The Problems of Consciousness | Within Reason #47

Josh rasmason thanks for being here thank you appreciate being with you Alex what is it about Consciousness that provides such a unique mystery in philosophy that is if I look at the world around me there are many things which asound me I mean Emanuel K famously said that he was most Amazed by The Starry Night above and the moral law within and I'm Amazed by the existence of all kinds of things I mean thinking about a star for example I was thinking about this earlier today it's this sort of nuclear Factory just floating about in space that to me is absolutely fascinating the existence of mountains and water and planets and laws like gravity but for some reason this one thing that exists in the universe Consciousness seems to be of particular interest uh interest to philosophers in a way that uh it's thought of as having this unique mystery this this unique attractiveness to to thinking about where it might have come from why is that what's special about consciousness well it's so interesting to me Alex like when I think about Consciousness I'm thinking about what you might describe as like a window into the reality of the things you just described like everything that we know about the world we know it through our own window of Consciousness and this window of Consciousness is so familiar that we kind of take it for granted very easily you know so like if I'm conscious of having certain feelings I might be focused on those feelings but I'm not usually also focused on my consciousness of those feelings that's a that's another kind of a thing or if I'm looking out and I see trees out there or right now I'm seeing pixels that represent you in some respect and as I'm seeing those pixels I'm not also usually paying attention to the consciousness of those of those pixels so Consciousness is like this very familiar window into reality and because it's so familiar it's kind of easy to take it for granted but there is a kind of profound mystery about like well what is this what is this window into reality how does it arise how do you make Consciousness can you can you take particles and smash them together into a certain way and then by Smashing them together in that way those particles form the window of Consciousness to now be aware of things including perhaps even those same particles that I would say is a mystery that I think about but there's another way Alex in which Consciousness is like the least mysterious thing because it's the most immediate it's like the most familiar the the the familiar experience of just being aware of things we wake up with that uh experience it's like it's the most known you might say on some level because it's the most immediate for example I don't need to sort of speculate about whether I am conscious by first figuring out okay what have the scientists revealed about my brain have they discovered heard that Josh rasmason is is conscious well scientists aren't really doing peer-reviewed research on Josh rasmason you know last I checked um because I'm a specific kind of I'm a specific being I don't mean I'm a specific kind of a being maybe that too but just that I'm a individual being I'm a specific being um and so that individuality is something that allows me to be let's say directly uh in contact with or directly accessing what I am so there's kind of that familiarity but there's the mystery which is like well what is this really and how did it come to be in our modern scientific age people tend to have an assumption I think that where there are mysteries in our knowledge and maybe it's it's not true of of all the things that we wish to know but something like Consciousness seems to be maybe something about the brain seems to if you imagine people researching Consciousness you're kind of imagining like a neuroscientist maybe you're talking about philosophers too but you like to think that they're being informed by the latest scientific developments and there's this idea that science uh that the Consciousness is like the next thing for Science and that although we don't really understand it now one day we're pretty confident given the track history of things uh that people have claimed are completely immune to Scientific empirical exhaustive explanation and yet then go on to be explained that at some point we're going to get this scientific explanation of Consciousness that is an account of what Consciousness is that explains it in terms of the purely material that is the stuff of Science in terms of physics or chemistry do you think that that is the case and if so or if not why I love this question because my my initial answer is it might be the case but the question points to the nature of science itself and what I've been seeing in my research both in the field of philosophy reading various developments in the conceptual analysis of consciousness and thinking through the implications of these things as well as neuroscientists um in the field and physicists what it looks to me like is happening is there's also an expansion in our understanding of what science itself is so if you think of science broadly as a inquiry into reality you talked about matter there's a further question about what matter is so let's say science is an inquiry into whatever this real world is out there using a kind of scientific method where we come up with hypotheses and then we try to test those hypotheses with real concrete observations of the world so we're not just having untethered webs of reason that have no contact with reality and if we think of Science in this broad way then I actually do have a kind of optimism that we can answer some of these questions about where conscious comes from um even if we say in terms of the material world as long as we leave open what we mean by the material world so that it is whatever it is that's the real stuff out of which things are made now some people listening to this they might reply to this and they might say well no we have a concept of matter that's more restricted than that so that we can actually talk about the prospect of things being Beyond matter but what I've been seeing is that if we broaden our our understanding of science to to include the wide range of observations including observations through introspection the the power to witness our thoughts and feelings from within then I think that there is more hope that we could get a fuller story but I really think that we need the philosophers and scientists kind of working together on this and not seeing each other not not having these kind of turf wars where we're trying to kind of protect a previous way of thinking about this it seems to me that there are developments both in the field of philosophy and in the fields of empirical science that are pointing into some interesting common directions I would say but that these common directions are often unseen or not understood because of the way they get translated in in our time so I want to suggest almost like a yes and no answer to your question like yes I do think if we brought in our notion of science to include any kind of testing where we make observations using all of our powers to observe including introspection um including the tools of reason to trace out the implications of our observations and Analysis uh then then I I have some optimism there but if we have an overly restricted view of science well then I mean no I I I don't think that we can understand the window by which we look into the World by using only the empirical senses of tasting touching seeing here here I I've even been talking about this in my classes about how the only way you can even know you have those empirical senses is by using another sense of introspection to be aware of your sense yeah it's kind of like the science trying to establish itself I mean the scientific method of inquiry relies peering through this window whenever we make an observation we're we're doing something that we're becoming conscious of and so to use science to try to explain the window itself is like trying to see the window through the window in a sense that's right yeah which unless we of science so that the window is included within science more broadly speaking Yeah but I mean even if we consider the window to be part of s it seems like almost like a category era to do so I guess is what I'm saying because it it's like looking through this window at a world of amazing things and when somebody starts asking about the window itself yeah we say well it's up to us whether we consider the window as as part of what we see through the window well no it's not that this is the mechanism by which we we look at the world you can't look at the thing through which you see everything through that thing you know it it doesn't seem to work and so there I I I have this I have an understanding of this thought that's quite popular I think that no consciousness is immune from from scientific inquiry in more ways than one because there's a sense in which it's thought to be sort of immaterial you know Consciousness is is not just the brain and science only deals with the material that's quite a popular View but there seems to be this other view that I'm that I'm just sort of thinking about I haven't really thought about this before that whether it's material or not it's sort of you know it becomes a bit circular trying to explain Consciousness through a method whose you first uh necessary element is the use of Consciousness I'm totally with you here that there's a kind of circularity and seeing the window through that same window right there's a kind of self- reference problem and this problem that you're pointing to gets at foundations not just of science but of epistemology theories of knowledge and philosophy in general I mean there's just this general question about how you can know anything including even the knowledge of your own your own window of awareness how do you know that you have a window of awareness into reality don't you have to use awareness to be aware of your awareness and isn't that circular is that kind of a problem that you're pointing to I mean this isn't just a problem for limiting things through the window of science uh understood uh empirically but just limiting but just understanding how we could know anything without circularity and yeah so can I answer this puzzle of how we know anything I all your viewers can be aware of how they know anything at all that would be helpful I think so I find knew I knew I got you on here for a reason I knew I got you on here for a reason everything happens for a reason Alex and it's to help us to know how we could possibly know because otherwise I think there is this worry about skepticism that there's this pit of skepticism we fall into when we start thinking about how we can justify the foundations of our knowledge if if we know something let's say I know that my hand is moving and I know this by awareness how do I know that I'm aware that my hand is moving and if I give you an answer to that then somebody can come along and they can say well how do you know that that answer is the correct answer and this questioning go on to Infinity one thing that I found super helpful with respect to this kind of