S02E06 What Does Physics Tell Us About Consciousness?

[Music] hello welcome to mind chat my name is philip gough hello welcome i'm keith frankish how are you doing keith not too bad not too bad recovering from uh from about of of kovid oh yeah you've been pretty ill with it sorry it's the after effects are dragging on the tiredness but um i'm getting there how about you i'm utterly miserable i'm afraid i've got my research leave has ended and i'm straight back into marking or grading as our us friends say i think mark grading is like it's a terrible mix of boredom and responsibility so it's like really boring but you can't kind of drift off because you know it's really important for the student and stuff and anyway actually i feel bad now complaining after you've had covert and i'm saying oh i've got a mark essays anyway well we all have our of our burdens then we will uh don't you don't you have something to say to me um i don't know what was that there's something you've not forgotten have you what have i forgotten it's our anniversary doing mind chat right oh happy anniversary i mean it's a it's an important date i mean i actually oh you got me flowers oh that's beautiful oh thank oh they're really lovely key thank you very much i'm really touched actually you think i forgot i didn't really i got you something really you ready hey got your pineapple everyone likes a pineapple a pineapple everyone likes a pineapple is the biggest one in the shop who gives anyone a pineapple for their anniversary i thought that you'd like a pineapple one pound 75 that cost me i i try to empathize with all these pancakes and i try to understand pineapple i no gratitude among some people uh anyway it's been a good year hasn't i think it's gone well it took us a while to get the hang of the technology and stuff but i think my microphone is finally working well that's the best anniversary present isn't it a good audio um it's been a good i i've i've really enjoyed it i've we've had some great guests we had some great discussions it's been lively it's been challenging it's been i've enjoyed it and uh well with more to come haven't we yes nearly finished season two so after this this well it's the next episode is um angela mendelovici part two on how does consciousness connect us to reality giving a very different view to the one barry lowe uh not barry lowe sorry david pappano has who he had on a couple of months ago and then the climax is going to be sophie and baritch talking about the neuroscience and philosophy of smell so yeah and we're making plans for the next season with some exciting exciting guests so what do we got today dr frankish right well we've we've we've got a first for my internet we've got a returning guest we've got uh sean cannell um professor of uh theoretical physics at uh the california institute of technology is is rejoining us his last episode was so successful and we had such a great discussion that we're getting him back for more um and uh we've got another first we've got two guests not just shawn but a very distinguished uh uh philosopher of science barry lower who is a distinguished uh professor of philosophy at rutgers university and director of the rutgers center for philosophy and the sciences and uh barry's worked in many areas of philosophy um philosophy of mind metaphysics epistemology history philosophy um philosophical logic but he's he's probably best known for his work in philosophy of science and uh and the philosophy of cosmology which is a fascinating area um and he's worked on uh like sean he's he's worked on the interpretation of of quantum mechanics so we i'm two wonderful guests an exciting topic what more could you ask brilliant should i bring them in bring them in let's go hello sean hello barry how are you doing welcome to my chat hi guys hello brilliant well thanks for coming back sean um so usually we start by um briefly getting to know our guests a bit we've already done that with sean so if you've never heard of sean carroll you can look back at our previous episode um uh barry do you want to just tell us a little bit about yourself what kind of philosophy you're interested in maybe how you first got into philosophy and yeah so i started off i wanted to be a mathematical logician discovered that was too difficult and so got interested in philosophy of physics and then philosophy of mind and what's working in philosophy of mind particularly interested in the question of virtual what does anything in your brain have the mental content it has discovered that was too hard and so they started working on philosophy of quantum mechanics that was easier so you found something easy in the end i'm glad happy ending it's still hard though um yeah actually barry is the reason i made a connection with sean because i was in uh new york staying with barry for a conference at rutgers and um and i was just happened to be reading sean's book and i was saying he's pretty clued up on philosophy you know you you often you get physicists writing about philosophy like saying oh it's a load of rubbish and not knowing what they're talking about but you know he's pretty clued up and and then do you remember what you said barry the exact words you said that's because that's because he talks to me that's why he's cleared up about philosophy had i said anything that's so aggrandizing i can vouch for it about cosmology from having talked to sean though i think you were just being tongue-in-cheek really but yeah so um anyway our purpose today is to continue an aspect of the discussion we had last time with sean that we couldn't stop and with some blog posts written and stuff and um so what we're gonna do i i'm gonna actually kick things off with a very short five minute powerpoint presentation under the first on on minechat but only very short one and then invite uh shaw so giving kind of my perspective on the discussion and what i think and then sean to um comment on that for five minutes or so or however long he wants to and then barry to comment on that and then we'll just see what happens uh lots of people have said happy anniversary thank you very much okay so uh hopefully i've got some slides that are going to appear here oh wow this is a first i just realized i didn't know how to do this five minutes before we went on but it's worked out swimmingly all right so i don't want to go on too long um okay so our topic is what does physics tell us about consciousness i thought i'd start just laying out the kind of main options on consciousness that might be relevant to today's discussion so first i guess the the view uh both sean and barry are fans of physical introductionism roughly the view that consciousness weakly emerges from physics uh so i actually like the way sean characterizes weak emergence the view would be just that in some sense all there really is is the stuff that physics specifies but then when we talk about consciousness or anything else that's just a sort of different way of describing the stuff physics talks about so i like to give the analogy of a party you know i could say you know there's people dancing and drinking at keith's tonight or i could say there's a there's a party at keith tonight that's just kind of two different ways of saying the same thing it's not like the party is this extra thing that floats above the heads of the people dancing and drinking it's to say there's a party is just another way of saying people dancing drinking so similarly to say this consciousness is just a different way of carving up the stuff physics talks about um so that's physicalist reductionism uh but then we've got a kind of different kind of reductionism so then there's two two views i'm kind of open to pancychist reductionism which would be does it the other way around physics weakly emerges from consciousness so roughly the idea is there's at the fundament and the thought is this is possible because of the purely mathematical nature of physics so the photos at the fundamental level we just got kind of networks of very simple conscious entities and they behave because they have very simple consciousness they behave in very simple predictable ways you know humans behave in complicated ways because we have complicated consciousness they behave in simple ways because they have simple consciousness and then through their interactions they realize certain mathematical structures and then the thought is those mathematical structures are the mathematical structures identified by physicists so physics kind of emerges from consciousness okay so that's one option i'm sympathetic to and then and then this is the view we're probably mainly going to be interested in today strong emergentism so this is the view that consciousness strongly emerges from the physical so consciousness in some sense arises from the physical but it's a genuinely radically new and fundamental thing in its own right um so contrast it with the weak emergence you know weak emergence talk of consciousness is just another way of talking about um what physics talks about but then strong emergencies although in some sense consciousness arises is brought into being by the physical it's something genuinely new and because it's genuinely new it brings into existence new fundamental laws or at least modifies old laws so if strong emergence is true then if you're trying to work out what's gonna happen in the brain just from physics you're gonna make some mistakes because it's not just physics running the show there's these new laws of nature that strongly emerge and consciousness is brought into being okay they're the options okay so what's the main dispute here that we want to focus on from last time so so i'll give my version of it sean if he if he disagrees could give her uh his own spin in a moment his own uh spin sounds slightly doesn't matter okay so his few as i understand it is that we have good reason to think uh the call theory which is the standard model of particle physics plus the weak limit of general relativity so viewers may know that there's a big challenge getting quantum mechanics to fit with general relativity but as i understand it that the places where it's hard to get them together just in non-terrestrial circumstances like when you're near a black hole or something in terms of the ma the master of our body and brains you can bring them together in what what is referred to as the core theory so sean thinks we have good reason to think that's the correct and complete theory of the matter in our bodies and brains and and this gives us grounds for thinking there's no strong emergence in the brain because if there was then the core theory wouldn't be the correct and complete account of what's going on in our brains because there'd be these new laws of nature or at least modifications of the old laws that consciousness brings into being okay so my initial response here is that you know that the experimental conditions in which we've tested the core theory do not include complex biological systems as sean says in the the paper he wrote in response to my book we should put that in the in the notes um you know most of the experiments work with just small numbers of particles and hence we've got no strong empirical ground to deny con strong emergence in the brain okay now now i want to start i want to make be a bit more detail i want to make a kind of point of an agreement here um so i agree that on the basis of occam's razor which we as philosophers and scientists we should respect we should assume there's no strong emergence in the absence of reason to think there is strong emergence right but i think sean is just theorizing about reality on the basis of experiments and i think that's not the only hard data i think the reality of consciousness itself is a hard datum that should inform our theorizing about reality so consciousness is not publicly observable but we know it's real we know it's realistic for our immediate awareness of our feelings and experiences and so any theory of reality which has a shot at being true has to account for that so i as i often say i think i really believe scientists and philosophers of the future will look back at the late 20th early 21st century and just think it's baffling that scientists and philosophers didn't make more of this resource you know we've got something we know something close to certainty is real and yet reflection on it forms almost no part of our theorizing about ultimate reality so that's uh so so we know consciousness is real and if as many philosophers uh believe we have philosophical grounds for thinking that reductionism about consciousness either physicalist or pancreas is false then we have very strong reason to accept strong emergence because consciousness is real reductionism doesn't work so it must be strongly emergent and for the reason as i've said i don't think we've got any significant reason to empirical reason to deny strong emergence so in that case we'd have strong reason to accept strong emergence and no significant empirical reason to deny it okay now i think nearly finished i think um sean and barry might say well that's fine because we can be reductionists about consciousness uh so why would we think that why except productionism a lot of people have this i think i'm motivated by this thought uh you know physical science has been so successful in reductively explaining so much of our universe surely consciousness is one day gonna go the same way but i i i don't think this is a so there's a sort of inductive argument from the success of science that it's one day gonna deal with consciousness in the same way physical science that is uh i don't think this is a good argument inductive argument because uh you know what physical science has been really good at is accounting for publicly observable behavior you know you've got a system publicly observable system you can explain its behavior by postulating a mechanism ultimately laws of physics physical science is really good at that but that's not what we're ultimately trying to do when we're explaining consciousness we're trying to explain these invisible subjective qualities that aren't publicly observable but can only be accessed from the inside by the person having the experience these colors sounds smells tastes that we're immediately aware of in our experience so it's a completely different explanatory project so i think you know i know sean likes to be a good bayesian i think as good bayesians we shouldn't think that the success of physical science and explaining publicly accessible behavior gives us any reason to think it's going to be able to explain private subjective qualities uh it's because it's a totally different expansion project so i mean an analogy i've given a bit recently is it's like saying uh telescopes are really good for astronomy probably they'll be good in pure math you know it's just a totally different explanatory project okay so my oh but so so i don't think we've got any good reason to accept reductionism physical reductionism about consciousness