Is the Universe Conscious? - Panpsychism with Philip Goff

once you're in the mindset of thinking that physics gives us a complete story of physical reality then pants psychism is absurd because physics doesn't seem to be telling us that electrons are conscious but once you've really absorbed this V that physical science tells us nothing about the intrinsic nature of matter and that the only thing we know is that some physical entities have been consciousness involving intrinsic nature pulse ICA's and starts to look much more probable that was my guest today the philosopher Philip Goff hi everyone Adrian here welcome back to you waking cosmos a philosophy podcast which takes an open-minded approach to the mystery of consciousness and its place in reality welcome thank you for joining me as I mentioned that my guest today is the philosopher Philip Goff who has recently gained quite a bit of attention for his defence of pan psychism which is a regular topic of conversation on this podcast essentially pan psychism is the claim that consciousness is fundamental to reality and is ultimately irreducible to purely physical processes it's a perspective which has gained that significant new support in recent years in both philosophy and science and so today Philip and I will be exploring the philosophical underpinnings of this view what makes it plausible as well as exploring some of its farthest reaching implications to both cosmology and life on this planet later we'll also be exploring Philips defense of the view that the entire universe has a mysterious kind of mind which seeks towards the realization of value one of the things that I do really like about Philip is his willingness to publicly change his position on things in response to new ideas and as we'll discuss today Philips views about pan psychism continue to evolve and change so I really enjoyed this conversation I hope you do as well just before we begin let me briefly mention that waking cosmos is entirely funded by supporters on patreon it's a series that I would love to create on a full-time basis so if you do enjoy these open-minded yet philosophically focus conversations exploring consciousness and reality please consider going over to patreon.com working cosmos and becoming a patreon subscriber the link to my patreon page is in the description and my most sincere thanks to my existing supporters and France as always remember to hit like give us a nice rating or a good review depending on where you're listening the last thing that I need to mention is that if you are a subscriber on YouTube I encourage you to click the little bell symbol next to the subscribe button which will give you a notification every time a new episode comes out which may otherwise be lost in your feed so hit that notification bell if you're listening on YouTube alright I hope you enjoy today's conversation without further delay I give you the philosopher Philip Goff I feel it paid in good thanks thanks for thanks for having us on it's good to be here good to be speaking with you I've really been looking forward to this conversation I think that the idea is that you're exploring relating to consciousness and and Pan psychism in particular a really interesting and I think you you're raising a lot of awareness around this real possibility that the consciousness could have a deeper place in reality than then scientists and philosophers have typically imagined so I'm looking forward to getting into your views of Philip but I think we should probably just start off today by simply defining what we mean by consciousness as we'll be using this word in our conversation today so what is it that you mean when you say consciousness yeah it's actually quite an ambiguous word it's used in a lot of different ways in la different contexts often I find people use the word consciousness to mean something quite sophisticated like self-awareness or or an awareness of of oneself or one's existence some this is something we might be reluctant to ascribe to certain non-human animals perhaps rabbits but the way I you use the word consciousness in the way it's generally used in philosophy I just mean experience so pleasure pain visual order experiences these for me are all forms of consciousness I mean the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously defined consciousness in this sense with this phrase what it's like to be something so Nagel says something's conscious just in case there's something that it's like to be it so there's something that it's like for a rabbit to be cold or to be kicked or to have a knife stuck in it whereas there's nothing that it's like or so we ordinarily assume for a table to be cold or to be kicked or to have a knife stuck in it there's nothing that it's like from the inside as it were to be a table and so we say that in this sense the rabbit but not the table is conscious so this is this is a a notion of consciousness that's not particularly sophisticated by Organic Standards it's certainly not something we'd be unwilling to ascribe to very very many non-human animals unless you've crossed Descartes who thought rabbits and non-human animals are mechanisms but generally you know we're happy to think they have feelings experiences and that's that's what we mean by consciousness really so of course science as we know has made a lot of amazing progress we've sent probes out into space and you know we've made a lot of discoveries in biology and and even neuroscience and yet for all of the achievements that science has made consciousness the most immediate fact about the universe that we know of is still very much a mystery and arguably even after a century of neuroscience we are no closer to understanding what consciousness is and why it exists so Philip why is it that you think consciousness is this hard problem for science yeah I think the core of the problem it's a complicated debate but I think the core of the problem is that physical science works with a purely quantitative vocabulary whereas consciousness is an essentially qualitative phenomenon just in the sense that it involves qualities you think about the the blueness of a blue experience or the smell of coffee or the taste of salt these conscious experiences are essentially defined by these qualities that they involve and and you just can't capture these kind of qualities in the purely quantitative vocabulary of physical science you can't capture for example in the in the austere vocabulary of neuroscience the blueness of a blue experience and so so long as you're describing the brain or the mind in a purely quantitative vocabulary you're you're inevitably gonna leave out leave out these qualities and leave out an essential aspect of consciousness itself you've mentioned that consciousness is this one thing that we that we know about directly is this one thing that we know for certain that exists about reality and I agree with that but since it's apparently true why do you think it is that we do have philosophers and scientists who do deny the existence of consciousness what do you think leads to this view among some academics that consciousness is just an illusion or that it doesn't really exist yeah it's a good question it's a puzzling view I suppose you know so I mean my starting point is that nothing is more evident as you say nothing is more evident than the reality of feelings and experiences and so we have to fit them in somehow into our overall theory of reality you know if you've got a theory of reality for the physicists talk about the grand unified theory we're aiming for if if we one day have a theory that can account for all of the data or observation and experiment but that can't account for the reality of feelings and experiences then I think that theory cannot be true or at least cannot be complete so you know I I think I think a consciousness as a hard datum in its own right any theory that wants to be a complete theory of reality is obliged to account for the reality of consciousness but as you say there are some very good philosophers Keith Frankish is a good friend of mine and Daniel Dennett although Daniel Dennett's a bit slippery kind of sounds like he means different things at different times say that the very phenomenon doesn't exist what's going on there I suppose I'm inclined to think we're we're going through a phase of history where people are so rightfully you know so blown away by the success of physical science and the wonderful technology it's produced it's transformed our planet but they're so blown away by that that they're inclined to think oh that's everything that must be everything you know we finally found something that works and it you know has that the technology has such a visceral effect on your sort of ontological yearnings and you you want to put all your faith in this method that's been so wonderful and has had such positive progress and positive impacts on society and so if there's something that doesn't fit in there then you think well but that doesn't exist it's it's it's sort of like fairy dust or magic and you know you're so absorbed by that idea that physical science is giving us a complete story of reality that if something doesn't fit into that it can't possibly be real I mean actually I think the irony here in my view and this is I'm exploring him in my new book Galileo's error if I could moment reach look for that the irony here is that I think the reason physical science has been so successful is precisely because it was designed to ignore consciousness it was designed to put consciousness outside of its domain of inquiry and so Galileo that the father of physical science was quite explicit about this can you tell us a bit more about what Galileo's role in science was here yeah absolutely so a key moment in the Scientific Revolution was Galileo's declaration that mathematics was to be the language of the new science that the new science what he called natural philosophy what we now call physical science was to have a purely quantitative vocabulary so this is a key moment but what's often ignored is the philosophical work