Philip Pullman & Philip Goff in conversation: Galileo's Error, consciousness & philosophy

[Music] we took about consciousness and and just to begin Philip Goff could you say how he got interested in consciousness and why is it is because obviously become a big thing in your life you just written the whole book about it yeah I think I've been obsessed with the problem of consciousness as far back as I can remember really I think I think what chores you in a cell I think there's a kind of paradox about consciousness on the one hand consciousness is the thing that's most familiar nothing is more evident than the reality of one's own feelings and experiences on the other hand consciousness is the thing that's proven most difficult to integrate into our scientific story in the world so you know despite rapid in lots of progress in our scientific understanding of the brain we still don't have even the beginnings of an explanation of how complicated electrochemical signaling is somehow able to give rise to this in a subjective world of colors and sounds and smells and tastes that each of us knows in our own case so this is the the so-called hard problem of consciousness and yeah so some people think that this is you know there is a deep problem here but we just need to do more neuroscience and we'll eventually crack it but I'm I'm inclined to think the problem is deeper than that and the core of the problem for me is that physical science works with a purely quantitative vocabulary whereas consciousness is an essentially quantitative phenomenon just in the sense that it that it involves qualities if you think about the redness of a red experience or the smell of coffee or the taste of mint and you can't capture these kind of qualities in in the purely quantitative vocabulary of physical science and so so long as your description of the brain is framed in the purely quantitative a pillar of neuroscience you're always going to leave out these qualities and hence leave out in my view in a you know an essential component of consciousness itself it's interesting because lots of neuroscientists think they're on the way to giving an account of exactly the thing that you think cannot be accounted for by sight yeah yes so I mean neuroscience is absolutely crucial for a science of consciousness you know you're not gonna make progress and conscience without neuroscience but what neuroscience gives us I believe are correlations between activity in the brain and conscious experiences so you can you know scan someone's brain and you can ask them what they're feeling and experiencing and you can discover that you know a certain kind of activity in the hypothalamus is a comfort is always accompanied by a feeling of hunger you know that the two always go together and you know neuroscience has developed this rich and very important body of correlations between brain activity and conscious experience but that in itself it is not a theory of consciousness you know what we ultimately want from a theory of consciousness is an explanation of those correlations you know why is it when you have this kind of activity in the hypothalamus you have a feeling of hunger and I think just doing more neuroscience just gathering more correlations isn't going to answer that question thank you okay so how did you get interested in consciousness well I in a sense I always have because one of the first things I remember doing is looking at you know when you look at your finger and then you let your eyes drift but you see two different images each of which is transparent that puzzled me for a very long time why am I saying that why does it look like that why does nobody talk about that it's so interesting but the moment when I started actually working it out a bit more consistently than I was doing as a small child was when I first when I started writing my first novel which was the day after I finished my final exams at Oxford where I was studying English you might think I'd come across this particular problem before in the essays I should have written on the lectures I should have gone to but somehow it had passed me by anyway I found myself faced with a problem that the filmmaker and playwright David Mamet has very well put in the question which he says every film director has to answer where do I put the camera where am I telling this story from where is this I located a zy e located that's looking not into not only and what the characters are doing but into their minds and telling us what they're thinking and then I began to wonder well hang on I can't do this as a person I can't describe the activities of any of you and then tell the reader what you're thinking that's not possible for a human being so whoever is doing this storytelling is not whatever else he or she is human and over the 50 years since then I've kind of [Music] anthropomorphised if that's the right word this strange floating consciousness into what I call a sprite it's a sprite who tells a story it's a sprite who is the camera who can go anywhere see anything and so on this used to be called the position of the omniscient narrator and it used to be the one way we could tell a story once upon a time there was a poor farmer who had two sons for example that's obviously something from a folktale it's a voice and I looking at it from the outside then we're in the sort of 18th century 19th early 19th century when the modern novel first got going the consciously the the telling voice big-bank began to do different things Jane Austen for example began to float around between this character and that telling us what she's thinking and then telling us what he's thinking and that became the way of telling stories for quite a long time but then that's at the point where I came in and one what it was that was doing the seeing so what kind of consciousness was this it's interesting you chose the sprite rather than cause I mean on this since is usually the quality of it god haha but