What is Panpsychism? | Rupert Sheldrake, Donald Hoffman, Phillip Goff, James Ladyman

[Music] [Music] psychism pants I Kazan tell me more well we've spent several decades to know what's the motivation for puns like is and I think we've spent several decades now trying to explain consciousness in terms of completely non conscious processes in the brain and in my view have got precisely nowhere with that project and so what the plan psyche is proposes is we try and explain complex forms of consciousness in the human or animal brain in terms of simpler forms of consciousness where those simple forms of consciousness are then postulated to exist as as basic features of matter perhaps basic properties of fundamental particles so it feels a bit wacky and new-age but you know I think we should judge a view by its not by its cultural connotations but by its explanatory power and I think that the attraction upon psychism is it it gives us a way of integrating consciousness into our scientific picture of the world and in a way that avoids the deep difficulties that play the other options such as materialism or dualism so I think that in itself gives us a very least strong reason to take this view very seriously indeed you talk more about the one is the fact that physical science works with a purely quantitative vocabulary whereas consciousness is an essentially qualitative phenomenon simply in the sense that it involves qualities so if you think about the redness of a red experience or the sweet smell of flowers or the taste of coffee you simply can't capture these kind of qualities in the purely quantitative vocabulary physical science and I think this was well understood by the the founder of physical science Galileo so Galileo only intended physical science to be a partial description of reality he hoped that it could capture that the mathematical features of reality but he never dreamt it it could capture the qualities of consciousness which he took he believed decided in the soul so a lot of people have this argument I mean a physical has done so well you know this ought to give us great confidence that it'll one day solve the problem of consciousness but my responses are when a physical science has done so well since specifically because it was never designed to deal with consciousness so from the very start Galileo kicks things off by taking consciousness outside of the domain of scientific inquiry and thereby giving physical scientists I'm all manageable tasks so I think that's the go I mean another way of looking at the difficulty is the clash between the subjective and the objective I think physical science tries to give a completely objective description of reality as a a description of reality that could be grasped by anyone no matter what your life experience so they might you know there might be aliens who visit us from another planet and they have very different sensory organs and very different kind of experience of the world and maybe they couldn't understand our music or our art because of that but if they're intelligent enough to understand mathematics they could get our physics so that's that's what we try to give it completely as Thomas Nager put it physics tries to get the view from nowhere whereas consciousness is an essentially subjective phenomenon so you can only understand someone's consciousness if you can take on their perspective so a blind neuroscientist no matter how much they know about what's going on in the brain when someone sees colors they'll never know what it's like to see color because they can't adopt the perspective of a sighted person or to use a famous example again for Thomas Nagel no matter how much we know about the neurophysiology of bats we'll never know what it's like to be a bat because we can't take on the perspective of a creature that Ecco locates their way around the world so I think I mean I think at the end of the day materialism always ends up inevitably just denying the existence of consciousness arguing that you know there aren't really these kind of subjective qualities there are really just the objective quantitative properties of physical science so I think yeah that that's really really the problem with materialism I think turning to judaism so I take Judaism to be the view that consciousness is a property of the immaterial soul outside of the physical workings of the body and brain unfortunately this views hopeless - so I think we now have I mean I think the problem is if there was an immaterial soul interacting with the brain every second of waking life you know sending signals to raise our arms and move on lips that would certainly show up in our neuroscience there would be all sorts of things happening in the brain that had no physical cause there would be like a poltergeist was playing with the brain and we just we just don't find that so I think neuroscience gives us a strong and ever-growing case that consciousness is is located in the brain rather than the soul so this is a problem right so when I studied philosophy in the dying embers of the 20th century we were taught that there were two options on consciousness right either you think physical science can't explain it in which case you're a materialist or oh you think it's non-physical in which case you're duelist and I think philosophers have come to see that you know both of these options are pretty hopeless and so you know more and more in the past five ten years I'd say more and more philosophers and some neuroscientists are turning to punt psychism this our best hope for making progress and consciousness well as the strongest argument against panic is it was the thing that you weren't up against most the