puzzle about how knowledge gets started and this is related to how what Consciousness is which is one kind of level of the mystery and then we'll maybe talk a bit about how Consciousness could come to be but you know what is consciousness and in my view you can use conscious awareness without being aware of your conscious awareness so I can use conscious awareness to be aware with my eyes of shapes and colors without using my conscious awareness to also be aware of my consciousness of shapes and colors okay so that's the first observation the second observation is that there's nothing circular in me also having a power to use conscious awareness to be aware of my first order conscious awareness of the shapes and colors so this would be kind of like taking a second window and then pointing it on the first window to seeing that that what that first window is so the second window is conscious awareness of conscious awareness of shapes and colors that's visual experience and I don't think that's circular that's just using a power to be aware of my awareness and I think for a lot of people once they get to that meta level of awareness of their awareness that's when lights go on and they realize oh there's something about Consciousness that I know it has a qualitative aspect to it or it's hard to even really describe it you just know it and you could never know it and this I think goes to your point you could never know it just by looking at the molecular motions of particles and brains using your empirical senses because those empirical senses aren't Windows of awareness on the awareness itself so um that's part of my solution to this kind of circularity problem it's to say that this power of introspection is a power that you can use to be aware of that same power and there's not a circularity because you're just using it a second time to be aware of the first iteration have we potentially there sort of exchanged this problem of circularity for a problem of infinite regress this is all getting a bit you know philosophical but that's that's what we like to do here it's it's interesting and and I'm I'm thinking of like meditation for example when people everybody breathes all the time you're constantly breathing and meditation usually begins with this task of becoming aware of your breathing and there does seem to be this difference between doing something and being aware that you're doing it and sure that can apply to Consciousness too it's like maybe when a child first comes into the world and sees a big red block or something it's aware of the big red block but would that child be aware that it's aware of the red block it seems kind of odd to say that the child would have that level of Metro analysis now it might be the case that they even though they wouldn't put it in those terms or really uh or really be able to verbalize it that they must be aware that they're aware of it in some sense maybe not but the problem I see with this is that I don't know like doesn't this problem sort of keep getting pushed back where so you can be aware of the red block but then you could be aware that you're aware of the red block block but then with this conversation here we're really becoming aware that we're aware that we're aware of the red block you know and now because I've I've started this chain somebody's going to start thinking you know what I'm aware of that too and don't we just sort of get this this endless spiral of how far we could push back this potential this potential awareness we just get like an infinite series of of of Windows all in front of each other I think you would only if we assume that you have to be aware in order you have to be aware of your awareness in order to have the first order awareness right so like your example of the the child who sees a block if they have to be aware of their awareness of the block to be aware of the block that leads to the infinite regress that's the very assumption that I'm I'm challenging here I'm suggesting that you can be aware of your awareness and this gives you knowledge of your awareness uh by being aware of your awareness but you don't have to have knowledge of your awareness to have knowledge through the window of awareness if that makes sense so and because if you if you did then you'd run into this problem right if you had to be aware of your awareness of the block to be aware of the block you'd run into this problem where you know how far back do you push that it goes on forever and if there's no place at which that terminates there's no awareness to be had in the first place in order to escape that infinite regress you need to say that I can be aware of my hand in front of me without being aware that I'm aware of my hand in front of me yes it's basic awareness foundational awareness right that's not virtue of second order awareness and this is actually really key I think I would say it's a discover of philosophical reflection um all knowledge all theories of knowledge divide into four possibilities U First there is no knowledge U second there is knowledge but it's derived through an infinite chain of knowledge third there is knowledge but it's derived in a circular way and then fourth there is knowledge and this is because some knowledge is basic you just have basic powers of awareness and I would say that the problems with those first three um through reflection and Analysis lead to in our argument for number four which is that you have a power of awareness and it's it's not again it's not an empirical sense of uh seeing with your eyes or hearing with your ears it's kind of prior to all of your senses in a way or comes in through all of your senses we could put it that way um but it's it's a basic power by which you can be just have knowledge of anything and do you think it's a special kind of sense I mean typically there are five famous senses but it's fairly well known that there are in fact more than those for instance your sense of balance uh is is a sense other than the famous five and maybe we've got this thing called the sense of like introspection yeah or the something something like the the intuition of deduction you know if I produce a syllogism it's just a I can't remember who wrote that that short story about the animals debating modus ponin that it's sort of if P then q p therefore q and one of the animals is trying to prove to the other it might have been leis Carol or someone trying to prove to the other animal that well look at this deduction and the the other animal asks sort of well why is it that if P then q and P then Q you sort of create this new statement you know if if P then q p brackets therefore you know q and and it's it's that process of deduction that gets questioned and and you can keep sort of extrapolating and and it just seems to be based on this intuition if I say that like all men are Mortals and so soes as a man it it just follows that Socrates is Mortal but that seems to just be sort of an intuition I mean that feels like it might be some kind of sense as well in the way that if I if I touch something it just presents this static feeling like I I don't consent to it it just happens I just feel it in a similar sense I guess an analogous sense to how when I see two and two I just feel that it's for I just recognize it as such introspection might work similarly I'm just like aware of certain things that are happening in my mind and inside of me do you think these kinds of mental awarenesses that is things like the intuition of deduction and the process of introspection are they examples of senses like touch and sight and hearing or are they sort of more special and more fundamental yeah so the way that I've been thinking about this is that each of your senses are powers of awareness and so awareness is kind of what they all have in common and then interest inection is the power to be aware of your senses so that's kind of the special power that gives you the knowledge of your knowledge the basic knowledge knowledge of your awareness um I I like how you put that in terms of Reason itself is also kind of a sense and I was using this example of M ponents in in my class just the other week because I asked my students how do you know that if a is true and A's truth implies B's truth that therefore B is true rather than like how do you know that that's a really hard question for anybody to answer because there's no further like argument you can give for that you just know that inference I think in sort of a direct way it's sort of like asking how do you know that you're thinking of something right now you know or how do you know that you're having an experience of seeing something right now these These are the foundational um points of knowledge I think and and I I totally agree with you that we have more than five senses uh I put on the board for my classes at least 10 senses and I kind of leave it an open question I think sometimes we limit ourselves we limit our powers to get the treasures of truth because we get really good at some of our senses but we don't realize we've got these other powers as well that we can utilize to investigate reality and I would say that what all the senses have in common just is this basic Act of conscious awareness each sense gives us a power to be aware of different aspects of reality so Vision gives us the power to be aware of shapes and colors it's a further question whether those shapes and colors exist in a mind independent world or in a mind mind dependent world that that's a that's a different question it's an interesting question but I don't think we have to resolve the question about the nature of the contents we see to recognize that we're seeing things of that category that we're see we're actually having conscious awareness of shapes and colors through vision through hearing we we get consciousness of sounds right through the sense of reason we get consciousness of logical deductions like modus ponin or modus tolin U so I think we have all these different powers and Consciousness is kind of the root of all those Powers this goes to the significance of Consciousness this is why Consciousness is our window into reality because Consciousness is kind of this power in all of the windows uh in all of the powers to see in my view I I suppose one thing that people might want to to point out is that the physical senses are just that they're physical and I guess awareness itself um all of the other senses seem to go through this thing called awareness and so if it is an example of a sense it seems to be the foundational one it seems to be you know the not so much the guardian at the gate but the gate itself like you say a window uh but there's also this feeling that there's something a bit more immaterial about the stuff that's going on in the mind but like I say we we live in a fairly um scient ific and I should say materialistic age in which people assume that materialism if it doesn't explain most things probably will at some point explain most things and it does seem like Consciousness has something to do with the brain right like you don't get Consciousness as far as we know without a brain and it seems as though in order to affect my conscious experience something about my physical brain needs