the omniscient narrator never is omniscient because you didn't have everything she doesn't have everything they know a lot the word really should have been multi siient I his example of the values of serendipity and the value of chambers dictionary I wanted when I first use multi siient I wanted to look it up to see if it had been defined anywhere whether it official as a word you could use in Scrabble and it does but on the way to discovering to discovering that and finding more to see that I came across this definition in chambers mullet a hairstyle if he's short at the front long at the back and ridiculous all around which is why I say chambers is the one dictionary for yeah I mean I mean so I think literature is all about consciousness in a sense and the first-person perspective and you know part of what I try to do my work is yeah how do these worlds relate of the first-person perspective of consciousness that we we know probably best through literature I think you probably you're better at communicating the reality of consciousness than I am but what I think of doing is how does that that world of the first-person spective relate connect with the with the third-person world as the information we learn from science about quantitative objective facts how does all that fit together in a single unified worldview you know and connecting with fiction I mean so one way of avoiding this is to say what may be consciousness doesn't exist right this is a and I wanted to ask you about this actually because so so for example philosophers like Daniel Dennett or Keith Frankish I've argued in various moods that actually that the brain tricks us consciousness is a kind of illusion the brain tricks us into thinking we're conscious but we're not really it's just a sort of fiction and I've just finished the secret Commonwealth and I was intrigued by this I engage a lot with the philosophers sometimes called illusionists mean believe that's an eighth word it's caught on people you think consciousness is just an illusion a magic trick but I was intrigued by this character Simon Talbot who what is this sort of cold rationalist to liars enamored with for a while and and one of the things he defends is is the startling thesis that maybe demons are an illusion that there are sort of psychological projection and I was I was curious to ask whether whether the this character has any basis in these illusionist philosophers like dent Daniel Dennett or well there may be points which the one resembles the other but I certainly wasn't modeling my character Simon Tolbert on done it in particular there are two philosophers in the bid they in the story who have slightly different takes on it but neither of them believes in demons I've just explained for those who haven't read any of my books that the demon is an aspect of the character's personality or nature which has the form of an animal and it's sort of external so we all go through life in Lyra's world accompanied by a demon who has the power to change shape when you're a child and then remains fixed when you're a grown-up that's what the demon is I've always found it a very good metaphor for all sorts of things states of mind alienation from yourself for exactly that kind of thing but no I wasn't modeling my philosopher on anyone in particular but because I find philosophy rather hard to read me too yeah philosophers don't do enough to reach out my method is to read like a butterfly and write like a bee what you're saying about the sprite because the sprites of offense the storyteller and we were talking a bit earlier before we came on here about the role of narration in our self understanding and that you know consciousness is in part telling us of ourselves stories about what's happening what might happen what happens how that all fits together yes indeed we're always doing that the French phrase list qui there Scully a refers to the the answer to a witty proposition or whatever it is that we think are on the way home and we should have thought of at the time so we're always adjusting our stories of us about ourselves and recasting what we've said and saying it better and and so on and we've come I think in recent years especially to mistrust memory in a way because it's been shown how people who claim that this has happened all that a certain witnesses in court cases or whatever must be mistaken because evidence goes the other way memory is a is a malleable thing and I haven't written my memoirs yet but when I do I shall treat it exactly like a work of fiction in that I'll arrange it in such a way that it makes better sense of the story might not might not anyway be true but no one will know and it won't matter because what I'm doing is making a story rather than giving evidence in a court case I mean that those are the two examples of telling a story which are so different if you're if you're giving evidence in court as a witness your duty is to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth but but sometimes makes a very poor story if you're writing something that you hope people will buy and read so we do this biographers don't tell the whole truth even if they happen to know amazing data yeah they have to tell stories you always have to hide where to bring something in what do I make perhaps a link different parts of somebody's life together it's not straightforward you can't just begin on day one then go on till the day different biographies tell different stories about the same size so so even the apparently factual story where the facts are controversial you're pretty ready in a forum you're giving it a narrative arc you're making sense things in the light of what has happened I imagine it's something akin to what a painter might be doing I mean a realist a representative Pater might be doing when they see a landscape they all sort of moving that tree a bit to the left and then raising the mountains you know they're adjusting in their medium in there in