Does consciousness point to God? Philip Goff & Sharon Dirckx

[Music] mind consciousness and the brain is currently one of the great frontiers in science and philosophy many atheists say that our experience of thinking feeling and being me is an illusion foisted on us by an entirely physical process in our brain others are pushing beyond those materialist explanations and we're going to be examining some different approaches today Philip Goff is a philosopher and consciousness researcher at Durham University now he wouldn't necessarily describe himself as a Christian we'll get into that in a moment but he is unsatisfied with a theist materialist explanations of consciousness and in his brand-new book Galileo's error foundations for a new science of consciousness Philip argues for a new understanding of consciousness known as pan psychism Sharon Derrick's is a senior tutor at the Oxford Centre for Christian apologetics and has a background in neuroscience research her new book a my just my brain also challenges the materialist view of mind and consciousness with Sharon arguing that our experience of being embodied human cells points ultimately to God looking forward to this program Sharon and Philip thank you very much for joining me today thank you thanks for having us um I want to talk about both of your journeys as it regards writing these books perhaps we'll start with you Sharon and your background cuz it's very interesting that you're writing a book on the brain and you do have a background in neuroscience so you say I do have a breaking point tell us because I mean I think when you got into science as an undergraduate you weren't actually a Christian either so how has those two journeys gone together as well yes well so I grew up well not really believing anything in particular although I do one of my earliest childhood memories is of sitting by a window looking at the rain slightly bored on a weekend afternoon and suddenly the thought popping into my head why can I think hmm why do I exist what I was suddenly aware of my own consciousness and I don't thought to be having yes I can't remember exactly how old I was maybe nine ten eleven who knows but I really remember that moment and I wasn't being raised a religious nor was I being kind of fed anything that was unhelpful on a religious realm so it was fairly neutral and I actually well my a Louisville biology teacher because by then I I knew from an early age that I loved the sciences and pointed me towards Richard Dawkins and I read The Selfish Gene in the 1980s about how we are biological machines and I arrived at university probably agnostic I'd kind of absorbed some of this materialistic perspective but I arrived fairly agnostic and probably with the assumption that science and belief in God were incompatible and quite early on in my time at university I was able to ask the question to Christians surely you can't believe in God and be a scientist or at least not a credible one and missed all actually you can these are mutually compatible explanations that both together give a complete sense of reality and we actually need both the underlying mechanism and the the one whose idea it was and continues to uphold everything today and so I change my views about God as a young adult at the age of 19 in the middle of a biochemistry degree I was studying these mechanisms and this was in the 1990s a time that was very exciting for biochemistry there were lots of areas that were undiscovered you know the human genome project was just underway and so there were lots of gaps in our knowledge but the story reminds me a bit of a Alister McGrath I'm sure you know who was also I think studying biochemistry at Oxford as an undergraduate when he had a conversion yes it's not unheard of is it for her the science and the faith to come together in that way but tell us about the neuroscience because that is obviously where your scientific career took you yes it did so I actually loved the discoveries of biochemistry but didn't very much enjoy the practise of them per petting tiny amounts of material from one test tube to another and when there's an electricity cut you lose your last three months of work I wanted to study something on a larger level and I was drawn to magnetic resonance imaging I was drawn to this and area of research and I pursued a PhD in functional MRI of the brain which I did at Cambridge and this is an incredible technique that's arisen in our lifetime really which enables in scientists to look inside the brains of healthy volunteers prior to brain imaging techniques them a lot of physiology and neuroscience was conducted on post mortem studies or on those in disease states that were willing to be you know studied but this brain imaging techniques enable scientists to look inside the brains of healthy people without invading them and so it really changed the whole landscape and Muresan someone who's not particularly familiar with the area would if they had seen pictures of images of brains lighting up in different parts and that kind of thing that's probably a result of this imaging technology yes most people have encountered MRI in terms of having a structural scan so perhaps a knee or a shoulder or their brain perhaps and they're they're looking at changes in the structure of that thing but there's also a type of brain imaging called functional MRI where you're looking at the changes in brain activity in response to particular tasks that a person might have so you put them in a scanner which is a bit like a giant toilet roll and you give them an activity to do that's been designed in a very precise way to localize the brain areas that are involved in that task so early on in functional MRI the primary functions of the cortex were studied a lot things like vision and hearing and motor function and people saw the you know visual cortex auditory cortex motor cortex light up in response to these the uses of these parts of the brain they've even done I believe studies when people pray or even speak in tongues what what bits of the brain are lighting up now we might may or may not have time to go into that today but there's been an interesting interface in that sense between people's claimed spiritual experiences and what's going on in the brain yes and I think there's been a progression since it arrived in the 1990s started off looking at primary functions just trying to understand what can we see using this technique in terms of the the fundamental features of well that the brain and then moving on to kind of cognitive tasks uses of different mental tasks such as working memory or you know well different just different types of cognition and higher thinking and looking at which brain regions are involved in those tasks and then moving on even further to looking at the effect of drugs or as you say of religious experience on the brain that's an area known as neuro theology where theology intersects with neuroscience and I know that you cover a lot a little bit in the book as well I mean the book itself as I see is a response to the emergence of a very naturalistic materialistic view of the brain the mind of consciousness that's emerged especially from people like daniel dennett sam harris and others do you want to just spell out that view and and what your task was in the book in terms of looking at the neuroscience the philosophy behind this and and sort of where you come out ultimately in the end yes so um I think I mean I think Phillip and I probably in agreement on this that the prevailing landscape for philosophy and neuroscience is a strongly materialistic one journals like New Scientist and Scientific