weakest argument and then I'll get to the strongest argument I think the weakest duggan gates pun psychism is which is probably the most common is though it's just weird just kind of too weird to think the particles that conscious at all or it's it's it's got a kind of New Age feel to it but I mean I just think this really isn't a serious objection you know plenty of our best scientific theories are wildly counter to common-sense the view the time slows down when you travel faster the view that particles can be in an indeterminate between two locations but I think probably what is generally agreed to be the strongest argument is the so-called against plan psychism what is everything to be the strongest arguing against plans like is and the so-called combination problem so this is the difficulty of how we get from little conscious things like particles to big conscious things like brain so this is a very serious problem and there's a lot of energy currently being expended to try and make progress on this there are people exploring integration of information people trying to rethink the nature of spatial relationships or part-whole relationships some people three minutes okay maybe I'll get back of it so that there are people thinking about the integration of information people thinking about whether we can rethink the nature of spatial relationships or part-whole relationships people thinking whether we can think of this is a more general aspect of the problem of the unity of consciousness so I think yeah there's lots of very interesting ideas and there's real hope that we can make progress on this so it's not it's not that pun psychism offers as a complete finished theory of consciousness you know I think it's it's still very early days in the science of consciousness but to my mind the problems faced by the pants I guess looked to be much more tractable than the problems faced by either the materialist or the dualist it looks to me just like just looks like a more promising research program and and you know it doesn't have to be either/or you know sometimes materialist talk as if we shouldn't be doing anything else but trying to get a materialist solution of consciousness and everyone else is you know holding back scientific progress but you know we can let a thousand flowers bloom and you know and you know see what happens see what see what can be worked out well I mean fast question the code I think consciousness is the realm of possibility and you can't know about possibilities unless they're in a conscious space I think minds are containers of possibility possibilities are not physical facts they're just possibilities and they can only exist in something like an imagination so I think our conscious mind so you know that's what they do they're to do with choices among possibilities our unconscious minds are about habits things that we just do automatically we need to think about them and I think all minds really are spaces of possibility even the mind underlying the cosmos so I think that think of Minds in general as conscious spaces or realms or containers of possibility units on the road there to pan psychism what do you think oh I'm propensity ism I just think those pen psychics don't go far enough most pen psychics talk about the consciousness or minds of electrons or protons or and assumes and things like that which is fine the reason they do that is because they're trying to explain how we come to be conscious standard materialism is the doctrine that matters unconscious the whole universe is unconscious and then they have the problem okay but everything's unconscious and everything is made of matter including our brains how come we're conscious so they only have said well the consciousness is somehow emerges out of complex arrangements but how can something totally different from unconscious matter emerge that's called the hard problem in the philosophy of mind so to get out of that some pants cyclists some materialists have become pen cyclists by saying okay well let's have a little bit of consciousness in electrons and atoms and things so consciousness can emerge from something it has a much much lower grade of mind or consciousness even in subatomic particles and therefore we can overcome the problem of how something different in that's it's a difference of degree not a difference in kind the emergence of consciousness in human brains so I think that's fine I don't have a problem with that but the question I then asked them is well what about the Sun the Sun is a self-organizing system what does the Sun think about what's the mind of the Sun like I'm personally I think the sun's conscious and indeed the entire galaxy and the whole universe so I'm in favor of pen psychism but pan means everywhere psyche means mind I'm in favor of pen sarcasm I just think it's so much too limiting to confine it to the realm of subatomic physics so consciousness is not an emergent property of material well emergent property I mean what does it mean it means that something comes from something that wasn't there before it's a way of conjuring something out of like a rabbit out of a hat you see there are three main ways of thinking about it one is top down the whole universe is conscious and even before there was any matter there was consciousness or mind and the evolution of matter in the universe is the content the universe has lower in lower levels of consciousness as it evolves the Big Bang the entire universe is one system one mind as it were then the fields of physics and things separate art and stars and galaxies and whatnot so then you have the emergence of many forms of consciousness and then on life a life on Earth you