the form there at home in their adjusting what they see in terms of something that might be look better you know they're adjusting yeah so yeah I mean I think there's a lot of truth in that isn't it that we are the stories you tell about ourselves and but I I suppose I think one can take that too far well it depends what you're doing I don't think you can take it too far if you're writing a novel but in terms of thinking about what consciousness is and how it fits in I mean these illusionists were just talking about say it's all a fiction but I think there is an undeniable reality there the reality of feeling pain you know the reality of feeling you know seeing red or feeling emotions this is this is a cold hard reality it's it's I agree with Descartes that it's in one sense the reality that there that we can't really deny the only thing we can't really deny and so we have to find some way of fitting it into our overall picture of the world and that's you know that's the challenge I think to be fair to the people you're attacking they're not going to ten it's not going to deny that you feel pains they feel real to you easily you see amazing well Keith frankish is it comes clean most explicit to saying that the way consciousness in the way we ordinarily think about it just does not exist and it's what he's such a warm empathetic character he's very good friend of mine I know he thinks in some sense no one's ever felt pain no one's but there's this impish there's that way of thinking imply that other people must be zombies or might be damaged then it has it what so this is the philosophical zombies of these imaginary creatures who behave just like us in all ways but they have no consciousness so you stick a knife in them they scream and run away but they don't actually feel pain or if they're crossing the road they look both ways and wait for the traffic to stop but they don't actually have any visual experience they're just complicated mechanisms that are set up to behave as though they have experience when they don't really so these are put to various philosophical aims but Dennett so you're saying does he really mean this Dennett is a direct quote from downer he says we are all zombies so you know we think we have feelings and an inner life subjective inner life but this is just a trick clever it's not far off psychopathology you know there's a I suppose the usual definition of a psychopath is someone who has no empathy for other people who acts as if they don't have any feelings isn't isn't Dombey I didn't lead to that yes then from that they said good question how do people end up thinking these very strange things so I mean what I'm keen to press is I think one reason is people look to the great success of physical science in explaining more and more of our universe and they think you know this has to be the complete story it's really worked it's really getting us somewhere but what I tried to press in my work is actually the reason it's been so successful is because it was always aimed at a quite narrow specific task from Galileo onwards of just cap constructing mathematical models to capture their the behavior of matter the quantitative features a matter and that's gone really well and it's produced extraordinary technology but it you know it was it was always aimed at a very limited task and that's why it's been so successful this is what I like so much about your book because it points to that moment when Galileo did decide that the things he would investigate are the things you couldn't investigate by means of mathematics and other things he'd leave yeah I went fascinating fascinating take on it yes sir Galileo wanted the new science to be mathematical to have a purely mathematical vocabulary but actually he well understood that you can't capture consciousness in these terms consciousness is an essentially qualitative phenomenon and you can't capture it in a purely quantitative language like mathematics so what he did was he said well if we want a mathematical science we have to take consciousness out of the domain of science once we've done that we can capture everything in in mathematics but the dekor object was promised so people say oh it's gone really well it's so it'll surely one day explain consciousness yeah the irony is it's gone really well because it was designed to exclude consciousness yeah and the difficulty is you have the you know the mind-body problem and are they separate things the dualism and all the rest of it the thing I like about Penn psychism which is your field of expertise is that at a single stroke it seems to do what Copernicus and Kepler did with the Ptolemaic universe when we before we had telescopes and before we knew very much about the physical world we'd see the planets going across the sky and imagine quite perfectly reasonably that they were getting around the earth or the earth was the center of everything as time went past and time went past and observations became more acute and more of them came in it began to wrote that people began to notice that they weren't going regularly some of them would sort of stop again slow overall speed up a bit and they had to find an explanation for this so they thought of the epicycles which were little loops on the big circles that they described when they're going around the earth and eventually more and more observations came in and even that wasn't sufficient so they had every cycles on epicycles and it became to mend ously complex which is a state of things that I think we have with consciousness and physical science the the explanations get more and more complicated and more and more unreasonable with one stroke pen psychism does away with it it Benesch --is the epicycles and explains a lot so much about consciousness it was like for me it was like the Sun coming out okay I saw a few puzzled faces at the word and psychism so maybe you could gloss pan psychism and you did mention earlier you know you're curious