American there's really no hint of any other worldview other than the materialistic one which and and the outworking of that in neuroscience is the view that you are your brain you know there are lots of different ways of looking at the human person but but actually neuroscience now that it's uncovering all of these mechanisms that some have drawn the conclusion that those mechanisms dictate everything about you the behaviors you exhibit the choices that you make the religious beliefs that you hold are all dictated by the activity in your brain and I argue in my book am I just my brain that this this view not only is it not what the neuroscience is showing us we don't need to go far beyond this very domain in order to see that that that isn't the case but also it leads to a very diminished view of the human person with significant implications for ethics for AI what we believe will ultimately be possible and for free will as well and so I really look at all of these different areas and I show that you know my my intention was not to argue for a particular mind body position hmm but rather to argue against a reductive approach to the human person by showing that actually there are many other options available that many thinking philosophers and scientists hold that helped us make more sense of the human person and more sense of the neuroscience which is a good point to bring Phillip in into the into the equation as a thinking philosopher himself tried to be you were on the show not too long ago Phillip talking about religious fictional ISM interesting mer which was a fascinating and is why I hesitated to give you a label at the beginning of the show you you are someone who goes to church finds a great meaning in the practice of Christian ritual but I as yet uncommitted to the a lot of the doctrinal elements of that I'm stronger than that I mean I positively believe it's false very at least yeah I'm definitely a theist about God as traditionally conceived because of the problem of evil which I think is one of the most compelling philosophical arguments there is funny you should we should have for Sharon now because her last book before this one was on that very subject oh but but that's a debate for another day but as it stands yes but you know I think I mean I do believe that there is a moral and a spiritual aspect to reality and the bats as real as what we know about reality scientifically and I guess I see the purposes of religion is to connect individuals and community up to that moral and spiritual aspect and Christianity in particular you know I think the the story of Christianity the story of identifying God with the naked executed peasant the person who shunned the wealthy and powerful and with outcasts and lepers I think although it's perhaps not literally true I think at a metaphorical level it expresses a deep truth about the nature of moral and spiritual reality so that's why it's important I only wish we had time to go into that discussion but as I say for another show perhaps really what you were coming on to discuss last time isn't your main area of research is what we're talking about today consciousness and in that sense as you've indicated you you're an atheist as regards perhaps the Christian God at this point but not not quite the same sort of atheist as a Daniel Dennett or a Sam Harris because you take quite different view as I understand it of the nature of consciousness you are equally as it were opposed to the materialist view as Sharon is in that sense so what what led you into this whole area and and can you give us a brief sketch of where you try and draw things out in the book yeah well I guess I've just always been obsessed by the problem of consciousness as far back as I can remember really you know I think what's fascinating about it is it's there's a sort of paradox that on the one hand consciousness is the thing that's most familiar you know nothing is more evident than the reality of your one's own feelings and experiences but on the other hand its consciousness is the thing that's proved most challenging to incorporate into our standard scientific worldview and I guess we can get into some of the reasons for that but I suppose it's that it's that combination of familiarity and mystery that's gonna say okay so most of the time and of captivating and unlike that deep thought you had as an 11 year old Sharron D we don't even think about consciousness it means literally staring us in the face because we're so we're swimming in it we don't really think about the fact that this is quite extraordinary that we're having thoughts feelings visual experiences because actually as you elucidate so well in the book it's very hard to understand how that exactly links in with a purely physical understanding of the Union yeah so nothing is more evident than this in a subjective world of colors and sounds and smells and tastes and you know as you say we kind of take it for granted but you know we still don't have even the beginnings of a of an explanation of how complex acro chemical signaling is somehow able to give rise to that in a subjective world so you know some people think this is oh you know we just need to do more neuroscience and we'll crack it but I think the problems a bit deeper than that but yes I mean and I guess as a philosophical as a philosophy undergraduate we were taught that there were only two options on consciousness and by the end of my decorations I just materialism on the one hand that's the Daniel Dennett Sam Harris yeah approach well Sam Harris is actually I mean these guys have very different views that Sam Harris is actually I believe open to the view I definitely I think he's much more of a strong he's certainly much more of a strong believer in consciousness than Daniel Dennett his partner Annika Harris has just published a book which explores these issues and tentatively defends pon psychism but in dualism on the other hand that consciousness is sap is non-physical outside of the physical workings of the body and brain and by the end of my degree I came to think that both of these were pretty hopeless and I actually my end of my end of undergraduate dissertation I argue that the consciousness was just irresolvable and I went off and did something else tried to forget about it but then I came to eventually discover this middle way this Third Way pun psychism which sounds kind of crazy but the advantages in my view that it you know it avoids the deep difficulties that face these more conventional options so so that's when I came back to philosophy now now I remember Sharon when I was doing my undergraduate degree learning about dualism being told by my philosophy tutor that Descartes was really responsible for this view that there's a a spiritual substance at a physical substance and it essentially they're completely separate but somehow the spiritual works on the physical and and that's the way we are we're we're a mind and a body and but they're very separate different things I mean is that one of the options for you and and what are the other options that you explore in your book yeah so yes that is one of the options that's out there that there's a an immaterial mind that interacts with a material brain but of course the million-dollar question is how exactly does that happen and how do we measure that but I think that you know there are there are ways in which that it seems that that might be happening all the time around us you know the way that kind of speech effects our physical body you know the things that are said to us the nature of information is in itself non-physical but it seems to have a physical physical