Episode #180 - Transcript

So we talked about some general DISCUSSION surrounding consciousness last time. Let’s TALK about some actual THEORIES now. IF you’re born into TODAY’S day and age…STATISTICALLY…the MOST likely thing you’re PROBABLY going to be when it comes to your thoughts about consciousness…is some version of a physicalist or a materialist. 

Meaning that you believe… that consciousness… is PROBABLY reducible to material, PHYSICAL properties of the brain. Usually that would mean you’re a PRETTY big fan of science. 

Usualyl that would mean that… you’d probably BE the kind of person that SAYS stuff like…I think, one day… we’re PROBABLY going to find, that there are some INTERNAL mechanisms that are going on in the brain… that if only we study them enough…let’s be REAL…we’re PROBABLY gonna be able to know.. everything about consciousness one day.

And if you said something like that…NOBODY in their right mind would be MAD at you for it. They may disagree with you but they’d understand the world you’re coming from. I mean picture being born into the middle ages somewhere in western Europe and NOT being a Christian. At some level we’re all BYPRODUCTS of the cultures and time periods that we come from…and SCIENCE…it’s just how you GET THINGS DONE these days! When you got a problem…SCIENCE is what you THROW at it to figure it out. And WHY would consciousness be any different we gotta assume?

But there’s something ELSE we ALWAYS DO these days… on ACCOUNT of the fact we lovescience so much (southern?)…and THAT IS when we’re DOING science…we LOVE to construct theoretical models that HELP us understand reality. 

AS A SCIENTIST…at least whenever I hear from scientists that are IN MY LIFE…as a scientist you TRY to construct a MODEL that is SIMPLE enough to explain the problem that you’re trying to deal with. You TRY to be parsimonious. No more SIMPLE than it needs to be, no more COMPLICATED than it needs to be. That’s an example of a SOLID…theoretical model.   

And maybe a PARTICULAR theoretical MODEL…works out GREAT. Maybe so far it explains 98% of all the PHENOMENA that are OUT there that you’re studying. Amazing. But when something’s worked out SO WELL…FOR SO LONG…a very TEMPTING thing to do… when that last 2% CAN’T seem to be explained in the theory, something like consciousness in TODAY’S world…a TEMPTING thing to do… is to STICK with the model overall…but then TRY to TACK ON a bunch of ADDITIONAL things that can EXPLAIN AWAY that last two percent. 

You can understand why people DO this…you know we’re so close! Just look at it! 98%! 

Sometimes it can be DIFFICULT when it’s worked out for so long to think that the PROBLEM… MAY have been ALL THE WAY back with assumptions that we made at the BEGINNING of the theoretical model. 

Well what if THIS were the case…WHAT IF…when it comes to the HARD PROBLEM of consciousness that we talked about LAST time…what if the reason…it’s been SO HARD to explain CONSCIOUSNESS USING the current scientific model…is because a LONG TIME AGO…consciousness…was REMOVED from the SCIENCES so that we could better compartmentalize and narrow our focus?

This line of thinking is EVENTUALLY going to lead us to a theory of consciousness known…as Panpsychism. You can just LOOK at the two parts of the word Pan and psychism and venture a pretty good guess as to where we’re GOING with all this. But something I want to make sure I say right at the outset here is that the Panpsychism I’m talking about today is not…your DAD’s Panpsychism…where he has one too many mocktails and starts talking about how the trees are watching him or how EVERYTHING is conscious. There are VERY FEW, SERIOUS people doing work that are REALLY making a claim like that. I’m more interested in NOT wasting your time talking about those today and talking about what I see as more of a good faith Panpsychism that has been gaining a LOT of popularity as of late in these conversations in the philosophy of mind we’re going to be orbiting around for a bit. 

Now with the intelligent brand of Panpsychism that I’m talking about here in particular… if there was a MOUNT RUSHMORE of panpsychism…one of the FACES on that mountain would be a philosopher by the name of Phillip Goff. 

And to get us STARTED on understanding where a PANPSYCHIST view of consciousness may be coming from: Phillip Goff in 2019 wrote a book called Galileo’s Error…where in it: he talks about what HE thinks is a FUNDAMENTAL MISTAKE in the THEORETICAL models we USE to understand our reality. And it’s a mistake… that MAY have made science, in it’s CURRENT state, INCAPABLE of ever being able to explain consciousness fully. 