Galileo had to do to get to that point so before Galileo people thought that the physical world was full of qualities so the colors on the surfaces of objects smells floating through the air tastes in food and this posed a problem for Galileo because as we've discussed it it's hard to see how you can capture those kind of qualities in the purely quantitative vocabulary of mathematics so this was a problem for Galileo's aspiration to exhaustively describe the physical world in mathematics so Galileo got round this by proposing a radically new speculative philosophical theory of reality so according to this theory the qualities aren't really out there in the physical world they're rather in the soul of the observer which crucially Galileo took to be outside of the domain of science so so colors aren't really on the surfaces of objects spicyness isn't really in food rather these things the colors and the spiciness are in the soul of the observer so Galileo as it were stripped the physical world of its qualities and after he'd done that all that were remained in the physical world with the purely quantitative features of matter size shape location these kind of characteristics that can be captured in mathematical geometry so Galileo's worldview has this radical dualism this radical division between the physical world with its quantitative properties which is the domain of science and the soul with its qualities of con which is outside of the domain of science so this is this is the start of mathematical physics which is obviously gone incredibly well but crucially it was never intended to be a complete theory of reality the whole project for Galileo was premise on setting the qualities of consciousness outside of the domain of science so you know so this is really important because I think so many people think you know look at the great successes of physical science in explaining more and more of our universe and producing incredible technology you think that's gone so well one day it's gonna crack the problem of consciousness but the irony is the reason it's gone so well is that it was designed to avoid the problem of consciousness by setting consciousness outside of its domain so you know I think if Galileo were to time-travel to the present day and hear about this problem of explaining consciousness in physical science he'd say you know of course you can't do that I designed physical science to deal with quantities not qualities that's why it's been so successful you're trying to do something with it that it was never intended to do right it's almost like we've forgotten that we partitioned consciousness off from the world this reminds me a bit of the explanatory gap which philosophers sometimes talk about which is that there does seem to be as you mentioned this disconnect between describing qualities and describing quantities and it's often framed in the context of the brain that even with the most sophisticated account of physical brain processes this is never going to add up to or arrive at any kind of qualitative language or a description of the qualities of experience so there is a gap here and we don't know how to traverse it and it seems that Galileo saw this gap and accepted it yeah absolutely so this is this is something that's discussed for a fairly long time now I'm going to think things have changed a lot and progressed a lot if a lot of the 20th century consciousness was just a completely taboo topic that you know you couldn't talk about if you wanted to do proper science you know I know people who couldn't get jobs people our generation older than me because they wanted to do the science of consciousness I mean this all changed I think from the 1990s if figures like David Chalmers with this phrase the hard problem of consciousness that really caught on this phrase that the the explanatory gap that's really caught the imagination and this sense that there is something physical science isn't doing and that's really caught the public imagination that there is this hard problem of consciousness this real serious challenge to science however I think still at this stage many people react to that by saying okay there's it there's this problem there's this serious problem but you know we just need to do more neuroscience we just need to keep plugging away with our standard methods for investigating the brain and we'll crack it you know you hear this in new scientists all the time latest rating so you know I guess what I'm trying to get at I mean it's not it's not that this is original to me it's it's more that I'm trying to you know get across more to the public and a scientific community the philosophical underpinnings of the problem of consciousness and this is you know perhaps best captured with this talk of qualities and quantities that you know this isn't just another another scientific problem this is a problem that is built in to the very scientific revolution the very paradigm of science we've been operating with for the past four or five hundred years and I think this input this is important for another reason I think the fiddly arguments that I spend a lot of my time as the professional philosopher dealing with fiddly arguments and that's good as important but I think that never really persuades people I think what persuades people is the big picture and is a narrative a narrative about that makes sense of how we understand the world and make sense of the success of science and so I think I think what I'm trying to get across is really more of a narrative of explaining the success of science but explaining that in a way that's consistent with taking the problem of consciousness very seriously and indeed taking it so seriously that it it bans rethinking what science is for us right now so let's get further into your particular views about consciousness because you you that consciousness could in fact be a fundamental feature of reality which is of course a form of Pan psychism so could you talk a bit more about this form of Pan psychism that you defend yeah so the particular form I'm attracted to and in fact I mean the reason why punt punt psychism that used to be laughed at for so long in certain so far as it was thought about at all is now getting taken much more seriously in academic philosophy it's largely due to the rediscovery of really really important work from the 1920s by the philosopher and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell and the great scientist Arthur Eddington he was incidentally the first scientist to experimental II confirm general relativity after the first world war but 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 I think it's a tragedy of history that for various historical reasons it got forgotten about but it's in the last 10 or 15 years it's getting rediscovered in in academic philosophy and it's causing a lot of excitement and you know what I'm trying to do really is get this across to a broader audience philosophers are not are not very good at reaching out to a broader audience and generally they just end up talking themselves so I really want to get this view out to a broader audience so that as a scientific community we can start to fill in some of the details so to come to the view itself so Russell and Eddington starting-point really was that physical science tells you a lot less than you think about the nature of matter so I think in the public mind physical sciences on its way to giving us this complete story of the nature of space and time and matter but what Russell and Eddington realized is that it becomes apparent upon reflection that actually physical science is just confined to telling us about the behavior of matter about what matter does so if you think about what physics what does maza physics tell us about an electron physics tells us for example an electron has mass and negative charge what his physics tell us about these properties mass and negative charge mass is characterized in terms of gravitational attraction and resistance to acceleration charge is trapped is characterized in terms of attraction and repulsion so this all concerns the behavior of the electron what it does in fact physics has absolutely nothing to say about what philosophers like to call the the intrinsic nature of the electron how the electron is in and of itself and independently of its external behavior so to in fact it turns out there's this huge gap in our scientific picture of the world physical science tells us a great deal about the behavior of matter but it leaves us completely in the dark about the intrinsic nature of matter and space and time and fields and particles so this is sometimes called the problem of intrinsic nature's so as has got to do a consciousness I think the genius of Russell and Eddington was to bring together two problems that on the face of it have nothing to do with each other on the one hand the problem of consciousness and the other hand the problem of intrinsic nature's and to see that they could be given a unified solution so the problem of consciousness is roughly this challenge of finding a place for consciousness in our scientific theory of the world or scientific world view the problem of intrinsic natures is that we have this huge hole in our scientific worldview so the unified solution is roughly put consciousness in the hole what you're looking for a place for consciousness you've got this hole put consciousness in the hole so the result is as you say a kind of pond psychism but the view is you know this just matter there's just physical stuff the subject matter of physical science indeed nothing supernatural but matter can be described from two perspectives physical science describes matter as it were from the outside it tells us what it does its behavior but from the inside in terms of its intrinsic nature matter is constituted of forms of calm so this is a beautifully simple elegant unified way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview and it does so in a way that unlike dualism arguably is completely consistent with everything we know about the body and the brain scientifically