effect whether that is positive or negative the effect of cyberbullying on you know lack of sleep or the news of the loss of a loved one on on us you know these things are happy it seems like there are non-physical aspects to reality all the physical things and clothes things sometimes yes it's yeah and they're also I mean an in the clinic you know there are I mean I think a huge proportion of Neurology the diagnoses are put in this category of functional disorders and what that basically means is this is a physical illness for which there is no traceable physical cause and this constitutes a huge part of Neurology you know it's just not the case that we're answering all of the questions that we have about the human body and about how it acts and so it seems like and then you have notion things like the placebo effect where you see that you know the mind is powerful in its effect on the body which is a slightly different point but it this is all to say that if you are just your brain you wouldn't see any of these phenomena sir I mean I mean presumably the materialist that I know then it's have some responses for this you know that well yes if the brain is very good at fooling us you know and when I had him in this very studio having a conversation with Keith Ward on consciousness a year or more ago he said it's the the the mind is their brains of user illusion is the way he put it and that we but ultimately yes you can reduce it to the physical activity and when you poke the brain in a certain way you have certain thoughts when you do things and that alone in his view proves that it's it's a physical thing producing what we experience as a kind of user illusion yes I mean I think from reading your book Phillip I think we're probably on a similar page in in the sense of consciousness being a loser is I find I have well there are lots of both scientific and philosophical problems with it first of all it is itself a conscious act to say that consciousness is a loser II see you end up just going round and round in circles it's because you have sort of depending on your consciousness to move assess that yes conclusion yes and then what of where does this sense of illusion come from and how do we know that whatever those forces are to bring about illusion they're not also at work in distorting Dennett's argument he assumes that he is independent of the phenomena that he describes but what if he is subject to the illusion that consciousness is illusory so is a-- you cannot end up going round and then of course he asserts the first person all the time i believe you've been yachting with him and spoken the first person on many occasions and so we don't live as though that is the case and and this is where we need to bring philosophy into the real world as well we can't just have these ideas and arguments we have to say look if something is true when it's going to be an acceptable framework that we take seriously it has to stack up in in the real world as well I mean obviously we we know that there's a lot of agreement between you but I do just want to hash out the the problems you have with the materialist for you before we get into your own views on this you and it sounds like you leave a very exotic life yachting with Daniel Dennett I think this was some kind of cruise around the Iceland or somewhere was it in the art in Greenland yes funded by a Russian billionaire who's also pretty good philosopher in the Moscow center for consciousness studies and wanted to spend and some money putting a dozen philosophers on a sailing ship to talk about consciousness and free world I'm gonna cause it a huge rush for people applying for academics I managed to persuade Daniel Dennett he was wrong about something on a trip actually not about everything but about that I tell you what you have to read the book to get that technical small point I mean cheiron's elucidated some of the the kind of practical problems with whom with claiming that consciousness is simply an illusion what I mean there are some philosophical yeah and it's as well which you obviously spell out as well in the book yeah what I'm keen to press is is the philosophical underpinnings of this problem you know it's not just oh another scientific problem and there are a number of ways of getting at this but for me the core of the problem is that physical science works with the purely quantitative vocabulary whereas consciousness is an essentially qualitative phenomenon just in the simple sense that it involves qualities you know if you think about the redness of a red experience or the smell of coffee or the taste of mint you can't capture these kind of qualities in a purely quantitative vocabulary and so you know as long as your description of the brain is framed in the purely quantitative or Cabul area of neuroscience you just you're always going to leave out these kind of qualities and therefore leave out consciousness itself really and that's where the book title actually comes from as well Galileo's era yeah so I mean what I'm trying to I think Galileo is at the root of all this although he understood things a lot better than we do now I think in some ways so so a key moment in the Scientific Revolution is Galileo's declaration that mathematics is to be the language of the new science you know the new science is to have a purely quantitative vocabulary but Galileo understood perfectly well that you can't capture consciousness in these terms you know your consciousness is a qualitative phenomenon and and so you can't capture it in a purely quantitative language so Galileo said what we have to do put consciousness outside of the domain of science that's in the soul you know once we've done that we can capture everything else in mathematics so you know this kicks off mathematical physics people forget you know the philosophical starting point which and you know mathematical physics has gone incredibly well but we need to remember that it was only ever intended as a partial description of reality you know the whole project was promised on putting consciousness outside of the domain of science so why is this important you know the problem of consciousness is now taken seriously it was taboo for much of the 20th century you know you couldn't do proper science if you were talking about consciousness it is now taken seriously but as I say many people have this idea I would just do a bit more neuroscience and we'll crack it and but and I think the reason people think this and you read this in New Scientist all that every time is an article about they say you know well there's a problem but you know look at the great success of physical science and explaining more and more our universe you know of course this should give us confidence that it'll one day crack the problem of consciousness but I think this is this is rooted in a sort of misunderstanding about there by the history of science you know the irony is physical science has been so successful precisely because it was designed to ignore consciousness if Galileo were to time-travel to the present day and hear about this problem of explaining consciousness with physical science he'd say you know of course you can't do that I designed physical science to deal with the quantitative not the qualitative you know I gave it it's gone well because I gave it a really limited focus I also my experience as a scientist think that there is a a sense in which the boundary between the practice of science and then entering into philosophy is very blurry for practicing scientists you know their bread and butter is to study the mechanisms underneath undergirding whatever phenomena it is that