about how some people came to believe such exotic things as that consciousness doesn't exist exotic to me to believe in pain psychism which all can across them yeah well maybe I could just build up to the the kind of pants psychism I defend so it's it's rooted in very important work from the 1920s by the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the scientist Arthur Eddington who was incidentally the first scientist to confirm Einstein's theory of general relativity 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 it was forgotten about for so long but it's recently been rediscovered in academic philosophy and is causing great deal of excitement and part of the reason I wrote this book was to try and get these ideas out to a broader audience but anyway so the core of the idea Russell and Eddington starting point was that and I want to connect this to Philips work actually is that physical science actually doesn't really tell us what matter is and that seems a kind of bizarre claim you know you read a physics textbook you seem to be learning all this incredible stuff about the nature of space and time and matter but what Russell and Eddington realized is that physical science despite its richness is confined to telling us about the behavior of matter about what it does you know physical science tells us matter has mass and charge and these things are characterized entirely in terms of behavior you know charge is a matter of attraction and repulsion mass is defined in terms of gravitational attraction and resistance to acceleration this is all about behavior physical science tells us absolutely nothing about what philosophers like to call the intrinsic nature of matter how matter is in and of itself so it turns out actually there's this huge hole in our scientific story of the world the proposal of Russell and Eddington is to put consciousness in that hole right so you know we're looking for a place for consciousness in our scientific story worried not sympathetic to dualism which we should briefly touch on looking for a place for consciousness we've got this hole why not stick consciousness in the hole so the result is a kind of pan psychism which is the ancient view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality but this is a kind of pun psychism that's stripped of any mystical connotations or at least could be so the view is this just matter feels particles nothing supernatural nothing spiritual necessarily but matter can be described from two perspectives physical science describes it as it were from the outside in terms of its behavior but matter from the inside in terms of its intrinsic nature is constituted of forms of consciousness so this is a beautifully simple elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific story the world and that's really the attraction I mean if I could just just say sure things so that was a bit of long-winded but I discovered an intriguing connection to Philip so I'm huge fan of Philips work but I didn't realize there was a connection with my own work until we hooked up on Twitter of all things and emailed a little bit and then I look back at his dark materials and I found this fantastic line from the subtle knife which actually perfectly captures I think the view I've just been describing so so this is a conversation with the scientist merry talking to dust particles or shadows as she calls them I think memory and she asks them are you what we have called spirit and the particles reply is that I won't go into how they're communicating but anyway they're not magically speaking and they reply from what we are spirit from what we do matter matter and spirit are one and I think you know that perfectly captures only not you know the view have been describing so yeah well I'm very flattered to to hear you say that I've been the story his Dark Materials is in part an investigation by me of this whole problem of the the nature of us the nature of what we are how we come to perceive things and a lot of exciting things were going on then when I was writing it 25 years ago one of them was the nature of dark matter this mysterious thing in the universe which must exist for galaxies to behave gravitationally on the way that they do but nobody knows what it is and I was praying all the way through a brain to whom I don't know hoping all the way through but they wouldn't discover what it was before I finished the book and they haven't yet so I've been lucky so far but it seemed to me as I was developing the world of this of this book and I say developing and not creating because it feels like unfolding something that's that's already there or discovering something that's already there and there's one of the mysterious things about creativity I suppose it really does feel like discovery and not invention as if it's there in some way before anyway in this world there's a entity which they call dust with a capital D and it seems to have various properties which some people are investigating in the world other people fear because it seems to deny what their holy book tells them and I thought of it is I thought of it as rather like dark matter or something we don't know yet but we know is there there must be a field and that the Higgs boson the Higgs field came into it as well giving me another metaphor now I don't want to say the function of the physical sciences is the production of metaphors for subsequent development in the arts but I can't deny they're very useful and the Higgs boson which was discovered recently is the particle which is associated with a field which is what gives mass to things we have we about the mass of things because they are that this mass is conveyed in some way which I don't understand by the Higgs boson which is an expression of the Higgs field I think you have dust in the same way but with regard to consciousness I have a scientist called Raja cough who discovers a soccer field which permeates everything and the