Philip Goff is a philosopher of mind and consciousness at Durham University and author of Galileo's Error. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Philip's Twitter: https://twitter.com/Philip_Goff
Philip's Website: http://www.philipgoffphilosophy.com/
Galileo's Error (book): https://amzn.to/3ustY5B
Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (book): https://amzn.to/3ojldH1

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:14 - Conscious matter
34:40 - Death, mystical experiences and collective consciousness
45:04 - The authority of expertise
1:06:00 - Panpsychism and physics
1:34:45 - Suffering, zombies and illusion
2:07:31 - JRE podcast recap
2:19:07 - Free will
2:36:46 - Are we living in a simulation?
2:40:37 - Meaning of life

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

Do you think we're living in a simulation?

We could be in the Matrix, this could be a very vivid dream.

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

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

Consciousness is the basis of moral value, moral concern.

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

The following is a conversation with Philip Goff, philosopher specializing in the philosophy of mind and consciousness.

He is a panpsychist, which means he believes that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of physical reality, of all matter in the universe.

He is the author of Galileo's Error, Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, and is the host of an excellent podcast called Mind Chat.

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

And now, here's my conversation with Philip Goff.

I opened my second podcast conversation with Elon Musk with a question about consciousness and panpsychism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So as for whether it's outside of the scientific method, I think there's a fundamental challenge at the heart of the science of consciousness that we need to face up to, which is that consciousness is not publicly observable.

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

We know about consciousness not from doing experiments or public observation, we just know about it from our immediate awareness of our feelings and experiences.

It's qualitative, not quantitative, as you talk about.

So there are a couple of reasons consciousness, I think, is not susceptible to the standard, or not fully susceptible to the standard scientific approach.

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

Another reason is it's not publicly observable.

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

You know, fundamental particles, quantum wave functions, other universes, none of these things are observable.

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

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

In the case of consciousness, in the unique case of consciousness, the thing we are trying to explain is not publicly observable.

If we want to fully bring science into consciousness, we need a more expansive conception of the scientific method.

So it doesn't mean we can't explain consciousness scientifically, but we need to rethink what science is.

What do you mean publicly, the word publicly observable?

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

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

If there were aliens who visited us from another planet, maybe they'd have very different sense organs, maybe they'd struggle to understand our art or our music.

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

They could look at the data of our experiments.

They could run the experiments themselves.

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

I am directly aware of my own feelings and experiences.

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

My pain is just totally directly evident to me.

But you from the outside cannot directly access my pain.

You can access my pain behavior, or you can ask me, but you can't access my pain in the way that I can access my pain.

It might be difficult to totally pin it down how we define those things, but I think there's a fairly clear and very important difference there.

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

So my observation, all the ways in which I can sneak up to observing your pain is indirect versus yours is direct.

Is it possible for me to get closer and closer and closer to being able to observe your pain, like all the subjective experiences, yours in the way that you do.

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

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

And as we get to know someone, we find it very easy to adopt their perspective, get into their shoes.

But Strictly speaking, all we have perceptual access to is someone's behavior.

And if you were just, strictly speaking, if you were trying to explain someone's behavior, those aspects that are publicly observable, I don't think you'd ever have recourse to attribute consciousness.

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

So someone like Daniel Dennett is very consistent on this.

So I think For most people, what science is in the business of is explaining the data of public observation experiment.

If you religiously followed that, you would not postulate consciousness because it's not a datum that's known about in that way.

And Daniel Dennett is really consistent on this.

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

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

On the 1 hand, they think the business of science is just to account for public observation experiment, but on the other hand, they also believe in consciousness without appreciating, I think, that that implies that there is another datum over and above the data of public observation experiments, namely just the reality of feelings and experiences.

As we walk along this conversation, you keep opening doors that I wanna walk into, and I will, but I wanna try to stay kind of focused.

So you mentioned Daniel Dennett, let's lay it out.