they're looking at and this phrase and neural correlates is something that you see come up a lot in you know scientific papers which perhaps leads to the the view that well if my bread and butter is this then surely this is going to ultimately explain reality but it's rare I think to to it to see a scientist acknowledged where their scientific methodology and that the realm of science ends and where the realm of philosophy begins and what you end up with and what we've seen lasts you know a few decades and through history is you have scientists making philosophical statements about reality that are accepted to be scientifically correct and therefore objectively true and so I think part of the the progression of this conversation around consciousness will involve continuing to bring to the foreground the difference between the nature of scientific explanation and the nature of belief and worldview which you bring to the science and interpret it and you know when I see things like in a fairly recent version of scientific America note says that brains create thought well there's actually nothing in the science that says that brains create anything what it tells us is that mind and brain are clearly connected and neither of us are disputing that that's so clear from the evidence you put someone in the scanner you give them a working memory task their you know their dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex will activate you know mind and brain are clearly connected but to say this brain creates thought is a worldview statement that is brought to the science and is used to interpret it we need to distinguish between these two things we're gonna go to our first break we've been stimulating your Dicer lateral prefrontal cortex or whatever with this conversation today I'm looking forward to the rest of it as well we're talking about consciousness asking ultimately whether it points to God and we will get to that question with my guest Philip Goff and Sharon durricks on the rest of today's show we'll be back in a moment time for more conversations between Christians and skeptics subscribe to the unbelievable podcast and for more updates and bonus content sign up to the unbelievable newsletter or continuing to talk about consciousness the mind the brain really interesting subject so many different things I want to talk about on the show today but great to have with me Philip Goff and Sharon Derrick's Phillips new book is Galileo's error foundations for a new of consciousness in which he argues for Pan psychism will come to that Sharon Dirac Senior Tutor at the Oxford Center for Christian apologetics is also with us am i just my brain is her new book arguing against the materialist view of mind and consciousness and we'll hear some of the alternatives that Sharon lays out in the book in a moment I think you want to just respond quickly though to what Sharon was saying in that last segment well just supporting that really I mean I think it's really important to distinguish what neuroscience has to offer a theory of consciousness and what philosophy has to offer and I think you know I think we need both so you know what neuroscience gives us I think this is really just agreeing with Sharon ah correlations right but you can scan someone's brain and you can ask them what they're feeling what they're experiencing and you can discover that you know a certain kind of activity in a certain region the brain is correlated with a feeling of hunger for example you know and you can neuroscientists come up with a really rich body of of correlations which is absolutely crucial for any theory of consciousness but that's not in itself a theory of consciousness right what we ultimately want from a theory of consciousness is to explain those correlations right why is it when you have that kind of activity in that region of the brain you have this kind of feeling and I really think at that point we need to turn to philosophy we need to work out which is the best philosophical theory for explaining those correlations could be materialism could be pun psychism could be dualism could be idealism these are all philosophical theories some there's a common assumption that materialism is supported by science and the others are sort of weird philosophy but no no materialism is a is a philosophical position the science gives us correlations and then we have to see what philosophical Theory best explains them and all of these theories at least in certain forms are empirically equivalent which is to say you know you can't do an experiment to distinguish between them so I think we need to turn to other ways of evaluating theories which we like it well well so far so much in agreement in a way the two of you but maybe we'll get to some of the differences you have as we open up the different possibilities that you're both open to so where do you go with the book in terms of alternative ways of understanding the relationship between body and mind yes so why I as a non-academic philosopher I sought to understand and condense and I guess summarize and popularize a a vast area and in doing so recognized that I have kind of smoothed over many categories that philosophers would prefer to uphold and observe one of those kind of distinctions but I I condensed it into three main positions although I did also address pants like ism very briefly and I'm I'm glad of this opportunity to learn more about this view that the materialist view being that consciousness is the brain and then I posited the alternative views that consciousness emerges from the brain or that consciousness is beyond the brain so the view that consciousness emerges from the brain is talking about non reductive physicalists views or emergentist views which say that when a number of physical component parts come together and increase in complexity something new emerges from those physical component parts that is greater than the sum of them is dependent I've heard an analogy face I don't know if it's a good one or not but sir someone's saying that you can think of the wetness of water as an emergent property of what happens when lots of h2o particles come together I don't know if that yes I suppose that could be one the analogy that I use in my book is of a university so take for example purely at random Oxford University began with a number of kind of core building blocks and you can you know the the departments of had a no metaphysics theology mathematics philosophy and that has gradually been built and built and a number of kind of other departments have been added over time and then you end up having students II then who graduates so you need an alumni network and you need to set that up and then you spread the net wider see you have an international student body so you need to do something there and then this university begins to posit you know ideas which influence society and culture and what you have is the emergence of something which is greater than the sum of the original building blocks and yet it's dependent on them if you were to remove any of those fundamental departments the emergent what we talked about that that idea just quickly first of all I mean it it's still to me at least as someone untrained in this area sounds like compatible with materialism in the sense that you're not necessarily positing anything apart from the material stuff that makes this up it's just you're saying and by the end of it the way it all works together you do get something that feels different yes I think that they're saying that you know mental properties emerge from physical substances so there's really only one substance but it leads to mental