but is there any good reason to deny physical reductionism i haven't specified that i'm talking about physical reductionism right now well i think yes there is sorry people have heard me say this before but just briefly i think we find that our consciousness is populated by these subjective qualities colors sounds smells tastes that you can't fully capture in the purely quantitative language of physical science you can capture a lot about our experience the structure our experience in quantitative terms but you can't fully capture the for example the redness of a red experience and i think you'd have to be able to do that to reductively explain these qualities in the terms of physical science you'd have to get your neuroscience theory to sort of articulate those qualities and then reduce them to patterns of neural firings so so i don't think physicalist reductionism can work obviously we're just touching on the start of the debate but so my conclusion from that is you know either pan psychist reductionism is true or strong emergentism is true i'm open to strong emergenism in a panzerkist version someone like david chalmers would have non-pancy kiss versions of it i i'm open to it in the pan circus version um okay nearly done so so just final slide uh here's the things i think we should discuss although open to people have other thoughts so i think that the first and perhaps main thing so so here's my view and i like to know what people what people think of this so so i i so i i think that reflection on physics this is my central claim okay reflection on physics has just very little evidential force in deciding this issue of whether consciousness is strongly emergent and why is that well look either the philosophical arguments against reduction work or they don't work if the philosophical arguments against reduction work then we have very very good reason to think strong emergence is true because we know consciousness exists if it's not reduc if it can't be reduced then it must be strongly emerging and as i've said we've got no significant empirical evidence of the country on the other hand if the philosophical arguments against reductionism don't work then we don't need any empirical reason to doubt strong emergence because we just go off occam's razor you know okay so that's my main claim that sean seems to think and i think barry thinks possibly um that you know reflection on physics can tell it can give us strong reason to think strong emerges as well as i want to deny that either way if with reductionism arguments against rejection work or if they don't work okay so i think you know we see how far we get with that two per supplementary points we could we could say um you know do my the kind of arguments i just gestured at uh work against physical introductionism uh um and keith to an extent at least if we're talking about phenomenal consciousness i think keith's sympathetic to those arguments that's why he's an illusionist um and then third discussion point you know do sean's argue so sean's offered arguments against a pansys reductionism he thinks it just ends up being epi phenomenalism so we can perhaps discuss that as well anyway over to you guys that's my sorry i've probably gone on a bit longer than five minutes haven't i so feel free to take as long as you want um sean what do you reckon sure thanks develop that was actually very helpful um so i'll try to be brief in my own views because probably most of the people listening in have heard them before but here is the issue for pan psychism as i see it we have uh the fact that human beings contain electrons and protons and neutrons i'm not even saying that they're entirely made up of those particles but every human being i've ever met has atoms inside them and we have as philip alluded to an extraordinarily empirically successful theory of the behavior of electrons protons and neutrons and the associative forces that push them around called the core theory of physics and furthermore i'll get to a little bit more in a second but the core theory is not just a statement of facts about what happens in particle physics experiments it comes with a very well justified domain of applicability where we have good reasons to believe it is correct and human beings and everything that happens in their bodies are well within that domain of applicability so here is the dilemma for the would-be pansys who wants to put consciousness at the fundamental base of everything either they say sure you have the core theory it makes predictions for how the electrons and protons and neutrons in a human being will behave i'm not going to change that but i'm going to change the nature of it in that case i would say who cares you're you're adding something that change in no way plays an explanatory role in how i behave or how i talk about myself good on you have fun i have other things to do the other option that the pan psychist can make is to say i don't think the core theory is right for human beings i think that we need to modify it in some way and i was very happy with philip's little introduction there because i might be wrong about this but in past interactions i've noticed some prevarication on phillips part like not quite wanting to buy into either one of those options but i thought that in his intro there he was very clear that in the strong emergentist perspective that would count as modifying the core theory which it would that is correct i i agree so one thing that philip didn't really do in any careful way is to define strong emergence so let me give my best a shot at that um he gave examples but it's it's it is a subtle thing because people again try to take refuge in fuzziness of language sometimes and i'm very fond of the like the the uh categorization that was offered by mark badao in his famous paper on emergence where he says look if you have a what you might call a microscopic theory you have a theory of the fundamental level it might not be the world's most fundamental level but you have a more fundamental and less fundamental set of levels and you have a theory the fundamental level i actually never use the word reductionism myself but uh that's okay it's not crucial for our talk today and he says you can put that microscopic theory on a computer and you can make predictions using it and if you have weak emergence there is a compatibility you can take the microscopic theory you can talk about how it leads in the macro world to emergent phenomena and you can sort of evolve those forward in time in the macro theory or you could put the micro theory on a computer evolve that forward in time and then ask what emergent properties you get and you get the same answer either way there's a commuting diagram in the technical jargon strong emergence is when sure you're welcome to put your microscopic theory on a computer and you're welcome to say what it would predict but it will be wrong because once you consider the predictions of the microscopic theory in certain macroscopic circumstances it fails so i'm very open to contemplating the possibility of strong emergence in the case of that we're considering right now it would mean that i could take the quantum state of the electrons protons neutrons in a human being run those through the dynamical equations of the core theory and i would find that i get it wrong that's what strong emergence would say it is saying that the core theory fails in the context of human beings so why would we ever you know what what is the evidence that we have one way or the other whether the core theory works or not in the case of human beings um so i completely understand philip's point that you know we haven't tested we you know we've tested behavior of atoms and etc in certain laboratory circumstances but not literally in human brains to any high precision so we don't know whether the theory applies there or not but this is something that is you need to understand the details and and dig into the details of how the physics theory works and this is what i explained in my paper that probably you'll you'll put in links somewhere the argument is not simply that we have done a lot of experiments and so far it works therefore it'll probably keep working that is not the argument the core theory that we are talking about right here is a quantum field theory is an effective quantum field theory and one of the things about quantum field theories is they come with a specification of the domain of applicability in which they should be trusted so if you believe the fundamental principles of effective quantum field theory like locality and lorenz and variance we can talk about what those principles are but if you believe those fundamental principles we can say with quite high confidence that the brain is extremely within the domain where the core theory is supposed to apply so what this means is you're very welcome to contemplate deviations from it i'm certainly not saying that you're not allowed to change the core theory because you think that if you don't do it you can't explain consciousness by all means do that but be honest about what you're up against you're not just taking advantage of some vagueness or some unknown territory in the regime of physics you're saying yes physics says this should happen in a certain way in this regime and i think that physics is wrong about that and in my mind that means you should tell me exactly how it's wrong because when we build up the core theory and other quantum field theories we do so for good reasons we have zero reason on the basis of physics to uh to imagine that the behavior of electrons is any different in an atom or a rock or a human brain if you you're allowed to contemplate that it is tell me how it is how do you preserve energy conservation engage in variance where do the interactions come from how are you not violating locality by doing this the everything that happens in the human brain is not only within the domain of applicability but really really really deep into the domain of applicability like it's not in the boundary where we're not sure what's happening because we can really quantitatively specify where that boundary is so um that's the main point i wanted to make but let me just very very quickly touch on a couple of points that philip made explicitly and i will try to be very quick uh philip says that consciousness is hard data sure absolutely it is i have no trouble explaining it and i do think that uh philosophers and historians of science in the future will be aghast but not at what we're talking about now but not for the reasons that philip brings up he tries to make a distinction between the data we have inside ourselves the purely subjective experiences versus the external data i just think that this distinction is completely fake i mean you can imagine all sorts of similar distinctions you could you could make up a distinction about what happens inside planets versus what happens outside planets we've never been at the core of the earth that's just not how science works we can make measurements here outside the earth and on the basis of those measurements infer what happens inside because they're connected to each other in some way it's exactly the same thing going on with consciousness which is why i think this distinction is entirely fake either you think that what's happening inside us has no impact on what's happening outside or we're just doing regular science and we're trying to find out exactly what is the best theory of all of it at once and i think that the ordinary physics as it as it stands does a perfectly good job at that finally um there are these there there's philip's last argument that in some sense the physics doesn't matter because the anti-reductionist arguments either work or don't there's a little bit that was a little bit of a slip there uh he's trying to pull one over on us because of course in the real world we're not 100 sure whether the anti-reductionists arguments work or don't we have some credence that they work or don't and that credence is going to be affected by how dramatic the anti-reductionist claim is if you need to overthrow the most precious principles of modern physics to do it you have a little bit of a right to decrease your credence this is exactly the argument that i tried to make in my paper again it would not not novel to me in any way but consciousness is the hardest thing to understand we all agree on that it is extremely complicated and subtle and difficult to wrap our minds around to me that's exactly why we should not overthrow the laws of physics in order to try to do it thank you very much just on the um whether i've changed my mind the point about um is strong emergence essentially to benefit as a violation of core three i do have a slide on that uh so but i just think it's a it's a boring issue we got too bogged down and so i'm happy for most of this because at least to sort of concede that point but maybe at the end we could come back to that i just don't want to get lost in that not very interesting issue i don't think but anyway uh i won't say anything on it i'm desperate to say things but i'll hold off and let barry share some thoughts yeah i'm sure i'll give you more to say first of all i completely agree with i think everything sean said um but i would organize this discussion in the following way there are two parts to it one is the arguments against reductionism and the other argue part is the arguments against non-reductionism but i think the arguments against reductionism are i'm not sure what a word i can use in polite society here but they're crap they're really really bad they're based on a confusion that philosophers can help dispel if they pay attention um and then there are problems with the anti-reductionist view i've come back to the confusion i have in mind is the confusion between concepts and properties or features of the world it's right that there's no reduction of phenomenal or consciousness concepts and physical concepts but that's has to do with representations with concepts um there is a reduction for example of a sort of certain kind of physical concepts higher level physical concepts like for example temperature or pressure to more fundamental physical concepts like those found in statistical mechanics there the reduction involves both understanding the concepts which are functional concepts and also understanding the physics which explains how it is that certain physical phenomena make for something that satisfies the functional concepts in the case of consciousness that can't be done because the way we understand our own conscious states is by concepts we apply subjectively to our own selves we don't apply they're not functional concepts so i know that i might now have a certain sort of itch in my toe which i do um not because of any functional features of the itch they do have functional fidgets regions of course but i just know it directly that's the way that concept works i'm going to give you another example it's not a perfect analogy but it may give you an