think, does a really good job of this. And I had a question for you about it with regard to phenomenal Transparency. But to get me there, I'm going to try to set up the key moves here and you can let me know if I'm making any mistakes. But here's how I kind of understand what you're going. You're going for this argument from phenomenal transparency, which I'll try to get to in a second, against physicalism. So you argue that phenomenal concepts are ways of thinking about conscious experiences like pain, when we attend to how they feel, are transparent. And by phenomenally transparent we mean that they reveal the nature, the essence of what it is they're about. And if, on the other hand, physicalism were true, this would mean that in the classic knowledge argument, Mary sees red thought experiment, Mary sees red for the first time, she should be able to recognize that this experience has the same nature as some physical properties she knew about in the black and white room where she was before she saw red. And the fact that she can't suggests either phenomenal concepts aren't transparent or physicalism is false. And you have arguments elsewhere about phenomenal transparency. What I was trying to get to here though, and what I wanted to ask you about was I wonder how you think about the way this relates to the traditional debate between physicalists and anti physicalists. Because historically, if we look at anti physicalists, they're arguing consciousness is irreducible to physical properties. Physicalists say this apparent irreducibility might not quite reflect metaphysical truth. And I guess what I'm trying to get to is I wonder whether moving the debate to phenomenal transparency really advances the discussion or if we're just kind of reconstructing the same physicalist, anti physicalist disagreement, but at a different level. Does that question make sense?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's very interesting. Thanks for explaining my argument very nicely. And this is just as a bit of background. This is where my approach differs a little from that of David Chalmers, you know, probably one of the most influential people on my side of the debate in opposing physicalism. And um, I was very pleased in my PhD when I realized I didn't agree with Chalmers about something. I wasn't deliberately looking for something. But so my approach has very much been on this argument that phenomenal concepts are the concepts we use to think about our experience in terms of how it feels are sort of essence revealing. Like, um, the concept of a triangle is essence revealing. If you have the concept of triangle, you know what it is for something to be a triangle, right? It's to be a three sided figure. Whereas in contrast to the concept of water, I think Is not essence revealing. Right. People had the concept of water for thousands of years without knowing it was H2O. They, you know, the ancient Greeks thought it was a fundamental element. Um, so I think our concepts of consciousness are of our feelings are essence revealing. Like, you know what pain is when you feel it, you know, if, you know, I mean, pain is a feeling and it's essentially defined by how it feels. And when you feel it and you attend to it, you know how it feels. So you know what it is to feel that way. So that is the thought that, um, when physicalists say, you know, pain is identical with a certain pattern of neural firings, um, and it has this physical nature. Well, if I'm right, that we grasp the nature of pain when we feel it, then if it has this physical nature, we ought to grasp that physical nature introspectively. But obviously we don't. Neuroscience isn't that easy. You can't just attend to your pain and see what the right neural pattern is. So that's, that's roughly the argument. Obviously there's a lot more depth to it than that. But you asked a very interesting question. Um, how does this move on the debate? Well, I think it does connect very much to the contemporary debate, because actually, so you, you said, um, physicalists are trying to explain consciousness in terms of brain processes. But actually the, I would say the dominant contemporary physicalist position in a sense, has given up on explanation at least. I mean, I need to be careful about how I phrase this, at least in the sense of trying to give this sort of intelligible explanation that we get. For example, if you think about water, the boiling point of water, we can intelligibly explain that in terms of the underlying chemistry. Right? That will explain why water boils when it does, why it behaves the way it does, what, what, why it behaves differently when it's frozen and so on. We have intelligible explanations of that. The dominant physicalist position has given up on that. They try to give reasons why that can't happen in the consciousness case. And it's just, we just end up with a kind of brute identity. Pain is just a certain pattern of neural firings. And we, we need to give up on that, that attempt to give some intelligible story. This is interesting because I think this contrasts with a lot of scientists who would self identify as physicalists, like Annal Seth and Sean Carroll have already mentioned. I think they do think we should be aiming at some kind of intelligible story. But most physicalists in philosophy have kind of been persuaded as I have, that um, the concepts of consciousness are so diff. These kind of first person qualitative concepts are just so different from the kind of third personal quantitative concepts you get in physical science that you're never going to get some explanatory link between the two. So, so instead they try to argue, oh well, we don't need one. Um, and I suppose my thought is. And so that's actually really where the debate happens. And they try to say, well, we don't need one. Why should there be an intelligible connection? Maybe there is an intelligible connection with water and H2O. Right? You don't know. You just got a kind of identity there. And then my response to that is to bring in what, as you say, phenomenal transparency or so. Well, the difference is in the case of water, the concept doesn't tell us the nature. And so we have to do science to find out what water is. Like lightning, you don't know what lightning is just from having the concept. You might think it's the anger of Zeus until you do some science and find out it's electric discharge. But in the case of pain, if I'm right, that we know it says its essential nature introspectively, then we already know what it is before we do the science. And so we know what it is. And so if there's going to be some intelligible connection, some intelligent explanation, it ought to be a transparent explanatory connection. So yeah, so I think it is something that very much connects to at least the contemporary debates in philosophy. I mean it's interesting actually if you just finally talking, um, slightly long winded answers here. If you take the, the view of like Sean Carroll and Annal Seth that we should be giving an explanatory explanation of consciousness. If physicalism is true and you take um, the view of physicalist inside philosophy that you cannot give such an explanation, then you end up with my view, you know, the anti physicalist, that yeah, physicalism is false. So, so both sides are getting, getting half, half the story. Right. But anyway, anyway, that is an interesting sociological explanation. Obviously it doesn't prove.