properties what's your view on that they're emergent view no wonder ever there are two views in this area because there are stronger and weaker forms of emergence David Chalmers has this distinct it's been strong and weak emergence so weak emergence would be I mean well maybe it's easier to start with struck strong emergence would be where you have new basic laws of nature that bridge the gap between the brain properties and consciousness so this would be David Chalmers view he thinks if you just had the laws of physics you wouldn't have any consciousness right we'd all just be mechanisms and no in alive but he thinks as well as the laws of physics there are fundamental psycho physical laws and because those laws obtained in our universe when you get certain rearrangements brain structures consciousness emerges so that's a very strong kind of emergence and I well I think of that as charm as does as a form of dualism right it's not Descartes dualism where you have the soul as well as the body but there are these not non-physical properties that are really genuinely something new cuz you need these new laws of nature whereas weaker emergence is more like you know liquidity and h2o it's it's you don't need new fundamental laws of nature you just put stuff together and it automatically happens in one way the philosopher Saul Kripke famously made distinction he wasn't a theist but he had it was a theological analogy what does God have to do to create the universe you know for the weak emergentist all God has to do is create all the physical facts that's it whereas to charm her self here she has to add God has to add the psychophysical laws to get consciousness interesting I mean what do you think that the the emergent view is plausible one Sharon dude and how does it fit with the the theistic oh you know the picture is oh yeah so I again I think that this view makes sense of the integration that we observe in neuroscience between the mind and brain by saying that they're kind of very fundamentally integrated but I think it still runs into problems in the sense of well we're still left with the question well how do do qualities emerge from brain structures how does the first person experience the consciousness emerge from a physical system you're still left with the hard problem of consciousness that David Chalmers talks about and and if we are indeed in a kind of a closed system of cause and effect matter time plus chance then the hard problem remains as hard as it ever was and ever will be but if it's true that the system isn't closed that if God exists the judeo-christian framework then there is information that is inputted into that system which might even provide a basis for understanding what these psycho physical laws might be and you know that Psalm 8 describes human that God made humans are little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor the sense that actually we are closer to heavenly beings we are necessarily to the rest of the animal kingdom that there is something very different about humanity because there's something that's been extrinsically given in addition to some something that is intrinsically part of a sort of physical nature these two things together make humanity unique and different I mean we could stay on this but I'd like to go to the other option you mentioned as well which is the idea that there's actually another thing that there's something else and I think that's more the dualist view that we've been already talking about I think there are plenty theistic philosophers out there Richard Swinburne JP Moreland others who do hold to this view yes I'm John again just briefly explain it and we'll hear what what you have to say yes so this view I guess I just the umbrella term being that the mind is beyond the brain that we are made of two substances so whereas the previous position said there's one fundamental substance that gives rise to everything this view says that there are two fundamental substances there's a physical brain and a non-physical mind or material brain an immaterial mind and those two are causally connected they do interact but they are distinct and I guess can exist independently so there there's a sense in which even if the physical part of our brain mind were to go it's still intrinsically possible that you could survive that there could be another death of the body which I suppose is Maps well onto a theistic view Christian framework idea that we survive our physical death yes although there are Christians that hold the previous view mmm which was and they would say that actually when there when the brain dies that the person dies but they're recreated all over again by gods which is again the resurrection of the body is obviously yes Christian principles and it's the love of God that continues your existence not your mind body position that's that's interesting so in a way both of the positions are compatible with Christian theology level they are you might find people saying actually some are more compatible than others I do think fee you know there are hints of a dualistic approach in in terms of what's laid out in Genesis and in terms of although I don't take those to be scientific accounts of the human person at all but that it does talk about dust plus breath of God makes the human being so they're about the breathing into a self of that spirit that that brings to life the inanimate in that way I mean you're as we said you you're not a Christian believer yourself exactly Philip but what's your feeling on this and and the God connections as well I suppose with the the different perspectives Sharon outlines that I suppose I worry both with substance dualism the belief in the soul and with the strong emergentist view of david chalmers you know there's a worry that they sin against Occam's razor you know this very important theoretical principle and both science and philosophy that we should believe the simplest theory right we should postulate as few entities as possible but wouldn't that take us to material if you well like that you should believe so one way putting Arkham's razor is don't multiply entities beyond necessity gotta say okay you know first my starting point is consciousness is real nothing is more evident than the reality of our feelings and experiences so you've got our account for it right you get and I think a materialist view or the weak emergentist view can account for it because we've got this unbearable gap between the quantitative and the qualitative so I'd rather be a duelist you know because of that at least does the consciousness does account for consciousness I also have worries about it whether it's whether it's empirically adequate but anyway maybe but I think there are more economical options there in fact I think the view I would ultimately defend pushing onto something is just as parsimonious just as simple as materialism and that's why you know that's why the main attraction of it it's it's just as simple as materialism but it avoids this unbridgeable explanatory that is at the core of material well let's talk about plan psyches and then feels like the right time to move to that and we can always return to the gold question later because this is the this is kind of the the hot new thing on the scene as I understand it pan psychism I I hadn't really come across the phrase I don't know more than two or three years ago but now I seem to find it popping up all over the place it sounds very hippie and new-age just just the name sounds whoa I'm into that the hands like is a man what is what is I thank you what what is pan psychism mm just explain it and and convince us that it's