to change and similarly I seem to be able to change people's conscious experiences by in their brain not I don't know that from experience I just know that from uh from so I've been told in the scientific paper I've never actually done that myself um this is the grand mystery I think in the opposite direction I mean the mystery for the materialists is why we have this this thing called redness which doesn't seem to be present in the brain If redness is just in your head then why is it that I can't open up your head and find redness itself not just the neural activity correlated with redness the materialist says well no redness is just it's obviously not in the object or in the air because these are just electromagnetic waves it's processed by your eyes it's sort of in your brain somewhere well redness isn't just brain activity that's correlated with the experience of redness if redness itself existed in the brain I'd be able to cut open your brain and find redness but it's not there um so where does it come from that's the mystery for the materialist but for the person who just says well that's because Consciousness is immaterial of course redness exists sort of IM materially it's a it's a it's a thought it's part of your mind yeah for them the mystery is then why is it that I can't have this redness this red experience without there needing to well seemingly needing to be correlative brain activity so right right which of these Mysteries do you think is is more problematic in which direction and and how might we go about sort of you know uh I suppose trying to answer these I'm plagued by both of the Mysteries deeply so on one side you describe the kind of interaction problem of how the kind of conscious experience of thoughts and of colors and of smells can interact causally with um neurological activity in a brain so that that's a deep in vexing question and then then there's another mystery that you're pointing to which is like well how does neurological activity in brains like give rise to the Consciousness in the first place and it's it's so interesting Alex because I think these two problems one problem you could describe this as the kind of interaction problem of how does mind and body go together and the other problem you might call this um chmer calls this famously the hard problem of Consciousness how can you explain the kind of qualitative introspective aspects of Consciousness that you know when the first person experienced the smell of coffee the taste of chocolate out of purely let's say third person uh spatial aspects within a brain that are complex they moving in certain ways and and I I sort of thought of these two different problems the interaction problem the hard problem as very far apart in my mind and I was thinking yeah the hard problem kind of presses against certain materialist views um not all materialist views because you can broaden your notion of matter itself um gayen Sten for example would call himself a materialist but he understands matter to include these qualitative aspects of Consciousness I know you talked with Philip Goff on your show and he also would include these aspects of Consciousness within matter itself sort of in the intrinsic nature of of the material world so there are broader forms of of materialism that can maybe um address the hard problem but here what I discovered in my own work is that these two different problems are kind of maybe two wings of the same problem um so the interaction problem kind of is a problem about like how can these different kinds of things uh spatial aspect of brain matter and experiential aspects of conscious thinking and feeling how can those things interact if some sometimes people say well you know the hard problem shows that you can't get Consciousness out of mindless brain matter that's what the hard problem seems to give us that you can't explain the the mind out of the the Mindless matter but if if that's right then how can you explain the interaction between the two I mean there's kind of a two sides of the same I think deep problem which I've been calling it a materials problem because you need sort of the right materials to be conscious um so my short answer is I'm I'm really vexed by both and and both problems have led me on a journey to kind of reconceptualize and rethink my starting points I think I've inherited some Concepts through culture that have guided me to view the world in a certain way but as I reexamine those Concepts I'm coming to a view that kind of allows me to use different words if that makes sense to kind of redescribe what we might be and how we might fit into the world I hesitate to even use the word material world because that word material is so variable in its meaning but I want to just say you know all of us thinking about this face a question how can us the kinds of beings We Are Who apparently can think and feel and reflect and understand the question who have a window of awareness into the world how can we fit into the World by any means and I have in my notes a series of problems that we we might get into seven different construction problems um that philosophers are worried about not just philosophers of course but people looking into the nature of Consciousness are are thinking about how can we fit into the world whatever it is whether the world is immaterial or material whatever it's nature how do beings like us fit into that because no matter what your view is I think you're going to have problem s there's seven different problems I have in my notes that everybody faces okay it's not just you know the the classic materialists you know everybody faces these problems and I think thinking about these problems can help everybody from every perspective get a Clear Vision of what's at stake in explaining this profound mystery of Consciousness and not just Consciousness beings who can be conscious the being that has the Consciousness also has to be explained yeah I've seen you speak on a few uh podcasts just about reflecting on this this idea that I mean we all like to if we're sort of into philosophy we like to think we've considered why there's something rather than nothing that's in a sense the foundational philosophical question but like really reflecting on the fact that there's there's no rule of the universe that we can discover that that necessitates that any of this was here I I think I heard you on one podcast talking about the idea that the Universe could have just been full of green balls and nothing else like there's there's no and and that would be really weird it'd be really weird if there just existed this thing called a universe with these sort of physical green balls inside of them but like is it any more weird that we find ourselves in the universe with like I say sort of nuclear factories floating in the sky with little rocks going around them and on that Little Rock you've got these kind of atoms that bump into each other in such a way as to produce you know firsters conscious experience any one of those things seems to be sort of uh entirely contingent right and there seems something particularly odd about how easily this universe seemingly could have existed without any firstperson experiences at all it's full of rocks it's full of bits and Bobs it's full of you know rain water and and calcium and and helium and all kinds of things and and we don't generally unless you're Philip go I suppose think that uh think that these things have first person consciousness it's like this is one of the most fascinating questions of philosophy why does this completely unnecessary thing exist um so you're right like there is a lot at stake here we're talking about a foundational question um so why don't we why don't we jump into this why don't we go through these seven problems and uh and see how far we might get so each of these problems I call a construction problem and each one we could take a whole semester worth of philosophy of mind and focusing on just one of them in fact I even took a course with Michael Tuli on perception that just focused on one of these problems uh of explaining how it is that we have a conscious experience to see things out in the world and I want to just kind of frame these problems um before our conversation together you suggested that maybe we could even think about how Consciousness points to a vision of reality that includes some kind of like theistic foundation and I was suggesting to you that for the sake of kind of neutrality and maybe broadening um kind of bringing more perspectives on the on the table I wanted to even think about this in terms of two different visions of reality either reality is Mindless at the foundations or there's some form of Consciousness or mentality at the foundations and and philosophers coming from a variety of perspectives including non-theistic perspectives have followed some interesting Pathways to what I'm calling a mind first theory of reality now a Mindless first theory of reality where everything kind of unfolds from mindless particles uh or fields or whatever is a very important vision of reality to explore and to navigate but that vision of reality is going to have different resources for dealing with these particular problems and so one way I was thinking about sort of framing the problems is in terms of maybe a general argument for a mind first vision of reality kind of an outlined argument and then looking at the problems as maybe motivations for a certain step in the argument so if I kind of just it's worth but it's worth just emphasizing I think what you said about the difference between fundamental mind and something like theism right there there are atheistic at least secular theories of I suppose implications of Consciousness that yes there is is mind at the at at the fundamental position in the universe but that doesn't necessarily entail something like traditional theism I mean Philip Goff would be a good example of somebody who thinks that Consciousness is fundamental that you don't get conscious emerging out of non-conscious um but that that doesn't I I think it's just often implied when we have this kind of conversation at a popular level that somebody who's trying to say yes there's mind at the basis of reality is some kind of religious apologist trying to establish the existence of God but that's not necessarily the Cas yeah I mean Paul Draper for example sent me an email where he said that he's finding this kind of mind first view of reality to be alive option in his mind um David schmer um he thinks of some kind of mentality maybe it's you call it Proto mentality or some kind of qualitative aspect of Mind as being foundational uh castrip he's a philosopher who calls himself a naturalist who's followed a pathway not to support religious views he he he was isn't coming at this from a religious perspective he still calls himself a naturalist but has arrived at a kind of my first vision of reality my dialogue partner U Felipe Leon he goes by the screen name ex apologist okay so he's not a religious apologist he's ex apologist and we had a nice Dialogue on the existence of God in the name of the book our book together was is God the best explanation of things and what was so interesting in our dialogue was