Speaker A: And I think, no, it's interesting. I think maybe more specifically where I'm trying to get with this and I do want to poke at some of what you said about the phenomenal transparency and things like pain as well. But in general, the way I think about your argument too is we're kind of getting to the. It's really. If I kind of interpret Your argument as just a syllogism, then we're basically saying phenomenal transparency is true or physicalism is true, and we kind of have to begin to argue those out. And you have defense as a phenomenal transparency. And I did want to complicate that a little bit in a second, but I guess the reason I'm trying to poke at this particular distinction is something like before the debate was just generally we were talking about physicalism, anti physicalism, how that looked like before. And you raised a number of important caveats here about how precisely that debate looks that I hadn't quite introduced. I think what I'm trying to get to is my maybe not worry about this, but kind of question here is something like the phenomenal transparency point seems so versus physicalism seems so analogous to what we had before that I wonder if we're kind of having a debate where the positions are very similar, but just kind of under different terms. Does that make more sense?

Speaker B: Uh, so you mean it's basically just the phenomenal transparency intuition is sort of too close to the anti physicalist intuition? Is that what you mean? Or it's just the sort of the

Speaker A: same, you know, I guess I'm wondering for the physicalist, for example, are they really going to respond to phenomenal transparency in a completely different way? And as you were talking, you were mentioning pain as something that we can kind of access internally. And um, this made me think. I do feel like there are examples where we have certain phenomenal concepts or phenomenal experiences that we can access what they look like at this time, but maybe there are depths to them that we don't quite have access to. So I think about sadness, for example. I can access a particular form of the sadness I'm feeling right now, but maybe at some future point something external happens to me and the depth of that sadness is revealed to me in a different way. Not to say that this is a full on rebuttal or anything of that nature. I guess I'm just trying to figure out how the debate, the ways in which the debate really looks meaningfully different. I think there's some ways in which I feel some of the same arguments go back and forth even when we're talking about phenomenal transparency.

