Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind | Lex Fridman Podcast #261

I believe our official scientific worldview is incompatible with the reality of consciousness.

Do you think we're living in a simulation?

We could be in the Matrix. This could be a very vivid dream.

There's going to be a few people that are now visualizing a pink elephant.

A hamster has consciousness, except for cats.

Who are evil automatons that are void of consciousness.

Consciousness is the basis of moral value, moral concern.

Do you think there will be a time in like, 20, 30, 50 years when we're not morally okay turning off the power to a robot? The following is a conversation with Philip Gough, philosopher, specializing in the philosophy of mind and consciousness. He is a panpsychist, which means he believes that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of physical reality, of all matter in the universe. He is the author of Galileo's Error, Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, and is the host of an excellent podcast called Mind Chat. This is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, here's my conversation with Philip Golf. I opened my second podcast conversation with Elon Musk with a question about consciousness and panpsychism. The question was, does consciousness permeate all matter? I don't know why I opened the conversation this way. He looked at me like, what the hell is this guy talking about? So he said no, because we wouldn't be able to tell if it did or not. So it's outside the realm of the scientific method. Do you agree or disagree with Elon Musk's answer?

I disagree, I guess. I guess I do think consciousness pervades matter. In fact, I think consciousness is the ultimate nature of matter. So as for whether it's outside of the scientific method, I think there's a fundamental challenge at the heart of the science of consciousness that we need to face up to, which is that consciousness is not publicly observable. I can't look inside your head and see your feelings and experiences. We know about consciousness not, you know, not from doing experiments or public observation. We just know about it from our immediate awareness of our feelings and experiences.

So it's qualitative, not quantitative, as you talk about.

Yeah, that's another aspect of it. So there are a couple of reasons. Consciousness, I think, is not susceptible to the standard or not fully susceptible to the standard scientific approach. One reason you've just raised is that it's qualitative rather than quantitative. Another reason is it's not publicly observable. So, I mean, science is used to dealing with unobservables, right? You Know fundamental particles, quantum wave functions, other universes. None of these things are observable. But there's an important difference with all these things. We postulate unobservables in order to explain what we can observe. Right. In the whole of science. That's how it works. In the case of consciousness, in the unique case of consciousness, the thing we are trying to explain is not publicly observable. And that is utterly unique. If we want to fully bring science into consciousness, we need a more expansive conception of the scientific method. So it doesn't mean we can't explain consciousness scientifically, but we need to rethink what science is.

What do you mean publicly the word publicly observable? Is there something interesting to be said about the word publicly, I suppose, versus privately?

Yeah, it's tricky to define, but I suppose the data of physics are available to anybody. If, you know, if there were aliens who visited us from another planet, maybe they'd have very different sense organs. Maybe they'd struggle to understand our art or our music. But if they were intelligent enough to do mathematics, they could understand our physics. They could look at the data of our experiments. They could run the experiments themselves. Whereas consciousness. Is it observable? Is it not observable? In a sense, it's observable, as you say, we could say it's privately observable. I am directly aware of my own feelings and experiences. If I'm in pain, it's just right there for me. My pain is just totally directly evident to me. But you from the outside cannot directly access my pain. You can access my pain behavior, but. Or you can ask me, but you can't access my pain in the way that I can access my pain. So I think that's a distinction. It might be difficult to totally pin it down, how we define those things, But I think there's a fairly clear and very important difference there.

So you think there's a kind of direct observation that you're able to do of your pain that I'm not? So my observation, all the ways in which I can sneak up to observing your pain is indirect versus yours is direct. Can you play devil's advocate? Is it possible for me to get closer and closer and closer to being able to observe your pain? Like all the subjective experiences, yours in the way that you do?

Yeah, I mean, so it's. Of course, it's not that we observe behavior and then we make an inference. We are hardwired to instinctively interpret smiles as happiness, crying as sadness. And as we get to know someone, we find it very easy to adopt their perspective, get into their shoes. But strictly speaking, all we have perceptual access to is someone's behavior. And if you were just strictly speaking, if you were trying to explain someone's behavior that those aspects that are publicly observable, I don't think you'd ever have recourse to attribute consciousness. You could just postulate some kind of mechanism if you were just trying to explain the behavior. So someone like Daniel Dennett is very consistent on this. So I think for most people what science is in the business of is explaining the data of public observation experiment. If you religiously followed that, you would not postulate consciousness because it's not a datum that's known about in that way. And Daniel Dennett is really consistent on this. He thinks my consciousness cannot be empirically verified and therefore it doesn't exist. Dennett is consistent on this. I think I'm consistent on this. But I think a lot of people have a slightly confused middle way position on this. On the one hand, they think the business of science is just to account for public observation experiment, but. But on the other hand they also believe in consciousness. Without appreciating, I think that that implies that there is another datum over and above the data of public observation experiments, namely just the reality of feelings and experiences.