Since he sticks to his story, pun unintended, and then you stick to yours.

What is your theory of consciousness versus his?

So my view, I defend the view known as panpsychism, which is the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.

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

So literally that means everything has mind.

But the typical commitment of the panpsychist is that the fundamental building blocks of reality, maybe fundamental particles like electrons and quarks, have incredibly simple forms of experience and that the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow rooted in or derived from this much more simple consciousness at the level of fundamental physics.

So that's a theory that I would justify on the grounds that it can account for this datum of consciousness that we are immediately aware of in our experience in a way that I don't think other theories can.

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

Dennett says the data for science of consciousness is what he calls hetero phenomenology, which is specifically defined as what we can access from the third person perspective, including what people say.

But crucially, we're not treating what they say, we're not relying on their testimony as evidence for some unobservable realm of feelings and experiences, we're just treating what they say as a datum of public observation experiments that we can account for in terms of underlying mechanisms.

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

So you have a very clear, and we'll talk quite a bit about panpsychism, but you have a clear view of what, almost like a physics view of consciousness.

He, I think, has a kind of view that consciousness is almost a side effect of this massively parallel computation system going on in our brain.

The brain has a model of the world and it's taking in perceptions and it's constantly weaving multiple stories about that world that's integrating the new perceptions and the multiple stories are somehow, it's like a Google Doc, collaborative editing.

And that collaborative editing is the actual experience of what we think of as consciousness, somehow the editing is consciousness of this story.

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

The narrative theory of consciousness or the multiple versions, editing, collaborative editing of a narrative theory of consciousness.

Yeah, he calls it the multiple drafts model.

Incidentally, there's a very interesting paper just come out by very good philosopher Luke Roloff's defending a panpsychist version of Dennett's multiple drafts model.

Like a deeper turtle that that was stacked on top of?

difference being that, this is Luke Roloff's view, all of the drafts are conscious.

So I guess for Dennett, there's sort of no fact of the matter about which of these drafts is the correct 1.

On Roloff's view, maybe there's no fact of the matter about which of these drafts is my consciousness, but nonetheless, all the drafts correspond to some consciousness.

I guess I think he calls it Donetti and panpsychism, but Luke is 1 of the most rigorous and serious philosophers alive at the moment, I think.

I hate having Luke Roloff in an audience if I'm giving a talk because he always cuts straight to the weakness in your position that you hadn't thought of.

So it's nice, panpsychism is sometimes associated with fluffy thinking, but contemporary panpsychists have come out of this tradition we call analytic philosophy, which is rooted in detailed, rigorous argumentation, and it is defended in that manner.

Yeah, those analytic philosophers are sticklers for terminology.

It's very fun, very fun group to talk shit with.

Yeah, well, I mean, it gets boring if you just start and end defining words, right?

I think starting with defining words is good.

Actually, the philosopher Derek Parfit said when he first was thinking about philosophy, he went to a talk in analytic philosophy, and he went to a talk in continental philosophy, and he decided that the problem with the continental philosophy, if it was really unrigorous, really imprecise, the problem with the analytic philosophy is it was just not about anything important.

And he thought there was more chance of working within analytic philosophy and asking some more meaningful, some more profound questions than there was in working continental philosophy and making it more rigorous.

Now they're both horrific stereotypes and I don't wanna get nasty emails from either of these groups, but there's something to what he was saying there.

I think just a tiny tangent on terminology, I do think that there's a lot of deep insight to be discovered by just asking questions.

I remember I was taking a course on algorithms and data structures in computer science, and the instructor, shout out to him, Ali Shekhafande, amazing professor.

I remember he asked some basic questions like what is an algorithm?

The pressure of pushing students to answer, to think deeply, you know, you just woke up, hung over in college or whatever, and you're tasked with answering some deep philosophical question about what is an algorithm, these basic questions.

And they sound very simple, but they're actually very difficult.