Speaker B: Yes, I think on your first point, I think it has advanced the debate in the sense that physicalists have had to respond to this point, which is. So when it was David Chalmers, maybe Chalmers would disagree with my way of setting things up. I mean, you can look, me and David Papineau have a paper Together called um. What is it called now? Um. God, I can't even remember the name. But now just look at the co written paper we wrote. Wrote. It's a, it's a, maybe the world's first forking philosophy paper. And I'm sure there must be other examples where we, so we both agree where Chalmers argument goes wrong. And then, and then I go the anti physicalist way. He says well here's a better argument, uh, for physical, uh, a better way of making the argument. Um, but, but with Chalmers argument it got wrapped up in these kind of semantic views actually. I mean Chalmers got this complicated two dimensional framework and it was a kind of very sweeping semantic framework that made very general claims about concepts. I mean maybe we don't need to get into the details, but I kind of agreed with the physicalists that he never really justified this sweeping framework. Whereas my approach is no, let's focus explicitly on phenomenal concepts or concepts of consciousness. Forget concepts in general. I think they're transparent. Intuitively they're transparent. I've given some arguments for that and then physicalists have had to respond to that and they've responded in different ways. Um, I think the most common response would be to say well I don't think they are transparent, um, and maybe reject my arguments for that. Other physicalists have said yes, I think they're transparent. And you can have two radically different transparent concepts for the same thing. Two essence revealing concepts. So maybe the concept of pain captures the essential nature of pain, but also the concept of this pattern of neural firings that is, that is pain also captures the same state but in a radically different way. So there's two very, there's one state that is pain and is, and is a brain state, you know, just like water is H2O. And there are these two very different ways, radically different ways of grasping its essence. And then my way of kind of mockingly in a friendly way rejecting is to say, oh, this is like, this is. Ends up like the Trinity. You know, you've got like the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are sort of the same, but they're different. But the, you know, I don't know, it just all seems, and it seems so different to like what we find elsewhere in science. Like water is H2O. There's none of this fiddleness. Um, so yeah, it has advanced the debate in that it's got in, you know, you make a new kind of argument and people have to respond to it and, and, and it changes their positions and, and you know, so I think that's been advanced in that regard. But you made a very good objection. I think, um, aren't there things some of our conscious states that we don't grasp all of the essence of all of the details of? And I think you're right there. And this has forced me over time to nuance the view a little bit and because I think, yeah, I think also there's good evidence with things like change blindness that with our reflective cognitive capacities, we don't capture all aspects of our experience. I think I've discovered that also through meditation. You know, you think you first start meditating and you think, oh, uh, I'm just aware of my breath. And then after you've been doing it for like a long time, you realize actually you were kind of projecting onto your breath a sort of caricature of it. Then you weren't realizing. Or, you know, to take another example, if you, if you take a wine tasting course, you might learn all sorts of depths about your wine experience that you never appreciated before. It's a bit tricky. There is maybe. Is the experience changing or are you just realizing more aspects of the experience? Not. Not clear. But yeah. So anyway, so the way I nuance the transparency claim now is um, to say that insofar as we grasp what it's like to have the experience to that extent, we grasp its nature. So that leaves open that there might be some experiences where we don't fully grasp what it's like to have the experience. Maybe there are depths of sadness that we're not fully. I mean often, you know, in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, don't you, you know, or something you, in therapy, you uncover aspects of your emotions you hadn't fully appreciated. So, so this is. Actually, I talk about this in a paper I've written, a paper that I wrote, I finished a while back I need to put on online. I keep not getting around to. There's always too much to do, uh, connecting these, these debates on conceivability and possibility and philosophy of mind to arguments for the existence of God. And is God conceivable? Is God not conceivable? What, how does that impact anyway? So I gave this more nuanced principle in that paper, which I will. Maybe I'll put it up before this interview comes up. So that'll give me a, ah, motivation to get around to putting it up.

Speaker A: I'll definitely link it if you do. I want to maybe take this and try to start getting into panpsychism proper a little bit. The thing I was hoping to get into with you is the really interesting way that you present panpsychism in your paper on how exactly does panpsychism help explain consciousness? And here I see you kind of getting to this really interesting solution, hybrid cosmopsychism. And I want to ask you a couple of questions about some of the details here. But maybe to start with, I'm thinking we can maybe lay out some of the argument here and kind of how this begins. And I see you kind of threading the needle between these two flavors of traditional panpsychism, of strong emergentist panpsychism and weak emergentist panpsychism. And eventually your solution is allowing for the strong emergence of new subjects of experience, but then they inherit their phenomenal properties from the universe's consciousness and you kind of get causal closure this way. I want to get to the qualia transference notion that comes up here in a second. But before we do that, I guess do you want to maybe give like a bit of a rundown of how you're kind of threading this needle and navigating it a little bit?