So how exactly did that happen? Well Goff says that a LONG time ago, Galileo…OBVIOUSLY known for all the work he got done in the sciences…was ALSO someone doing philosophical work. And Galileo was DOING his work during a time where a lot of people that came before him believed that the THINGS that we’re looking at IN the physical world…are full of qualities. For example Goff says…COLORS… people thought were on the SURFACES of the objects that we see…SMELLS they thought were FLOATING through the AIR…TASTES are INSIDE of the food that you are eating. These things are called QUALITIES…and these things PRODUCE what we call our QUALITATIVE experience of the world. 

OK. But then Galileo says…how about we start from an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT theoretical model. Because as we know NOW in 2023…his ULTIMATE goal was that he wanted to be able to understand PHYSICAL reality SOLELY through the language of mathematics. He thought, you know, if you wanted to be able to understand something PURELY quantitative, JUST PHYSICAL reality…descriptions of things like size, shape, motion… particles, fields, and all the various dispositions of those particles and fields…if you wanted to try to understand all THAT…mathematics, SEEMS, like a PRETTY promising direction to go in to be able to explain them. 

But as Phillip Goff says in the book this becomes a PROBLEM for Galileo…because there’s no way that an EQUATION…can ever capture something like the REDNESS of a RED experience. There’s no blue + yellow = red. When you TASTE something…there’s obviously no mathematical structure in the universe that can represent, how spicy curry tastes. That’s a QUALITATIVE experience. And Galileo KNEW this. 

So what Galileo HAD TO DO…to be able to GET to the basis of mathematical physics in 1623…is he had to effectively CUT OUT… QUALITATIVE experiences from what the theoretical model was trying to understand. And then to EXPLAIN the QUALITIES…he says that WHAT we experience when we see, smell or touch something…is NOT INSIDE of the objects somehow…to Galileo, those qualities ACTUALLY take place, in the MIND of the observer…so we gotta get RID of the qualitative realm of consciousness…and STICK… with the QUANTITATIVE realm of science. 

Put another way, his view of reality meant that we had to CUT OUT subjective experience from what science was trying to understand…and STICK WITH things like particles, fields, mass and charge…you know, the things that we are all very FAMILIAR with that science tries to study and understand today. 

What resulted from all this Goff says is that the physics we have today primarily explains the way that physical stuff BEHAVES. It doesn’t tell us ANYTHING at ALL… about the nature of the matter in ITSELF. Physics… doesn’t tell us what matter IS…it only tell us what it DOES. 

And by the way Phillip Goff is FAR from the ONLY one saying this. This has been well documented all throughout the history of philosophy. When you’re doing science… if you’re studying volcanoes for example…you’re interested in how the volcano BEHAVES…you’re studying volcanic gas emissions, you’re studying seismic activity, you’re studying the way that it erupts…what do YOU care about the INTRINSIC NATURE of that volcano…what are you gonna marry it? No, you’re JUST trying to understand how it behaves. 

And COMPARTMENTALIZING our focus like this has obviously been very helpful from VOLCANOES…all the way down into the realm of physics. The progress speaks for itself. 

But Phillip Goff would say it is NOT a coincidence…that IF we FIND ourselves in a time where this purely QUANTITATIVE theoretical model has done so much good for us…oh, but then there’s this one little thing at the end…CONSCIOUSNESS…that it CAN’T seem to explain. 

That’s NOT REALLY a coincidence. It’s NOT that we need to TACK ON some MORE STUFF to EXPLAIN that 2% that’s left over at the end. To Phillip Goff: Mathematical physics has BEEN SO SUCCESSFUL…PRECISELY BECAUSE it STARTED from a place… where it EXCLUDED consciousness. 

It may be helpful at this point and for the rest of the episode… for us to consider an alternative timeline of philosophical events in the past. I mean imagine if back in the time of Galileo…Galileo comes up with this PURELY quantitative method of understanding reality…and then he goes to his scientist and philosopher friends and says here you go guys, this is my new theory. 