not some kind of crazy yeah well enough so I guess this view was laughed at insofar as it was thought of at all for much of the 20th century I think the reason people are beginning to take it seriously again is partly due to the rediscovery of some very important work from the 1920s by the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the scientist after Eddington who's incidentally the first scientist to confirm general relativity Einstein's theory of general today so I'm inclined to think these guys did in the 1920s for the science of consciousness what Darwin did in the 19th century for the science of life and it's a tragedy of history that it got forgotten about for so long for various historical reasons but it's recently been rediscovered in academic philosophy and is causing a great deal of excitement and interest and yeah part of my motivation for writing this book was to get those ideas out to a broader audience so so the starting point of Russell and Eddington is that physical science doesn't really tell us what matter is and that sounds like a kind of bizarre claim you know you read a physics textbook you seem to find out all these incredible things about the nature of space and time and matter but what Russell Eddington realize is that physics despite its richness is confined to telling us about the behavior of matter about what it does you know physics tells us that matter has mass and charge and these are completely behaviorist eclis defined you know charge is defined in terms of attraction and repulsion mass is defined in terms of gravitational attraction and resistance to acceleration this is all a matter of behavior physics tells us absolutely nothing about what philosophers like to call the intrinsic nature of matter you know how matter is in itself independently of its behavior so getting to punt psyche is in the moment what is all this got to do with consciousness so their thought was oh my god there's this huge hole in our scientific story of the world and basically their proposal is or at least Eddington building on Russell put consciousness in that hole right okay so you've got a big hole we're looking for a place for consciousness in our sliders put consciousness in the hole so the it's a kind of pan psychism but it's pun psychism stripped of any mystical or spiritual connotations the view is there's just matter you know nothing spiritual or supernatural but matter can be described from two perspectives physics tells us what it does describes it sort of from the outside but matter from the inside that is to say in terms of its intrinsic nature is constituted of consciousness so this is a beautifully simple elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview it's as simple as materialism without any of the problems it sounds fascinating but there's all kinds of questions going off in my brain at this point but sure probably hand it over to you Sharon to our some of them so what oh no I mean right what I love about this view is that actually in a very elegant and persuasive way in a presumably very fierce and materialistic environment that you're in you have put the need to place consciousness is primary back at the centre of the conversation and that's what I love about the pants Lycus view I actually don't think it's necessarily incompatible with theism on on many levels that might explain the kind of integration but I would actually just then take our questions one step further back to ask where it comes from perhaps we can get that at the end and I even think the Genesis account of you know dust plus breath doesn't necessarily exclude a theory like pants psychism and so what I love about I'm very much enjoyed reading your book and what I love about that it acknowledges the insufficiency of materialism the needs put start with consciousness and build a theory from there to the human person and and and so this is why this is a really helpful conversation but here's my question like a first question so consciousness is is there in an every fundamental particle in the universe it's kind of the basis on which we can then do the physical stuff because consciousness is the kind of I don't know the undergirding reality that that constitutes it but I suppose this first of all is the question well how do you know in the Hat and and be how does how does it work so that that produces a complex consciousness like you or me here if are we saying there's simply like lots of different grades of consciousness and when you get enough of them together they form a human mind or once it all sounds like you know I don't know I'm tempted almost to say if you'll forgive me like what some of those old-fashioned theories about you know phlogiston or vitalism or something that sort of says well we can't quite understand it so we're just going to put this substance in there that kind of explains it and I can imagine that somewhat the materialists say you're you're just sort of coming up with a consciousness of the gaps or something because we can't explain this right although I mean there are aspects of dualism that fall into the same true situation and what you end up and I know you talked about this in your book that how exactly would an immaterial mind impact on a physical brain at some point we have to acknowledge the difference between a scientific theory and a philosophical framework and there will be things in the philosophical frame it you have to land on something that is properly basic that is taken as given and that you build from there and it's just that we agree on slightly different places for that for that to land yeah I mean yeah I mean I think what we what I'm most keen to press is that we need to think of consciousness as a datum in its own right over and above the data of observation and experiment you know what is the job of science we tend to think it's got to account for the data observation experiment job done don't say well there's this other thing we know is real and that has to be accounted for as well so what do we do we just we have to find the simple first account that can bring together both the quantitative properties of matter that science has been doing very well but 400 years and the qualitative reality of consciousness and I think so you asked me why I believe this view because it's the simplest least problematic view anyone has ever come up with in my view so you know dualism is is a cost in terms of simplicity materialism has this huge explanatory gap pun psychism avoids all the all these so that's that's the it I know I guess the my next question is you but I know what consciousness feels like for me in terms of my inner life and experience and so on what does it even mean to say that an electron is conscious because it's got to be something quite different to what I yes so it's not you know this is gonna be some unimaginably simple form of experience that we can't they're not sitting there having existential angst humans have very rich complex consciousness horses less so mice less so you know as we keep going to simple and simpler forms of life maybe at some point this consciousness switches off but it seems equally coherent and a little bit more elegant to think we keep going down simpler and simpler until we get to basic particles or constituents of reality that have just incredibly simple forms of experience ask you just on that how you so one of the things that is kind of fundamental to consciousness is the the unified experience that we have we don't have an experience of light and experience of taste we experience it all together at the same time so if there are kind of millions or billions of billions of local