so so you know I think this is a really really powerful and very much motivated worldview right so in this view that you're describing the intrinsic nature of the world to which all of our physics and all of our equations point to is not provided in any way by by physics but we may in fact have some access to it due to the intrinsic nature of our conscious minds and so consciousness in this view is an intrinsic nature could you say a bit more about why consciousness is an intrinsic nature and why it's also a good candidate for being the intrinsic nature of all reality yeah so as you say the view really is there's just physical stuff but there's more to physical stuff than physics tells us about or that physical science tells us about physical science just tells us what it does but tells us nothing about its intrinsic nature how it is in and of itself now you might you might accept that and you might be left with a kind of radical skepticism you might think oh well we just don't know anything about the intrinsic nature of the physical world it's a complete mystery some modern Canton's have this kind of view that you know they agree with this negative thesis that physical science doesn't really tell us what matter is in its intrinsic nature but they just think well we can never know but what Russell added you thought is well actually we do have one insight into the intrinsic nature of matter we know that at least some of matter namely our own brains has a consciousness involving intrinsic nature we know that because of our immediate awareness of our conscious experience our own feelings and experiences and assuming that I mean if you're a duelist then they are features of an immaterial soul but if if we suppose the falsity of dualism then our conscious experience of feelings of experiences are the intrinsic nature of a living functioning brain so actually once you really absorb this starting point of this Russell and Eddington picture it sort of turns the mind-body problem on its head people usually think I know the physical world and the brain is what we really understand the trick is how to fit this mysterious thing consciousness in but actually if Russell Eddington were right the one thing we know who power reality is that some matter namely functioning brains have a consciousness involving intrinsic nature once you've really absorbed this this Russell Eddington starting point I've argued that the most simple elegant speculation is that matter outside of brains has a nature that's continuous with matter inside of brains in also having a consciousness involving nature it's put it another way you'd need a reason to suppose that matter has two kinds of intrinsic nature consciousness intrinsic nature and non consciousness intrinsic nature rather than the more parsimonious proposal that it just has one kind of intrinsic nature but once you're in the mindset of thinking that physics gives us a complete story of physical reality you know then pond psychism is absurd because physics doesn't seem to be telling us that electrons are conscious but once you've really absorbed this view that physical science tells us nothing about the intrinsic nature of matter and that the only thing we know is that some physical entities haven't consciousness involving intrinsic nature pom psychism starts to look much more probable I think fur for pants ike ism to be plausible there doesn't need to be some reason for why we should expect something like consciousness or mentality to exist fundamentally at the ground floor of reality and I think this is why the view that you're defending is is very interesting and attractive because it does seem to frame physics as requiring something very much like consciousness there's this sort of outer objective description of the world which science provides very well but that description arguably also implies a grounding interior dimension of that reality what it is in itself and consciousness is not only the only intrinsic nature that we know of but it also seems to be exactly the sort of thing that we need to fill this gap yeah absolutely I guess there are two reasons to postulate consciousness of this fundamental level I mean one is the hope ultimately of giving an explanation an account of human and animal consciousness right we've we've tried for decades now to explain consciousness in terms of non consciousness and we've got precisely nowhere I mean neuroscience has provided lots of extraordinary data that a science of consciousness needs to take seriously but on that central question of trying to solve our problem of trying to explain why consciousness exists at all materialism I think is got precisely nowhere so this is proposing an alternative research program rather than try and explain consciousness in terms of non consciousness we try to explain complex forms of consciousness the consciousness of humans and animals in terms of simpler forms of consciousness simple forms of consciousness that are then postulated to exist as basic constituents of matter and you know in fact there's plenty of precedent in science for non reductive explanations if we think for example Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism Maxwell in the 19th century he didn't explain electricity and magnetism in terms of mechanistic properties and laws that science has already committed to rather he postulated new electromagnetic properties and forces and explained electromagnetism on that basis so the hope of the pants I kissed you know and it's early days in any theory of consciousness but the open upon psychist is that when the theory of cut final of consciousness eventually comes along the thought is it won't explain consciousness in terms of non consciousness I think it's a prejudice of materialist I suppose that's what we have to do it will rather explain complex forms of consciousness in terms of simpler forms of consciousness simple forms of consciousness which are then taken as basic so that that's one important reason the other is as you've already alluded to actually physical science doesn't gave us a complete account even of inanimate matter even of electrons you know even forgetting consciousness for the moment it doesn't give us a complete account of what a quark is it tells us what a quark does it doesn't tell us what it is and pants.i ghosts have a positive proposal as to at least in broad brushstrokes the intrinsic nature of basic matter one that is is continuous with the only thing we really know about the intrinsic nature of matter which is that some of it involves consciousness so if this species of pan psychic ism that you're describing is it's correct consciousness would be the intrinsic nature of matter so we have a real physical world as you described but in a way it's made of consciousness and Arthur Eddington I believe once said that the the stuff of the world is mind stuff so I mean as far as I can tell this view is not that far from idealism so for you what would you say is the distinction here between pan psychism and idealism at this level I would say there that they are overlapping views on psychism an idealist absolutely imagine a kind of Venn diagram there is an overlapping bit where there are views that are both pan psychism and idealism but there are also views that are pan psychist and non idealist and views that are idealist and not pan psychist so that the pan psychist thinks that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature reality but they might think there are also non mental aspects to basic matter so they might think you know quarks have very basic mental properties they might also have non-mental properties and then that wouldn't be a form of idealism because the idealist thinks that the basic fundamental nature reality is purely mental upon psychist might think that and then they'd be an idealist of a kind but they might they might deny that it's not true by definition that a pan psychist is an idealist conversely you have forms of idealism like Berkeley and idealism the view of George Berkeley the great 18th century idealist where the physical world is not fundamental so for Berkeley a table a physical table is a collection of ideas either in our mind or in the mind of God a lot of people interpret that as meaning oh well the physical world doesn't really exist but actually Berkeley would question that he thinks the physical world exists but it's not fundamental if the physical world is a construction out of human minds so I think that's inconsistent with pun psychism because the pan psychist thinks the physical world is fundamental they believe in the hard physical world out there they just think it's it involves consciousness it's it's can be formed by idealism but it's quite in some ways quite close to materialism both the materialist and the pan psychist think you know I'm looking at a table in front of me not right now the table is really out there you know outside of my perception of it the Berkeley would disagree with that Berkeley would think no no that the table is just exists in my mind whereas the the pan Saiga's materialist think the table is really out there independently of my mind it's just that it's made up of little conscious things so yeah so that they're importantly related views but there are also ways in which they can come apart Philip how do you respond to people who just recoil at the weirdness of pan-turkism it's it seems to have this slightly hippie new-age vibe about it yeah yeah so a lot of people it is getting taken much more seriously but very much an academic philosophy and also to an extent in neuroscience because of the interest in Giulio Tononi integrated information theory which psychist implications but there are still some people who just can't stand bees kind of as you say hippie connotations in scare quotes my view is look we should judge of you not by its cultural connotations but by its explanatory power and what plants like ISM offers is a way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview in a way that's completely consistent with everything we know scientifically that's a huge