And imagine they LOOK at it… but after thinking about it for a while they’re like no, Galileo. What have you done? You’ve STRIPPED the world of its qualities. Look, this theory you’ve come up with doesn’t ACCOUNT for the OBVIOUS existence of the DETAILS of subjective, phenomenal consciousness. 

Imagine they say it’s PRETTY good…but AS good scientists we can’t IGNORE this GIANT, self-evident PIECE of human reality called consciousness…that may be the most OBVIOUS thing that we know exists…we can DO BETTER than this. And imagine Galileo…STILL committed to mathematical physics as BEING the best path forward…imagine he goes back to the drawing board…what do you think the theory that he returned with would’ve LOOKED like…if he LEFT room for consciousness?

Well Panpsychism is DEFINITELY…one possible answer to this. See you hear the name Panpsychism and you might think that most of these people are saying something magical. But again a SERIOUS Panpsychist is NOT someone that believes that EVERYTHING AROUND YOU is conscious. Like your lamp is conscious, it’s WATCHING you. Your flip flops are conscious and they’re watching… your feet. It’s not like that. Panpsychists are not ENEMIES of science, or of ANYTHING mathematical physics has discovered so far. 

They just think that physical science… DOESN’T reveal EVERYTHING there is to KNOW about physical reality…because it’s BASED on a theoretical METHOD that’s purely QUANTITATIVE. They think we need to find a way to BRING CONSCIOUSNESS BACK IN to the models we use. 

So, it’s actually quite the contrary…a panpsychist is typically trying to find a way to PRESERVE the work that’s been done in mathematical physics… by finding a way to incorporate what THEY think we left out at the beginning. 

And one way to DO that… if that’s what you wanted to do…would be to imagine consciousness… as something that is fundamental, and ubiquitous…something that lies UNDERNEATH… physical matter as we know it. 

Imagine, at the fundamental level of reality…there are JUST, NETWORKS… of very SIMPLE, conscious entities. These conscious entities go ALL THE WAY DOWN, that’s the term philosophers like to USE in these conversations…they go ALL THE WAY DOWN… to EVEN something like an electron or a quark…that these VERY simple types of entities… have a very SIMPLE type… of internal experience. Imagine that’s possible. 

Now…couple things real quick…OBVIOUSLY we gotta be careful at EVERY STAGE of this conversation about consciousness of PROJECTING OUR OWN, HUMAN type of subjectivity onto the definition of what it is to have an internal experience… OBVIOUSLY these subatomic particles would have a very DIFFERENT type of internal experience than you or I do…they’re not watching football on sunday…they’re not worried about paying BILLS this month…

But, WHAT IF… in a very MONISTIC sort of way…a lot of Panpsychist theory is based on a form of Monism originally talked about by Bertrand Russell…what if there is a SINGLE SUBSTANCE that underlies ALL of what we know in physical reality… and that SUBSTANCE is consciousness? As Bertrand Russell suggests what if consciousness… is what he calls the causal SKELETON of the world. And physical reality…all those particles, fields, and the dispositions of matter… are REALLY, just NETWORKS of consciousness. 

Now its pretty EASY here for people to misunderstand this… as a type of DUALISM…where a Panpsychist is saying that there’s PHYSICAL reality…and then these PHYSICAL particles have this weird CONSCIOUSNESS substance embedded into them. That’s not what a Panpsychist is saying. 

What someone like Phillip Goff is saying…is that the particles and fields that we study… are CONSTITUTED of consciousness. They are FORMS of consciousness. When physics is able to map the reliable, mathematical structures of reality…they are able to DO so maybe because these simple particles, with very simple types of internal experiences… can be PREDICTED like that. And then under panpsychism, what if these more SIMPLE networks of conscious entities… somehow colesque into greater and GREATER levels of complexity? You walk up that ladder of complexity far enough…and EVENTUALLY you get to what we know as OUR type of subjective consciousness.

Starting from that set of precepts THINK of how much that changes…just as a SIMPLE example… in the conversations we have about free will. Maybe the more complicated, these networks of consciousness become…maybe the more complicated it becomes to predict the causal relationships between their behavior. 