have I dare say in biology there is an emergence of higher forms of consciousness I mean we have more than a worm or a bacterium so in that area in then you could say that there is a kind of emergence but the top-down consciousness means you start with consciousness and it goes down from the bar as it were the bottom-up materialist theory is you start from subatomic particles and atoms and you work your way up and then you have to say well it emerges but you could just as well say it descends the third position is say well it's both there's a sense in which there's a an emergency or an appearance of high levels of complexed you with more complexity but it's not that it was not there before and after all our evolution has happened within on the planet Earth within a galaxy and what if the whole galaxy and what if the whole solar system are conscious and what if Gaia the earth is conscious then our consciousness has appeared within much larger conscious systems so you know these are philosophically different ways of looking at it there's a prejudice in modern science in favor of materialism and reductionism and bottom-up explanations but that's really a kind of philosophical fashion it's not the truth how long is it in the fashion and how much further think is well it's been the fashion since the late 19th century's times became dominated by materialism in the late 19th century and in many ways our views of matter have changed since then they had an old classical physics view of matters little atoms as little billiard balls quantum theory changes that very radically and they didn't know about the galaxies beyond our own or the Big Bang or modern cosmology so all these things have changed but the philosophy of materialism sorted locked in a 19th century worldview and of course you can have an updated materialism and in a sense Pan cyclists are trying to update materialism but as soon as you admit psyche or mind into matter then it's not really materialism it's really a form of animism animism is the belief that the whole of nature is alive and they hold universes like an organism not a machine I think that's a much more reasonable view of myself so what we're at the moment in is a kind of conflict between old-style materialism and the kind of animism Orpen psychism struggling to get out and so far it's only got as far as atoms and molecules but one reason I like to ask pen scientists about the consciousness of the Sun is that I think they're on a slippery slope and I'd like to push them down it a bit fast and they go on their own and discussing the consciousness of the Sun is a very good way of accelerating this slide down the slippery slope into a full-blown animism it seems to be like there's a what was what was the basic definition then what is this thing that the materialists and miss wrapping over well I mean there's hundreds of definitions but it's to do with awareness and as I said to start with possibility I that's my own definition it's about a realm of possibility they would say it's about perception awareness algorithms and the brain you know as soon as you get into modern cognitive neuroscience then the brain is a computer consciousness is just the software programs running it but they of course needn't be conscious in fact they're not conscious so in the materialist philosophy of mind consciousness is either an epiphenomenon that does nothing like a kind of shadow of physical activity in the brain that has no role and it has no free well it doesn't actually do anything that's the majority of you or else it's an illusion produced by brains because it might have some conceivable evolutionary advantage but it still doesn't do anything the problem is that to call consciousness an illusion doesn't explain it it presupposes it because illusion is itself a made of consciousness so philosophers of mind and the materialist school go round and round in circles like dogs chasing their tails trying to explain it never succeed and any one of them comes up with a theory another one will point out the flaws and they come up with their own and the other one will point out the flaws in it and and that's why it's called the very existence of consciousness is called the hard problem it seems to me one major part of that is just the limitations of language of word to adequately describe a phenomena the way I being this the hot problem is will show many things one of it is just how limited English or languages to describe them stuff I don't think the problem the consciousness is a problem of language I mean language itself of course is a product of consciousness and languages inadequate to explain many things including the ultimate nature of reality at the beginning of the universe and so forth but I don't think that the problem is with language I think the problem is with worldviews and do you have a worldview that's essentially an atheist materialist worldview there is no God there is no consciousness out there the universe is unconscious it's purposeless meaningless everything's happened by chance or accident the laws of nature have no particular reason to be one way or the other we just live in a universe where they happen to be right for us evolution is a matter of blind chance mutations and blind natural selection that's a worldview that says that consciousness has just emerged in our brains and doesn't actually do anything also that we don't have free will a deeply depressing worldview and I think that when you have whole societies based on it like ours what you'd predict is that lots of people would suffer from depression and the facts actually bear that out if you think you live in a meaningless world by your mind is just