osai of consciousness how do you account for the unification of it yeah well so there are you know no one has a complete theory of consciousness and there are are many challenges in the pan Sarkis worldview and I guess what most of the energy of the pan psychic is research program is focused on is how to think about the relationship between particle level consciousness and systems level consciousness very interesting work by the philosopher Luc Roelofs thinking about exactly the question you've just asked about the unity in relation to split-brain patients you know these people who have the corpus callosum in the center of their brain severed and leads to a kind of peculiar fragmentation of consciousness and that's a sort of inverse of mental combination the pump psyche is trying to make sense of little conscious things making a unified consciousness warring whether light can be shed on this question of upon psychism from this empirical area I mean but what if all else fails so I think there are a lot of interesting proposals but if all else fails one option which adds a little bit of complexity but still not as much as dualism I think is just to postulate basic principles of nature that bridge the gap from particle level to consciousness to systems level consciousness and that their philosopher had Hassan Merck has interpreted the integrated information theory of consciousness by Julian by the trilliant and only leading neuroscientist in these terms so you have the result is you is just a basic principle of nature that you in any system you have consciousness at the level of which there's most integrated information this is a wonderful example of philosophy in neuroscience I mean it strikes me that a lot of scientists are gonna have a problem with this so there are the same reason two of them have a problem with the concept of God which is but I'm not going to be able to put this consciousness stuff under my microscope and examine it well with all the physical attributes of the world at the end of the day consciousness is unobservable you know people say to me how do you test plants that you can't lock in a particle and see whether it's conscious but you can't look inside someone's brain and see then can't and this is another reason why it's not a normal scientific question because the thing we're trying to explain is an essentially unobservable phenomenon so if you I have a pretend doesn't exist and I think or you're gonna have to rethink science a little bit and that's why we lost feet and science together but to recognize where one ends and where the other one begins but just to say that I think that I've heard some argue for dualism on the basis of the split brain studies as well in since that okay for a time that these patients had a confusion in terms of how they were processing visually and verbally but there was still one person there was still one overall consciousness and so they've argued that kind of although their perception of vision and obsession of speech and the way that those were processed was very it did write itself after a while and and so it's both an indication of brain plasticity the ability of the brain to change and adapt itself to these very traumatic surgeries but also that chopping the brain in half doesn't shock the mind of the person in half you know you still have one person and some have used that to argue a dualistic position as well which I've found interesting we're already at the end of part two I'm afraid so we'll we'll take another break and we'll be back for some final thoughts and maybe return to the god question as well and and how whether pan-turkism can be sort of brought into a sort of theistic perspective and and that that ultimate question of I guess what is there something that has to underlie even that kind of explanation of consciousness my guest today on a fascinating edition of the show are Philip Goff and Sharon durricks make sure to go to their websites and get their books I'll make sure that we give you those before the end of the show today as we continue our conversation on does consciousness point to God if you listen to unbelievable Justin brierley on premier Christian radio and enjoy the conversations between Christians and skeptics then this is the perfect app for you for the latest updates with podcasts videos articles bonus content and much more download from unbelieva today [Music] while we're concluding our conversation on consciousness the mind the brain fascinating stuff today with Philip Goff and Sharon Derrick's you want more about Philip and his book Galileo's error Philip Goff philosophy calm that's a Philip with one L and AG off with two F's or you can find him on twitter at philip underscore Goff and for sharon it's the akka o CCA org or at sharon durricks and well you'll just have to work out how to spell a surname it's one of the hardest certain homes in history to spell because I get it wrong every time I type it in but anyway Sharon what what about the the the God question at the center of this which is obviously important in your book Philip obviously feels that Pan psychism gives him a coherent explanation consciousness doesn't particularly require a theistic element to it to explain things what why for you are does the the god question still crop up whichever of these different views apart from materialism we might be looking at yeah well I want to say that as a scientist who loves discovering the nature of matter and you know what we are as human beings I am all in favor of a science of consciousness and that is better than the ones that we currently have and I'm actually whatever emerges in the next few decades none of that is a threat to God if God exists much the same as you know the computer code underlying Facebook is not a threat to the existence of Mark Zuckerberg these are complementary and compatible explanations and so I'm not advocating a consciousness of the gaps I'm not advocating that even if we are positing some sort of immaterial mind that interacts with a material brain that doesn't mean we have to just relegate it all to the realm of magic and mystery but even if scientists and philosophers come up with a water-type framework of a science of consciousness that will still not answer all of the questions that we have about human consciousness it doesn't answer question the question of why there is consciousness that is fundamental in the first place why is there consciousness at the microscopic level and then emerging you know high/low just poses a similar question even if you had a materialist view well why is there a material universe yes exactly and so I still think we have the question that I asked as a ten eleven year old why can I think why does it exist in the first place and you know when scientists start asking questions of purpose they often go to origins they say well where does this come from can we can we trace it back to its beginnings and and of course there are in a sense your your origin is the atomic scale you know it's the atomic level saying that there's consciousness that's fundamental at that level and I I guess I would want to say actually is can we take it back even further and if we're showing that you know the laws of nature alone are not sufficient to explain consciousness maybe the origins of consciousness lie beyond the laws of nature and if God exists does that help us to answer the question of why we are conscious and I guess that's really where I land in my book and that's where I land with my views that if God exists then consciousness exists outside of time and space as the Father Son Holy Spirit the true the Trinity the Godhead who is