theoretical plus and and to my mind they get the idea that it always feels a bit weird doesn't doesn't really count for much i understanded to think much more actually terms like new-age are sort of a term of abuse maybe a little bit of kin to racist terms that they you know they capture a range of views in terms of their content but they also have this implication that you know you sort of fluffy minded and not really thought it through seriously and so we can just dismiss them quite quickly and of course you know you know I'm sure there there is a lot of such views that are defended not non rigorously you know as there are in materialist views as well but there are also there's no reason why you can't defend these kind of views with with with academic seriousness and with scientific and philosophical rigor so you know I really think that there is another saying there's a deliberate conspiracy here but there is perhaps partly in reaction to that you know certain movements in the 60s there is a a kind of way in which this these terms are loaded to allow us to dismiss and ignore certain views yeah maybe I could just take a moment to connect this panel I kissed a view of reality that you're talking about with the the larger story that science gives us about ourselves in the universe because I'll give me that the progress of science has continually challenged any sense of our significance or our centrality in the universe and you know we now know that we're not really the center of anything we're not fundamentally different to animals and you know we zoom out and and all we appear to have a very peripheral place in reality as Stephen Hawking described us as a chemical scum smeared across the surface of the planet but the view that you and other pan scientists are describing I think kind of goes against that narrative in a way because if consciousness is not an illusion and our minds are in fact continuous with realities evolving mental aspects not so much in our identity as humans maybe but as our identity as conscious beings we do reflect a very deep and significant part of reality and we really are the universe becoming aware and experiencing itself and as far as I can tell that really changes things and our maybe our orientation to the rest of the universe yeah I mean so I think when we're doing science oh we're doing philosophy we we should certainly be thinking about not which view we'd like to be true but which view is most likely to be true and I think that there is a a very good case for Pan psychism as the best the best account of how consciousness fits into our scientific worldview nonetheless it's also interesting to think about the implications of a view for the meaning of human existence and human happiness my new book you know the most of it the first four chapters are dealing with this reality question what view is most likely to be true and building a scientific and philosophical case for Pan psychism but in the final chapter I get on thing all what implications if any does does this view have for human meaning in human existence and I am inclined to think that pun psychism as well as being probably true is is slightly better for our mental and spiritual health you know materialism it is a pretty dismal worldview you know you've got an essentially mechanistic picture of nature and you know then you've got the cold immensity of empty space you know it's it's it's pretty bleak whereas in a pond psychics worldview this is that this is a we are conscious creatures in a conscious universe this is a universe we fit into a universe where we can perhaps feel a little bit more comfortable in our own skin so I think this is in somewhere a little bit more attractive picture of reality also I think perhaps it can allow for a better relationship to the environment you know the turret we're going through terrible environmental crisis right now if you're a materialist and you think plants and trees are our mechanisms essentially on non conscious mechanisms then really you're gonna think of the value of plants and trees indirectly in terms of the effect it has on our conscious creatures you know either looking pretty or or more importantly sustaining our existence but if you're a pond cyclist and if you think plants and trees are conscious then then a tree is is a locus of moral importance in its own right chopping down a tree is is an active immediate moral significance so this is transformative of of our relationship with nature and encourages a very different relationship I think with the natural world yeah and you contrasted pan psychism with a mechanistic view of reality and I think pan psychism importantly is also a more organismic view of the universe if if consciousness plays a deep role in reality that's alive to me I'm pretty happy with that definition and so for me the idea of an organism is a much more resonant metaphor for the universe than a machine I don't know if you agree with that but do you think pan-slavism is in a sense a kind of return to a more enchanted scientific animism yeah I mean I think these are just to an extent as a thinkI degree metaphors or analogies ways of ways of thinking of of nature or reality rather than actually the bare bones of the view itself but yeah you're perhaps right that that thinking into inorganic terms of of the universe more generally is perhaps more apt metaphor and one that is slightly more consonant with with human happiness happiness we said not all pants cyclists will think the universe itself is conscious contrary to to the definition of the word pants psychism meaning everything has mind actually Matt medica temporary pants I guess don't think that literally everything is conscious the view is that the basic constituents our physical reality pups electrons and quarks have some form of very basic consciousness and and of course that humans and many animals and many organisms are conscious but they a lot of parts I guess won't think they're just any combination of atoms is conscious then even thinks arrowrock is conscious if there's no kind of natural unity there and they needn't think that the universe as a whole is conscious although it's you know it's not too much of an addition to basic pants acres for you to take the universe to be some kind of conscious entity and then maybe theoretical advantages to doing so but that would be a you know further step right so you've hinted at your view of cosmos psychism so your your pan psychism has ultimately led you to what you've called cosmos psychism and this is a view in which the entire universe is associated with a single consciousness of some description can you take us through how you move from the more traditional Russell II and pan psychism to Cosmo psychism and this cosmic mind that you've talked about yeah so this is a view I I defend in my book it's not necessarily the view I think I think it's early days in a theory of consciousness and I'm very much open to exploring many different options and in my new book actually I'm I'm becoming less attracted to the the cosmos I kiss view it's partly influenced by very interesting work by the philosopher Jonathan Schafer a philosopher at Rutgers University who's not a pun psychist at all who's very much a mainstream meta physician but he's been exploring for the past 15 years so and rigorously defending a view he calls priority so perhaps the way into that is to think that philosophers and scientists tend to assume that fundamental things are at the micro level you know it's a sort of Lego brick picture of reality you know you've got these little particles you stick them together and you get big things your little things put them together get big things but on Jonathon Shaffers priority monist view this is sort of turned on its head and actually the one fundamental thing is the universe as a whole and everything else exists and is the way it is because it is a part of the universe so is it you think of it turning to the Lego analogy you know we if you have a Lego tower we tend to think the tower is built up from the bricks the tower exists and is the way it is because the bricks exist and are located arranged as they are but shaffer would have it the other way around you think so no it's the tower that's the primary thing and the bricks exist and they're located as they are because the tower exists and is the way it is so he thinks you know parts exist in virtue of holes rather than the other way around and he's argued in great detail that this actually you know fits a lot better with contemporary science for example fits better with quantum entanglement one of the most well confirmed phenomena in in in modern science so this is the you know I want to get into too many details but roughly the phenomenon according to which particles at great distances from each other so distance from each other that there'd be no time for a signal to pass between them nonetheless behave as a kind of unity now if you're in a kind of bottom-up micro based picture of the world it's hard to make sense of this how are these particles behaving as a unified whole but if actually you think the pair of particles that's the fundamental thing that the unity of the pair of the particles that is primary then quantum entanglement MITM it makes a lot of sense there could be properties of that pair that pair of particles that are not reducible to the the two particles in isolation so so this is a picture the world this kind of top-down picture the world universe first picture the world that you know many ways fits better with bong science you combine that with pan psychism then you get a form of cosmo psychism that it's the universe as a whole the conscious universe as a whole that is the one fundamental thing it's interesting that we have made this seemingly unexamined assumption about reality that smaller things are more fundamental and bigger things but yeah as you point out this is not necessarily the case and actually seems quite natural to see the universe itself as as the most fundamental reality so I just want to bring in here because traditionally there is this