idea of what to have in mind we have indexical concepts in our language like i so imagine that somebody said well i knew this is where this person is here's where where sean is here's where philip is is where keith says here's where barry is but where am i i would be a confusion because the way the word i works is i it refers to whoever's using the concept i and of course since it was me who was using it it refers to barry to me i think consciousness concepts are like that in a way they're a mix so i i think the it's going to be hopeless i think actually what if sean is thinking that in the future enough will be discovered about physics so that one could say ah now i see what it is to feel an itch in your toe i think he's wrong about that that part i maybe i'm on the side of fill up with i don't think anything in physics will will will do that just because of the nature of consciousness concepts but that shouldn't lead us to think that consciousness isn't a physical feature of the world so that's the first big point i wanted to make that may take us more into philosophy than the physics part than you want to go but that's one point i i maybe should mention that this idea of treating these so-called hard problems in this way dates back to a former colleague of mine on sadly's deceased name brian lohr who had basically this way of thinking about this stuff and i've learned a lot from from him and my wife katie balago was a student of his on the other side i'm very puzzled by how the non-reductionist is supposed to be thinking about things the non-reductionist thinks that the very fundamental is something which has a little bit of consciousness now i suppose whatever the electrons are doing they're not feeling itches in their toes they don't have a dinner of toes they can't do that i don't know what it is for them to have this little bit of consciousness but whatever it is that's supposed to be conscious that they have i guess when a lot of them get together you know 10 to the whatever 20 ninth or something electrons get them more than they get together in a certain structure they end up uh putting all their little bit of subconsciousness together to make for an itch in my toe you need a theory of that how is the world is that going to go if we had a theory of that we basically would have what physics would want to come up with an account of how what electrons when you get a lot of them together get an itch in your toe i don't see how adding a little bit of consciousness in the electrons helps out there at all and in fact in thinking about this a little bit i i mentioned this to philip in an email i realized that in fact in a sense i was a pan psychist in the following sense i think that of course whatever electrons protons or whatever the quantum fields are whatever it is it is the stuff that is enabled it to be that when it gets in very complicated configurations can produce an itch in my toe if that's what it is to be a panzerkist i'm a panda psychist so i'll declare my allegiance to it in the under that form but i don't think i want to have the view that because the hard problem is hard i have to attribute something like little itches into my electron for electrons so that's basically my contribution thanks barry so i think you've you've commented the sort of arguments against uh you've you've rejected the arguments against physicalism um and just i i feel i need to just bring in so so you're saying the arguments are crap but i mean just to just to get the we actually have hard data on what philosophers think on this so i guess just over 50 agree with you and just over 30 agree with me so i just want to get clear this isn't like a a totally fringe position what's that no no no no but yeah okay but i'm just uh yeah you sure you can think the arguments are crap but just to say like sure this is this is a matter of which there is a little price at 50 percent or on by side i think it depends where which philosophers you're you're asking about this actually well well the phil papers survey one kind of answer philosophers of science with another and so on that's probably right um but but you haven't commented yeah you did i don't think you said anything about about the so you give an art you've you've rejected the arguments against physicalist reductionism the arguments against physicist reductionism you've cast out on the you've you've given arguments against pancythis reductionism but what about this first topic that does physics give us reason to doubt strong emergence so my so my claim is you know that given that we've never you know the experiments done to support the core theory are you know done with small numbers of particles they're not done in brains or biological systems we don't really have any strong empirical reason to doubt the strong emergence of the brain i mean you have a kind of simplicity ground uh but i think that's not a very strong reason a sort of simplicity it's just like you know unless we have reason to think otherwise by saying i agree with everything that shawn said i think sean covered that perfectly i don't think it's merely simplicity it's well the reasons he gave about the very nature of what the fundamental physics is like but also more generally of course anybody could take the attitude towards any scientific discovery of well maybe tomorrow we'll find out something different of course but that's not the way science works or the way we should think about things you know we we've come found this method the scientific method which has given us a lot of information about the world enabled us to construct theories about the world the theories get tested the theories look like they're working out it's forever really a deep mystery i wish i memorized it there's a great quote from einstein in which he's expressing his awe in the fact this is true and then saying it doesn't cause him to believe in god okay but it is awesome that physics works that science works it's astonishing but it does and so i think that's where we should stick with it i think once one understands for philosophical reasons what's wrong with the arguments they're very clever and interesting arguments that come from from dave chalmers from you from frank jackson many other people they're clever and interesting arguments but i think when you examine them carefully you see that they make mistakes if i could say one more thing i've been teaching this stuff recently and i noticed something that is obvious to philosophers maybe but it didn't strike me so much before is how much of this time that philosophers spend on what they think of as very deep mysteries consciousness free will especially personal identity get structured around the following thing some really really smart clever philosophers come up with an argument to prove that it can't be like that it must be that personal identity involves it being some sort of a non-physical thing that continues it must be that human beings have some free will which enables them to move their hands around independently of the physics it must be that our brains are such that they are able to just produce or be associated with something that isn't physical they come with arguments like this the arguments are often interesting and that they're great that they come up with it because then other philosophers like me can come along and get paid to show what's wrong with those arguments that's great but i think in almost every i think in every one of those cases in some cases i feel very confident of this those arguments are just not good so i i mean maybe we could just did you did you want to come in at all keith or maybe otherwise we could just keep going around but did you want to just point bring it up well just just i mean i i i'm with sean and barry on this so everyone's hanging up on me again but i'd actually offer a little bit on the offensive against against really alternative source of data i mean uh you know that you have this you have this introspective data that you trust that you think should actually is should stand on on a par with the with with the the data of science and the conclusions of science and you think in fact you think you should trust it more than we trust uh scientific theorizing um i just i don't buy that what you have is a lot of strong convictions about your own mind and about its nature and its powers and its inexplicability and so on okay you have them interesting fine let's try and work out why you have them no you might have them because they're true oh you might have them for other reasons i mean look one of my look i've got this very strong conviction that like you know that i don't trust it but i'm not pom said conviction are very strong sense that things around me in the world are colored in a very naive sort of way that you know that they're sort of painted with these irreducible colors that these these lovely flowers here that i that that their leaves have got this intrinsic sort of greenness to them and the flowers are this beautiful orange color to them and it's out there in the world it's not like well not so much that and i've got this sense that these colors are you know intrinsic features of the world that aren't and i can't understand how physics can explain how these things can have these colors uh so i go okay so physics is is wrong these they can't explain never mind it can't explain my mind it can't explain flowers it can't explain paint but nobody trusts that intuition nobody says oh physics can't explain paint so paint you know it's a paint is an irreducible feature of the world no they say you're miss conceptualizing what properties things have you think they have these irreducible colors but actually somehow that's a feature of of us that we project onto them well okay if you can do that with with with with leaves and colors and painted walls and so on why can't you do it with your own mind you can you have these strong convictions fine that's not the that's that's that's that's an interesting psychological fact about us and perhaps not all of us i think okay i i i have to respond i guess to all the um yes so look i thi so i mean sean's saying this is this is just a fake division this um between consciousness not being publicly observable and the normal task of physics to be explained in what's publicly observable and barry saying oh there's all these philosophical arguments and they don't you know don't really prove anything and and then keith said oh it's just your intuition okay look my my starting point my starting point is there is something here that um i i know to be real with something close to certainty namely nothing mystical nothing magical my own pain and it the character of that of of of of that experience and um that is not if you were just if your whole task of science was just explaining publicly observable data you would never have that explanatory task so this i mean there's something here that is a solid data in the sense that we so it's not like this in any other case personal identity that's just some abstract philosophical argument right there's no kind of data there there's no starting point um and you know people sometimes make the analogy to life or something okay life what how do we know about life it's all just um publicly observable data about about other systems whereas in the case of consciousness there is something uh we know to be real and i think we know something about its nate its character we know like how pain feels that's part that describes the character of the experience um the the the character of seeing red that's a that's that's a you can i mean one way of illustrating this is you can be curious suppose you've you've never seen red you might think i wonder i wonder what it's like to see red and you might say ah that's what it's like it's got that qualitative character um the the position barry likes uh which he says solves all the problems all he gets rid of all these crap arguments uh basically i think it only makes sense if our only access to consciousness is in introspection is just sort of pointing at something you know we've evolved this capacity just pointless just concede what i said so i just want to say before you go on and okay i didn't say because i completely agree that i know the character of my pain totally agree with it what i don't know is that it's not physical that's not part of my experience but do you think so so here's the crux for me do you i was arguing this with uh brian mclaughlin your colleague last night actually i was at what a wrestler so be careful sagan he's bigger than me and he's a champion wrestler is he really i did not know that i wish you'd told me that before we argued last night he's probably gonna get me now um but look he thinks he thinks when you you know that he has this view when you just uh when you think about your pain or seeing red you're just kind of pointing at something you don't know what the hell it is and then it you know if that's the view it could turn out to be a physical state sure but so the question i want to ask you barry and i'd like uh you know well i'll just ask you does that provide any information of course we all say you know what it's like the character of the the red experience but does that give you information about the experience or not sure or is it i know the difference between a pain and a pleasure i uh between tasting sour cabbage which i had some last night and taken matzo balls i had some of them last night too i know the difference between them that's information for me well okay but that's no no but that's consistent i did not know that those experiences are not physical that wasn't part of the information that's consistent with just yeah look nobody thinks it's not i know it's not physical like that's not that's not how the argument works that we just have some intuition that is not physical nobody argues that way no but look but the fact that you can distinguish experiences that's not enough that's consistent with just the the blind point of view brian's blind point of view he just pointed something and but i can recognize oh it's one of them it's not one of them but it seems to me there's one that just focusing on that experience i have some information about it as i say i might be curious i wonder what it's like to be read and then i say ah that's what it's like that only makes sense if introspection gives us information about the nature of the experience otherwise how can your curiosity be satisfied so just just well it is in in in in grasping the character of the experience that is part of what it is to have the experience i agree with that but is it is it positive information or is it just referring to something so you answered that question i was giving in an account so that keith would keith was brought up a very interesting point before and that was that one of the things that'd be going on here is giving a kind of a count about why our concepts work the way they do and i was giving an account of that it would be the indexable the pointing nature of the concept i