Speaker B: Excellent. You've done your homework. I do. So many, um, different kinds of podcasts. Often they're sort of for a very general audience. You know, absolutely nothing about philosophy. And they were just talking in very, very general terms or maybe just chatting about thought provoking stuff. And now we're really getting into the weeds, which is fun. Um, yeah, so, I mean, there's a big split among panpsychists between a more reductionist view and a non reductionist view. So the reductionists, ah, are basically very close to physicalism. Right. You know, the physicalist says, you know, in some sense all there is is what physics talks about, but all the other stuff, tables, chairs, somehow weakly emerges from that story. Physics gives us. The reductionist. Panpsychists sticks to that, but says the particles are conscious or the fields are conscious. Right. So, so, you know, all there is, is in your head is conscious particles arranged in a very complicated way. And your consciousness just emerges from the interactions of these conscious trillions and trillions of conscious particles. Um, and then the, but the, the non reductionist says, no, no, no, there's, there's the, there's the conscious particles or the conscious fields. Let's just talk about conscious particles for the sake of simplicity. And um, they causally bring into being your consciousness. Your consciousness is in some sense extra, something new that the part the conscious particles bring into existence and sustain in existence. And um, so it's a bit like you know, where you've got a causal relationship that the, the, the effect is something extra to the cause, isn't it? Right. Like my parents created me, right. But I'm obviously extra to my parents. I walk away and have my own life eventually, um, sometime soon, hopefully. Um, yeah, so, so, so there's these very different kinds of panpsychism and

Speaker A: the

Speaker B: worry is, right, that the reductionist view slips into all the problems of physicalism and the non reductionist view slips into all the problems of dualism. Right. Panpsychism is supposed to be this wonderful middle way that avoids all the problems of those two traditional views. So the, you know, the problem with physicalism is like how do you explain how consciousness emerges? How do you tell that kind of reductionist story? Um, but it looks like many have argued, well if you've just got conscious particles, you have the same problem because just stick loads of conscious particles together. Why don't you get, why'd you get the conscious ah, unity of the whole? Why isn't it just loads of conscious particles? So people worry. There's the same kind of explanatory worries. And with the non reductionist the problem is um, connected to what's called the causal closure of the physical or the causal completeness of the physical. Another thing I've argued, Sean Carroll, he's come up a lot tonight. Um, if you think, if you think kind of physics is sort of running the show basically physics determines everything that's going to happen. Then if consciousness is kind of something extra, if my consciousness is something extra, it looks like there's nothing left for it to do. You know that the particles in the fields have determined what's going to happen. So what does my consciousness do? It looks like it's going to have to float. Not adding anything to my behavior or the movements of my lips as I talk. Um, anyway, so that's the dilemma. Um, and what I'm trying to do, as you nicely articulated in this paper is say a, ah, kind of hybrid that may be um. Maybe so. So. Well I need to say one more thing, that there's two aspects to consciousness, right? There's, or arguably there's the, the subject, what we call the subject of experience, the thing that has consciousness, the thing that has experiences, the eye in Descartes sense. But there's also the experiences, the ch, you know, the pleasure, pain, seeing color, hearing sound and so on. So I tried to give a reductionist story, a non reductionist story, a strong emergent a story, if you like, of that is the term I use in the paper isn't it now I think, um, you've done your homework. So I tried to give a non reductionist or strong emergentist story about the subject, the eye. That's something new that the conscious particles bring into being. But there's no new consciousness to it doesn't. There's no new experiences. They're just inherited, as in a sense from the left, from these experiences, these streams of consciousness that already exist at the level of fundamental physics according to panpsychism. So if you think of it like the subject is sort of a glass bottle or something because there's a new bottle brought into a being, but then it's filled with things that already exist, uh, filled with wine that already existed. That's the kind of view, I mean, just, just very, very quickly. I mean these days I, I'm, I'm much less bothered by those causal completeness of physics worries because I just, I just, I don't think we know enough about the brain to think the underlying physics and chemistry is fixing everything. I just thought, uh, a very influential book on me was Matthew Cobb's book the Idea of the Brain, which really hammered this over how little we know. And he's someone who doesn't at all agree with me philosophically. But um, anyway, I really like, I really got a lot from reading his empirical descriptions there. Uh, um, but yes, okay, but anyway, in that paper I am taking seriously both the traditional challenge to dualism from causal closure of the physical and um, the traditional explanatory worries with physicalism that I certainly do take seriously. And um, this hybrid view is trying to capture both.