that he also was finding a certain Pathway to thinking that that the the foundational layer of reality includes some kind of powers of mind he talked about natural uh teeology the sort of an arrow of aiming for things or some kind of qualitative aspect of Consciousness kind of leaving open different theories of how that might look so I think it's it's very interesting because I think there's a certain impression in the popular culture about the nature of the debates where it's kind of like there's the physicalists and then the Duelists who are arguing for their religion that's kind of like I would say simplified popular impression and then what I find behind the sort of doors of academic Halls are non-theistic physicalist philosophers who were just curious to understand how we could Exist by any means and so it's these physicalist philosophers who are spearheading uh these these problems these challenges these construction challenges of seeing how we could fit into the world so we can go through the list we'll see how far we we go um in this list but I think that just to kind of outline my my argument here I have two forms of an argument for mind being first and then we'll look at the problems one is a kind of deductive argument which is starts with the premise conscious beings exist so beings who can be aware and who can think and feel those are real second premise if mind is not fundamental there's no sort of foundational mentality then conscious beings would not exist and you might think that's the premise to question the hard problems of explaining how we could exist are the pointers that support this premise in fact it's very interesting because a number of philosophers whove been persuaded that if mind is not fundamental then conscious beings couldn't exist there are eliminativist philosophers so they would deny the first premise that conscious beings exist I've met a few philosophers In the Flesh who told me that they were skeptical that there are real conscious beings as we might know them through the first person because one of them said very explicitly they didn't think that that could be explained in terms of the physics um so they so so there's some motivation we'll get into these motivations but this is just kind of an outline of an argument that therefore some kind of Mind Is Fundamental then I have a gentler probabilistic version of the argument that starts with the same premise there are conscious beings and this is a gentler argument because it just says the probability of conscious beings is higher if Consciousness is fundamental than if you start with just Mindless stuff like Fields or whatever um you don't get the same expectation of there being forms of Consciousness and so then that gives us a more modest conclusion that we have some evidence for mind being fundamental and even if at the end of the day you think you know this that mind is not fundamental you you could still think that there's some evidence on the other side is is there something I mean and we've got these seven problems specifically about Consciousness and I guess like the interaction between the the physical and the mental but to say that the that mind is fundamental if we say that material is fundamental and that mind kind of emerges from Material it's it's a mystery but we're sort of imagining something like atoms in the right organization produce this in called Consciousness but to say that mind is fundamental does that mean something uh sort of like the reverse of that whereby somehow material actually comes about from mind in a like like is that what you're sort of talking about here that like in the way that materialists think that the mind is either emergent from material things or it's just an arrangement of material things that somehow like material stuff is just a particular arrangement of mind or is emergent from mind is that what you're talking about so I love this question because I want to clarify two two different things so one thing has to do with the meaning of material um I'm kind of happy with a broad notion of material like the notion that gayen ston uses where it's just the stuff that physicists are studying but we're not going to fill in what is the nature of that stuff and if we understand material in that broad way um then you can be a mind first theorist and think that this stuff this material stuff has a fundamental mental aspect maybe has other fundamental aspects as well but it doesn't um give rise to mind later down the scene it's just this material stuff includes mentality within it if that makes sense so that's the first thing I wanted to clarify is that you can be a kind of materialist in a broad um sense and still think that mind is sort of deeply in matter all the way to the foundation of matter okay that's the first thing and then the second thing I want to clarify here is that a mind first theorist has certain resources for explaining various aspects of matter maybe the the spatial aspects of matter so for example um Carlo relli in his book reality Is Not What It Seems he's a a p in Quantum field Theory and he talks about the spatial aspects of matter emerging out of more fundamental aspects of matter that's not itself spatial and so this kind of leaves open the possibility for theorists to come along and fill in how mental aspects could cause or motivate or give rise to other kinds of aspects if you're a mind first theorist for example Donald Hoffman has an article called objects of consciousness where he spells out in some kind of technical detail how he thinks that we might be able to analyze some of the fundamental aspects of physics in terms of Prior more fundamental aspects of mentality and so he would make the argument that it's there's not actually an explanatory gap between having a a mind at the foundation of reality reality and then getting various material aspects that we observe in physics that in in our laws of physics because we actually have the vocabulary and The Logical analysis in fact we've done that to an extent we we can actually show how to analyze mental aspects in terms of um more fundamental aspects in mentality I offer in kind of a broad way um a strategy for doing this as well in my own work in my book um on Consciousness so so th those are my two clarifications first that you can actually be a mind first theorist and also be a materialist and think that matters a foundational stuff that has foundational mental aspects and then second um there are ways that theorists are working out and there there's a whole research here that's kind of open for people to explore but to see how you could then analyze the physical aspects in terms of mental aspects and then that's different than going in the other direction because I like what you said about the mere image you know people have this idea that well the mental aspects arise out of the prior mindless material aspects flip that around I I have this picture of an airplane so you're flying the airplane upside down and you're flying over an ocean the ocean is reflecting the clouds so it looks like sky as you're looking in an upside down airplane and it's hard to know which way you're flying I've heard that in the past some Pilots got into trouble for this reason is their plane got upside down but they thought they were right side up and so they're yeah and then they would end up crashing the plane to try to kind of pull up to get higher in the sky and they end up pulling down into the ground and so this has happened and so I have this picture of the airplane that you can have an upside down airplane and there's a lot of symmetry and so it's hard to see if your airplane is upside down if it is upside down and so the the the way that I think about this is like either a mind first theory is the upside down view or a Mindless first theory is the upside down view you know and there's a lot of interesting symmetries between them um and so yeah I like how you put that is I think there's almost an assumption that if mind is first you sort of think of matters maybe from a religious perspective origina originating out of God's powers or something and you can hardly see it any other way like how could the the beauty of the mountains or whatever emerge just from mindless stuff right it's hard to see it any other way but then if you come at it from a kind of mindless first perspective uh similarly it can be hard to see it any other way if if you think well you know matter is fundamental and of course we can see how mind emerges from matter it's like what are you saying that it's the other way that that's sounds like crazy talk so I have a friend who said like like every view in philosophy of Mind sort of seems crazy to somebody else uh we're all sort of in the same boat in that respect certainly yeah um yeah it's an interesting an analogy it's not one that I've come across before and one that I think I'll get a lot of use out of in the future so thanks for that um but yeah let's let's do it let's do these uh let's do these seven problems I think we um and these are problems for problem for Consciousness um I think we begin with something we've already mentioned which is the hard problem of Consciousness yeah I want to touch on this one briefly because I think this one is already going to be the most familiar to people and this is basically the problem that Chalmers talks about of explaining how you can have these kind of firsters experiential aspects of having a thought feeling love how those things can arise purely out of a description or an interaction of mindless physical bits of of matter and so this is kind of a hard problem because the idea is that there's no way of just merely describing a rearrangement of things in space that's going to include within it a qualitative aspect of Consciousness and I find that examples kind of draw this out so here I have a little um circular toy that I got from my kids I don't know which kid I'm taking this from but it's one of them and it's kind of bluish it's got a certain shape right so Alex do you think this object here is conscious presumably no presumably no and not even Philip Goff thinks this object is conscious okay I say I say here's a common ground because Goff thinks Consciousness is deeper in right it's deeper into um I think a common ground among all the different theorists is that there are some constraints on what it takes to be conscious and I think that we sort of intuitively and maybe even empirically recognize that things like this are just conscious probably not conscious right now would it become conscious if I changed its shape well one way which you could answer this and and I want to be careful here because my method to get to truth something that I I like to use is to try to focus on simple examples that are the most clear to my mind because I have a hard time thinking of too much complexity so I like to simplify it so I get clarity and then build from Clear starting points to get into more advanced territory but if I do that I don't want to come across like I'm being patronizing or that you know I'm focusing on these simple examples and I'm oversimplifying the situation it's just a method for me to like get some clarity and so when when I look at this object here I