famous combination problem that people raised upon psychism which we haven't touched on yet but maybe you could describe the the combination problem for people that might be new to it and in particular how you see cosmo psychism responding to it yeah so this is the combination problem is broadly accepted as the most serious challenge to the pan psychist research program and indeed much of the time and energy of the contemporary pan type and psychics research program is spent trying to address this problem so roughly it's a problem of how do you get from facts about particle consciousness to facts about human and animal consciousness yeah it's all over it's all very well postulating that little things at the micro level have some kind of experience but what we ultimately want to explain are our pre theoretical starting point is our consciousness or the consciousness of other organisms and you know if we can't get from the particles of consciousness facts to the human or animal consciousness facts then we haven't got very far so this is very a very serious problem I mean just to give the intuitive flavor of it we can make sense of inorganic parts or organic parts making holes parts of a car engine making up a functioning car engine parts of the body making the organism but the idea of lots of little minds coming together to make a big mind to many this feels puzzling or just even unintelligible so it's a serious problem but there's already some really interesting proposals for example Luke Roloffs who's a research fellow University of Baulkham it's about to star to NYU actually got a very interesting recent book called combining minds with Oxford University Press part of what he's doing there is is reflecting on split brain cases so these are and show you know cases where people have the the corpus callosum in the middle of their brain severed it's a very radical treatment for epilepsy and this results in a in a very peculiar fragmentation of consciousness it ends up looking like these these patients have two conscious minds in one brain so in a way split brain cases are the sort of reverse of mental combination you know with with a split brain case you've got one subject fragmenting into multiple subjects where as a mental combination the hope is that you get multiple conscious subjects coming together to constitute one so the Roloffs thought is you know if we can kind of understand what's going on in split brain cases and and as it were reverse engineer that then that might help us get more of a grip of mental combination it also seems to give us reason to think that there is mental combination because it looks in the spirit brain cases that something to do with having the cause corpus callosum intact makes the difference between having multiple subjects and having a single subject and also an another option for solving the combination problem is just to postulate basic principles of nature linking the facts of our particles to the facts about human and animal biological consciousness this is sometimes called emergentist and psychism and one of the leading proponents of this is had a hassle Merc who's currently at University of Oslo and she's actually developing a very interesting form of emergentist pan psychic is in the context of Giulio Tononi 'he's integrated information theory which is one of the leading most promising neuro scientific theories of consciousness also defended by Christophe Kok who's got a book coming out on pon psychism towards the end of the summer Azure in the fall as well so you know really see this this pun psychism is really taking off both in philosophy and then in neuroscience but so according to integrated information theory the idea is that consciousness is correlated with maximal integrated information which is a notion to known he gives a mathematically precise conception of so the head hassle Newark spent a year at two Nonis lab a great interaction between you know science and philosophy working out a pun psychist and emergentist pun psychist interpretation of of integrated information theory or IITs nothing called and so the resulting fairy theory is roughly that you just have a basic principle of nature that consciousness exists at the level at which you have most integrated information so I think this is you know really the closest I've got I mean I don't actually I've got all the problems with this view in many details but it's you know this is the closest we've got to a complete theory of consciousness I think I mean another problem is you know people think neuroscience gives us a theory of consciousness but actually you know all we get from neuroscience are correlations you know you can look inside someone's brain and ask them how they're feeling what they're experiencing and we we can get a rich body of a wonderful rich body of correlations between consciousness and neuro neuro physiological states of the brain that's all really great but that's not a science of consciousness what we then need is a theory to explain those correlations why is it that when you have such and such activity in the brain you have such and such a state of consciousness and you know the idea that we can just get that purely from euro science is sort of a non-starter I think we need to be doing the kind of stuff at a hassle Newark is doing brain together a neuroscientific theory like iit with a worked out philosophical explanation so yes at the combination the combination problem is you know how to get from the consciousness of little things to the consciousness of bigger things like human or animal brains but of course if you're a Cosmo psychist that's not the way it works at all because the for the cousin of psychist parts are grounded in holes rather than the other way around so for the cosmos I casino we start off with the whole universe we start off with unity the challenge is how to get fragmentation from unity unity looks to be a particular important feature of human consciousness human consciousness seems to be deeply unified in a way that it seems hard to see how you could get that from isolated particles interacting in certain complicated ways but if you're a Cosmo psychist you start off with unity you start off with the unity of the whole conscious universe and parts of the universe that exists as aspects of that unity so the thing perhaps more of a story you could get there as to how how we get from unity to fragmentation seems a little bit more intelligible than how we get from fragmentation to unity although there are there are difficulties in either case so it's I don't think it's a knockdown argument the Cosmo psychist faces their own version of the combination problem it's sometimes called the D combination problem you know the conventional pants I guess does how do we get from conscious particles to brains the Cosmo psychist has the problem how do we get from conscious universe to brain so there there are difficulties in either case but you might think the cosmos ICA's view has certain advantages I want to bring in cosmology into our conversation and specifically the apparent fine-tuning mystery that you've also discussed elsewhere and so fine-tuning for people who don't know is something that has come to light in modern cosmology and is that the universe appears to be very finely tuned for life and that there are a number of values which if they were just very slightly slightly different in in some cases just a fraction of the son no life could have existed anywhere in the universe at all and so it seems that a life friendly universe occurring by chance is actually trillions to one and so how do we explain this and some thinkers take this to be evidence of a multiverse and some take this to be evidence of a God but Philip you've suggested that what fine-tuning could be an indication of is that the universe actually requires conscious life to emerge and specifically that this connects to the value which conscious life is bringing into the universe so can you take us through this what does it mean to say that value in some sense shapes the universe yes so this is somewhat of an experimental even by my standards with somewhat of an experimental paper it's not necessarily a view I ultimately support in fact I'm actually coming back to be more inclined towards a version of the multiverse theory I was just talking about this in Germany last week because many of the concerns I had with the multiverse theory were framed in terms of that the most popular version that's wheeled in to deal with fine-tuning namely the that those based in inflationary cosmology but I've actually come to see that there's another version of the multiverse theory rooted in Everette II in many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics that avoids many problems I had so I'm currently working on a paper on that with al Wilson who's a philosopher of physics and Birmingham but but you know I still I think it's important to the fine-tuning is such a puzzling phenomenon that I really think it's important to try out different views in a you know in a spirit of humility and open-mindedness so the view I was exploring in this paper was to see if they're a form of cosmos psychism could perhaps help us deal with fine-tuning I think the crucial modification you have to make to the view is you have to suppose as you've already alluded to that the that the universe in some sense responds to value is it perhaps in some sense promoting the good you know we we tend to assume you know most even most pan psychist tend to seem that the universe is just driven by kind of brute causal forces like gravity you know and it's just there's no rhyme or reason to it it's just one event after another in accordance with mathematical laws of nature but as the great Scottish philosopher David Hume observed a few centuries ago we can't actually directly perceive the inner workings of causation all we can observe are one event following another what Hume called constant conjunction and then we can speculate about the underlying causal workings so I suggest in this article it's it's consistent with observation to