in your brain and it's nothing more than what's happening inside your head not truly related to anything else deeply depressing whereas if you think that consciousness is primary that we live in a universe that's purposeful that our minds are part of something much greater than ourselves that mystical experiences connect us with greater Minds than our own they're not just serotonin levels changing inside our brains but then you have a completely different view of the universe it's not just imagine language pants like is my phone really odd I mean I I see things that are colored I'm not tempted to think that means that fundamental particles must have color I I see things that are alive but I'm not tempted to think that therefore some particles must have the life property things in aggregate interacting Lots behave in novel ways compared to how the parts on their own behave we see that all the time you see that even in a pile of sand which will have a you know characteristic shape of slope and it when builds up and then there'll be an avalanche and it will shift back into that shape it's an emergent property of lots and lots of grains of sand it's not a property of any individual grain of sand now one walls not tempted to say are but that means every grain of sand must have a kind of heat property that it brings with it to the heap right just the heap is what you get when you put all the sand together so why on earth would you think that you have to say electrons are consciousness for very very complicated systems and material things to be conscious any more than you'd have to say that you know for there to be wetness there has to be kind of wet molecules the things that we perceive the world to be like might be artifacts of our interaction with the world that are experienced and we don't need to think that the things have those properties independently of us we need to understand how given the properties they have got independently of us through interaction with us and our nature our minds we can perceive them to be in certain ways and that's what we now think we don't tempted to think that sweetness as we experience it is in sugar so I I don't understand why you wouldn't say the same thing about consciousness I mean and give you another example I think that there can be moral properties but I'm not tend to say though in order for that to be true they have to be little good and bad electrons it's an emergent property of the world given life and sentience and the possibility of suffering and social groups and so on then we then get morals and there can still within that frame what you could say yeah though moral facts this stuff about what's right and wrong you don't need to build that into the sort of foundations of reality at the particle level do you I mean why why don't see it's motivated at all what the right thing to say is that consciousness is an emergent property that only arises in as at the moment living systems but maybe other kinds of systems we have to be very physically complicated and we know that life is an emergent property of very physically complicated things consciousness isn't an all-or-nothing thing I think there's a tendency among these popular debates that people talk about consciousness but they don't distinguish sentience experience consciousness self consciousness so if I think about a spider it's got the primitive sentience it's got perception is it conscious maybe a bit you know and then you start thinking about layers and layers and layers and then you can get the idea of okay I can sort of understand how there could be human consciousness arising out of matter because it doesn't just it's not like there's just billiard balls and consciousness there's this incredible complexity of layer on the layer in between the two the there's a historian of ideas Lynne white who argued toward the late 1960s he had he wrote a piece called the historical roots of our ecological crisis and what he was saying was that the problem with ecology dates back to the overcoming of paganism by monotheism he says you know in a pagan world if the rocks are alive if the trees are alive if the rivers have personalities you can't just take them right you can't just cut the trees down with impunity if they have if they're spirits if they're living things you can't just remove mountain tops if the mountain is a sacred webbing being you have to at least ask a river before you pollute it right but he says that the problem with the triumph of monotheism is that what monotheism does is it reserves all agency and all life for conscious beings God and then humans who are in made in God's image everything else is just dead matter animals and just use them with impunity rocks river street who cares right so I'd like to think about if like if we are thinking about rocks rivers trees bacteria mushrooms as animate as getting stuff done as in some way having agency and even maybe personality which is what a lot of Animists teach us that they have personalities I think I'm a real a lot harder to say frack the earth for natural gas if that earth were a living animate thing and perhaps even sharing in what we think of it as divine so that's that's kind of the hope the hope is to reanimate the landscape I'm not the first person to do this there are new materialist philosophers who are doing this constantly who are sort of cobbling together different ontology to see the way that we can think of even like lead and steel as animate and certainly that what we call the landscape as animate what I'm trying to argue is that we can use this work to start also tearing down the concept of divinity is again enshrining the importance of humanity and sort