think one thing that seems clear to me is that a feel feeling of love is not the same thing as this particular circular shape and I and I I think I can tell you how I know this actually I know this by direct acquaintance with shape and direct acquaintance with the experience of love the qualitative aspect of feeling love I I've had that feeling and I've been able to use that power of introspection to be aware of that qualitative aspect I've been with my eyes acquainted with shape and if I'm directly acquainted this this is an awareness that's not based on inferences from other things I'm aware of this is that basic awareness if I'm aware in that basic way of two things I can directly compare them and see if they're the same thing so I call this the direct comparison test that I think you can use to get knowledge that this circular shape is not the same thing as a qualitative aspect of love now I think that's kind of a clear point but it's a very important point because now we can build from there there we can begin to think about whether changing the shape would then change it into a feeling of love and I would argue that by direct comparison you can also see that these differences in shape are not relevant to be a difference with respect to the qualitative aspect of Love same for colors so here's a BL a green one the other this one was blue we moved to green and I I don't think people are going to say well now we know it's conscious because it's green I think we all understand actually by reason I think it's actually by reason we can see that the difference between blue and green is not a difference in being in a state of love it's not the kind of difference that that would affect its Consciousness or or it's uh how how closely it begins to approximate something like a subjective feeling like that of love that's right now I want to be careful there could be some kind of law like a psychosomatic law a Mind Body law that says that once things are in a certain configuration then there's Consciousness associated with this configuration this is related to the interaction problem of why neurons in a brain once they get to that configuration then there's Consciousness correlated with that so there's definitely correlation so I want to be careful I'm not arguing against correlation I'm just arguing so far that the mere shape is not the same thing as the qualitative aspect of Consciousness and this leads to what's called an explanatory Gap the gap appap is between describing things purely in terms of their spatial geometric properties and describing things in terms of their phenomenological experiential properties and this explanatory Gap has led some philosophers to think that we can actually simplify our view of the world if we don't bridge that Gap so instead of saying that we go from the Mindless quantitative spatial aspects to the mental aspect we just eliminate that Gap by suggesting that mind is fundamental um let's say there's two arguments from the hard problem one argument is from this kind of simplification procedure and then the other argument is from a kind of in-principle explanatory problem that if you can't explain it then it can't just emerge I want to kind of leave open the possibility for emergence and this is why the hard Problem by itself isn't the problem that I found to be the most um let's say persuasive though I think it is a chip in the in the set of considerations sure um okay so we said we we'd get through that one quickly because it is going to be the most familiar here what's number two second one I have on my list is causal exclusion and this is uh popularized by a philosopher named jaguan Kim I took a course with him in graduate school when I was at Notre Dame and he went through this particular argument and at that time he had written a book called physicalism or something near enough and there's a reason why he says something near enough because he would call himself a physicalist but jagan Kim thinks that there are aspects to Consciousness that are qualitative that are not going to be explained in terms of sort of mindless uh motions of matter or functions of material systems but he does think that you have a power in your mind to make a difference to the material world this leads to the causal exclusion problem the problem basically is to see how you could make a difference in the material world through intention like if you intend to raise your hand and then your hand goes up how does that actually work if everything that happens is fundamentally happening at the Mindless level so the basic layer of reality is Mindless it's composed let's say just for Simplicity particle of particles these particles are smashing into each other I understand that's not really how how it is but just to kind of give us a visual these particles are smashing into each other and that this leads to everything that that we think and feel the question then is how is it that our thinking and feeling can make a difference to the Motions of matter if the Motions of matter are already determined by prior motions of matter together with the laws of physics and even if these laws are probabilistic and not deterministic the point is is that these laws are describing the foundational layer which is Mindless and this mindless layer then pulls the strings on all the behavior of the mental beings and sort of causally excludes the power of the Mind the reason why I think this is a problem is that there's a lot of scientific evidence I think for the power of mind to make a difference uh in in in the psychology literature for example there's all sorts of techniques my sister I have a sister who's a therapist she talks about techniques that you can do in your mind to affect your body and this is I think evidence of a kind of mental causation in the world so there's an open question or challenge as to how you account for mental causation if the world is fundamentally mindless and there are various possible solutions to this challenge how you can account for mental causation if the world is fundamentally mindless that's it yeah if the Mindless bits of reality are pulling the strings and all of your thoughts and feelings then how can an intention to raise your hand make a difference to the world if everything that happens is fundamentally explained in terms of the physics there's a kind of causal exclosure uh causal um closure of the physical domain that's kind of working in the wings here that everything that happens in the physical world is fundamentally already determined by something else that's happening in the physical world how can the Mind enter these are these are problems that exist if we presumably only really if we assume that Consciousness or that the mind is something immaterial right because if if the mind just is some kind of arrangement of material or or something like this this this problem goes away right so maybe we could say well of course this problem arises if you're going to be some kind of dualist but the reason in fact this provides good reason for thinking that Consciousness is just matter in motion because it it seems as though our minds allow us to do stuff my intention to raise my hand can cause my physical hand to to move this interaction problem goes away if I say that's just because Consciousness in my brain the intention to raise my hand is just a physical movement of atoms and so you know they bang each into each other in in the right way and then the the hand goes up it's like pressing the pedal on a car and the wheel's turning so is this not a reason to think that Consciousness is material yeah it could very well be so one solution this is a perceptive Point you're making here uh one solution to this causal exclusion problem is to reduce the Consciousness to the the material uh if if you're thinking about the material as a different kind of thing so we're we're not allowing here that the material world could also be fundamentally mindless we're stipulating that the material world is fundamentally let's say mindless um sorry did I say that wrong we're not saying that mind seeps to the bottom of the material world here we're we're saying that the Mind reduces and is explainable in terms of mindless motions fundamentally th this is very interesting to me because um Frank Jackson who's very famous for arguing for a kind of dualism that M doesn't reduce to matter later in his career ends up being kind of plagued by this causal exclusion problem I mean earlyer earlier in his career he ended up actually just saying that the mental states don't make a difference that there's no mental causation then later in his career he was more convinced that there is mental causation and this led him to the solution that you just proposed the kind of reduction where and this also is why jaguan Kim in his book physicalism or something near enough uses that near enough because he thinks there's something about Consciousness that's not reducible but in order for there to be mental causation he thinks there's something else about Consciousness that is reducible so he ends up reducing the part of Consciousness that is causally uh effective and so this is one of the the live possibilities in response to costal exclusion for my part I don't think well I actually kind of have two problems with the reductive solution first I don't think reductionism is is true and I think because of that direct comparison test I think it's possible to just know through direct awareness of conscious qualities from the inside the first- person aspects of Consciousness and compare them with various candidate uh aspects in physics and see that they're not the same thing unless we loosen our understanding of the physics vocabulary the physics vocabulary is describing Consciousness sort of from the outside um in which case then you could have a kind of reduction but this could point to a mind first reduction where mind is sort of an intrinsic aspect of matter that's doing the causal work that comparison test of like sort of you know the the the circular shape of a toy versus the feeling of Love or something and if we change the shape of the toy it doesn't seem to more closely approximate love but I mean we we had this caveat that maybe there is some arrangement maybe if I took enough of those toys and put them in the right kind of arrangement that sort of mimicked what atoms do at the subatomic level that there would emerge this sort of massive conscious Asian now that would be very weird to me that seems like a very strange way to to get Consciousness but it doesn't seem like something I can just apprehend as a priori impossible in the way that I seem to just be able to apprehend that changing the shape of the toy doesn't you turn it into love it doesn't seem as obvious to me that that there isn't some arrangement of physical material that would just produce Consciousness yeah so I think that the hard problem of Consciousness sort of leaves open this possibility of kind of a basic power to cause things to emerge hasker in his book the emergent self talks about this idea that maybe there's certain physical systems that once they enter certain States a conscious being um just emerges and and so that's kind of left open I think in terms of some