wasn't saying anything like there's there wasn't any information involved i mean information involves making distinctions among possibilities and surely we do that when we we know that what we don't do is get any information about the whether it's the experience of pain is physical or not nobody well don't well nobody argues like that nobody says i'm not saying i'm not saying anyone argued like that the arguments are rather arguments of the sort look i can imagine or conceive of a of a zombie something which is just like a physical being but it doesn't have any conscious experiences i'm not exactly sure what conceived means there but yes i can sort of get that but when you talk about conceives you're talking about kind of concepts so i want to know what is it about my concept that enables that and can i draw any conclusions from that fact to what pain is let's let's no let's think of why you can't do that was the indexical let's think about mary for a second who in her black before she sees red she's in a black and white room she's never seen red but she knows all the neuroscience right um i've sometimes given the example of nut norby who's a real-life equivalent where he's a color expert but he's got cones missing from his eyes so he can only see black and white and shades of grey but anyway let's take mary right and she might think i wonder what it's like to see red then one day she sees red and she goes oh my god that's what it's like her curiosity is satisfied the only way that makes sense to me if she's she's gaining information about the nature of color experience information about the nature of color experience that she couldn't get from the neuroscience what's happened is she's learned to apply the concept so your view is she's gained a new label now that that makes that cut in in that view you cannot make sense let me let me finish the point let me finish the many other concepts right right but that was the yeah but but she it's not just you want to come back to this comparative example again oh yeah okay she has information because she knows it's not this it's not this but just focusing on the red experience itself she will go oh that's what it's like not comparing to other things just the red experience that's what it's like it's got that character her curiosity is satisfied your view that she just gains a new label makes no cannot make sense of that datum because you you don't get your curiosity satisfied when you gain a new label for something so that's why it's connected with many other concepts and of course one of the things she wondered about before was i wonder whether it's like seeing green but you keep you keep coming back to the comparative notion but don't but but i'm suggesting before she compares it to any color maybe she just sees red let's take an example she just sees red she's given a red chip color chip and she would gain information there she'd say oh my god that's what red is like so you can't give your comparative answer and your theory that she's gained a new label is totally inadequate because it doesn't make sense sorry what was she seeing before she saw red black and white okay so now she has a comparison though you know i mean after all i mean there's a very subtle issue going on over here and that is whether information there's something like the very fundamental what i don't know what you want to call it criticistic nature of something that you learn about now in fact it's going to be very very difficult to figure out what we're talking about there we do know what it's like i mean in some sense we know what it is to be able to make distinctions among things of course we're making distinctions among things that we take it that we know what they are that's right but it doesn't mean that there's a added sort of criticistic nature that we're somehow grasping in order to make those distinctions well i mean i can only repeat that i i don't see in that sense i think if she's just focusing on one experience uh the new experience of red i think that would go that would satisfy her curiosity so you want to say okay well she could because now she's got a label that she can contrast with oh it's not that thing black and white i mean that just seems to be totally inadequate for the satisfying her curiosity she's not just like oh there's this that's not that it's like oh it's got that character so just that because she knew she because of her experiences of seeing black and white she knew what it was like to see black and white now she knows when she says red it's seeing red it's not like that okay well i guess we listeners and viewers can i think we've we've given both sides of that debate for ourselves can we bring can we can we can we bring back just to pick up on something you said earlier you said that we'd have certain uh practically certain knowledge of our own experiences and it's a source of data and everything it's something that we can uh we can uh uses a basis to to criticize scientific theories well just tell me something about you you talked about pain was your example okay so you have a pain where is your pain when you have when you stub your toe and you have a pain you you know this pain with a it's a concept where is it uh well it's in your brain i believe and that you know with certainty just by having the pain no no you don't know what you don't know where it is from you don't know where it is okay yeah um do you know what it what do you know about it do you know what it does do you know what effects it has no you know the character of the experience how it feels and i think that's positive and i just finished the point since you asked me the question if that is positive information about the experience information that you cannot get from physical science how the pain feels is information about the about and you can tell that you can tell that what you're getting when you have this knowledge of pain that it's not just information about say the effects that the stubbing your toe had on you the the the the the desire you can tell that it's not that it's something over and above all of that although nobody argues like that that's that's going back to barry strawman that it's like an intuition that it's not physical the point is you you get information about the experience and that information cannot be got from physical science and so there's that's the bit i'm desperate i'm challenging okay how do you know that bit well i mean so the alternative i mean i think barry would agree with me on that point that you you cannot you know a congenitally blind person is never going to know what it's like to see color through reading neuroscience that that would be the claim yeah there's an intuition then i see what you mean there's some sense to it but you know turn that into something that actually does duty as a scientific data might he i don't think you can go the fact that what the what you're talking about here this vague gesturing at the character of it that isn't just information about a well when i start to ask you what does what does this character do oh does it have any effects on you which effects and you know could you feel still feel that character could you feel the character of pain without wanting it to stop without feeling without judging that something bad was happening to you can you separate it out from all the various other effects that stubbing your toe has on you anyway i'm i'm pushing my input view and i don't want to do it let me just i was just hoping to bring you back in with sean but you were going to do this we should bring sean in sorry i don't know what you're you were going to say but one way to reconnect this would be to ask how since you do think there is uh this data is something that well let me ask you the question but do you think this data that this introspective data is something that can in any way engage with the sort of project that sean is doing or does it just proceed it's just another level of describing reality that has no connection to what sean is doing and if it does have a connection what is it and where does it happen are you talking to me i'm sort of talking to you but it's a question for for both of you really there's a way of seeing what you're saying is there's this there's this other aspect of the world of the that sean just doesn't see that physicists just don't see and can't see and i i i can't even construct out of the things they do see and you know we just got to do introspection and write you know poems about it or whatever and just let it go and great and there's another which says that and that which where's the debate about strong emergencies seems to come in but they do they do potentially uh uh engage with each other and that the theories that shawn endorses don't apply in certain uh uh domains such as the the human brain so which one of those do you go for because this seems pretty central which one of those do you go for if it's the latter if you think they can potentially engage how and where would the engagement come and how could we test it well i think you i think you know what my view is about how these things fit together and also that i i don't think it's because consciousness is not publicly observable you know very well it's not i don't think it's simply a matter of uh testability the hard problem of consciousness is not an experimental question and so it's not going to be onto an experiment but maybe sean do you want to say something about how you would think of a potential explanation of consciousness or something or as a weakly emerging phenomenon or yeah i mean sorry the my printer just started let me i'm stop stop this um yeah like as i've said before you know consciousness is a higher level phenomenon it's like temperature it's another way of talking about the same stuff uh at a higher level i see you know when you're talking about mary the color scientist i i mean i have no idea why this is supposed to be uh probative in any sense i mean mary has a list of facts about color that's a certain set that that is the higher level way of talking about a certain set of facts about what are going on in her neurons in her brain she sees red for the first time that's a completely different set of things going on in the neurons in her brain so we describe it differently at the higher level i just see no difficulty there whatsoever yeah it's a tricky argument that the argument isn't of course it's it's a change in her brain that means she can now see red of course no one denies that the point is my my point i'm making here is that through experiencing red she gains new information about the nature of the experience information information she couldn't get from physical science she might say oh wow that's so so if it's just a pattern of neural firings and she already knew let's say the relevant pattern of neural firings how can she gain this new information how could she go oh that's what it you know how can she gain new information on your view she already had the all the information she shouldn't be able to gain anything i mean the analogy i make in my book is like gum it is clearly different to say that she knows what neurons would fire if she saw red and to have those neurons fire you can that's not the point if you want but either you're begging the question about some phenomenological phenomenal experience being non-physical and that's what she's gaining information about or she's just having something different happen in her head that ever happened and i think that that's perfectly reasonable of course of course it's she she can only see red because of changes in their brain of course no no that's not the my claim is that she in doing so she gains information that she couldn't get from physical science and i'm not just stating that i'm giving you an argument my argument is her curiosity could be satisfied she can say i wonder what it's like that's what it's like and i don't see how either you or barry uh could could can make sense of that satisfaction of curiosity that you would have well i think the main term you just used was i don't see because i do think that i gave an explanation of what was going on there information is at the level of concepts we have you know learning what the quantum state of sean's room is gives you information in terms of those concepts but doesn't tell you how many books he has in there what you can use is because of the nature of books if we have a functional account what it used to be a book we might be able to or at least uh in super intelligence might be able to figure out that there are books in short but we can't do that and we can't do that with conscious states like pains because they're not functional concepts that's why you know different information yeah i know your view but well i don't want to i'm worried i'm going to repeat myself what's wrong with it you just keep insisting i'm getting new information no i'm not insisting i'm not insisting i'm saying i'm giving you an argument and i i'm saying hey look here's something we need to make sense of that her curiosity is satisfied and and you say well her curiosity satisfied because she can compare it to other things i want to say yeah but curious can be satisfied just by attending to the experience and and the character of the experience now your view i mean viewers a lot of people won't know the the details of of your view i know very well what your view is it is that she gains a new label she get that's what she gained okay well i'm not saying it's your view sean i'm saying it's barry has already said that's not his name okay tell me tell me tell me it's your label she she she had that label all along so it's not a new label but she's now what she has a new she's been now occupied a brain state she never occupied before oh yeah yes all right yes learned that an old label she has which is the label it is in part because of the way it interacts with all sorts of other labels that's what makes the concept the concept it is she now learns that it applies to this new state she's now actually i don't you just said i'd mischaracterize your view and then to my mind you just said exactly exactly when you left out the g-action a new brain state oh yeah okay okay sure fair enough fair enough okay so she she gains a new brain state [ __ ] i mean she has a new brain stayed in her head why i don't i don't see why why that would satisfy your curiosity you know if i have something new going on in my body that doesn't in itself satisfy your curiosity what else does she gain she gains a new label a new way of referring to something how is it an old label she didn't she's never seen red before she had the sleigh block she wondered how could you wonder what does it like to see a red red if she didn't have that that concept no but she couldn't think of she couldn't think of a red experience as a red experience he i thought now she can but before she had the she had that that concept now because she's had the state because she's now been in that it comes into that brain state because she said regret