As we walk along this conversation, you keep opening doors that I want to walk into and I will, but I want to try to stay kind of focused. So you mentioned Daniel Dennett. Let's lay it out, since he sticks to his story, pun unintended, and then you stick to yours. What is your story? What is your theory of consciousness versus his? Can you clarify his position?

So my view, I defend the view known as panpsychism, which is the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. So it doesn't literally mean that everything is conscious, despite the meaning of the word pan. Everything, psyche, mind. So literally that means everything has mind. But the typical commitment of the panpsychist is that the fundamental building blocks of reality, maybe fundamental particles like electrons and quarks, have incredibly simple forms of experience. And that the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow rooted in or derived from this much more simple consciousness at the level of fundamental physics. So I mean, that's a theory that I would justify on the grounds that it can account for this datum of consciousness that we are immediately aware of in our experience in a way that I don't think other theories can. You asked me to contrast that to Daniel Dennett, I think he would just say there is no such datum. Dennett says the data for science of consciousness is what he calls heterophenomenology, which is specifically defined as what we can access from the third person perspective, including what people say. But crucially, we're not treating what they say. We're not relying on their testimony as evidence for some unobservable realm of feelings and experiences. We're just treating what they say as a datum of public observation experiments that we can account for in terms of underlying mechanisms.

But I feel like there's a deeper view of what consciousness is. So you have a very clear. And we'll talk quite a bit about panpsychism, but you have a clear view of what, you know, almost like a physics view of consciousness. He I think has a kind of view that consciousness is almost a side effect of this massively parallel computation system going on in our brain. That the. That the brain has a model of the world and it's taking in perceptions and it's constantly weaving multiple stories about that world. This, that's integrating the new perceptions and the multiple stories are somehow. It's like a Google Doc collaborative editing and that collaborative editing is the actual experience of what we think of as consciousness. Somehow the editing is consciousness of this story. I mean, that's a theory of consciousness, isn't it? The narrative theory of consciousness or the multiple versions editing. Collaborative editing of a narrative theory of consciousness.

Yeah. He calls it the multiple drafts model. Incidentally, there's a very interesting paper just come out by very good philosopher Luke Roelofs defending a panpsychist version of Dennett's multiple drafts model.

Like a deeper turtle that that turtle is stacked on top of.

Yes. The difference being that this is Luke Roloff's view. All of the drafts are conscious. So I guess, I guess, I guess for Dennett there's sort of no fact of the matter about which of these drafts is the correct one. On Roloff's view, maybe there's no fact of the matter about which of these drafts is my consciousness. But nonetheless all the drafts correspond to some consciousness. And I mean, I just sound kind of funny, I guess. I think he calls it donetian panpsychism. But this, But Luke is a. One of the most rigorous and serious philosophers alive at the moment, I think. And I hate having Luke Roelofs in an audience if I'm giving a talk because he always cuts straight to the weakness in your position that you hadn't thought of and so it's nice, you know, panpsychism is sometimes associated with fluffy thinking. But, you know, contemporary panpsychists have come out of this tradition we call analytic philosophy, which is rooted in, you know, detailed, rigorous argumentation, and it is defended in that manner.

Yeah, those analytic philosophers are sticklers for terminology. It's very fun. Very fun group to talk shit with over some years.

Yeah, well, I mean, it gets boring if you just start and end defining words, right? Yeah, I think starting with defining words is good, actually. The philosopher Derek Parfit said when he first was thinking about philosophy, he went to a talk in analytic philosophy, and he went to a talk in continental philosophy, and he decided that the problem with the continental philosophy, if it was really unrigorous, really unprecise, the problem with the analytic philosophy is it was just not about anything important. And he thought there was more chance of working within analytic philosophy and asking some more meaningful, some more profound questions than there was in working continental philosophy and making it more rigorous. Now, they're both horrific stereotypes and, you know, I don't want to get nasty emails from either of these groups, but there's something. There's something to what he was saying there.