problems but I think the causal exclusion problem kind of raises an additional problem that like even if it does emerge there's still a question about how it makes a difference in the world if the fundamental makers and movers of everything the stuff that pulls the strings is is Mindless and there you could go with reduction I was just going to add one other problem that I have with the reduction solution is I don't think it really solves a problem at the mological level which is the problem of parts and and holes because even if you can reduce conscious states to material States there's still a question about whether the particles that make up those material states are themselves pulling all the strings and if those particles are governed by laws of physics and you don't have control over laws of physics and the particles are pulling the strings and everything you do then there's another kind of argument that you still become a puppet even on some forms of reduction so I wanted to offer for that there and I want to acknowledge that yeah I mean one problem by itself I think is going to kind of leave open some possibilities but it's sort of all seven problems together uh maybe if we move on to the third problem I was just thinking on on what you just said uh I'm imagining like Consciousness being analogous to something like a blue LED I mean there's you know there'll be there'll be a blue LED just just down to my side here you can see the walls a bit blue behind me and I've just given away how I do it um and we're sort of trying and it's complicated because the perception of bless is itself an awareness it seems to require Consciousness but let's just talk about the electromagnetic wave or something that seems to exist even if no Minds exist and we're trying to figure out where this comes from where does this weird quality come from this this wave that produces this color experience um and I sort of say it's got something to do with a bunch of wires and this like remote control and this thing called a plug socket and then like electrons sort of bumping into each other in a particular way so as to produce a current that lights up a particular thing and and and it would seem very weird to to say what so so this this blue light is reducible essentially to electrons bumping into each other it's like well in a in a way yes you say well look think about an electron think about this think about this bit of copper wire how do we get the blue light from you know a copper wire or do I just bend it in a particular way and then it's blue all of a sudden of course not that that seems and of course that seems ludicrous but it still Remains the case that if you put the wire in the right arrangement with other other wires and you you turn things near a magnet or whatever that you do just produce this this blue LED and that's and bless just comes about even though it seems really strange that if I rotate you know metal near a magnet in the right way that's what's going to produce It ultimately that does seem strange but it is true and similarly of course like just taking little bits of meat and plopping them together in different ways it seems very strange that Consciousness could somehow emerge but if we do it properly then why not so one thing I love about this question is that it points to different concepts of emergence and I talk about three different concepts of emergence there's what's called weak emergence strong emergence and then what I'm going to call in congruent emergence so weak emergence would be emergence where let's say you can derive that there's a traffic jam that has emerged from all the cars being crowded on a freeway you can actually derive that there's a traffic jam by know knowing the information about the positions of all the different cars and you can logically deduce uh that the traffic jam has emerged that's we emergence because you can use logic to derive the emergent phenomenon just from a description of all the the entities in Play Strong emergence is kind of I think what you're pointing to there Alex where there's something that might seem weird that happens that you can't just sort of deduce using logic um but it does happen you know like there's colors that get displayed because of colorless things and it's like well how do you go from the colorless to the to the colorful exactly yeah yes and this this also plagues me it's like that's very mysterious um but that doesn't mean it's impossible right and and so I don't want to make an argument from ignorance where it's like well I don't understand how this works to therefore it doesn't work or it couldn't work fact I think this is part of the value of empirical science is to pay attention to what comes from what where logic we're sort of in the dark you know that the light of logic doesn't let us see what things could possibly emerge here and there okay so this is strong emergence strong emergence is where something novel comes up where you can't just predict that's going to come up and empirical science can help us to find examples of strong emergence then what we have is called I call um in congruent emergence that's where I think you can actually see an impossibility of the one thing coming from another so for example I think it's possible to see well let me just ask you Alex do you think that a pine cone could emerge from the number four the abstract number four okay point taken I I can I can it's the first time I've been confronted with that question funnily enough uh but on on the face of it yeah of course not of course and no no playing around with four in my head no like adding multiple fours together or sort of harving them or is is that going to get me to a pine cone yeah maybe we could take a more complicated number you know maybe four is too simple right we need more complexity more mathematical complexity I think we can sort of see by an Insight a rational insight into the nature of the items in question that the one is not congruent with the other now when it comes to Consciousness this is so tricky because there are many different parts of Consciousness there's uh different contents of Consciousness there's thoughts there's feelings there's intentions there's all these different things we could talk about the binding problem where you have different aspects that come together and bound together into a single field of experience and my experience is that from a distance some of these aspects of Consciousness I can't really see clearly I feel like I'm in the dark about whether they could emerge out of dirt or atoms configured like a brain um in a spatial way I'm just in the dark and so that leaves me open to the possibility that they could emerge and a strong emergence sort of way but I just have to say that as I've gone deeper into the space specific details of different parts of Consciousness what it is to be about something what it is to intend something and then focus more carefully on certain characterizations of matter leaving open the idea we that we could have a broader characterization of matter where Consciousness fits into to matter in this broad sense that that I I've come to a place where I think that it is possible to see a certain kind of construction in congruence but this doesn't happen sort of from the armchair in abstracta I think it helps to consider examples uh to focus on actual objects to to focus on specific aspects of Consciousness not just Consciousness in general but the unification of Consciousness maybe the aboutness of Consciousness and to slow down your concentration and my sense is that you can see maybe with various degrees of clarity this is sort of How It's been for me that there is a kind of in congruence between certain materials and certain effects that there are certain things like if you just take sand and and you just throw it into the wind that's the wrong material to become it self-conscious now maybe it can affect Consciousness that's already there so one of the principles for constructing Consciousness I think is that if something affects Consciousness there's got to already be something capable of having Consciousness so this is why I think that if you have a brain that acts in a certain way it can affect the consciousness of it being that's there I think there's ways of explaining that but I do think there a deep congruence problem so it's interesting this idea of throwing out sand to the wind is it ever going to become conscious well okay intuitively not but it doesn't seem obvious to me that you know the stuff that sand is made out of that is subatomic particles potentially waves strings whatever it is at the B at the basis the the mological simple um it doesn't seem obvious to me that that can't produce Consciousness even if I have no idea how that would actually occur the example you gave a moment ago you know could you get a pine cone from the number four I think is a is a clever one but it it it might uh a fault with it I suppose might be that it's debatable whether numbers exist right we sort of have to assume that numbers really do exist to talk about getting a pine cone from the number four but most I think there's there's a strong um uh philosophical objection to that idea to that idea a lot of people think the numbers don't exist I'd imagine that most viewers of this channel are probably inclined to think that numbers don't exist they're sort of instantiated in objects you know like people have discussed this at nuseum um I'm wondering if there's another example yeah there's other example but but something that doesn't involve something whose you know existence onto logically is so dubious as numbers yeah maybe turning a mental image into a pine cone or into a conscious being or you know maybe the mental images of your dreams uh if you can right you can get those images in the right way then they become conscious beings with their own brains you know like this feels like it's the wrong category you know or taking thoughts in your mind putting them together in a certain way and then they turn into conscious beings the thoughts do right um yeah well I guess we we're talking I mean with numbers as well like when I think of a number I imagine it is existing essentially in my head I think of it as an abstraction I don't think numbers actually exist out there in the in the platonic realm or whatever um similarly a dream or an idea a mental picture we're sort of just restating the same problem because the thing that we're trying to find an analogy for is this Discord between matter and mind I'm saying well you know I know it seems really strange that mind can come from matter but how might we know that that's just not the kind of thing that can happen and you say well there are some examples where we intuitively know that you can't get one thing from another and you say pine cone from a number that is as far as I understand it physical thing from like mental thing and then you say well what about a mental image producing a real conscious being and that is a sort of mental thing producing a physical thing that is this isn't so much an analogy anymore for the problem it's just restating the problem and seems to maybe be begging the question if what I'm asking you is is how can we how can