she now can say ah that's what it is to see red what how do you account for her curiosity being satisfied i think i just did say it again please she wanted to know i wonder what it's like to see red yeah and and philip goes to her and said here's what it is and waves the red flag and now she says now i know what it is because i wondered what it is that satisfies this concept and now she she knows it because she's now been put into that brain state why but so i when you when you just use the the ordinary language the pre-theoretical terms saying oh yeah she she's her curiosity is satisfied because she knows what it's like to see red oh that sounds very reasonable that sounds very reasonable on my view because i think commonsensically we think she's gaining new information but it ought to still make sense when we substitute your view in and i just don't think it does when you say her curiosity is satisfied because something different happens in her body well why would that make you curiosity satisfied i don't know keith's views in detail but i don't like the term illusionism but probably the way he uses it is so okay with me but one of the things you've noticed a lot of philosophical problems is that when when philosophers construct these arguments that that it can't possibly be that people that free will can be in physics and then some philosophers come along and show that those arguments are no good and they show how they could be free will it's not what those other guys really wanted for free will because they want to hold on to their concept which can't possibly be so to that extent it's a little bit of a illusion that's what you're doing here if i can finish this for a second i'm going to encounter a big argument with peter van impe next week having a conference here and he loves the mystery so much that even though i think it's clear to me that the arguments that free will and determinism incompatible are crap just like in this case he's not going to be convinced because he loves his mystery i think that's what you're like this is a bit of an ad hominem barry you were doing that before i would i would not have done that unless you weren't doing that oh sorry i apologize if i didn't add hominem um you started it so i think this is i'm i wondered why philip uh brought in barry to the conversation but i'm because he's clearly on my side and i and i love it and you know honestly philip this is why you're awesome because you're the best at engaging with the best people who don't agree with you and and that's why i'm happy to be here but look this whole conversation that you've just had forget about the substance of it it's clearly two smart people disagreeing about subtle things right that are kind of contentious and tricky and blah blah blah blah versus the laws of physics and the idea that on the basis of these kinds of arguments you would say oh yeah sure we should change the laws of physics how i don't know which equations are going to be altered we don't know that yet come on you should at least weigh what is going on here and and understand that the laws of physics that apply to the atoms and so forth in your brain have a status that is a little bit different than our feelings about the experience of red all right okay i'm glad we're coming back to that issue right because so and this connects as well to what barry just said i totally agree with barry when in any other philosophical case free will personal identity uh maybe value because in all these cases how do you know if the concept is satisfied barry said it totally right right you know how do we know you know maybe our ordinary concept of free will is incompatible with determinism but how do we know that concept corresponds to reality right uh but in the case of consciousness it's not just these abstract conceptual arguments it is um they're i would say and viewers listeners can make their own mind up whether they agree with this i would say in this case there are concepts we know are satisfied right if you attend to your pain and you think about it in terms of how it feels you you know that concept is satisfied you know there is a state that feels that way and that is why this utterly unique and that's why this has such uh such force now of course it's contentious like things in theoretical physics are contentious right but and here we come back to the point look i think you're all proving me correct in a sense because we're having the argument about the problem of the hard problem of consciousness right and everyone disagrees with me fine i'm i'm happy to debate i love the word it's very hard to convince somebody listen listen listen listen listen this is what i'm saying it all hangs and falls on that this is what the point i was trying to make in my presentation it all hangs and falls on whether that whether these arguments against physicalism work it's nothing to do with reflecting on physics people like me people on my side over thirty percent of philosophers as opposed to fifty percent who disagree fifteen twenty percent are agnostic or don't like the question we think these arguments work and that gives you incred very strong reason very strong reason to think let's say for the sake of discussion consciousness is is is strongly emergent right if we think it gives us and why how can it possibly give us a strong reason these philosophical arguments because it's not just arguments we're starting from something we have immediate connection with and we and we know on in our view something about its nature right and just let me i want to finish the point please let me finish the point right and and so we think it gives you very strong reason now what are we weighing that against the it's i can't see anything more than simplicity reasons right we we if we had tested the core theory in brains and seen that it applies i i would say that is very strong reason maybe i'm getting something wrong i would ha and i think a lot of you as listeners will get that impression that when you say there's this strong empirical reason that we've like tested but we haven't we've tested it with small numbers of particles i agree there's a kind of rough simplicity reason to think oh well if there's no reason to the country probably applying brains as well i agree ultimately there would have to be work to done to make it consistent with conservation of energy with locality and so on but why that doesn't that doesn't give us strong that doesn't give a strong empirical reason like you'd get if you'd actually tested it in brains there isn't all there is a very empiric in terms of the empirical reasons this is a very weak consideration easily trumped if if the arguments against physicalism work so what we should be doing is is having a debate about the arguments against physicalism as we have been doing great talking about physics is just irrelevant uh yeah no so i think let me just quickly hear before i know keith has something to say but of course it like i said if you think that the arguments against physicalism are just a hundred percent effective then the discussion about physics has no role i think that it would be absurd to think that no matter what side you're on clearly the physicalists think that they have answers to all of these questions that are purely physicalist so there is a role for the physics arguments here and the second thing which is much more important in my mind is that as i said before and i'll try to say again it's not just a simplicity argument it's not just a parsimony argument it's not just well we don't know therefore let's extrapolate the same laws the way quantum field theory works at a fundamental level is crystal clear on whether or not the core theory should apply in the human brain it's not just saying well we don't know therefore who knows it's as if you did a million experiments and you said oh look momentum is conserved in any experiment i've ever done and someone comes along and looks at your data very closely and says well i've noticed that even though you've done a million experiments none of them were done over the weekend so maybe momentum is not conserved on the weekend that's an absurd argument i don't see that let me finish let me finish now we understand quantum field theory well enough to know exactly when it should apply and the answer is when the energies of scatterings between certain kinds of particles exceed some threshold we know what the threshold is we know what the energy of subparticle scatterings in the human brain are it's deep deep deep within the understood regime so again you're welcome to contemplate changing the theory but it's not a simple harmless change it is a radical revision of our best understanding of how the universe works and there's every good reason to put very small credence on that move especially when you haven't even said what the revision is i i i don't see how that's not um simplicity grounds we've got we we've got a theory that if it is if it is the correct and complete theory of um of what goes on in brains gives precise predictions but what is our what is our evidence for that theory being the correct theory of of what goes on in brains experiments involving small numbers of particles you yourself sean in in the article we should put in the notes suggest you know raised ways in which th those laws could be modified both in terms of uh born rule and you know collapse dynamics um and and and and um what's the opposite of that singularity dynamics or anyway they they they pre-collapse dynamically dynamics yeah and and so you know how do how do how do we know that uh those modifications don't occur in complex systems i i mean what what we'd have to explore explore the the brains i mean it's maybe it's like saying you know uh well in europe we've only ever seen white swans so probably there are there are no all swans in australia are white okay you know that's a reasonable assumption we've never been to australia but it's precisely not like that why is it not like that because again the it's not just a matter of this experiment this experiment that experiment there is a theoretical structure we don't just get data on this process in this process using that data we put together a picture and the picture tells us that it should be valid in a certain regime and again you're welcome to try to overthrow the picture but please appreciate the magnitude of the project so we we know it applies in brains but unmodified how do we know it how do we know those modifications do not don't know that there are no modifications but the modifications are incredibly profound they're not tweaks they're saying that there are deep mistakes in our understanding of locality which is one of the most fundamental features of modern physics but i take it on like sorry i i take a chance that you know if you had uh fairly strong evidence like empirical evidence a reasonable amount of evidence that there were modifications in brains then you you know you'd be happy to you quite easily you know change accept those modifications people on my side over 30 no no look when okay an experiment at cern said oh we've discovered neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light the reaction of the theoretical physics community was like oh let's drop everything and explain neutrinos faster than moving fashion the speed of light it was that's got to be wrong because we have a theory that is really really good that says that can't happen it turned out that was precisely correct when you have these credences in different versions of modifying the theory your credences depend on how radical the modification is going to be but the whole point is i'd be very happy to ultimately change my opinion in the theory but the evidence would have to be overwhelming for good reasons but i just i just think so i'll say one more thing and then maybe bring barry in i you know i just think you're you're you're assuming that the only things that are going to inform our theorizing about reality are our experiments for people on my side of the debate 30 30 percent over 30 bronzers you know we think that there is a very high credence that physicalism is false based on our immediate awareness of our unconscious experience and reflection upon it you know i'm not 100 percent but i don't know 87 80 percent so this there's there's there's the situ the epistemological situation for me is i've got very strong reason forget put let's put pan cyclist reductionism on one hand just for the sake of discussion we've got very strong reason to think the strong emergence in the brain we've got well it would be you know okay there's some reason to keep our theory the way it is but we haven't actually tested it uh that's it that that seems to be obviously a weaker reason that's and that seems to me a total totally wrong entirely correct to take all of these things into account and the only contrast i will once again draw very quickly is between attempting to explain the emergence of the most complex and subtle phenomena in the known universe versus doing a dramatic modification of something like locality that underpins everything we know about modern physics yeah how would how would a hydrogen atom know that it was in a brain how would its being in the brain affect the behavior of the hydrogen atom would it sense that it was in a brain how would it work i don't understand you well i don't you mean strong emerge well i don't i i'm not sure maybe maybe different things have to happen you know the the core theory doesn't apply unmodified in brains okay so how do the things that the core theory talks about how do they know they're in a brain how do they know they're in the brain what do you think oh what's sensitive to that the rest of the brainy stuff i mean are you starting to i mean it's clearly not incoherent that there may be it may be that the the the dynamics change in complex system that's clearly a coherent hypothesis right that means giving up as i understand very different from any of the physics yeah yeah actually maybe maybe i can help maybe maybe i can say something that is purely physics-y that is informative here it's not the point of the chord theory i should have worn my core theory t-shirt i i forgot to you know bring the empirical evidence here but um it's not just that there is an equation and that it fits the data it's the character of the laws that it really really matters here which is the following that that hydrogen atom to which keith refers the rules of modern physics are that the all of the particles and fields in that hydrogen atom the electrons protons all the gluons and whatever they obey an equation with the following character that the field at any one point in space only feels the influence of other fields at exactly the same point in space that is what locality means that is why it is literally not possible in that framework for the hydrogen atom to know whether it is in a brain or not so again you're welcome to change the the equation in a in a certain way but it's not a trivial change it's throwing