And 1 of the things I really value in conversation is asking these dumb, simple questions of like, you know, what is intelligence?

And just continually asking that question over and over of some of the sort of biggest researchers in the artificial intelligence computer science space.

At the same time, it should start a terminology and then progress where you kind of say, ah, fuck it, we'll just assume we know what we mean by that.

Otherwise, you get the Bill Clinton situation where it's like, what is the meaning of is, is whatever he said.

It's like, hey man, did you do the sex stuff or not?

So you have to both be able to talk about the sex stuff and the meaning of the word is.

With consciousness, because we don't currently understand very much, terminology discussions are very important because it's like you're almost trying to sneak up to some deep insight by just discussing some basic terminology.

Like what is consciousness or even defining the different aspects of panpsychism is fascinating.

But just to linger on the Daniel Dennett thing, what do you think about narrative?

Sort of the mind constructing narratives for ourselves.

So there's nothing special about consciousness deeply.

It is some property of the human mind that's just, is able to tell these pretty stories that we experience as consciousness, and that it's unique, perhaps, to the human mind, which is, I suppose, what Daniel Dennett would argue, that it's either deeply unique or mostly unique to the human mind.

It's just on the question of terminology before I, yes, I think it used to be the fashion among philosophers that we had to come up with utterly precise, necessary and sufficient conditions for each word.

And then I think this has gone out of fashion a bit, partly because it's just been such a failure.

The word knowledge in particular, people used to define knowledge as true justified belief.

And then this guy, Gettier, had this very short paper where he just produced some pretty conclusive counter examples to that.

I think he wrote very few papers, but This is just, you have to teach this on an undergraduate philosophy course.

And then after that, you had a huge literature of people trying to address this and propose a new definition, but then someone else would come out with counter examples.

And then you get a new definition of knowledge and counter examples, and it just went on and on and never seemed to get anywhere.

So I think the thought now is, let's work out how precise we need to be for what we're trying to do.

So precision is important, but you just need to work out how precise do we need to be for these purposes.

Coming to Dennett and narrative theories, I think narrative theories are a plausible contender for a theory of the self, theory of my identity over time, what makes me the same person in some sense today as I was 20 years ago, given that I've changed so much physically and psychologically.

1 running contender is something connected to the kind of stories we tell about ourselves, or maybe some story about the psychological, the chains of psychological continuity.

I'm not saying I accept such a theory, but it's plausible.

I don't think these theories are good as theories of consciousness, at least if we're taking consciousness just to be subjective experience, pleasure, pain, seeing color, hearing sound.

I think a hamster has consciousness in that sense.

There's something that it's like to be a hamster.

It feels pain if you stand on it, if you're cruel enough to do it.

People always give, I don't know, philosophers give these very violent examples to get the cross consciousness and it's, yeah, I don't know why that's coming about.

So it experiences pain, it experiences pleasure, joy.

I mean, but there's some limits to that experience of a hamster, but there is nevertheless the presence of a subjective experience.

Yeah, consciousness is just something, look, it's a very ambiguous word, but if we're just using it to mean some kind of experience, some kind of inner life, that is pretty widespread in the animal kingdom.

Bit difficult to say where it stops, where it starts, but you certainly don't need something as sophisticated as the capacity to self-consciously tell stories about yourself to just have experience.

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

I mean, Descartes thought animals were mechanisms.

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

So in which way would you say humans are unique versus even our closest ancestors?

Like, is there something special about humans?

What is, in your view, under the panpsychism, I guess we're walking backwards because we'll have the big picture conversation about what is panpsychism, but given your kind of broad theory of consciousness, what's unique about humans, do you think?

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

There's nothing that special about human consciousness.

It's just a highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe.

So we're very much continuous with the rest of the physical universe.

I suppose the capacity to reflect on our conscious experience, plan for the future, the capacity, I would say, to respond to reasons as well.

I mean, animals in some sense have motivations.