of human comfort over everything else and would you go as far as seeing consciousness and in all beings in the rocks and the rivers right so here's the thing yeah I guess I could say yes but then I get worried about consciousness because consciousness is the thing that we have is that the the power the faculty that we've traditionally reserved for human beings right so I can see the sort of generosity and saying look not only are dolphins and dogs and whales conscious but also rocks and rivers and trees are conscious particles or conscious quarks are conscious things like that I worry a little bit about the way that that kind of remakes the whole universe and the image of the human so I'd like to talk I guess a little more about them having like personality or agency which or our anima see which feels a little less like it's taking the stuff that it's supposed to distinguish us and then seeing ourselves everywhere in the universe but sure I you know I that's the position known as Pan psychism right the idea that everything down to the level of the quantum has a kind of consciousness or proto consciousness yeah I affirm the pants like it's sort of pants psychic viewpoint as as helpful and as useful I guess I just I just worry that it then ends up re-establishing a kind of chain of being where photons and electrons have a kind of proto like primitive consciousness and then bacteria have like a little more consciousness and then you know a little and then you you know work your way up and you work your way up and you're right and finally humans have like serious consciousness where you get that same establishment of that hierarchy of being if you're trying to see consciousness all the way down so that would be where I would depart from the pants.i coasts pan psychics [Music] what I'm doing as a scientist as I'm suggesting that well I'm trying to understand a specific scientific problem which is for me it's called a hard problem of consciousness and I'm trying to think of a theory of reality that will allow me to solve this hard problem of consciousness the problem is this we have a lot of interesting data that gives us correlations between certain kinds of brain activity and certain conscious experiences that we have so for example we know that if I take a powerful magnet called a trans Meg a transcranial magnetic stimulator and touch it to a part of the skull that's just next to an area called v4 and if I inhibit my neural activity in that area immediately all color will drain from the left part of my visual world I'll just see shades of grey I'll still see color in the right part of the visual world but not in the left then you turn off the magnet and color it comes flowing back in so there's this very interesting correlation between interference with neural activity and income the right hemisphere and loss of certain kind of conscious experience in the left visual world we can do that with motion if I put the stimulator over an area called v5 I can turn off my ability to experience motion in the left visual field and it turns out that in in the science of you know cognitive neuroscience we've discovered scores maybe hundreds of these kinds of correlations so correlations are the raw data this brain activity is correlated with that conscious experience and of course correlations are not a theory rooster crows are correlated with sunrises but that's not a theory for example does a rooster crow cause a sunrise well no that's we would tend to think it might go the other way but but it's hard to go from correlations to a genuine theory of what's causing it you might say well so for example we know that brain activity that we can measure with EEG electroencephalograms we can predict your choices that you'll make in certain cases your free will choices seven seconds before you can tell me what you're going to choose so here again brain activity is cleanly correlated with your experience 7 seconds later of a choice that you're making so here again we have this correlation and in this case you might say well ok here clearly the theory is the brain activity came first the experience of feeling like you had a free will choice came a few seconds later so clearly the brain activity had to cause it and that's too quick another example the counter example is if you look at a train station a bunch of people assemble at the train station a few minutes later the train appears did the people coming to the train station cause the train to appear no they didn't so even though the correlation is tight every time a group of people appears a train appears a few minutes later is not the case that the people appearing cause the train to appear there's some third entity namely a train schedule as coordinating broke both so we have to be very very careful when we have correlations that's not the same thing as a theory and then the final example is you might say well look when you actually take that magnet and stimulate area before or inhibit it you're intervening and by intervening we can actually figure out what's causing what right so you turn off before color goes away surely that shows that be for is the color experience and that's also to fast if I'm in a virtual reality game like Grand Theft Auto and I've got a steering wheel I can say look I can intervene I can turn the steering wheel to the left that will make the car turn to the left therefore the the steering wheel is real and it really does have an effect on the real car no it's not there's again a hidden reality of diodes and resistors all the circuits that's mediating this it only we only have the fiction of intervening and in a fiction of causality so the problem we have in the hard