That we’d LOVE to believe that EVERYTHING is simple enough to be causally predictable like particles are…where PEOPLE are that way…where everything you DO as a person is deterministic. And as a committed MATERIALIST living in today’s world… you may be WILLING to make a LOT OF assumptions in that direction if that’s what you WANTED human beings to be, you know they’re LIKE MATTER! They’re LIKE… SCIENCE PROJECTS these people. But as we’ll talk about soon, maybe that’s just not the case. 

Now if Panpsychism sounds ridiculous at first…consider a few things for a second. First, Phillip Goff would say that a lot of scientific theories that are WIDELY accepted today…are actually completely counter to common sense. Quantum mechanics, relativity, natural selection…just to name a few. Second, consider how little we KNOW about the NATURE of ANY of the physical objects we’re studying the behavior of. He says at one point: IN FACT, the ONLY thing we REALLY know about the intrinsic nature of matter is that SOME of it, specifically the stuff in our brains, INVOLVES this mysterious kind of internal experience that we can’t explain yet with our models. In light of the philosophical zombie thought experiment we talked about last time…could we KNOW if ANYTHING else HAD an internal experience if it did? Again, let’s try hard not to project OUR conscious experience onto what consciousness is overall. 

Remember Helen the monkey. Things can APPEAR to have an experience of phenomenal consciousness but not ACTUALLY be having one. And on the other hand…things can APPEAR to be unconscious, but may actually BE a conscious creature. Like when my daughter wakes me up at four in the morning. I mean, in all seriousness… just consider PLANTS for second as an example. 

If you are looking around you trying to find OTHER things that are conscious at ANY level…and you run that experiment looking for SOMETHING similar to your OWN, HUMAN type of consciousness. You’d look at a plant… and think there’s no WAY this thing’s conscious. But anyone who’s been around plants knows these things are far from just randomly sprouting, GROWTH algorithms…I mean these things make plans for the future, they make adjustments, they’re competitive. They just MOVE slower than people do. 

So if we were looking for ONLY something that resembles a HUMAN consciousness… we might be MISSING it. Just saying if you saw an article tomorrow saying that scientists discovered plants have a rudimentary type of consciousness…would you BE that surprised? 

Maybe you would be…and maybe you’re someone who’s on BOARD with Panpsychism in THEORY…but you still got some reservations, you still wonder…WHY would anyone WORK so hard to reincorporate CONSCIOUSNESS back into a theoretical MODEL that’s working so well already? I mean, we can already EXPLAIN particles and FIELDS…WITHOUT having to add in this consciousness underneath. The purely QUANTITATIVE method is WORKING! 

But a Panpsychist might respond and say, well it’s NOT working for consciousness. It never actually has from the beginning. And imagine a scientist in the 1800’s working under Newtonian mechanics who hears about a crazy theory from one of their fellow scientists talking about an ENTIRELY SEPARATE, QUANTUM REALM that plays by a TOTALLY DIFFERENT set of RULES than macroscopic objects. They might SIMILARLY…be skeptical of that. And they might ALSO say well we can ALREADY EXPLAIN particles WITHOUT this magic quantum realm where electrons are in two places at once and things are quantized. Wouldn’t say a THING IN THE WORLD about the VALIDITY of quantum mechanics though…and magically towards the end of that era of that scientific paradigm…scientists felt the need to construct NEW theoretical models to explain things that were still mysterious. 

But still the question remainsl… WHY work so hard to bring CONSCIOUSNESS back in when the current model is so good? 

And this is usually the point in the show where I would QUOTE the philosopher that we’re talking about to help me make a further point. And USUALLY the philosophers we talk about are dead. Eek. But the GOOD news about this arc of the show is that these topics are RECENT. Phillip Goff…not dead, it turns out. In fact I sat down and talked to him ABOUT Panpsychism and what it’s like to be a philosopher on the front lines today…INSTEAD of reading quotes. I’m going to be splicing in relevant pieces from our conversation… if you don’t like it, don’t worry, we never gotta do it again, but I thought it might be an interesting way to make this arc of the show BETTER to HEAR from the actual people. And look as a RULE I just try to sustain quality on this podcast…I’m not necessarily trying to do the EXACT same thing over and over again. I just hope you guys like what I’m doing. 