suppose that actually the universe is acting in a way that's in some sense is responsive to value in some sense it's promoting the good now you might think at first this is obviously ridiculous because if the universe was promoting the good then presumably I think things would be a lot better than they in fact ah you know you think the universe would be teeming with intelligent life and there wouldn't be famines and disease and earthquakes and so on this is similar to the problem of evil and suffering for classical fears and classical traditional belief in God so the viewer is considering was that that the universe is an entity that's trying to promote the good or responding to value but it's constrained by very limited causal capacities not in the sense that there's something outside of it that's constraining it but just in the sense that it's its causal capacities are quite limited so classical theism traditional belief in God assumes that God is all-powerful can do anything but I don't think we need to think that a cosmic subject is all-powerful in fact so on this view I take on this view the the laws of physics to actually describe the limitations of the of the causal powers of the universe right so the universe is trying to promote the good but under quite constrained causal capacities you might concede okay maybe this is in some sense consistent with observation but why on earth should we take it to be true well here the thought is that it provides an explanation of the fine-tuning so the the speculative thought would be that in the Planck epoch which is the first split-second of the universe when our kind of current models break down the universe was able to shape the constants that would govern it thereafter and managed to do so in a way that was consistent with the possibility of things of great value like intelligent life and people falling in love and writing poetry you know with many most of the other valley values of these constants you just have a world with just hydrogen the simplest element and no chemical complexity very little or no value at all so this is hugely speculative but to be honest all of our current accounts of fine-tuning are hugely speculative and have deep deep problems and so you know I think it's worth just exploring different different possibilities I think if we do take consciousness seriously as something that we do have various reasons to consider could be a fundamental ingredient of reality then like you said it is a natural step to consider that it plays some role in the universe and I think a very natural role for consciousness to play is in the realization of value so to clarify you're saying that the universe in in having conscious beings has greater value and that this is in fact mysteriously connected to its ability to exist and certainly Alfred North Whitehead said something like this I think he said that existence itself is an expression of value intensity or something along those lines so you're in good company they're relating to this sort of issue of the problem of evil I don't know if it is or even just that the universe could have a lot more value than it does I don't know if this is necessarily true but I think that there is a defensible argument that there is a lot more suffering or negative experiences going on in the world than positive ones especially when you consider the natural world and the sort of endless cycles of predation that animals are going through with each other and so I think it's defensible at least that right now the there more negative experiences or negative value in consciousness in general than positive experiences all in all so you know it perhaps in in terms of the universe being sensitive to the value of future states of itself perhaps it's more like we're at the beginning of a very long journey perhaps billions of years during which the universe actually explores its full mental potential I don't know if you're familiar with the physicist Paul Davies but he's argued and in sort of a similar way that we should consider the possibility and perhaps even the high likelihood that the ongoing development of life and consciousness through that the universe is entered eventually going to achieve a kind of self-realized state and so it perhaps in which all of the matter and the energy available has been optimized for this consciousness so what do you think about that could the ultimate value of this state be what the universe is teleologically driven towards yeah that's really interesting so I mean in these papers I've written they are simply you know cold blooded scientific stroke philosophy Lusaka chol attempts to explain an observable phenomenon you know I don't I don't call it God I don't discuss the spiritual significance and you know I mean and one could just might be inclined to take that very seriously without thinking that it has any kind of bearing on the significance of their lives so I think I think it's important to sharply distinguish these things you know the scientific questions from the the spiritual or the meaning questions and certainly the view doesn't imply I don't or I don't see why it would imply the kind of things you're getting at it you know it could be that the universe is so constrained that it's just not going to be able to get much all it was able to do is create a kind of universe in which you'd eventually evolve intelligent life but this is pretty much the end of it sadly everything's gonna die out and we'll have heat death and you know the universe that it's best I you know I think we can't rule out that possibility which is terribly terribly sad however I think you know the religious impulse in my you or the spiritual impulse if you prefer should be thought I was more about hope rather than belief you know people think about spirituality religion is about belief but I think it's much more about hope and I think you know we naturally hope that there's a purpose to existence and I think that can be rational even if even if you don't have enough evidence to believe that there's a purpose to the universe you know to take an analogy if you're just thinking about evidence to believe I think we all really ought to think that human beings are not gonna deal with climate change because it just doesn't look like we're we're up to the task but nonetheless it can still be rational to hope to hope that we'll deal with it and to and to live that hope more importantly similarly even if there's not evidence to believe the things you were just outlining that maybe there is I'd be interesting if you think there is but even if there isn't it might still be rational to hope I think you know individuals and communities a happier I believe when you know you hope there's a greater purpose to it all and you you conceive of what you're doing and your contribution to society in the world in terms of that that great I hope I think you know we're seeing the rise of nationalism at the moment and I think our current intellectual worldview tells us you know that there is no purpose to at all and I think people think it's irrational to think any different I think people are really craving some sort of of hope that can give meaning to their lives and yeah I think this this could be one way of making sense of it it's not something either explicitly worked out myself you know I've just dealt with these things in a sort of cold-blooded scientific stroke philosophical manner but yeah it certainly is something I'd like to explore in later work thinking more about these questions as the meaning of existence which is so important I think right and I don't disagree with any of that actually and I really was sort of simply getting at that perhaps there is a fully realized state of the universe and that is in fact the the attractor or the value state to which the universe is primordial II sensitive to yeah yeah actually reminded me when I wrote Excel wrote an academic and a popular version of of this article on fine tuning in Cosmo psychism and I got she got an email from Justin Gowri who's a pretty good at really good amateur philosopher who showed me a blog post from 2008 where he basically defended pretty much the same view so he beat me to it and he's also got a lot of other interesting posts on this giving us a sense of hope and this informing our political consciousness that this this kind of teleological hope again even if we don't have reason to believe it we might have it might be Russian acceptable to hope for it and that can really inspire perhaps some some forms of political action so you know I think this is really interesting possibilities here that again as us often dismissed as kind of hippy or something and I do suspect us to some extent that's a mechanism for you know closing down certain interesting lines of intellectual inquiry fair enough I just wanted to raise in because I feel and not that I'm particularly qualified to make this claim but I still personally feel quite skeptical about the multiverse theory and you want a quite interesting and maybe slightly obscure criticism of the multiverse theory that relates to your work but I've heard of is that you know it could entail that there are more Boltzmann brains than classically evolved Minds like ours and so you know Boltzmann's brain for people who don't know is a complicated and intelligent mind which spontaneously emerges out of the the randomness of entropy and so in the enormity of the multiverse of these trillions of the universes the contention is is that there would actually be many many more of these kinds of bizarre spontaneous Minds than there would be minds which evolve in in the classical way like we do and so this apparent absurdity is thought to count against the plausibility of the multiverse it's not maybe a knockdown argument but it's quite interesting do you still feel that this is a valid criticism towards the more retty and multiverse view that you're becoming more sympathetic with yeah absolutely I think I think this is certainly an important criticism of inflationary forms of the multiverse based in inflationary cosmology and actually also