I think just a tiny tangent on terminology. I do think that there's a lot of deep insight to be discovered by just asking questions. What do we mean by this word? I remember I was taking a course on algorithms and data structures in computer science, and the instructor shout out to him, ali Shekafonde, amazing professor. I remember he asked some basic questions like, what is an algorithm? The pressure of pushing students to answer, to think deeply. You know, you just woke up hungover in college or whatever, and you're tasked with answering some deep philosophical question about what is an algorithm? These basic questions, and they sound very simple, but they're actually very difficult. And one of the things I really value in conversation is asking these dumb, simple questions of like, you know, what is intelligence? And just continually asking that question over and over of some of the sort of biggest research and the researchers in the artificial intelligence, computer science space. It's actually very useful. At the same time, it should start a terminology and then progress where you kind of say, ah, fuck it. We'll just assume we know what we mean by that. Otherwise you get the Bill Clinton situation where it's like, what is the meaning of is is whatever he said, it's like, hey, man, did you do the sex stuff or not? Yeah, so there's. You have to both be able to talk about the sex Stuff and the meaning of the word is with consciousness. Because we don't currently understand, you know, very much. Terminology discussions are very important because it's like you're almost trying to sneak. Sneak up to some deep insight by just discussing some basic terminology, you know, like what is consciousness? Or even defining the different aspects of panpsychism is fascinating. But just to linger on, the Daniel Dennett thing, what do you think about narrative, sort of the mind constructing narratives for ourselves? So there's nothing special about consciousness. Deeply, it is some property of the human mind that just is able to tell these pretty stories that we experience as consciousness and that it's unique perhaps to the human mind, which is, I suppose, what Danielle Dennett would argue, that it's either deeply unique or mostly unique to the human mind.

Just on the question of terminology before I. Yes, I think it used to be the fashion among philosophers that we had to come up with utterly precise, necessary and sufficient conditions for each word. And then I think this has gone out of fashion a bit, partly because it's just been, you know, such a failure. The word knowledge in particular, people used to define knowledge as true, justified belief. And then this guy Gettier had this very short paper where he just produced some pretty conclusive counterexamples to that. I think he wrote very few papers. But this is just. You have to teach this on an undergraduate philosophy course. And then after that you had a huge literature of people trying to address this and propose a new definition, but then someone else would come out with counterexamples and then you get a new definition of knowledge and counterexamples. And it just went on and on and never seemed to get anywhere. So I think the thought now is, let's work out how precise we need to be for what we're trying to do. And I think that's a healthier attitude. So precision is important, but you just need to work out how precise do we need to be for these purposes. Coming to Dennett and narrative theories, I mean, I think narrative theories are a plausible contender for a theory of the self, theory of my identity over time. What makes me the same person in some sense today as I was 20 years ago. Given that I've changed so much physically and psychologically, one running contender is something connected to the kind of stories we tell about ourselves or maybe some story about the psychological. The chains of psychological continuity. I'm not saying I accept such a theory, but it's plausible. I don't think these theories are good as theories of consciousness, at least if we're taking consciousness just to be subjective. Experience pleasure, pain, seeing color, hearing sound. I think, you know, a hamster has consciousness in that sense. There's something that it's like to be a hamster. It feels pain if you stand on it. If you're cruel enough to do. I don't know why I gave that stand. People always give, I don't know. Philosophers give these very violent examples to get the cross consciousness. Then it's. Yeah, I don't know why that's come above.

But anyway, say mean things to the hamster. Let's, let's back. It experiences pain, it experiences pleasure, joy. I mean, but there's some limits to that experience of a hamster. But there is nevertheless the presence of a subjective experience.

Yeah, consciousness is just something. I mean, look, it's a very ambiguous word, but if we're just using it to mean some kind of experience, some kind of inner life that is pretty widespread in the animal kingdom. Bit difficult to say where it stops, where it starts. But you don't, you certainly don't need something as sophisticated as the capacity to self consciously tell stories about yourself to be, to just have experience.

Except for cats who are evil automatons that are void of consciousness. They're the fingertips of the devil.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Well, that was, I was taking that as red. I mean, Descartes thought animals were mechanisms.

And humans are unique. So animals are robots, essentially, in the formulation of Descartes. And humans are unique.

Yeah.

So in which way would you say humans are unique versus even our closest ancestors? Like, is there something special about humans? What is in your view under the panpsychism? I guess we're walking backwards because we'll have the big picture conversation about what is panpsychism. But given your kind of broad theory of consciousness, what's unique about humans?

Do you think, as a panpsychist there is a great continuity between humans and the rest of the universe? There's nothing that special about human consciousness. It's just a highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe. So. So we're very much continuous with the rest of the physical universe. What is unique about human beings? I suppose the capacity to reflect on our conscious experience, plan for the future. The capacity, I would say, to respond to reasons as well. I mean, animals in some sense have motivations, but when a human being makes a decision, they're responding to what philosophers call normative considerations. You know, if you're saying, should I take this job in the US you weigh it up, you say, well, you know, I'll get more money, I'll have maybe a better quality of life, but if I stay in the uk, I'll be closer to family. And you weigh up these considerations. I'm not sure any non human animals quite respond to considerations of value in that way. I mean, I might be reflecting here that I'm something of an objectivist about value. I think there are objective facts about what we have reason to do and what we have reason to believe, and.

Humans have access to those facts and.

Humans have access to them and can respond to them. That's a controversial claim. You know, many of my panpsychist brethren might not.