we know that there might be something something like Consciousness that we can just know can't be made up of physical stuff I don't know if we can come up with an example of of this kind of thing that doesn't just involve restating the the the very thing we're trying to prove yeah I appreciate the question and one of the challenges for me is that I don't feel like I have a firm enough grasp of what it means to be physical in general or you know the semantic range of the term physical this is why I'm sort of open to the idea that you can have states of consciousness that emerge from a physical stuff or physical substance um what seems clear to me is that there are certain states that are the wrong States for being the ingredients for a conscious being and I like the example of visual images because if you have a dream where you're having visual imagery in your dream you can notice within that imagery what you might call spatial contents there's extension um there's maybe vertices you can apprehend end those in your dream just why you could talk about your dream and describe its various aspects and whether that dream represents something that's in the outer world or not it's kind of beside the point the point is it's kind of part of the mental imagery to have these kind of spatial aspects and it seems evident to me that and is this isn't just a easy intuition I I I want to say that this has kind of grown on me from thinking about this topic from different angles but it seems evident to me that there is a certain challenge with taking these spatial aspects within the images and organizing them to produce not just a representation of a conscious being but an actual real conscious being and so it seems to me that if the basic stuff of existence call it matter call it energy call it call it whatever you want if that basic stuff includes some spatial States my view is that it's those spatial States aren't the ground ingredients for making ious beings that conscious beings are in a significant sense prior to the emergence of of these spatial States the spatial States can't on on their own do it that does leave open the idea that conscious beings could arise out of maybe some other kind of a stuff um I don't want to multiply entities Beyond necessity so I do have a kind of Simplicity motivation to think that um there's a kind of stuff of Consciousness that doesn't have to come from another category of stuff that's unconscious but I'm happy to say that this is physical or material in some Brad sense it's when we get very specific and we focus on particular aspects of like shape or color that it seems evident to me and this again is just one particular line that kind of points the idea that there's a construction problem of building us out of those States leaving open the idea and I think it's good to leave open the idea that maybe there's a broader concept of matter According to which we are rooted into Material World um but it's just not limited to spatial categories if that makes sense well there's as you pointed out there's there's seminars and and book length debates that can be had about every single one of these subjects but why don't we move on to number three while we still have the time to do so yeah let's do it and I don't anticipate we'll get to all of these but I'm glad that we can at least get to the ones we've talked about because um I think causal exclusion is a very important one that is kind of less known and yeah number three that I want to talk about is um well I have on my notes the problem of intentionality which has to do with aboutness but what I wanted to skip to is the number three in my mind which is um about the combination problem or The Binding problem so let me just kind of illustrate this this is the problem of seeing how you can take different things and put them together into a single conscious being with a single field of awareness so I have some objects here and imagine that you give me a this Mission Alex to turn these into a conscious being okay not just a robot that acts like it's conscious but it's something that actually has a first-person experience of Consciousness so that's my mission so because I I'm not you know able just to do this on my own I hire some different teams and I get one team to work on this red piece and they're going to figure out how to get this piece to be um able to have the feelings so this is the feeling piece and then this blue piece over here so I have different pieces with different colors the blue piece is going to do the thinking and then this green piece will do the mental images of dragons Okay so the imaginary piece imagination piece so the teams get to work and let's just imagine they succeed they overcome the hard problem of Consciousness they overcome even the causal exclusion problem because they create the thinking piece so that the thoughts can now have causal over causal power over its motions so by thinking it'll move in certain ways so they solve that causal exclusion problem and we now have all the different pieces of Consciousness but now we have another problem which is how do we bind these together into a single being that has its own first person experiences there are two unities of Consciousness here there's the unity of the experience that binds together many different like I can have an image of a dragon while you're thinking about pizza but there's no being that has both the image of the dragon and the thought about pizza merely having me thinking uh having the image and you having the thought doesn't have a single awareness that has both yeah there's two senses of Consciousness yes and then the second Unity is the unity of the being itself um so one being can have different perspectives over time so there's the unity of the perspective and then the unity of the being and both of these need to be built to succeed and turning these into a single being that has all of this at once how yes and so we've succeeded in producing feeling we've succeeded separately in producing thought we've succeeded separately in producing imagination and you know maybe particularly good at Imagining Dragons um but they're still separate so I guess the question we're asking here is like you know you say you've got a picture of a pizza I've got a picture of a dragon in my head what's the difference between that State of Affairs in the universe and me having a thought of a pizza and also having a thought of a dragon at the same time what's the difference between those thoughts occurring to me and one occurring to me and one occurring to you it seems this suggests to me upon sort of first rudimentary Thinking Out Loud that Consciousness is not so much the feelings like what what we think of as you know our conscious awareness is not the thoughts and the feelings and the mental images it seems to be more like something that those things happen to it seems to be a more fundamental thing that we might call the self and maybe it's the self that's the real mystery here that's what we're trying to explain and everything else like the thoughts the the feelings because they're not necessarily unified they become unified in the sense that they both happen to the same person in the same way that like you could hit get hit by a car or I could get hit by a car you know if these physical things just both happen to me if it's like one of us gets hit by a train one of us gets hit by a car that's separate well what's the difference between that and getting hit by both the train and the car well it's that this physical these two physical things happened to me rather than to you and so if we produce feelings and thoughts it doesn't seem like we've produced the person that they're going to happen to in other words even if your team succeeded in producing thoughts and feelings and mental images if they hadn't simultaneously produced the kind of thing that they can be you know given to or instantiated in maybe you wouldn't actually get Consciousness so to speak at all that's beautifully put that is so well put yes so there is this question about what unifies the different elements within Consciousness and I like what you said about the self maybe there's a a unifying being which is the self I call it a conscious substance in my work it's it's the kind of thing that's able to unify different things into a single field of conscious awareness and it's the kind of thing that can be the same thing even as its own perspective changes from thinking about lions to thinking about sandwiches right so it's changing its own perspective the perspective Unity but it's still the same being and this is actually a way of solving the combination problem in terms of a conscious being so in fact actually this is kind of my own solution is is I think that a conscious being provides the ingredients for unifying the different contents of Consciousness into a single field that is is as it appears from the first person perspective that's not all it is but it's at least that and it's unified by that being so now the question is are there other ways of accounting for this because let me just draw this out a bit if it takes a conscious being to explain the unity of Consciousness then you run into a kind of circularity problem if you're trying to build a conscious being from disparate pieces of reality because now it sounds like you need a conscious being to already exist to unify those pieces of reality in which case in order to build that conscious being you need to have a conscious being already there to build the conscious being and that's a kind of circularity problem that's I think a deep deep deep problem but there are other possible solutions and I think the the depth of the problem comes into my own light more clearly as I run through the different solutions we don't need to go through them all here but just to kind of illustrate if you have these different pieces one idea is that I mean this is kind of a rudimentary idea is that well maybe the way you bring them into a single field of awareness is by bringing them closer together they're sort of unified into the same brain right you just get them closer together if if they're close enough then they're thereby part of the same experience right th this is kind of like let's say you have a mental image of some sky and then I have a mental image of an ocean and maybe a beach and then we want there to be a mental image of some sky above some ocean so what we do is we put your head on top of my head does that generate the mental image of both together no you just have two beings with two images you don't have a unification merely putting them closer together you know we could take my brain and get it integrated into your brain so another idea is that well maybe there needs to be some kind of causal or functional integration if you can have causal functional integration then you can solve this binding problem then you can have all these elements bound together um but I end up making the argument that for every way that you spell out that functional integration you can imagine a scenario where you have the functional integration but you don't have the experiential integration um or you do have the experiential integration but you don't have the functional