particle associated with this is my dust and it has something to do with consciousness though I don't know exactly what it is yet because I haven't read the last part of the last book but I will and I will continue my investigations that's a bit that's my picture of it anyway obviously you've got an amazing imagination and he believes this stuff almost curious how how sympathetic you are to I mean I I get the feeling you are a little bit sympathetic I loved the way you know in relation to a book he described it as this sort of new Copernican revolution I mean that's the skill of a novelist that wonderfully poetic way putting it and that really captures for me the appeal of it you know when I was a philosophy undergraduate in the dying embers of the 20th century you we were told there were only two options on consciousness right either you were a materialist and you thought consciousness could be explained away in terms of the chemistry of the brain always an illusion of some kind even oh you were a duelist the view that consciousness is non-physical outside of the workings of the body in brain and I came to feel the you know both of these views were pretty hopeless with our histories and so I actually left philosophy and thought I wrote my end of year my end of degree dissertation saying the problem of consciousness is irresolvable you know and when often did something else had tried to forget it and then was discovering this middle way it sounds kind of wacky but you know it's the difficulties with these two sort of analogy do you think between the contradiction between Newtonian physics and quantum physics I mean I'm stayin developing Newton describes the cosmic in terms of space-time gravitation and so on but for some reason which I have never understood this isn't compatible in some strange way with quantum mechanics so they're both true but they're two hundred scales yeah could the two views that you just described both be true but on different scales or different dimensions yeah that's a really nice way of putting it in a way we've got these two things that we know are real you know our own experience obviously has to be real but also the rich information the objective information we have to physical science but they don't you know they don't seem to fit together and yeah and and I mean I think I mean some people just think oh we just need to do more and more science you know but I think often that's a very simplistic view of science as though it's just doing the experiment getting the data but actually you know some of our biggest leaps in science have involved reimagining the universe you know rethinking you know Einstein developing special relativity wasn't so much doing experiments he was sitting wondering what it would be like to ride on a beam of light and follow and that wonderful reimagining from thinking of space and time as different things as we always had thinking of there just being one fundamental thing space-time and there are all sorts of radical reimagining from an armchair and so my hunch is you know to make progress on consciousness it's not gonna it's not only going to involve experimental data but reimagining the universe and this seemed this pun psychist the specific context framework seems to me a way of doing that in the way you do that in the book actually one of the delightful bits to the book for me was where you start to be imagining what it would be like to be a parent psychist in relation to ethics in relation to the environment how we think about trees if they could be conscious at some level how we think about other people yeah yeah so yeah so I always want to emphasize I'm not a novelist I'm a philosopher and you know I think a scientists or philosophers we should be thinking not about the view we'd like to be true but the view that's most likely to be true but III do think a case made that there's a strong case for the probable truth upon psyches and as the best explanation we have of how consciousness fits in to a scientific story but I also think it it is a picture of the world that's maybe slightly more consonant with our mental and spiritual well-being you know there the materialist view is kind of pretty bleak you've just got a kind of mechanistic essentially mechanistic view of nature and then the cold immensity of empty space whereas you know on the pond psychics worldview were conscious creatures in a conscious universe this is a worldview in which we can perhaps feel a little bit more comfort at home a little bit more comfortable in our own skin this is I completely agree with that and I think it's a very true very strong observation I come to it also through poetry William Blake is my guiding star and many things and I like to quote Blake whenever the chance arises at one point he says what how do you know but every bird that cuts the area way is an immense world of delight close to your senses five and elsewhere he talks about a world where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy he was a clearly very sympathetic to the idea that matter itself the stuff we can feel them see around us is conscious in some strange way and so before Bertrand Russell and Eddington William Blake was on the same track I think right it's not very comforting what if the bookcases and the waters that you know thinking about me everything's looking at me come miss approach me so the punch like is needn't necessarily thing absolutely everything is conscious that I mean the view is a minimum the basis of the view is that the the basic constituents of reality may be electrons and quarks may be feels have some kind of unimaginably simple experience it's not like the electron sitting there feeling existential angst or something you know you only get the kind of rich human electrons do that yo you only get rich human experience after millions of years of evolution but but that doesn't say the basic constituents conscious but doesn't mean every combination of particles