out all of quantum field theory it's violating the fundamental idea that fields respond to other fields at the same point in space somehow they have to know what's going on elsewhere in the system that opens the door to all sorts of terrible things faster than speed of light communication you know uh violations of energy conservation who knows and again you're welcome to build the theory but in the absence of someone having built such a theory just saying well we don't know yet is not you're just coming back to implicitly um saying the arguments against physicalism are are not are not worthwhile because you're saying you know if all we've got is we don't know but that from my perspective that's not all what we've got we've got very strong reason to think their consciousness is strongly emerging right and uh i mean that's my point that's what we should be arguing about we've got very strong reason on one side and we've got the theory that has not been tested in brains on the other side it's not totally i need to think more about the locality issues i i certainly don't think uh a strong emergency stereo consciousness will be inconsistent with um conservation of energy uh this is the point i think churchlin and dennett a mistake they made oh this is the point i convinced dennetty was wrong um but um in terms of locality you're welcome to believe anything you like about it but but again again sean you're just assuming the the anti-physicalist arguments have no evidential force it's not just believe anything you like i'm i'm asking the anti-physicalist to say what their theory is of course i already admitted it but we don't know enough about their own force but then that's another arguments that also have there for us that's an unreasonable request because we don't know enough about the brain to offer a detailed theory our argument our reasoning our reason is is not on empirical grounds it's on philosophical grounds perhaps some humility is called for who knows well i could say the same to you you know if if 30 percent of philosophers uh think there is a very high credence for for this view maybe maybe you should have a bit of humility that you your reasoning might be wrong and there might be a very strong consideration uh pointing another so i think that goes two ways the humility point so can i chime in go a couple of things just about the very last remark um about humility probably if you ask physicists you probably find a lot more duelists among physicists than you'd be surprised that's just a problem about physicists though really about phillip phillip just a little while ago said we know on the base of our experience that strong emergencies is right but we don't know that on the basis of our experience though none of the points you've been up before had anything to show about strong emergentism what they might have shown is that i learned something new in some sense when i learned that i have a when mary or mary lives on you and she has a red experience and i think i have an account of what it amounts to that she noted something new even if in fact uh our experience is just a physical state but that's a subtle philosophical thing one thing i really want to insist on is it's not a matter of our experience that strong emergencies is true absolutely not the other thing i wonder about asking philip about or sean too for that matter is what kind of discoveries that physicists could possibly make or anybody could make about the operations of neurons or protons or or humans or whatever ons could possibly satisfy philips question of here's what it's like at this fundamental level and now when mary learns that then she won't have to go bother and have the experience you have to see something red as soon as she learns that she will know what it's like to see red i think if you reflect on that you'll see there's nothing nothing that physics could ever discover well i can certainly um uh fill up and i think sean sometimes suggests as though that might be it might be the brain is so complex it may be a few million years from now people discover that some super complexity will provide an answer to philip's question if philip is around it for millions from now years from now i guarantee you with more i i can answer exactly what what uh empirical data would would cast out on this look i mean it's a it's a it's a slightly complicated argument that we're having that i'm trying to simplify because i'm not necessarily committed to strong emergentism i'm you know i'm open to the panzykus reductionism as well so you know in a way i don't have to commit on this but um but i'm i'm partly persuaded by certain arguments against any kind of reductionist picture so yeah it's not as we as i said before it's not just instantly known on the basis of experience but there is a hard datum here our awareness of our own experience and some and its character and it's it's drawing out the implications of that as i said i think future people will you know it it's a philosophical process of drawing out the implications of that which i think can lead to uh irrational to have a very strong credence based on drawing out the implications of this datum but i can tell you exactly what empirical evidence would cast out in strong emergence testing the core theory in the brain of course yeah if we tested it we saw you know the prediction i mean i'll give you an example actually andrew melnick a very good philosopher who's a physicalist on on your side of the debate and and he ends his book a physicalist manifesto very good book saying you know what what we we don't really have that strong our evidence for physicism what would give us strong evidence is if you know we we can um you know reduce uh certain i can't remember the example he gives now maybe um certain reasoning doing modus ponens and reasoning or something we could sort of really explain that how these different reasoning works and in terms of underlying chemistry in terms of underlying physics if we started to really um reductively explain um um the the um processes associated brain activity associated with consciousness in terms of underlying chemistry physics yeah we'd have strong reason to doubt the strong emergence in the brain but when you have when you've just tested the theory on on a bunch of particles in isolation i just don't see why that gives you strong empirical reason i take i take shawn's point that might be sort of reflecting on the uh on the virtues of the theory might give us poor support but that's nothing compared to actually testing it and that is not what we've done yeah anyway sorry you talk they're just about drawing out the uh implications of our uh of our experience of what we know for we're never certain there's uh some something's happening something's going on here there's nothing to draw out from that something's happening i think we know more than that there's things to draw out from the way we conceptualize what's happening okay now suppose i conceptualize what's happening here is i'm acquainted with a world where the qualities of experience are all out there the qualities of the color are all out there and the sounds and everything's not in my mind it's out there i can conceptualize it that way fine that's how most people do intuitively that the colors are just qualitative things painted on surfaces and they're there and i conceptualize it that way and then i go so i can't see how this stuff out there can be purely physical because i can't see how you know atoms aren't colored are they so how when you put a lot of them together does it get colored i just can't see that and therefore i've got an argument that the world around me isn't physical yeah that's a consequence of the way i conceptualized it i drew out the consequence of the way i conceptualized it and got the view that you know the walls in my room are not made of atoms great i proved that wow i drew it out i hope the consequences the way i conceptualize you're conceptualizing your own experience in a certain way and i agree that when you conceptualize it in that way you get all this stuff out of it but you're only getting out what you put in and you don't we talked about humility but don't you see that there might be might just be another way of conceptualizing it which draws out different stuff you're just insisting this way of conceptualizing it entails implies this yes i agree but that's not the only way i mean one thing is this this will be a difference i think between between you and barry i don't think barry thinks it's a mistake in the in the way we're conceptualizing it but uh just to just to illustrate there's a bit some diversity of opinions but look this is back to the argument the argument we we always have keith which is starting point how do you start theorizing how do you know anything about reality i think you three guys assume the only way we can theorize about reality is observation experiments uh why i i of course agree that that is that that is one source of data but what but there is there is even to get to empirical data you have to make a lot of uh a a lot of uncertain commitments like you you know how do i know i'm not in the matrix how do i know the future will resemble the past how would you you can only you have to start theorizing with what seems most evident and to my mind the reality of my own pain for example and not just there's something going on as you put it keith that there is something with a certain qualitative character that reality seems to me more evident than the external world so i'm going to take that datum very very seriously because it seems to me more evident than nothing exactly i agree i agree i'm happy with that the quote i started is the pains in my tongue the colors on the wall the smells in the air that's where i start and then philosophers go along and say hey that's not quite right because look yeah okay so we revise that we change i'm happy to look i'm not saying this is infallible i've never said that and if and if there was a perspective on reality i'd like to say i'd like to say an empirical influence that's that's that really opened me up to strong emergence more than anything because i do have the possibility of you know uh psychic instructions and re as i've said for talking to neuroscientists i used to assume there was this strong empirical argument against strong emergence talking to neuroscientists i'm reading matthew cobb's book the idea of the brain uh you know a wonderful intellectual history of the brain and basically the the the the the the take-home lesson is we know a lot about the basic chemistry of the brain uh neurons firing calcium chambers and so on we know a lot about we know a fair bit about large scale functions of the brain we know almost nothing about how large scale functions are realized at the cellular level you know we're only seventy percent of the way through mapping the maggot brain with its ten thousand neurons we are just clueless on the working of the human brain that's why we can't clue that we can't explain keith but you're just you're just assuming my view is wrong when you say that you're assuming scientist that the only ev the only data to inform reality is observation experiment when you know i i think there is another in the middle of it and we try and fathom our way out and you know we try and find things out we if we tested the core theory in the brain and we saw it was correct i would say that's bloody good reason to think the strong emergency but until you give me that kind of evidence you want to get people in particle accelerators right the ethics committees are going to have some problems with it well just because it's hard to do i don't think we should pretend the evidence is is stronger than it is you can get people near particle exodus and get them to think about the particles a lot maybe would that help uh yeah it needn't be testing the core theory it could be you know explicating so brain activity associated with conscious experience in terms of underlying chemistry and physics i i just don't think we've maybe maybe one issue we haven't really it might be it's i don't know if barry and shawn ways they want to go is to think about this this sort of patchwork this dappled world conception that nancy powder this idea that all science is doing is it is kind of idealizations restricted to certain domains and that we really don't know what happens outside those domains uh it's a you know central island yeah let me say something because i do think that this is i don't want this to slip by we do experiments i mean very parenthetically i don't know about barry but of course i'm happy to take our conscious experience as data i'm not ignoring that that's that's just a straw man but the important question is the domains of applicability of our theoretical ideas and where we might expect deviations from them and that's why i think that the momentum being conserved on weekdays rather than weekends is a fundamentally different example than swans being white in britain versus australia because if you only observe swans in australia in britain and you haven't seen them in australia it's clear theoretically why they might be different in australia there's a clear difference that is relevant to the situation whereas if all of your data about conservation of momentum happens to fall on weekdays and not weekends there's clear theoretical reasons to expect it to also extend to the weekends and those theoretical reasons are relevant in the case of the hydrogen atom in the brain all of the theoretical understanding we have says that the hydrogen atom should obey the same rules in the brain as it does everywhere else so the burden is on someone to show how it should be modified but sean when you say it the reason this is just analogous is because we've got good reason to think that swans might be different in australia i mean you just again you're just assuming the anti-physicist arguments don't work i mean no no i'm just not referring to the anti-physical i've said over and over again you're welcome to consider the anti-physicalist arguments i would think it would be a mistake as a good philosopher to give them credence one and therefore we should have other arguments that we are also considering and changing the laws of physics in the brain is one of them but what if we give it 80 credence do whatever you want i'm just i i am i've said at the very beginning of our very first interview i am neither educated nor especially interested in consciousness or the brain my point is that it is not cheap and easy to change the laws of physics and that should be one of your considerations do you think it would overcome a credence of eighty percent it depends on what your credence in the law of physics is if if i have 99.9999 credence that the core theory is correct in the brain then yes and you think you've got 99.9 credence um okay what is your creative i don't have an 80 percent credence in the anti-physicalist arguments i think that they're pretty bad so think about what one should have in