Anyway, right here he is talking about WHY we, as a species, would ever WORK so hard to BRING consciousness back in when there’s SO MUCH GOOD we’re arriving at in the quantitative realm of science. He says:

“If there were nothing more to reality than the purely objective, quantitative facts that physical science postulates; I don’t think there would be subjective, qualitative experience. And so we’re at a funny period of history where our official world view is incompatible with the thing which is most evident and the thing which gives life meaning and value. I mean, I think that consciousness is at the root of everything that matters. From deep emotions, complex thoughts, beautiful sensory experiences. Without consciousness nothing would really have any importance.”

Now first of all: it’s an interesting point what he’s saying there. We OF COURSE, spend… a TON of resources in our societies in this MASSIVE PROJECT of studying the nature of the PHYSICAL world, and that’s GREAT. But no matter HOW MUCH of that black and white, PHYSICAL scaffolding of reality we uncover…at some other level it’s the QUALITIES of our conscious experience…feeling love, a great conversation, a great song… these are the things that make our lives more full of color. At some other level… our conscious EXPERIENCE of the volcano… matters in a different way than anything about, volcanic gas emissions or anything like that.  

But now that we’ve established that…REMEMBER at the beginning of the episode, MOST of the people listening to this are going to probably be materialists of some sort…and I’d imagine there’s a lot of materialists out there that HEAR what Phillip Goff just said… and are a bit confused bit. Like… wait a sec, as a good MATERIALIST I gotta ask…don’t we KNOW…the CHEMICALS in the brain that PRODUCE these conscious experiences of love? Or the chemicals inside of the FOOD that PRODUCE a certain reaction in the brain? There obviously IS a connection between the physical world and our subjective experiences. 

Phillip Goff would say OF COURSE. And ALL of that is valid! But Materialism still DOES NOT EXPLAIN consciousness FULLY. And this goes back to the hard problem of consciousness. EVEN if we can EXPLAIN the exact chemicals that are present that PRODUCE a certain PIECE of our qualitative experience…there is STILL this entire OTHER PIECE of consciousness that it can’t even touch…MY, individual, subjective experience. That it FEELS like something to be me? And I think Phillip Goff would say maybe one day materialism WILL be ABLE to explain it fully…but he’s highly skeptical of that and we’re CERTAINLY NOT THERE YET…and UNTIL that day…if we’re going to be TAKING consciousness SERIOUSLY… we have to consider the possibility that MAYBE it’s a problem with the overall worldview that we’re approaching things with. See, on one hand he’s trying to PRESERVE all of the good work that’s been DONE in science so far…but on another hand he cannot IGNORE… this GLARING mystery that isn’t explainable yet. 

Now part of me wants to sit here all day and keep making the case for PANPSYCHISM as an answer to the hard problem of consciousness. But like we talked about last time, at a certain point NONE of these answers are PERFECT… and in this LARGER series that we’re doing on the big questions of the philosophy of mind…the REAL conversation begins when we start talking about the IMPLICATIONS of accepting Panpsychism. What sort of things may happen to SOCIETY… if we all more or less ACCEPTED a form of Panpsychism to build our personal and SOCIAL policies around? 

I asked Phillip Goff this in our conversation and he thought that there are SEVERAL ways…that our ENTIRE PERSPECTIVE may shift. 

“I think Panpsychism has the potential to radically change our relationship with the environment and the natural world for the better. If you're a materialist and a tree is you think a tree is just a mechanism, then  its value is only indirect. It  only really has significance in terms of what it can do for us, either looking pretty or sustaining our existence. But if you think a tree is a conscious organism albeit of a very alien kind, then then a tree has moral significance in its own right. You know, chopping down a tree that is an act of moral significance. And I think, for example, when we see these terrible images of forest fires in Brazil of late few years ago now, if you see that as the burning of conscious organisms, that really does add a whole different moral dimension.”

See where he’s coming from is that we TYPICALLY see CONSCIOUSNESS as this UNIQUELY HUMAN domain…that it’s something… that makes us SPECIAL. Conscious creatures BECOME something that it’s IMPORTANT to PROTECT in our societies. And the FACT that we have consciousness… is USED to JUSTIFY doing any NUMBER of things to the natural world around us… on the basis that these things are NOT conscious and we ARE. These things are just RESOURCES at our disposal. 