integration for various reasons so that that the functional integration is not neither necessary nor even sufficient for the integration and I'm not saying I don't want to kind of put an exclamation point on this maybe just put a question mark on this I think there's good research to be done on how we might explain this but this does point to another kind of problem that just because you can build even if you can build the conscious ingredients there's a further question about how you unify them I think that what you said about a self as a kind of unification for the Consciousness is exactly on the right track I mean that that I think does solve the problem I think that does explain how you can have the unity of Consciousness in my view well I I don't know if because you know we we've been talking for a while now and there are still quite a few more of these problems I don't know if there is any particular one that you think really needs to be aired that's like you say some of them are less well known than the others uh I want to make sure that you've got the opportunity to to to put in anything extra here that you think need to be heard I think just I'm I'll point to one that grows out of my own work uh I'm not going to go into it but there's this kind of counting argument that comes from analyzing the nature of thoughts and aboutness and it's a very technical argument but I make this argument that through u a mathematical analysis of the kind of abstract landscape of different kinds of thoughts one can derive some interesting theorems um I have ACC counting a mindful thoughts theorem that provides constraints about how thoughts could possibly arise and sort of one version of the result of this is that thoughts cannot even in principle be made out of mindless ingredients um given some of these principles so I have some articles are very technical on this is it too technical to give a to give a sort of overview of of the argument here and now I can I can I can do that yeah um and maybe we can even provide a link to a video presentation I give of one version of this but just to use my props here again if these are bits of reality and let's just stipulate that these are Mindless bits of reality that I'm holding up there's a red bit and an orange bit and then there's this question about okay how are mental States related to these bits of reality and one idea is that for any bit of mindless reality one could fine without contradiction or incoherence a possible or logically possible mental state of thinking about these bits of reality and if that's right then what you can get here is the result that there's at least as many types of mental States as types of of mindless States because for any type of mindless State you can define a logically possible mental type in terms of that mindless state and then we can use Cantor theorem to take subsets of the mental States and Define additional mental States in terms of those subsets to derive a higher ordered Infinity I'm I'm I'm thinking about okay how much detail do I go into is is is this is difficult you can maybe help me with this um but let me just do my best so Cantor showed that there are different sizes of infinity and so even if you have an infinite set of even numbers the set of all the decimal numbers is a larger infinite and one way to think about this is that if you have an infinite set then you can create a power set which is the set of all the subsets of that original set and that power set is going to have more total members than the original set and there's a technical way of of dering like within within if you take all even numbers the set of all even numbers and then you've separately got the set of all numbers within the set of all numbers you can you can create sets within that set such as the set of all odd numbers or the set of all numbers under 10 or the set of all numbers under 100 or something like that and there'll be more of those subsets in the set of all numbers or the set of all decimal numbers then there will be in the set of all even numbers for example you couldn't have you know the set of all the numbers ending in 0 five in the set of all even numbers just wouldn't exist but that that does exist exist in the other set and so there are more of these subsets yeah and it's so tricky too because apparently the cardinality of the set of all the natural numbers is the same as the cardinality of the set of just the even numbers which doesn't include the odd numbers because there's a mapping one to one so then once you find that out then you think well then that all the infinities are the same but then you find out that there are Infinities where you can't get the mapping and so then there are actually higher Infinities so I Ed canor theorem then to derive that if you can have a logically possible thought about any of these subset subsets of thoughts about Mindless States then by canor theorem you get a higher Infinity of possible thoughts than possible mindless States okay that that's like a first stage or first result and let me just add here that the way that I um motivate this is see I don't think none I don't think any of this can happen without using introspection to witness aspects of your thoughts uh you need in inection to be aware that if you're thinking about zebras if you're thinking that zebras are running wild then that thought that zebras are running wild has a kind of aboutness to it and then you need introspection to witness what I call logical links between thoughts so that you can see that your thought about the zebras or your thought about the giraffes can be joined together to form a more complex thought the thought that either the zebras are running wild or the giraffes are piling on top of each other okay so you can build these more complex thoughts using logical links without contradiction and this is this is so important I mean because you're using that introspective power to witness these very familiar aspects within your own mind to then be able to um deduce this result that through canor theorem that there are more logical possible constructions of thoughts than mindless States and first of all this uh implies some problems with reducing the mind in terms of the Mind mindless so this challenges a certain kind of reductive Theory where you're reducing the mind in terms of mindless atoms in certain arrangements so thoughts can't just be the same thing as certain atoms in Mindless Arrangements um that reduction will fail by this argument second there's also a problem of deriving the thoughts out of the Mindless there's a problem with even grounding the thoughts in terms of the Mindless and I draw this out uh in in in my book where I make the argument first for there's too many logical possible thoughts and then the question people have is how does all this stuff about what's possible anchor to what's actual there's this kind of worry you know the philosophers are out there in the possible again how do you anchor this to what's actual and there I use some deductions to show that given this the sort of uniformity of the thoughts the thoughts are of the same category then that's going to imply something about our actual thoughts like if you're actually thinking about zebras that's of the same category um of being a thought and it's going to challenge both the reduction and the grounding of the thoughts in terms of the Mindless States and so this would be an independent Avenue towards a mind first vision of reality another consideration well I am I am glad that we left that till the end because uh that that is I see what you're saying about the technicality of the argument now well we can link uh further discussion of this I I I think you've done a I think you've done a stellar job considering um just how technical an argument that is but but I I I imagine that there will be some dedicated listeners still here who are following everything you're saying I mean I I'm getting a bit lost I must say um but then you did warn me that this is something that's difficult to to try to summarize in a in a few minutes at the end of the podcast so I'll make sure that's that's Linked In the description a further explanation but um it's it's fascinating I guess the the different number of or the number of different ways that we can arrive at this same kind of question or conclusion about mindlessness or mindfulness at the basis of reality there are lots of ways in it's not just a sort of straightforward which side of the argument are you on it's which side of these 20 different considerations are you on and what might that imply about the nature of reality so it's it's always fascinating to talk about I think yeah I totally agree with that yeah and it's sort of surprising in a way how many different mind Fields there are to understand this basic question of how could Consciousness fit into reality by any means yeah well I'll be interested to see what uh viewers of this episode make of the the I I don't know how many we covered I think we did three or four of the of the problems but before that we had a quite extensive discussion about the nature of of Consciousness more broadly and I'm really interested to hear what people have to say um so thank you for taking the time and thank you for for sharing sharing your information with us it's been it's been yeah a pretty a pretty big one a pretty heavy one I think yeah well thank you Alex I I've really appreciated your work I feel like you have impact positive impact I think probably beyond what you would normally see because I think it goes beyond your kind of your main audience I think it ripples out in ways that I appreciate so much and one of the things that I see coming out of your work is kind of lifting people to a bigger Vision um of kind of what the world is than maybe certain pack ages that would sort of limit our vision of reality I feel like it's even sort of in your your tagline of cosmic skeptic it's I love that there's a kind of healthy questioning of various paradigms and I think that helps all of us get closer to truth so I'm just so glad we could have this conversation about one of these big questions thank you well yeah that's that's uh that's obviously very kind of you to say and I'm uh I'm glad that's the case I uh I well this podcast I think we're on episode this this will be episode 40 something of the podcast but I only really relaunched it properly at like episode 20 something so it's still quite a new Pursuit for me so it's always nice to hear that you know at least somebody thinks that it's going well so so thanks for the kind words and like I say thanks for thanks for being here man if you enjoyed that conversation then thanks I'm glad you can watch more full episodes of the within reason podcast by clicking the link that just appeared on your screen the podcast is also on platforms like Spotify and apple podcasts don't forget to sub subribe thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Alex O'Connor

Views: 72,411

Keywords: Alex O'Connor, cosmic, skeptic, cosmicskeptic, atheism, within reason, podcast, within reason podcast, religion, debate, Alex J O'Connor

Id: rmuZOS5Gs1A

Length: 91min 25sec (5485 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 10 2023