problem of consciousness is this scientists have gotten dozens maybe hundreds of these tight correlations we do not have a theory we cannot explain why neural activity is correlated with conscious experiences in particular we can't offer a single consc experience like say by conscious experience I mean something really simple like having a headache experiencing color the taste of vanilla the theories that are proposed are basically only believed by the graduate students of the professor who proposes them and and no theory that's been proposed can even predict or or specify the conditions for a single experience like the taste of vanilla so if you think that neural activity causes the taste of vanilla precisely what neural activity is causing the taste of vanilla and how does it do it no one has any idea or if they say that neural activity is identical to the taste of vanilla then as a scientist I want to say ok tell me with mathematical precision what exactly is the math the neural activity that's identical to vanilla and why is it identical I mean it's anybody can say anything you know I can say the moon is identical to two blue cheese and just stipulate it presumably you need to give me some reason why I should believe in the identity so they can't specify the identity and and much less say why the identity should be plausible so that's the problem we've got it's it's a really deep open scientific problem and it's very personal we all have conscious experiences we would like to understand what and we also we also have brains we'd like to understand what's happening here what's these correlations there where do you stand in relation to pan psyche asthma then if we if we ended on physicalism that's the obvious kind of opposite theory to physical is me so so pants I could pant psychism is an interesting theory there are a couple versions of it and when I talk to different pants I kists they they will say no that's not my version so I'll talk about two different versions of it that so in one version is more dualist so an electron really exists and it really does have physical properties whether or not it's observed like position momentum and spin but in addition it has a unit of consciousness and when electron and a proton get together then somehow the unit of consciousness from the electron and the unit of conscience from the proton have to interact to create the consciousness of you know of the to put their coming together right into hydrogen say so that's that's one theory it's dualist and most scientists don't like dualism right so so most scientists would just not even go there if it may you know it's not that it's wrong it's just that we try to come up with a simplest theory so another version of pants psychism that some people talk about it in some sense is what you would just say well what I was already saying that the fundamental nature of reality just is consciousness and some pants I kiss that I've talked with will will say when I talk about all these conscious agents the word agent makes it sound like there's all these selves and personalities and so forth and and I'm not trying to imply that I'm just saying that there are these elementary perceivers that can have experiences and take simple actions in the mathematical model I don't assume that there's a self I don't assume intelligence problem solving creativity in memory even but what I can show mathematically is I can from the network with these simple conscious agents I can build networks that simulate selves that simulate intelligence that have memories and so forth so so that that version if that's what people mean by pen psychism then then it's equivalent to what I'm saying but I like to just call my theory conscious realism because I want to be very very clear that I'm saying that consciousness is fundamental and I'm proposing I mean I don't know what the truth is I'm just a scientist I'm just proposing a bold hypothesis that consciousness of consciousness is fundamental and it's real now if that's false it's false we'll find out but the idea of science is to be precise and bold so that we can precisely find out where we're wrong so I'm making a precise and bull hypothesis and it's mathematically precise I published it so any scientist can go out there and say this is what's wrong with the mathematics but that's the whole goal of course I'm probably wrong I don't think any scientific theory I've read so far is correct including general relativity and quantum field theory and so forth they're brilliant they're wonderful tools we should study them they're the best we've got so far and they're almost surely deeply wrong and so the same is true of my theory I won't say it's brilliant but I'll say it's probably deeply wrong at least as presents for more debates talks and interviews subscribe today to the Institute of Arts and ideas at IAI TV you

Channel: The Institute of Art and Ideas

Views: 159,306

Keywords: reality, conciousness, pansychism, sheldrake, hoffman, rupert sheldrake, pansychists, mind, matter, philosophy, brain, soul, materialism, dualism, plato, ecology, interview, learn, think, debate, evolution, human, evolutionary, game theory, hard problem, psyche, science, harris, meaning, understanding, illusion, neuroscience, parapsychology, cognitive, religion, body, bodies, mind-body, body-mind, panpsychism

Id: B7KaNnFij2Q

Length: 36min 1sec (2161 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/BigShapes]

James Ladyman supervised my dissertation on Panpsychism

[u/DMann59]

I am the collective consciousness of everything... How does one explain that?

Why me not you? I hate being at the top of the pyramid... Can wait for the stack to overflow