But if EVERYTHING is ultimately constituted of consciousness…then all of a sudden it becomes a lot easier to float the idea that we’re all on MORE of an equal, metaphysical PLAYING field. All of a sudden, as Goff says, human consciousness…there’s nothing THAT special about it…we’re just a highly evolved version of what’s going on everywhere ELSE in the universe. 

And under THAT way of looking at things…think of how that changes EVERYTHING. A forest fire as he says starts to take on an whole different SORT of moral dimension. How about the way we treat animals, FARMING them so that you can have a beef tar tar with your lemonade. The ENTIRE attitude VERY RECENT in human history that the natural world is just a bunch of SUPPLIES so we can light them on fire and send a rocketship to Mars one day…that WHOLE way of thinking about things starts to look like it MAY be just a BYPRODUCT of modern economic and political systems. 

This attitude goes hand and hand with the purely QUANTITATIVE method of breaking down reality. You know, WHEN we try to understand reality in the sciences…we BREAK things down INTO their component parts. This is what we do. PLANTS exist in the world of biology…a laptop exists in the realm of solid state physics…but it can be easy to forget… that on ANOTHER level…everything IS just sort of EXISTING, WHOLISTICALLY as well. There’s no reason to assume that this stuff is not ALL interconnected in some way, OURSELVES INCLUDED in that. Its just if you were LOOKING at things in a PURELY quantitative sense…it can be EASY to start feeling ALIENATED FROM that connection to everything else. Phillip Goff told me about how he sees Panpsychism as a possible way OUT of that. He said:

“I think it's part of what Max Weber called the disenchantment of nature, this sense that we don't fit in to the reality, the picture of the universe that science is painting for us. And I think what Panpsychism has to offer is a picture of reality able to accommodate both both the the objective quantitative facts of physical science, but also, as it were, the human truth, the evident reality of our own feelings and experiences. It's able to bring both of these together into a single, elegant, unified picture of reality.”

Maybe in an alternative timeline…in a totally DIFFERENT society that could’ve emerged…maybe we would’ve STRUCTURED things in a way where we have more RESPECT… for the metaphysical worth of the ECOSYSTEM that we are existing in. Maybe we would’ve found a BALANCE within our own ecosystem the same way every OTHER animal out there finds a balance. In the same way TECHNOLOGICAL progress is a huge goal of our CURRENT society…maybe SIMBIOSIS would be one of the goals of a Panpsychist society. 

I mean I’m all for pleasurable states of consciousness…but if you make a batch of cookies…and burn down your house in the process. What’s the point of making cookies?

Now USING this as a foundation…consider how in a hypothetical Panpsychist society this MIGHT not just change the citizen’s relationship with the environment…this MAY HAVE the ability to CHANGE their relationship…EVEN with themselves. 

Because what does a SELF even start to LOOK like in a panpsychist society? This is ANOTHER one of these questions from the philosophy of mind. If WHAT you are FUNDAMENTALLY is a NETWORK of conscious entities working in coalition. What are YOU at that point? 

It’s not unreasonable to think that the people LIVING in a panpsychist society like this, might start to SEE themselves as just… temporary concentrations of conscious complexity…you know, BRIGHT SPOTS on a larger unified NETWORK of consciousness that’s all interconnected. Where you live your life out…and then when you DIE the component parts that make you up, are dispersed and go on to serve some OTHER role in this larger conscious network. 

Anyway part of me wants to stop talking about this I feel like if I keep talking like this I’m gonna accidentally SUMMON my yoga teacher…I’m JUST SAYING. Imagine the differences in the way the average person would SEE the concept of self and other. The lines between ourselves and the rest of the universe, start to become a lot less clear…and I guess FROM that place…maybe the fact that its SO HARD sometimes in OUR society for people to find a way to feel connected to everything around them…maybe as Phillip Goff alluded to that has SOMETHING to do with the purely QUANTITATIVE mode of understanding that we’re accepting as the most important. Think the episode we did on Max Weber back in the day goes into it PRETTY well if you want MORE on that. 

But how about SCIENCE… in a Panpsychist society? What would THAT look like?