philosophical arguments given their history okay i mean come on you know with so many philosophical arguments that have proved all sorts of things i i don't even want to start with it but um uh you know so my credence that a philosophical argument is going to trump the um the theoretical structure that has been built up in physics you know it would have to be not unbelievable i it would have to be very personal that someone i'm really convinced by this particular philosophical argument i've never encountered a philosophical argument i mean to repeat barry i i would agree with you in any other case it's it's only in this case because it's not just abstract reasoning it's starting from a data point which is and the data point is um you know not just that i have experience but but i i'm a i'm aware of some information about it namely its character and and i'm not interested what conclusions you draw i i completely agree with you that we have introspection and feeling and experience and i don't want to call it an illusion at all i think it really is the case that i have a tickle in my toe or an itch in my toe okay it's not an illusion at all but now what do i want to draw from that and is there an account of how it is that it's right for me to say it's true for me to say that you know i didn't know what it was like to to taste what did i taste recently i had a com quad recently which i hadn't had before okay i now know what it's like to taste the conqueror okay i learned something for sure but i don't see any reason to conclude from that that i've learned something about there being anything non-physical particularly then all shawn's reasons come in over here but i don't even think i i don't think that in some sense sean's reasons considerations apply when somebody gets into an argument about strong emergencies where they can be strong these properties which affect how people move around like limbs or something like that that we don't know about that that's where they apply but they're they're even being brought up because somebody has become very convinced by these anti-physicalist arguments and when there's a good analysis of why they're convinced by it such that it doesn't require rejecting physicalism and furthermore that there's nothing that anybody could discover from what's going on in the physical world it could ever satisfy the anti-physicalist anyway the dualist you never really answered that you're shaking your head no don't no i gave you i said i said what evidence you know what she did was to tell me how you could you how sh how you you might make discoveries which would tell you now that well strong emergencies in the brain is false but what you didn't do is to say how finding out that is going to tell you how mary learns the what you want to know but as what it is like to see red from the physical characterization of stuff that's what you didn't do okay fair point i guess i mean i guess there are these interesting issues around charm what chalmers talks about the the meta problem of consciousness like why do we why do we um think there's a hard problem of consciousness uh can we explain reductively our intuitions on consciousness i mean maybe i'm not too certain but maybe if you know if there was a totally reductive explanation of our intuitions about consciousness and that could be presented maybe that would make me think ah this is just something natural selection has brainwashed me to think i talked to dave about the meta problem he said he met a problem which has made a career for his for him and for many other people that's has been a problem well i wouldn't be so cynical about it i think there's a an interesting kind of project do you want to um do you want do you want to have a quick chat about the um there's this final slide i've got here about like whether we have to understand this is a violation of the core theory is that worth doing or oh yeah have we had enough [Music] i think we agree that it is a violation of the core theory and we've had enough we should get onto questions from the peanut gallery oh yeah okay yeah let's have a few questions so we've got well i just wanna i just i just wanna note for the record that i i don't think that's so obvious but uh i don't think it's a very i think it's a terminological issue i think there are i mean i just this does has already been mentioned my colleague nancy cartwright you know it's quite esteemed an influential philosopher science on her conception of the her philosophical interpretation of the laws of physics that would not be true so i don't think it's sort of totally straightforward so again she doesn't think there are physics she does she thinks that they have just have ceteris paribus clauses built into them so that they only she said i actually have a quote i just put it in something i wrote but she says that if there's no god there are no laws right through that she then decides to use the phrase with kenner's parabus terms but she's an illusionist about laws okay third point but you could have it would be a philosophically acceptable position to have a view closely related to nancy were well you are realist about laws but they have acetarus parabus yeah and i i think she said that in in in certain contexts okay well thankfully sometime you you you would be talked a lot about what mary learns and the cure has to be satisfied so maybe just drop me an email sometime and tell me that what she learns about about what it's like to see red that doesn't use any relational terms or any demonstrative terms or any indexical terms or anything like that tell them something about the intrinsic nature of red that she learns well obviously you know it's a commitment to my view that's that that's not possible and i mean i could defend why that's not a negative feature of the view if you like but then take that as a basis as a the datum is a pretty slippery one you can't convey what red looks how what it's like to see red or how pain feels uh to someone who hasn't felt it but still we know is something close to certainty that there is the experience with that character and that is positive information about reality that should factor into our theorizing use it in any sort of uh constructive way how she can incorporate it with other bits of knowledge and use it and theorize on the basis of it but anyway i was only winding up okay well it's the argument we have a million times okay should we get some a few i forgot about questions actually does anyone oh however made the comments disappear oh they're back again okay who wants to ask a question do you want to uh a question mark oh right my friend mark this is my friend uh mark disagreeable me who we argued for two years when he was living in new zealand argued on twitter and then he's moved to durham so we hang out a bit now okay is is it strong is it strong emergence if there's a psycho i could put it on the screen can i is it strong emergence if there's a psychophysical law which states that and how we have phenomenological consciousness without any downward causation on particles discuss who wants to take that anyone want to take them i mean if i think if i understand the words correctly uh without any downward causation on particles then it is not a strong emergence because the behavior of the physical system is the same i think strong emergence really is not just about extra stuff going along with it but a true dynamical difference in my understanding would be phenomenal i guess wouldn't it yeah if yeah so there is i mean it's a it's a good point to raise that there is the epi phenomenalist position that consciousness is radically new but it doesn't do anything and so is that strong emergence i guess it's just a terminological issue there i suppose today we've been talking about strong emergence that's something that would make a causal difference but there's also a clear sense in which the epiphenomenologist position is strong emergence because consciousness is sort of radically something like that it used to be chalmers view i don't think he's so sympathetic to epi phenomenalism these days but uh paul marco question for goff do human cells in the brain perform their cellular chemistry according to the laws of physics well does i mean the strong emergent disposition would be which i mean as i say i'm open to both a panzerkiss reductionist and a strong emergence would be uh there are going to be some things going on in in the brain that you would not expect just from underlying chemistry and physics actually depends whether chemistry is emerging my colleague my colleague robin hendry thinks chemistry is strongly emergent so but let's assume that's not the case let's assume um chemistry is reducible to physics then there's going to be some things going on um and how exactly the that you wouldn't predict from underlying chemistry physics how exactly that's worked out we just i i agree with sean that ultimately there would have to be serious theorizing how how these new dynamics uh modify our understanding from our current understanding of the laws of physics but um but we don't know anywhere near enough about the brain to know what that would look like yet and then you might say well why do i think it's it could take the idea seriously on these philosophical grounds right i'm not i'm not a proponent of scientism i don't think the only way to theorize about reality is observation experiments i think drawing out the implications of uh conscious experience that we're directly aware of is also a crucial source of data does anyone else want to come in on that or should i bring in a question for others well i mean just to say that uh it's not even a tiny little bit of an effort of a of a meager um start to changing the laws of physics in such a way that they would look strongly emergent there is just the wish being expressed that maybe that will help things somehow well which which sounds like there's no evidential support here but you know there's no construction of a better theory sure i can agree with that i can agree with that but i still think there's strong reason to take the possibility seriously in the absence of that because it's the the source of the source of credence here the source of taking it seriously is not a scientific empirical one but a philosophical one if i were cynical which as you know i am not i would say that if if people really believed that they would really be devoting themselves to building such a theory even if it's not the right theory just to as an existence proof show that it could happen because many nobel prizes await the person who overthrows the core theory in precisely the correct way i mean we just i just think we don't know enough about the brain to really to really make a start on that it's not a question about the brain's question about physics how could you possibly change the laws of physics in something like the way that is being imagined here well i mean you you in in the paper in response to me that people can go and look at you you raise a couple of in very broad brushstrokes possibilities i just don't think we anywhere near enough knowing enough about the brain to but there's certain things you'd have to do regardless of what you know about things like locality you'd have to be building theories that alternative there's that drop that now i'm not sure it's not totally transparent to me why you need to drop locality because you keep saying in the brain okay you know you can't say in the brain and then yeah but it could be it could be for example it could be that the um the strongly um there's some kind of strongly emergent entity like a you know a com not not like spiritual entity but there's there's some kind of strong unity to the composite whole and that strong unity sort of emerges in a progressive way that respects locality individual uh atoms and so there's got to be a violation yeah yeah now this is this is crucially important and i'm understanding that maybe we disagree about this it has to be non-local if it's not non-local it's the core theory if you're gonna change the chord theory in a way that only shows up when the atom is in a brain the the other atoms in the brain are not in the same location as this atom that's not what will affect in that change the atoms take up room in the unities they're fields that's that's the fundamental nature the fields just have values at points so why couldn't there be an um a a a strongly emergent field that emerged that uh that respects locality well that there there could be new fields that's what i wrote the whole paper explaining why there aren't and we know that there aren't but if the new field knows the difference between being in a rock and being in a brain it has to have non-local impacts non-local influences i i need to think more about this i'm so i i won't i won't i won't carry it is something i should have thought more about really um okay question uh barry seems to be a qualia realist how about sean i'm a quality realist in exactly the same way i am a temperature realist or a table and chair realist these are real categories that exist in a higher level theory and have no fundamental existence do you do you think they're just the talk of consciousness is just a way of talking about complex behavior yeah yeah i want to make that clear because i think i think that really um i think a lot of people if you if you sort of say oh you know we'll one day explain consciousness in terms of the brain people think oh yeah that might be but if you say talk of consciousness is just a complicated way of talking about behavior now with the different sentences you just said sorry you changed the sentence that i'm purportedly agreeing with oh did oh sorry did i mischaracterize you in that sense it is a part of a higher level theory and it plays an explanatory role in accounting for behavior it is a it is nothing i don't like to use words like just or merely or whatever but it is uh a way of drawing to get like any higher level emerging phenomenon a summary of many many possible things that could be going on at lower levels it's not an intrinsically new thing just like temperature is not but i think most people think you know who take the hard problem seriously not necessarily opponents of mater physicalism or materialism think we're not trying to explain behavior we're trying to explain subjective experience that we're immediately aware of you know so my point again again is that the idea of suggestive subjective experience is a concept within an explanatory higher level framework that also includes behavior and we can talk about it perfectly sensibly as it relates to behavior when i have pain to say that someone has pain plays a causal role in how i understand the world as many people have pointed out if i were a robot that didn't have any conscious experience and went down to earth from an alien civilization and met people and tried to talk about people i would very soon be talking about their inner conscious states because it plays an explanatory role but i mean could i say i just