Speaker A: So what I want to ask about first is precisely the subject as ah, glass bottle that gets filled up kind of metaphor that you made there. Because I think this is a really interesting crux of your point and precisely kind of relates to the qualia transference thing that I was kind of hinting that I wanted to get into earlier. The idea that we can have phenomenal properties that uh, transfer from one subject to another. The universe kind of sharing its consciousness with emergent subjects, as it were. And the thing I kind of want to talk about though is like the glass bottle, or maybe the empty glass bottle, if that makes sense in this metaphor. Not to take it way too seriously as the analog here, but I'm thinking about, you know, how do I conceive of these subjects before this qualia transference occurs when we have the empty glass bottle, as it were. I think that you bring in some ideas like the localization and thinning principle that make me think. You want us to think of these subjects, the empty glass bottles, not as like bare subjects, but these systems that kind of have the capacity to integrate information and forms of consciousness and things like this, that kind of go along with the integrated information theory story, which I think has its own troubles that we could probably talk about. But really what I kind of want to ask is how do you. How do you think about this? Like, what is the empty glass bottle to you? How do you think. How do you kind of conceive of this?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a good question. I've got it. I should have read over this paper again before our discussion. Um, I think. Yeah. So there is a worry, I suppose, if they, if they don't come with their own consciousness, than are they, as you say, bare, uh, particulars just things with no properties at all that often philosophers are suspicious of. How can there be something that has no properties at all? Um, I guess I was thinking, and maybe you think this is, um, a bit of a cheat, that, well, they come into existence. There's never a time when they don't have properties. So they, you know, they. At the very moment they come into existence, they, uh, inherit some consciousness that was the universe gives them some consciousness, as it were. Um, so. So maybe it avoids the bird particular worry that way. I think, I think from memory. I do also consider, um, a view because a more of a bundle view where there's just collections of properties, but that the difference is you get a subject when the properties are unified in a certain way. So then we can say, you know, in the beginning there was just the conscious universe and all its experiences were unified. And then as time goes on, um, subsets of. Of the universe's experiences, um, stop being unified with the whole universe, but become just unified in. With themselves in little groups. So, so, so that's. I'm a bit old school. I like the kind of distinction between the thing and its properties. But actually probably more panpsychists don't like that. They just think, you know, uh, you know, we just have collections of properties that unify. And so I think you can run the story that way as well. So, yeah, there's two responses there, I suppose, if we're going old school, like as I like and the glass bottle, then the glass bottle. So it's not a great metaphor, I guess. Now I think as soon as it appears, it has some wine in it. Right. So there's never a moment when it doesn't have Any properties. And then also there's this alternative, more cool and funky, that's shown my age using the word funky to try and try and suggest some new cool, happening view. But, um, yes, uh, that's another alternative. What do you think?

Speaker A: Those are both interesting. Maybe on the second one first, that got me thinking about some of the classic bundle theories. And if I recall, it was either in Hume or Leibniz where some of these theories were advanced, where we're really just a bunch of experiences or kind of like the bundle concept of what it is to be a self. I think that one of the classic troubles with this. And you kind of give us a picture here, it's like, how do we account for the fact that there is a distinction between myself and. Between yourself. And there's some kind of organization going on there that isn't entirely random. And there appears to be some sort of coherence with my experiences and things like this. And I think on the broad picture of what you were saying of, uh, maybe the universe kind of organizes itself in these ways, then you could posit, oh, okay, there are laws about how this works or something like this, so that we get those coherence properties that you and I seem to experience. I know this isn't necessarily your preferred picture, but I think. I don't know, there are worries there that I think I still kind of think about when I encounter these views.

Speaker B: Yeah. So the problem is, um. So this is a problem with the bundle view.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So if we all are really just bundles, I think they're. Is a question. And uh, not to say that I've read the latest kind of version of the bundle view, but I think the original worries about it were if we all are really just bundles, how do we account for the distinction between the two of us as selves? I'm just a bundle and you're just a bundle, then how do we account for. Well, these things happen to be in my bundle. These things happen to be in your bundle and so on.