Well let this be an example in this series of something that’s going to be recurring…that whenever you have a theory… that does a GOOD job of SOLVING the hard problem of consciousness…it ALWAYS seems to create NEW problems in its place. Because what do you do in a field like science that RELIES on empirical observation…if you want to be able STUDY something like CONSCIOUSNESS… that as Phillip Goff says doesn’t seem to be publicly observable? Those two things… at SOME level just seem to contradict each other. 

One of the BIG problems that experimental scientists in a Panpsychist society would INSTANTLY have to dedicate some time to… is what has become known as the combination problem. Put very simply the PROBLEM is…HOW EXACTLY do these networks of consciousness… COMBINE TOGETHER from SIMPLER forms of consciousness? WHEN does it happen? WHY does it happen with SOME simpler forms of consciousness and not with others? As the philosopher Keith Frankish put it one time: How do the micro-experiences of billions of subatomic particles in my brain… combine to form the twinge of pain I’m feeling in my knee?

These are BIG questions that would have to be ANSWERED and whether or not they are falsifiable in a scientific setting… seems like one of the first things a Panpsychist scientist would be facing when trying to answer them. Now…it should be SAID…there have BEEN things in the sciences before that SEEMED very difficult to falsify… and then either new technology or a brilliant experimental scientist comes along and figures it out. Falsifiability when TALKING about consciousness is certainly a CHALLENGE that would face Panpsychist scientists…but it MAY not be impossible. 

ANOTHER interesting thing to consider…is that MAYBE in this alternative panpsychist brand of science that would EXIST in this society…maybe they’d have to ABANDON falsifiability as a primary goal…in order to make progress based on some OTHER metric. Maybe they’d see the way that WE do science as being overly OBSESSED with quantitative, falsifiability. 

Either way, when you consider RETHINKING science through a panpsychist lens…you can see the same trend emerge over and over again. 

Panpsychism…on the surface is EXTREMELY exciting because it HAS this potential to give us a WHOLE NEW PERSPECTIVE of tons of different things that are MYSTERIOUS to us in the sciences with our current model. It can give us a NEW perspective on everything from how we look at mental health… to the origins of life.

But as you can IMAGINE in basically EVERY ONE of these cases, you ALWAYS find yourself BACK… at this combination problem. Take the origin of LIFE for example: oh its exciting! SO THIS IS HOW IT GOES from a primordial, chemical soup… into something that looks like simple LIFE! But then as SOON as you GET there…you’re just right back at the OTHER mystery of how exactly does that HAPPEN? 

Combination problem extends to OTHER scales of the universe as well: for example…if consciousness can combine somehow into networks at this smaller level of reality…and then into brains and our OWN subjective phenomenal consciousness at OUR reality…can our subjective experiences, collectively combine into a larger network with other people’s? In other words, can a society be…a conscious entity? Is the WORLD a conscious entity? WHATEVER the science looks like in a society like this…you would HAVE to find a way to make some theoretical headway on these questions. And that’s NOT to say it’s impossible…but one thing’s for sure…if we NEVER try to look at things from a Panpsychist perspective…we will never SOLVE something like the combination problem.  

When I asked Phillip Goff what HE thought would change the most in the sciences…he said he thought one of the BIGGEST changes would be that scientists would probably focus more on the actual inner workings of REAL human brains. He says you know despite all the great work that been done so far in neuroscience, despite how much faith people seem to have in the results of brain scans, he says every PIXEL on a brain scan corresponds to 2.2 million neurons. Your whole perspective as a materialist can potentially change once you realize the extent to which WE DONT… yet know about the nature of the brain and how it works. And that if we ever got to a place… where we understood brains at the level that SEEMS POSSIBLE… he thinks amazing things could happen. 

“I think we need to get more into the actual workings of real human brains. And I suspect if we did that, there would be empirical, observable markers of human consciousness because we'd find that certain where we find emerge in consciousness, unified consciousness at the level of systems of the brain. Those systems would behave slightly differently to how we'd expect from underlying knowledge of known laws of chemistry and physics. I think that must be the case. Otherwise, it's a total mystery why we would have evolved consciousness.”