conscious and that that God has made human beings to be in some senses like him you know it talks about that Genesis talks about humans being made in the image of God and this is where I would kind of slightly counter your argument about simplicity I would say that if God doesn't exist you're your account of simplicity sounds very plausible but if God does exist there's a more simple explanation that God made us like him that and if God exists then it's possible to have a mind without a body even though in the Incarnation in Jesus those two things are integrated and in human beings they are integrated but if God existed is possible to have a mind without a body and so on the lines of simplicity then it would make sense that God made human beings possibly with an immaterial mind also that interacts with their body or they are not necessarily fully committed to that but there is a case for simplicity if God exists yeah I mean you said just about there has mystical associations plan psychism just to start I mean always keen to separate separate out the question of explaining consciousness from religious or spiritual yeah considerations you know most of the people defending hunsaker's and at the moment are complete atheists who just think no there's a phenomenon we know is real and we have to fit it into our worldview somehow although I can maybe see if you independently have spiritual views maybe a pan psychist worldview is slightly more consonant with those than a than a materialist worldly but I don't know I'm not sure I agree that there are reasons pointing to God here being so you say yes it has to come from somewhere I mean but it so the view is that you know human consciousness this very sophisticated thing arises from millions of years of natural selection moulding together incredibly simple forms of experience okay where does it come from in the beginning well I mean that's the old cosmological argument isn't it you know where does the universe come from I don't see why that argument is strengthened if additional question now on top of that is why does it has it take in the direction it takes why does it is it I mean one cannot one might be able to make some kind of naturalistic argument for why evolution produces more increasingly complex yeah creepy it's wrong what what's but why why is it is it the same to say that not that for some inevitable reason we will develop the complex consciousness we have it was there any reason why nature should have taken that particular course because I might be tempted to say it feels like there's something else going on there's a there's a guiding hand if you like that is bringing about that what is it specifically about that the what which aspects of human mentality is the Darwinian account not sufficient to explain I mean it so I understand if you're a materialist you've got evolution making things more complicated and suddenly a miracle happens consciousness appears right but on the pants.i Kasturi simple forms experience natural selection shapes into more complex forms what is it what is it about human mentality that you still have the question of how exactly do more complex forms arise from simpler forms so there's still an emergent question surrounding emergence that there's a question as a I don't see why that points to God though yeah there are difficulties this is not come no one has a complete theory of consciousness there are unresolved questions there are a lot of interesting proposals about how we get from more basic to more complex forms of consciousness but I don't see a worry of a god of the gaps maybe I don't see anything pointing particularly to where I'm coming from is that if God exists it doesn't throw us into confusion about human consciousness actually provides a coherent framework for making sense of it that we are conscious because God is conscious we think because he does he said but we still have to I don't see we still have to explain how consciousness fits into our world and we still presumably want to do that in as intelligible and simpler way as possible I mean just because God existed mean it doesn't mean we give up on our comes razor so yeah so easy so even if God if we once we assume God does exist I don't but I think the simplest explanation then is that we are conscious because God is that that to me is is quite straight forward and and of course it is not contradicting any of the science it's just another layer of understand don't see how that answers the question we still want to know how does consciousness fit into the world I mean realism materialism so you're Occam's razor essentially says how did we don't need the extra layer that that you obviously feel is is somehow necessary to understand where consciousness comes from what what what it's kind of you feel like you're not satisfied with stopping a consciousness in that sense well I have questions as a ten-year-old having not been raised in a religious home that are asking me about myself and my own existence why where do they come from you know and if God exists you can kind of make sense of that as well that we're actually made to ask these kinds of questions and therefore we need to leave them on the table and accept that you know there are certain frameworks which answer those questions better than others and ultimately I mean really where I go is that you know arguably we are conscious we are capable of experience because God is an experience he's not just an experience he's objectively grounded in history and we could talk about historicity and the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus but he's also a person who can be known and experienced and I think that fundamentally if we are made for this kind of relationship and friendship then consciousness is fundamental to that as well mm-hmm obviously not convinced at this point of this Philip I suppose I mean do you feel that you're closer to to a Sharon than a Dennett where where do you sort of see yourself in this oh that's a good question well well if it was the dualism or or the non reductive physicalism I'd definitely be closer to Sharon but it's in terms of explaining and this is why there's the four horsemen you know they are very different views on consciousness you know and you know Dawkins is sort of impressed by the problem Dennard denies the problem sam harris is probably pretty close to me but in terms of the i'm not i suggest I'm not saying why any of this points particularly to God and so maybe in that sense I'm closer than that so Jamie's maybe only the fourth horseman Christopher Hitchens knows the answer to that one yeah look it's been really interesting super interesting actually it's certainly been stimulating my consciousness across the last hour or so so if you wanted to get hold of the books at Galileo's error by Philip Goff or am I just my brain by Sharon durricks and I'll make sure there are links as well from today's show you can find that at premier Christian radio com forward slash unbelievable but for the moment thank you very much Philip and Sharon for a brilliant conversation thank you for more conversations between Christians and skeptics subscribe to the unbelievable podcast and for more updates and bonus content sign up to the unbelievable newsletter you

Channel: Premier Unbelievable?

Views: 48,278

Keywords: unbelievable, justin brierley, premier christian radio, christianity, atheism, philosophy, faith, theology, God, apologetics, Jesus, debate, consciousness, panpsychism, mind, brain, daniel dennett, sharon dirckx, philip goff

Id: Ef2vvT5GfoE

Length: 64min 25sec (3865 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 01 2019