i just want to say that i i totally agree with with what trump said at consciousness i i i would just ditch the word qualia because it comes with so much philosophical baggage and if you use it people will immediately start saying ah but then you need to explain the intrinsic feel of the thing that's immediately yeah yeah and you're you're just dodging the issue and you're you're explaining consciousness away and yeah the idea i don't you know let's agree with that there's some new vocabulary here that's the whole point of talking about the illusion here is to say that it's this something over and above all that that's illusory and let's you know as as dan dan it says cut the tangled kite string about carly throw the thing away let's invent a better theoretical vocabulary that can you know doesn't come with all this hideous theoretical package so the position is the same but you know um i wouldn't call myself a qualia realist because it just invites expectations that you can't meet and shouldn't remotely want to meet i don't tend to use the word myself whatever all the what it is like there's all this stuff that kind of rarefies this this you know should we do a couple more questions about something and then call it a day i've i've really enjoyed this discussion sorry if i've got a bit heated but it's only because i'm having fun uh okay what's the next question what does it mean to be physical wow barry what do you reckon that's married what does it mean to be physical somebody's thought about getting physical i guess that's why we do these conversations over zoom so that we do not throw hands the idea of this the term physical the way i think about it was introduced in order to talk about what is found to be what's fundamental and what's fundamental is whatever it is that makes up paradigm objects that we think of as being physical objects like stables well i don't know tables paradigm but sticks and stones and rocks and mountains and and weather and stuff like that and then the interesting idea about physicalism is that whatever it is that gives an account of the behavior of this stuff gives an account to the behavior of everything else that's what i think physicalism is i mean it's not very precise what i just said it's a it's a notion that's it's used to talk about a kind of a um what to say a a view that developed within the development of of of of science ever since the 17th century so if physicalism would have been false if it turned out that it was discovered that there was something that's involved in the behavior of let's say living things which was not involved in the behavior of sticks and stones and so on then i would have said that physical since i understand it was false people thought that for a while that would you call vitalism but that turned out to be true so i think there's good reason to think that not just for that reason but from the history of the subject it's good reason to think that physical isn't is true the the last bastion is the mind about that and there as far as the behavior of of human beings and other creatures are concerned it looks as though physicalism is right there we've been arguing mostly that maybe it's not right because there's something that emerges some unity that happens in the brain or something which makes humans move their twitch their noses in a way that's different from from what could be accounted for in terms of physics or something like that that's one issue the other issue which is the other part of it which we kept going back and forth between is that this feature the what it's like feature and i don't think physics will ever be able to account for that not because of defect in physics or because of the falsity of physicalism but because of the nature of the concepts that we employ when we totally think about the what it's like future yeah it's i mean it's interesting actually that um yeah i mean again just i i don't like the analogy with with life because with life the data is all just public observation experiments whereas there's there's something else we need to account for here some are the feelings experiences divided up into these two parts the accounting for the beginning physicalism would have been false if if the stuff though counted for the behavior of sticks and stones couldn't yeah life on the other hand there's another thing in the world that we i think we all are realists in this sense about uh i'm i'm glad i was a thought that keith might not have been a realist about experience because he's called an illusionist but i i think he's willing to say we really do have pains in our he just thinks we're what's the illusion is the illusion is what philip phillips is the person who's under the illusion he's in the illusion that he can draw from the fact that he has those experiences that they're not physical well i'm not misconceptualizing i mean i have experience in the everyday sense obviously we have pains and things like that nobody denies that it's it's how you conceptualize them i mean i think there's just these things that are happening right whatever they are i don't know what they are what's an illu what's illusory is the uh we misconceptualize those things and in such a way that we're thinking about something that doesn't that's illusion and then we're drawing out the conclusion that the exceptional part misconceptualized i think it's very essential to those experiences that we have the very concepts we have of them so i wouldn't say it's a that would that would somehow things would be better if we gave up those concepts so we no longer misconceptualized yeah surely we could give them up i think i think look you know our ways of talking you know they're rooted in all sorts of social stuff and they're great they're fine what we shouldn't do is take them seriously and think that they need they're gonna force us to revise our physics or something you know it's what uh you know it's it's an issue about the the scientific status of these concepts that's right can i can i collect we shouldn't reconcept but we shouldn't give up the way we use our concepts it's or what it's like concepts either yeah i'm not convinced we actually use them philosophers think i mean we talk about what the world's like not what we know what we're not what are yes we're much less introspective than philosophers think so we talk about the the illusion if you like is that the world is packed with qualities in that sense um but yeah well you know it's just we revise our ordinary uh uh ways of talking about ourselves and describing what you know of course okay should we do a final question guys i'm just doing them in order people put them up andrew irish if we had a complete physical theory explaining how conscious experience arises would there be something would there still be something to explain knowing how red experiences versus experiencing it do you want to take that joan well i'm not exactly sure what is being presumed by the construction of a complete physical theory explaining how consciousness arises uh because there's two things going on there's a complete physical theory of the physical stuff and what it does and then there's connecting to the higher level theories which is still more work right in which we haven't done you know my claim is that we understand all the laws of physics underlying the basic stuff of which you and i are made that doesn't mean we can derive you and i from the basic laws of physics maybe we could someday that kind of derivation aspect i think is a little bit of a fake like that's a a criterion that people invoke but it never really happens we can't derive tables and chairs from the standard model of particle physics but we're pretty sure that they're completely compatible with the standard model so i think that there's just knowing the underlying laws of physics leaves plenty to still be explained in understanding the dynamics of the higher levels and how they connect with the lower levels yeah i think i mean i think if yeah if there was a complete physical theory explaining how consciousness arises then that that will be the end of the story but i think there's good reason to think there couldn't be uh and again repeating the point you know the argument is not yet we still so even if we had a complete theory that explained consciousness that wouldn't make you have a red experience by reading the theory i think that's the misunderstanding of the knowledge argument that i i think sean is still a bit subject to but it's it's not the point is not that oh you should have you know if you're a materialist you should have a red experience through reading neuroscience nobody thinks that you've got to have your brain in a point in a certain way the point is when mary when we when mary sees red for the first time she gains new information about the nature of red experiences that she couldn't get from the neuroscience i mean the analogy i gave my book is like you know we're going on too late how she could uh how she could encode that information and how many bits it would take to transmit it i'm not going to be drawn okay guys this i've i've really this has been really really good fun thanks thanks for joining us barry thanks sean for coming back do you have any final comments apart from conceding total surrender i think philip you're a really brave guy this is what i wanted right this is what it's all about i'm uh i'm happy i'm you know i mean i think the thing is i do feel yeah i mean i feel i feel quite confident i think when you you know i'm i'm only saying these things because i i do feel quite confident about them i think i think when you're not sure about something and you're trying to have a debate you end up you know just stumbling or something but i think you know i'm i'm this is the way you test your ideas i don't feel sure about anything so i don't feel that you said but what i i do think is this i do think what way i view philosophy often is philosophers often here's what i think of i remember when i was a kid i saw a cartoon in which there were these creatures who built up these mountains and they were like throwing these bottles at each other full of red paint and green paint and when they got one got hit by green paint they turned green by red paint to turn red and that's what philosophers are like they build up these things and they're throwing things at each other all the time we're really really pretty good at throwing things then we're pretty good at building the fences up to stop the growing things and so on and it's great because we keep getting paid that's a nice analogy i'm not sure i liked where that went but um um and we learned a lot about i don't think truth truth is is is hard to get at so i think we learn a lot by doing all of this and i'm not think i'm gonna find the truth yeah much anything in my life i mean you say i'm brave but just to return to the point this is you know 30 percent of philosophers agree with me 50 of philosophers agree with you guys it you know it's it's i'm standing up for the silent majority silent minority that's what my closing thought is just to point out that the physicalists here all have books in their backgrounds and the pan psychist doesn't so where does the intellectual heft lie uh philosophically this is what we were talking about before we before we went live and um i think it's a perfectly valid well this is because you guys you guys need books well i've got arguments i don't need this this uh you're supposed to break into song you have the keyboard behind you that's that was your we're gonna do a special musical case the musical the musical edition will be one i look forward to the musical episode all right thanks guys it's been lots of fun thank you very much look really thanks again see you see you soon um i forgot now kick you out now all right wow i think that was the possibly the most intense mind chat we've had a good way to celebrate our anniversary what do you think yes it was it was it was pretty intense uh uh we i am not sure we made a lot of progress but i think we're all perhaps a little bit clearer about where we where we're where we stand about about locality is i think i need to think about locality that's a good point i should have i do need to think about that but you know what i wanted to do for my own mind is is to is to test these views in the you know what's the analogy of just we steal is tested in fire you know and i i i feel um i don't know i still feel confident in that basic comparison between if there is very strong credence on this side and then there's uh you know we haven't actually tested the theory in in the brain then anyway i i i still feel confident about that argument maybe i'm maybe i'm an idiot but but that that is what i wanted to do for my mind i mean i am genuinely always open-minded on these things if you're not if you're not careful your credences they're going to lead you to epiphenomenalism i'm not sure that's a possibility but yeah i mean as i say it was empirical talking to scientists that sort of opened me up more to strong emergence and yeah i mean i am genuinely open-minded on this and um yeah i mean i i think it is i mean you know you know how we differ but i think you do a good job in i think what something you you're right about is that you're articulating something that is quite a widespread intuition certainly among philosophers oh i said you and i and actually and among the general public i think certainly among the general public in our in our culture uh it's it's it's it's a pretty widespread view i think so you certainly want people who are kind of interested a bit in philosophy okay so it doesn't take long to get this to get yourself convinced of this view and it's very useful to have that view clearly stated explicitly stated and traced down its implications explored and if you're going to have someone do that you need to do it in a you know it needs to be done in a rigorous and uh precise way and that's what you're doing and whether you're right or wrong that's i think that's a useful thing to do it's a useful thing for us i really appreciate that um my wife just messaged me that my daughter's desperate me to to read harry potter through every night this week i haven't put my kids to bed because i've been at this conference that shawn was at as well actually so i'm gonna probably have to dash uh is it the fourth one um i think because she's only five i think we need to stop reading them actually because they're getting adult he's 14 now yeah i'd better dash so sorry to suddenly cut off but that was 12 minutes ago and um i didn't look at my phone i've really enjoyed that happy anniversary we'll be keith later this month i think yes yes keep following look out for updates on twitter thanks a lot oh oh and you know we do agree is that we consciousness is wherever it is i know what else do it again [Music] you

Channel: Mind Chat

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Id: azroNJhQd1U

Length: 129min 47sec (7787 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2022