Speaker B: Yes. There's got to be some relationship, hasn't there? But actually, I think this is where panpsychism might help you, actually. Because if, if. If we think of, um, what's sometimes called the co. Consciousness relation or the relation of being co. Experienced or experienced in a unified way. And I think that's quite, quite intuitive, isn't it? I think like that, that our experiences are not just, you know, we have many different experiences at any moment. Colors, sound, smells. But they're not just. They don't seem to be just in isolated packets. They. You seem to have a. They seem to exist in a deeply unified form. They are co experienced in some sense. And so intuitively my experiences are co experienced, yours are. But it's not the case that my experiences and your experiences are co experienced, co conscious. So that might be. So I guess a panpsychist bundle theorist is likely to say, I think, um, there's just experiences and the co consciousness relation. And you get a subject when a certain set of experiences stand in the co consciousness relation to each other.

Speaker A: Yeah, this seems like a fair picture. I want to get into a couple of maybe other questions on this kind of general topic here. There are two directions I was thinking about taking at this point and trying to figure out which one I want to go along. Maybe the first is something like this. So there's this question of, I guess, subject and property emergence going on in your paper. So you argue that your view, hybrid cosmopsychism. There we go. Requires genuine emergence of new subjects. And it kind of maintains that, ah, their phenomenal properties are inherited and we kind of get to maintain causal closure because we don't have new fundamental properties emerging. And I could see somebody worrying about this. I haven't figured out if this is like actually a worry I have. But you could wonder, well, don't new subjects themselves kind of constitute novel causal powers or something like this? And so, um, I'm wondering how you would think about something like that.

Speaker B: Yeah, you might worry. I suppose you might worry. It seems a little bit cheating that there are these new things that are, um, making a causal impact. It seems like they're kind of epiphenomenal. The uh, if there's a rad, such a radical change, it ought to be making a difference. Um, I think I consider this in the paper and I try to say, well, well, they are making a radical difference from the inside. But that doesn't mean it's going to be necessarily something that's observed from, from the outside. And I suppose you just, you just kind of press the point. I suppose that it's properties that have causal impact on the world and something does what it does because of its properties. And so if a different entity really does take on all the same properties as me, then it's going to do the same stuff as me. Um, so that might be, you know, one way to try and press the point. And you know, I mean, or maybe you just take it as a slight hit, a slight counterintuitive aspect. But if you genuinely take very Seriously, the classic problems with both dualism and physicalism, then this might be a uh, bullet you can bite. But I mean, I suppose another worry you might have with it is if you believe you have certain views of agency, maybe strong libertarian free will or just some strong views that agency is just radically different or uh, um, and I'm increasingly on that team actually for various reasons. So, so this is why probably I, I do end up going for the um, a more straightforward, strong emergentist view where uh, um, new forms of consciousness, new subjects do emerge and things behave a bit differently in the brain than you would predict from the fundamental equations of physics. But it's, you know, it's just so complicated, it's practically impossible to identify that. So, but anyway, this is going way beyond the paper we're talking about. So if we're just sticking with the paper we're talking about, I suppose I would just say just kind of stick to that idea that it's, it's properties, not, not the thing that has the properties, it's just the properties that make the difference, causally speaking.

Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense. Another version of this I was toying with, and this is on the view where we have this localization and thinning law that you kind of make more concrete on the assumption that we take integrated information theory to be true, which is itself kind of contentious, but just saying that we do this in that case then I could see on the causal powers point version where we get subjects emerging without any fundamental causal powers because they're just new patterns of integration of existing properties or something like that. I don't know if that's like a view you'd be convinced of given taking IIT seriously or something like that.

Speaker B: So what would that solve to say new patterns of integration, the kind of

Speaker A: emergence of new subjects without the new fundamental causal powers thing. So they just become integration of existing stuff basically.

Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, uh, just to say, I mean the, the reason I, in that paper and in my last book modestly titled why the Purpose of the Universe, you know, I deal with integrated information theory not because I'm totally convinced it's true, but just because it's a nice simple example, simple to articulate the basic idea at least of a possible view of the physical correlates of consciousness that we can kind of work with. And what I do like about um, integrated information theory is that it has the result that consciousness is. There's no indeterminacy about which things are and aren't conscious. And for independent reasons, I, I, I think that there can't be indeterminacy about consciousness. It couldn't be. For example, like Eric Eric Schwitz Gable has recently argued, you know, maybe it's indeterminate whether a snail is conscious, right? So it's not that the snail is definitely just a non conscious mechanism or it's not that there's definitely something that it's like to be the snail. It's sort of neither one nor the other. There's no fact of the matter as to whether a snail has feelings or not. I think that's unintelligible. So I do think there has to be. The principles of the physical correlates of consciousness at the macro level must be utterly precise, which IIT gives us because it says, you know, it's the very moment you get more integrated information in the whole, in the parts, you get a conscious whole. And so I'm not saying. So basically I think IIT is the only theory that is not definitely wrong for philosophical reasons. Whereas, you know, other things like, uh, global workspace is going to be kind of vagueness. You get. It's going to have that kind of vagueness, at least in principle, where it's indeterminate whether something's conscious. And I don't think that makes sense. But anyway, that's, that's a big debate. But, um. Yeah, could that solve it? I said I suppose we'd still have to say something about the metaphysics of what's going on and probably it might come back to, you know, what is into. I mean, integration information is a sort of formal notion in, in the. In the integrated information theory. So I suppose as a philosopher I'd want to know, you know, what is the actual relationship beyond this formal structure? Maybe it would be back to something like the co consciousness relation or something

Speaker A: with IIT in particular. Do you take seriously the worries like there was one that Scott Aronson pointed out a couple of years ago. Why I'm not an integrated information theorist and I don't have all the details at the top of my head, but I remember it was something like you could actually look at a sufficiently large matrix or operation involving matrices or something of this nature. And based off of the calculations done in iit, this has a very high fee level and so we would have to say that this is conscious. And that feels not quite right. So I'm wondering how you persist in the face of worries like that.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Well, it was a good few years ago now Scott Aronson came up with, ah, that because we had a conference at NYU on IIT about 10 years ago with the scientists and philosophers. And Scott, um, Aronson was there, and I was talking to him about this for a while. Um, yeah, I do take all these worries seriously. I mean, actually, what the philosophers were pressing at that conference was, you know, there's good ideas in iit, and maybe we can kind of take those ideas and play with them a bit and, um, have kind of thin Iit as opposed to thick Iit, and, you know, Hedda Hassan Merck, very good panpsychist philosopher who's been a big influence on me in the journey I was just describing about having less confidence in causal closure and going to a more traditional, strong emergentist view. Very interesting philosopher. Um, she's kind of played with the ideas of IIT and mixed them with. Mixed them with this panpsychist framework in. In contemporary philosophy. And, um. So, yeah, look, I think it's. I think it's very, uh. Uh, I think we. I think the science of consciousness is very, very, very far from complete. And you know what. What I talk about in my. In my last book, the why book, Um, I think it's becoming more and more apparent that one of the reasons we're not getting consensus is because, um, one's philosophical assumptions of the scientist is impact how you interpret the data. I'm not talking about the big. The big hard problem questions. Just, you know, there's this debate about roughly whether consciousness is in the front or the back of the brain. Um, and I think it could. There's good reason to think certain philosophical assumptions about consciousness determine where you go with that. And so, yeah, I mean, where I'm thinking now is, so people like. I mean, people like Hakwan Lau, sort of philosopher and neuroscientists, get really annoyed with IIT because, you know, they sort of mixed up with philosophy and panpsychism. And he's thinking, you know, we need to get this taken as serious science and. Or we won't get funding. Right.

Speaker A: Very pro.

Speaker B: And I understand. I really understand that worry. At the same time, though, I just think you can't. Because consciousness is not publicly observable. You cannot deal with it without philosophical assumptions, without getting into the philosophy. So I think what we're gonna have to get to ultimately is sort of fragment, at least temporarily fragmented research communities where you've got scientists and philosophers working together with experiments being done under certain philosophical assumptions. And so the scientists and philosophers are working together, you know, how we interpret which experiments we do and how we Interpret the results and just see which bear fruit. And, you know, so, like, I'm sympathetic to a lot of what IAT does. I mean, that it starts with certain axioms about consciousness, but also like judo. Tononi is not. It's not like a trained philosopher, and he's got really interesting ideas. But I think we need kind of philosophers engaged in the philosophical aspects of the theoretical framework on consciousness. So, yeah, so look, I'm. As I say, I mean, I think I like. Uh. Because of my views on consciousness, I think we're going to need neural correlates with utterly precise specifications. And it's only integrated information theory that gets. Gets us those. But I. I mean, I don't. I don't think it's true, probably because I just. I don't think any of them are true. But, um, there's something heading in the right direction that it's engaging with the philosophy. And I think that's what ultimately what. What we've got to do. But there's still. That's it. We're in a very scientistic period of history where people, just because science has been so successful, people think that's. That's what we do. We do experiments and we get results. But, you know, you've got to do the philosophy as well, especially with consciousness.