is conscious it doesn't mean the table is conscious for example but yeah the things that make it up are conscious but maybe that the table as a whole does not necessarily have its own distinctive form of experimental body will have mass but a very little mass yeah we have mentioned the emergence what do you think of the idea that consciousness is a property that emerges with increasing complexity hmm you know so whereas the electrons and even the molecules and so on that constitute my brain don't have very much conscious Ness of themselves when they're all tangled together and talking to each other consciousness emerges from that does that make any sense yeah I think instead well so that's something contradicted already I think the problem it's a nice story but you know how does it happen it obviously thinks people use emergence as a sort of another word for a miracle happens it's some creature I mean I suppose my my core problem with that going back to where we started is physical science that works with a purely quantitative description of what's going on in the brain whereas consciousness is an essentially qualitative qualitative or nominal how do you bridge that gap between the purely quantitative and the qualitative you know no one's ever made the slightest progress in my view and making sense of that so when people talk about emergence I'd want to know how are you bridging that gap between the qualitative sorry the quantitative and the quality that's that's to me as the core of the challenge I saw a very good example of emergence being a something that you hadn't expected coming together from a lot of things in the modern art museum in Oxford a few years ago they had an exhibition of sculpture by Sola Witte who makes sculptures out of square white painted rods put together in cubes and then accumulated and what you saw when you walked around this big mass of stuck together white hollow cubes well also so unexpected things as you look through them from one angle you saw an equilateral triangle where'd that come from there are only angles he put into it were 90-degree angles not other angles that's the kind that was a picture for me of emergence that I hadn't seen before something unexpected emerging from simple things on the topic so I guess although I'm a pun Sigerson I thinks in some way experiences there all the way down but only very simple forms I do think human experience distinctively human traits are emergent and they evolved from millions of years whereas I'm curious though I mean dust as you describe it is actually associated with something quite specifically human loss of innocence or self-consciousness yeah so are you maybe sympathetic to the view that something distinctively human is kind of fundamental to the universe or not to the universe that couldn't be possible if we believe that the universe sort of jumped into being with the Big Bang 14 billion years ago whatever it was but yes I do think there's something distinctive about human beings which is our which is our power to our ability to reflect on our own experience you know whether if I believe that glass of water is conscious well maybe it is but it's not doing much reflecting as far as we know maybe it's in conversation but your glass and that's a no you couldn't later you look he's not going to put that back away but yes in the stories that I've written clearly human self consciousness human awareness came into being 30 40,000 years ago something like that and it's based of course on the the coming of artistic you know little remains of art cave paintings little carvings on stones that sort of thing that seems to be a time when people were becoming interested in other things than where the next meal was so yeah I did i do think you that's the sort of consciousness of we're displaying now and we display every day did kind of emerge from something that was less common for a pine circus isn't it you've got lots of little bits of vaguely conscious stuff and then suddenly you've got this thing that can reflect on what matter is and whether it's maybe not suddenly it's the same kind yeah difficulty that a materialist has been away it's just short expressed in terms a lot of people press that and try and say you know there's no progress here - I mean yeah I mean like all of these views have problems and that there's no it's early days in my view in a science of consciousness but it just I suppose it seems to me that the challenges facing upon psychist research program look to be more tractable than the problems facing say materialist you know the at the core of materialism as I've already labored you've got this huge explanatory gap between the purely quantitative objective properties and the qualitative subjective and you know I don't think it made any proof whereas the explanatory gap for the pants I kissed is how do you get from very simple forms of consciousness to very complex forms of consciousness that seems to me and in note no one quite has a fully satisfactory account there are already very intriguing proposals but it seems to be something we can make progress on and you know it just makes more sense to me yeah do you think it's true no yeah can we just show what my appreciation very brilliant it's got some between the teeth in it [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Penguin Books UK

Views: 21,512

Keywords: Penguin Books UK books, author, book, philip pullman, book of dust, lyra, oxford, panpsychism, human consciousness, consciousness, brain, science, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Eddington, new science, philip goff, durham university, Fundamental Reality, Philosophy Now, his dark materials, secret commonwealth, amber spyglass, Northern Lights, subtle knife, La Belle Sauvage, on writing, interview, in discussion, debate, bbc, lecture, galileo's error, ted talk, conscience

Id: YIvRaXVFNdI

Length: 38min 37sec (2317 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 07 2019