what I've been working on is a certain philosophical criticism of the multiverse hypothesis which is inspired by a paper by the philosopher Roger white in the year 2000 and actually we really see here a failure of the philosophy and a science to connect up there's this kind of really important arguments that's just completely unknown outside of the ivory tower of philosophy in these scientific and popular discussions of fine-tuning and you know I blame the philosophers to this you know they write papers in these incredibly technical Bayesian probability theory and they don't make any effort to reach out to a broader audience so what I'm doing with this new paper on them fine tuning in the multiverse hypothesis I'm gonna write an academic version and a popular version to you know try and get get to get these points out to the broader discussion so she just put it briefly White's argument is that he thinks the proponents of the multiverse hypothesis at least if they're trying to explain fine-tuning are committing what he calls the inverted gamblers fallacy so this is the fallacy of observing an extraordinary event and then inferring on that basis that there must be very many similar events that are slightly less extraordinary so to give a a vivid example suppose you you go into a room in a building and you see a monkey with a typewriter and it's banging away writing your perfect English you think that's weird that needs explaining you know maybe maybe think that the typewriter is rigged or maybe it's a specially trained monkey but what you're not gonna think or what you shouldn't think at least is oh there must be many other monkeys with typewriters in these other rooms in this building because if there just writing rubbish because if there are enough other type right the monkeys have typewriters then it's not so unlikely that this monkey would be writing English now the reason so that if you did that that would be committing the inverted gamblers fallacy and the reason that's a fallacy is because you know what you need explaining the only thing you've observed the only thing you need explaining is why this monkey in front of you is typing English and no matter how many other monkeys there are elsewhere it doesn't make it any more likely that this monkeys gonna be typing English so similarly white thinks the proponent of the multiverse hypothesis is make is committing a similar fallacy so they observe the fine-tuning say oh wow this is extraordinary and so they postulate all these other universes but no matter how many other universes there are out there it doesn't it doesn't explain why our universe is fine-tuned and that's that's what we need explaining now so a lot of people bring in here the anthropic principle or the observation selection effect but white you know explains how that's not really relevant to this particular point now I talked about this on my video on did the universe design itself a talk I gave at Blackfriars at Oxford a few years ago so I think this is a really good a really good criticism of inflationary cosmology multiverse in terms of its ability to account for the multiverse hypothesis and the Boltzmann brain you raises it is another good another important critique but I've just become persuaded that actually it's not clear that either these problems apply to the Everette Ian version of the multiverse so so that's made me kind of think again about maybe maybe the multiverse can be saved by going the Everette en route rather than this this inflationary route yeah fair enough so you have mentioned that you know conscious beings contribute to the value of the universe or they are sensitive to value is it also the case do you think that consciousness with this dimension of value which is kind of a part of it also implies a kind of moral reality perhaps not a transcendent source of morality but for example a morality based around realizing value in consciousness and the various strategies that we can discover that facilitate that there's pan psychism do you think or at least a recognition of the significance of consciousness takers in some sense up the first rung of a ladder towards a sort of scientific morality of some description that's a really interesting question in fact there's there's a lot of interesting work emerging in philosophy at the moment trying to connect up consciousness and value philosopher Uriah Kriegel severe eating work on this in Luke roll-off so I mentioned earlier in the context of the combination problem is as a as a theory of of how morality emerges from our own need to understand other conscious subjects he thinks you know you can't really fully understand another conscious subject unless you as it were put yourself in their shoes you know you get into their perspective and this necessarily involves a certain kind of moral engagement and so this is where he thinks morality emerges from I'm actually I might disappoint you a little bit here I guess I'm a little bit not not so much on board with that project that as it were a reductive project trying to explain value in terms of consciousness i I guess I'm sympathetic to David Humes thought that you can't get from an is to an or to you can't get from cold-blooded facts about reality to facts about value and it would seem to me if you trying to do that when you go from just the facts about consciousness to facts about Valley you're trying to get from this to a nought however certainly I think whatever the ultimate root of value is certainly consciousness is a great source of value consciousness value goes along with consciousness and the pan psychist picture of the world is a world where the with much more inherent value I think you know if in the materialist worldview where most of reality is cold on experiencing matter this is really empty of value although it can have great complexity Splendor doesn't really have it seems to me any inherent value unless there's somebody there to observe it somebody there to experience that that majesty and that's blunder whereas the pun Saiga's views our world is teeming with consciousness and in that sense is teeming with value I think so this is all part of it being a much more attractive conception of reality although again we need to be careful we shouldn't think it's true just because it's a nice theory reality but you know it's it's good if we've got reason to think it's true and it also is a very attractive picture of the world we live in it seems to me that a universe in which consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality this is a view of the universe in which Minds could be meaningfully connected with each other in ways there may be a materialist view of minds can't explain very well but such connections might actually be viewed as very natural in the context of a more holistic understanding of reality that involves consciousness in some deep way and of course I'm thinking of phenomena like telepathy maybe even synchronicity and I don't mean to push this only because I know this isn't really your area just because it has been to my idiosyncratic experience maybe with my mentors at Northampton and later ions that I have spent quite a lot of time around some serious scientists who are convinced that telepathy and other SCI phenomena of various descriptions do occur and with some pretty strong statistical confidence - to back that up and really the only reason that I'm aware of that why this work is marginalized in the way that it is is not due to its quality necessarily but because it can't be reconciled with materialism or a strictly brain-based view of the mind and so I just wonder if you've given much thought to these kinds of mental anomalies which are seemingly at least more consistent with the view of reality that you're putting out there yeah it's very interesting I mean it to be honest it's I guess it's not something I've really looked into it's probably something I should at some point and focus more on the sort of philosophical task of accommodating consciousness and I suppose I in a way I see my what I'm trying to do is try and be neutral on on the empirical scientific questions to try and have a general philosophical theory that could be connected to any kind of scientific empirical data that comes up so there is that urge to try and stay neutral on such things but one thing I would say is it's not obvious to me what you said it's inconsistent with materialism it's obvious to me actually why telepathy is inconsistent materialism I mean as we've already discussed that you know quantum entanglement is one of the most well confirmed phenomena in in modern science which seems to involve distinct objects behaving in some sense as a unified whole you know people accept that as part of the materialist world view so yeah why do you think it I'm not sure it would be so maybe it's just kind of brute 19th century picture of science that that makes people think telepathy doesn't there but yeah what why do you think it's inconsistent with material difficult for a materialist to make sense of telepathy I think it's it's it's more tricky to explain with materialism I certainly wouldn't say it was impossible I don't have a ready theory for how sort of information can say they coexist in two different Minds at once but it just seemed to me that a view of reality in which consciousness is fundamental in which consciousness is in some sense continuous with the same currency of reality that could exist elsewhere that there is this continuity between consciousness that exists which is it may be more easy to explain with more pants I Kissed view of consciousness but you know as you say I don't think it's necessarily impossible to explain with materialism but just that it is seemingly more favorable to a pantheist view that's interesting you got me thinking about I need to think about this more but I'm just thinking yeah you could be a materialist who thinks well we got these brains to it's kind of correlated maybe not quantum entanglement but some kind of related phenomenon which is that there's just some kind of non-local connection between brain