Speaker A: I think that's right. One last question on this broad argument. So far, a lot of what we've been discussing have been. I guess I would kind of frame them as sort of how questions about hybrid cosmopsychism. So what are kind of principles and ways in which we can describe how subjects. Their consciousness emerges from the universe and things like this on your picture? And so I want to ask how you think about some of the why questions? So we could start posing questions like why is it that, for example, we have, say, the structure of cosmic consciousness and that kind of gives rise to these subjects that have their own consciousnesses. But we could start asking things like why does cosmic consciousness take the particular form it does? And things like this. And so this is maybe a question of how deep do you want to go? But I'm wondering how you think about this.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I guess. Yeah, it's really interesting way of posing it, I guess. I mean, I kind of think every theory has to have its starting points. As Wittgenstein says, explanation has to end somewhere. You've got to have your fundamental axioms, um, physically start with physics and, you know, build up from there. Some people start with God and build up from there, but you have to have your starting point. And I think panpsychism has a not too complex starting point or the cosmopsychist view. There's just, um, the mathematical structures of physics and actually they are grounded in some conscious mind with a lot. Not a mind in the sense that an evolved human mind is a mind that is not thinking or anything, but just this mind with very, very complicated experience and that the complexities of that experience realize the structures of physics. So, you know, that's a fairly simple starting point. Um, where did it come from? I don't know. We're gonna get into, you know, why does the universe exist? Um, yeah. Or have I m. Have I missed the. It was.

Speaker A: The more.

Speaker B: Am I missing the subtleties of this concern or this question?

Speaker A: I think that's great, actually. I mean, it is really fundamentally a question of at some point we might need to take certain features of reality as primitive and we could be metaphysicians and try to construct a full system and kind of go all the way. And I think that you kind of answered in the way I guessed you were going to answer, but I was kind of curious how you take that and how you think about that question of where do you want to go with know the two directions there.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think we want, you know, we want the simplest theory that can account for the data. And. But then what's the data? Right? What's the data? Um, I think a lot of people think the data is just experimental, experimental data from observation experiments. And I want to say, I was like, that's absolutely crucial, that is data. But there's something else, right? There's something else that we know about, not from experiments, the reality of consciousness. And that's a fundamental datum as well, and we should treat it as such. And we want to find a simple theory that accommodates both of these data points. And so, yeah, I think that methodological point is really important because I think people are happy to go for. To be led to strange views if there's hard data supporting them. You know, quantum mechanics, special relativity is kind of wacky, but there's hard data. But then people think, oh, if it's just philosophical arguments, then that's something's gone wrong there. But I want to say actually the case for cosmopsychism or panpsychism, whatever, it's. It's not just from abstract theorizing. It's starting from a rock solid datum data point, you know, the reality of conscious experience that is not from experiments, but is just as solid and of course, there's lots of steps that doesn't get you to. You know, there's lots of arguments about how we get from that data point to panpsychism or cosmopsychism. But if we appreciate there is this solid state, solid data point as a starting point, then hopefully that opens us up to being led in a slightly peculiar direction. Peculiar just relative to our, uh, standard cultural assumptions.

Speaker A: I think that's a very nice message to end on. Professor Gough, this has been a really lovely conversation. Um, thank you so much for doing this.

Speaker B: Oh, thanks. I'm glad we did it. It's been a really fun conversation. If people have more questions, I'm always arguing on Twitter. Philip underscore Goff. Uh, well, actually, since the US Election, all the liberals have moved to blue sky, and I'm going to do both. So I'm arguing on both right now. So, yeah, if people want to carry on the argument, please do.

Speaker A: As always, thank you for listening and I'll see you next time.