Now, it WOULDN’T be an episode of this series if we didn’t talk about AI a little in relation to the philosophy of mind. Let’s talk about some ways the conversation ABOUT Artificial Intelligence might be affected in a panpsychist society. First of all… if consciousness is something fundamental to matter…and its NOT something that just emerges in complex information processing systems…then what does that mean for AI? Does that mean that artificial intelligence… can NEVER, become conscious?

That no matter how intelligent artificial intelligence gets…it’s only ever going to BE…INTELLIGENCE. It will NEVER be conscious. Under Panpsychism we HAVE to ask the question: CAN conscious experience ONLY ever be produced biologically…and if that’s the CASE…IS our ENTIRE CONVERSATION about AI these days and the impending singularity, ACTUALLY incredibly naive…maybe it’s just DUMB to PRESUME to think that we can WRITE SOFTWARE that even comes CLOSE to the software updates of MILLIONS of years of natural selection.

Well IF THAT were true…then the MORAL considerations we’d have to make surrounding artificial intelligence would have to CHANGE as well. Because in that world all of a sudden…the moral concern…is NOT ABOUT IDENTIFYING EXACTLY WHERE something becomes CONSCIOUS so we can know when it deserves the rights of a conscious being…the biggest concern in THAT world is that AI… NOW becomes just another, powerful, CIVILIZATION altering technology… that is NOT unlike a nuclear weapon. NOW this technology can be WIELDED by ANYBODY if we’re not careful…and NOW the moral dilemma becomes finding a way to deal with the banality of evil and the metaphorical person that’s going to DROP this technology out of a plane. 

But then again...considering this from a DIFFERENT angle…IN a panpsychist society if we SOLVED the combination problem…and we found out HOW these networks of consciousness form…maybe we COULD RECREATE the conditions of consciousness, artificially. 

And in THAT world…ALL sorts of interesting questions start to come up that we’ll be talking about on this series… EVEN when it comes to just potential forms of ALIEN life from another PLANET. 

Like if a silicon based life form was able to be conscious…the question’s been asked: could IT… feel pain…in the same way that a HUMAN BEING feels pain? In other words: is PAIN… just a particular SIGNAL that’s based on the specific STRUCTURE of our brain in particular? Or could a SILICON based brain FEEL pain in the exact same way that WE do? And MORE than that if our brains were structured in very similar ways…could two beings made of COMPLETELY different materials…have SIMILAR psychological experiences? I think we can LEARN A LOT about our OWN conscious experiences by asking questions like this…and I can’t wait to get a couple more episodes INTO this series so I can share some pretty cool thought experiments with you. 

But in closing: Panpsychism…offers us an ANSWER, to the hard problem of consciousness. And it DOES so from a place that says that physical science…in it’s CURRENT FORM…is incapable of EVER being able to explain consciousness fully. But there’s ANOTHER theory that starts from this EXACT SAME PLACE...that arrives at almost the COMPLETE OPPOSITE conclusion. 

What if CONSCIOUSNESS…is actually an illusion. What are the arguments for why that is the case? How would that reality go on to affect things? In particular for the next episode of the podcast…how is that argument related to all sorts of OTHER things people have said may be an illusion in these conversations about philosophy of mind. That the self is an illusion. That free will is an illusion. That TIME is an illusion. We’re going into MORE than just consciousness next time, so be ready. 

I want to thank Phillip Goff for having a conversation with me and allowing me to use it on the podcast. On twitter at Philip_Goff. HE has a podcast…he co-hosts it with Keith Frankish someone we’ve quoted TWICE so far on these episodes. If you’re into consciousness it REALLY is like if Lebron James and Steph Curry had a podcast talking about basketball. Two of the ABSOLUTE best ever going at it head to head. He’s also on SUBSTACK just search for Phillip Goff on there. 

Check out his book on Amazon Galileo’s Error referenced in the episode today. Also maybe check out his NEW book comes out in November its called… Why? That’s the title. Subtitle: the purpose of the universe. 

That said to the people from me…I just need to say. Ten year anniversary of Philosophize This is coming up on june 4th. Thanks for letting me do this for people that want to know more about philosophy. Thanks for letting this be MY purpose. I have an AMA I’m releasing on Patreon soon. I guess if I’m GOING to ramble about it I’ll try to ramble there instead.

Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.