States and this facilitates certain kind of telepathic results yeah I did that would seem to me no more a problem for materialists that upon psychist I'll have to think about it though it's interesting say in telepathy assuming that telepathy is real and I am agnostic about the existence of telepathy although I do think that this appears to be some good evidence that it occurs it seems to take place between people who have other kinds of connections between them like a kind of a meaningful connection between people who are in a relationship or between siblings or twins and that it seems to be indicative to me that we occupy more of a matrix of meaning rather than strictly a sort of a nuts-and-bolts reality which is insensitive to consciousness and the meanings that exist between people you know telepathy it seems to be an expression of meaning the when telepathy occurs assuming that it does occur it seems to be an exercise of meaning a bit like how you see a spark moving from two conductive points of metal maybe meaning is in some sense operating in the same way in reality no that's good but so yeah actually that makes more sense of why it would be harder to fit with materialism so I was just thinking about the non-local bit thinking what why can't a materialist think there's a non-local connection in fact materialists do think there are non-local connections because they believe in quantum entanglement and so I don't see but but now you actually what you say makes sense because that it so if telepathy is more about yeah that the meaning of human connections and it's sort of reflection of that then yeah that would be inconsistent with a materialist mechanism so that's introduced I suppose if if a materialist wanted to accommodate telepathy they'd have to give some reductive story that it's about you know it's actually more to do with the proximity of people are kind of non-local connection builds up rather than any of these things to do with meaning but hey there's a paper there is telepathy inconsistent materialism or is it fit better yeah the last thing that I wanted to get your thoughts about Phillip today is experiences of the transpersonal you've mentioned before at some point elsewhere that you you do believe in a transcendent reality or and that this is also a transcendent reality that we can have a relationship with so during a mystical experience of some kind perhaps some experiences are very profound oneness with all reality how do you think about what's going on there is this maybe a direct experience of the reality of cosmos psychism how do you think about this I guess it's to do with value really and relates to what we're saying about is is the noughts just as I think that you can't explain consciousness in conventional scientific terms I similarly I don't think you can explain value in in conventional scientific terms and nonetheless I think we encounter a value in in lived human experience it says maybe not as it's not as certain as as the reality of consciousness you know the reality of your own pain is is pretty hard to deny but you know it could be it could be that our sense of value is some kind of illusion or projection of our sentiment as Hume said we get we might guild that guild and stay in the world with our sentiment lovely phrase so you know you gotta acknowledge that as a possibility more so than in the case of consciousness being illusion but still I'm inclined to maybe it's partly a leap of faith partly trust my sense that there is objective value and given that the facts of natural science are value less Valley must in some sense of its source beyond the world as we know about it through science yeah and I suppose that that would be the core of my spirituality is that's what I would call the this transcendent source of meaning and value and I suppose I think you know I try to in some sense orientate myself relate to that but how does it relate to punt psychism I guess a common-sense assumption is throughout history people have had these kind of experiences you refer to this sense of a wondrous reality and that in some sense reveals a kind of a oneness and a unity I guess people in general assume that if such experiences are a genuine they're revealing something supernatural something outside of the physical world and that's why I guess many materialists think well they must be sort of delusions or something some funny going on the brain but actually if you adopt this Russell Eddington view that actually we don't know the intrinsic nature of physical reality we don't know the intrinsic nature of space and time then it's least an option to suppose that that reality that the mystic is aware of is directly aware of that wondrous reality could be an aspect of the intrinsic nature of physical reality so we don't need to suppose necessarily but it's something supernatural something outside of the physical universe it could be an aspect of the intrinsic nature of space-time for example slice I rather speculatively explore that that option in the final chapter my book so yeah I mean to some degree I mean I I'm agnostic on these things I meditate every morning but I've not as yet had a a mystical experience so you know I have to remain somewhat agnostic yeah if you're if you're a materialist I suppose you have to think pretty much mystical experiences and illusions because you know it's so ill-fitting with your worldview but if you're upon psychist and you already think fundamental reality is in some sense constituted of consciousness then it's you know I guess it's not not not much of a step further to suppose that what is experienced in the in the mystic experience might be some aspect of that fundamental consciousness reality yeah so I'm a agnostic but more open-minded that I could be if I had other worldviews yeah yeah I think like you said a materialist kind of has to say that everything we do experience can only reflect our sort of specific mental architecture but the idea that an experience of oneness and and totality could actually be an echo of some truth about reality it's certainly easier to imagine that that could be the case if you have a more pan psychist view of consciousness yeah that definitely seems to be more consonant with with the pan psychist worldview were already there is some kind of consciousness involving reality I would always want to emphasize that we can distinguish the cold-blooded scientific philosophical question of how to integrate consciousness into reality from more spiritual or mystical speculations that you know put a lot of people like David Chalmers Luke Roelofs a complete atheist material not materially sorry complete atheist but cyclists and you know I once asked charmers if he if you had any religious or spiritual views and he said only that the universe is cool so you know I think he's you know this is a cold a cold-blooded intellectual scientific task of how to integrate consciousness it needn't necessarily be wrapped up with with any spiritual or mystical beliefs but obviously there's a clear sense in which you know for independent reasons you do have certain spiritual beliefs that they seem to be more consonant with a pond cyclist view than a materialist will be for example well Philip it's been really great to talk to you I've got loads more to ask you so I'd love to have another conversation at some point in the future but in the meantime where should people go if they'd like to learn more about your ideas and still to date with what you're up to ah well I have a website Philip Goff philosophy calm and and a blog conscience and consciousness to come with just terribly titled but oh you can get to that from my website so this new book Galileo's error foundations for a new science of consciousness coming out August 15th in the UK the US and later in Portugal Portuguese if you're a portuguese listenin to this having read the last chapter of Galileo's error I can say I find it very interesting so I can personal command at least one chapter of the book very much also Twitter I Twitter it at Philip under / Gogh that's Philip with one L and G Oh F F so yeah I like Twitter interaction takes up too much of my time unfortunately I'll miss all there's links to everything that you've just mentioned in the description of this episode will Philip thank you again very much for joining me today and I know that I'll continue to follow your work with interest oh thanks a lot you lab really it's been a really stimulating conversation Thanks hi everyone I hope you enjoyed today's conversation with the philosopher Philip Goff as always I'm definitely interested to hear what your thoughts were today about the ideas we got into is pan psychism a plausible theory could the entire universe be somehow conscious of itself remember that if you enjoy these open-minded philosophical conversations exploring consciousness and its place in reality please consider supporting waking cosmos over at patreon.com slash waking cosmos the link to that is in the description and of course all patreon subscribers get early access to every episode and a huge thank you to my existing supporters who are gradually helping me turn this into a full-time project as always liking and sharing this episode is really helpful algorithmically which of course helps wicking cosmos to find its audience that is about it from me today though I will be back next time for more episodes exploring consciousness and its place in reality but until then have a beautiful day

Channel: metaRising

Views: 80,250

Keywords: Philip Goff, Waking Cosmos, consciousness, philosophy podcast, fundamental mind, panpsychism, cosmopsychism, telepathy, Adrian David Nelson, conscious universe, teleology, cosmic mind, cosmic consciousness, david Chalmers, quantum mind, Roger Penrose, Stuart Hameroff, integrated information theory, hard problem, hard problem of consciousness, Waking Cosmos podcast, quantum consciousness, omega point, mystical experiences, russellian monism, neutral monism, IIT, galileo's error

Id: _nd9dqFXHRU

Length: 87min 24sec (5244 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2019