But when a human being makes a decision, they're responding to what philosophers call normative considerations.

You know, if you think, should I take this job in the US?

You weigh it up, you say, well, you know, I'll get more money, I'll have maybe a better quality of life, but if I stay in the UK, I'll be closer to family and you weigh up these considerations.

I'm not sure Any non-human animals quite respond to considerations of value in that way.

I mean, I might be reflecting here that I'm something of an objectivist about value.

I think there are objective facts about what we have reason to do and what we have reason to believe.

And humans have access to them and can respond to them.

That's a controversial claim, you know, many of my panpsychist brethren might not...

too can look up to the stars and ponder theoretical physics.

Maybe not, but I think it depends what you think about value.

If you have a more Humean picture of value, by which I mean relating to the philosopher David Hume, who said reason is the slave of the passions.

Really, we just have motivations and what we have reason to do arises from our motivations.

I'm not a human, and I think there are objective facts about what we have reason to do, and I think we have access to them.

I don't think any non-human animal has access to objective facts about what they have reason to do, what they have reason to believe.

I mean, yeah, do you want to know my problem with Hume's?

This is, it might not be connected, it's not connected to panpsychism, but I had a radical conversion.

I used to have a more Humean view when I was a graduate student, but I was persuaded by some professors at the University of Reading where I was, that if you have the human view, you have to say any basic life goals are equal, equally valid.

So for example, let's take someone whose basic goal in life is counting blades of grass, right?

And crucially, they don't enjoy it, right?

That's just their basic goal, to spend their life counting as many blades of grass as possible.

Not for some greater goal, that's just their basic goal.

I want to say that that is objectively stupid.

I shouldn't say stupid, but it is objectively pointless in a way that pursuing pleasure or pursuing someone else's pleasure or pursuing scientific inquiry is not pointless.

As soon as you make that admission, you're not a follower of David Hume anymore.

You think there are objective facts about what goals are worth pursuing.

Is it possible to have a goal without pleasure?

So this kind of idea that you disjoint the 2.

So the David Foster Wallace idea of, you know, the key to life is to be unboreable.

Isn't it possible to discover the pleasure in everything in life?

Once you see the mastery, the skill of it, you can discover the pleasure.

Therefore, I guess what I'm asking is why and when and how did you lose the romance in grad school?

I think it may or may not be true that it's possible to find pleasure in everything.

But I think it's also true that people don't act solely for pleasure, and they certainly don't act solely for their own pleasure.

People will suffer for things they think are worthwhile.

I might suffer for some scientific cause, for finding out a cure for the pandemic, and in terms of my own pleasure, I might have less pleasure in doing that, but I think it's worthwhile.

I just don't think it's the case that everything we do is rooted in maximizing our own pleasure.

I don't think that's even psychologically plausible.

But pleasure, then that's a narrow kind of view of pleasure.

But you can see pleasure is a kind of ability to hear the music in the distance.

It's like, yes, it's difficult now, it's suffering now, but there's some greater thing beyond the mountain that will be joy.

I mean, that's kind of a, even if it's not in this life, well, you know, the warriors will meet in Valhalla, right?

The feeling that gives meaning and fulfillment to life is not necessarily grounded in pleasure of like the counting of the grass.

The struggle is a source of deep fulfillment.

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

It for a moment allows you to forget the terror of the fact that you're going to die.

Like that's the broader view of pleasure, that you get to kind of play in the little illusion that all of this has deep meaning.

Yeah, well, but I mean, you know, people sacrifice their lives.

Atheists may sacrifice their lives for the sake of someone else or for the sake of something important enough.

And clearly in that case, they're not doing it for the sake of their own pleasure.

That's a rather dramatic example, but there can be just trivial examples where I choose to be honest rather than lie about something, can I lose out a bit and I have a bit less pleasure but I thought it was worth doing the honest thing or something?

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Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind | Lex Fridman Podcast #261