They would say the hamster too can look up to the stars and ponder theoretical physics.

Maybe not, but I think it depends what you think about value. If you have a more Humean picture of value, by which I mean relating to the philosopher David Hume, who said, reason is the slave of the passions. Really we just have motivations and what we have reason to do arises from our motivations. I'm not a Hume and I think there are objective facts about what we have reason to do, and I think we have access to them. I don't think any non human animal has access to objective facts about what they have reason to do, what they have reason to believe. They don't weigh up evidence.

Reason is a slave of the passions.

That was David Hume's view. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Do you want to know my problem with Hume's? I had a radical conversion. This is. This might not be connected, it's not connected to panpsychism, but I had a. I had a radical conversion. I used to have a more humane view when I was a graduate student, but I was persuaded by some professors at the University of Reading, where I was, that if you have the humane view, you have to say any basic life goals are equal, equally valid. So, for example, let's take someone whose basic goal in life is counting blades of grass, right? And crucially, they don't enjoy it, right? This is the crucial point. They get no pleasure from it. That's just their basic goal, to spend their life counting as many blades of grass as possible. Not for some greater goal. That's just their basic goal. I want to say that that is objectively stupid. That is objectively pointless. I shouldn't say stupid. It's objectively pointless in a way that pursuing pleasure or pursuing someone else's pleasure or pursuing scientific inquiry is not pointless. As soon as you make that admission, you're not a follower of David Hume anymore. You Think there are objective facts about what goals are worth pursuing.

Is it possible to have a goal without pleasure? So this kind of idea that you disjoint the two. So the David Foster Wallace idea of the key to life is to be unboarable. Isn't it possible to discover the pleasure in everything in life? The counting of the blades of grass. Once you see the mastery, the skill of it, you can discover the pleasure, the. Therefore, I guess what I'm asking is why and when and how did you lose the romance in grad school? Is that what you're trying to say?

I think it may or may not be true that it's possible to find pleasure in everything, but I think it's also true that people don't act solely for pleasure and they certainly don't act solely for their own pleasure. People will suffer for things they think are worthwhile. I might, you know, I might suffer for some scientific cause for finding out a cure for the pandemic or. And in terms of my own pleasure, I might have less pleasure in doing that, but I think it's worthwhile. It's a worthwhile thing to do. I don't, I just don't think it's the case that everything we do is rooted in maximizing our own pleasure. I don't think that's, you know, even psychologically plausible.

But pleasure, then, that's a narrow kind of view of pleasure. That's like a short term pleasure. But you can see pleasure is a kind of ability to hear the music in the distance. It's like, yes, it's difficult now, it's suffering now, but there is some greater thing beyond the mountain that will be joy. I mean, that's kind of. Even if it's not in this life. Well, you know, the warriors will meet in Valhalla, right? The feeling that gives meaning and fulfillment to life is not necessarily grounded in pleasure of like the counting of the grass. It's something else. I don't know. The struggle is a source of deep fulfillment. So like, I think pleasure needs to be kind of thought of as a little bit more broadly. It's just kind of gives you this sense. It for a moment allows you to forget the terror of the fact that you're going to die. That's pleasure. That's the broader view of pleasure that you get to kind of play in the little illusion that all of this has deep meaning. That's pleasure.

Yeah, well, but I mean, you know, people sacrifice their lives, atheists may sacrifice their lives for the sake of someone else or for the sake of something important enough. And clearly in that case, they're not doing it for the sake of their own pleasure. That's a rather dramatic example. But they can be just trivial examples where, you know, I choose to be honest rather than lie about something. Can I lose out a bit? And I. I have a bit less pleasure. But I thought it was worth doing the honest thing or something. I mean, I just think so. That's a. I mean, maybe you can use the word pleasure so broadly that you're just essentially meaning something worthwhile, but then I think the word pleasure maybe. Maybe loses its meaning.

Sure.

Wow. But what do you think about the blades of grass case? What do you think about someone who spends their life counting blades of grass and doesn't enjoy it?

So I think. I personally think it's impossible, or maybe I'm not understanding even, like, the philosophical formulation, but I think it's impossible to have a goal and not draw pleasure from it, make it worthwhile. Forget the word pleasure. I think the word goal loses meaning if I say I'm going to count the number of pens on this table. If I'm actively involved in the task, I. I will find joy in it. I will find, like. I think there's a lot of meaning and joy to be discovered in the. In the skill of a task, in mastering of a skill and taking pride in doing it. Well, I mean, that's. I don't know what it is about the human mind, but there's some joy to be discovered in the mastery of a skill. So I think it's just impossible to count blades of grass and not sort of have the jiro dreams of sushi. Compelling, like, draws you into the mastery of the simple task.

Mm. Yeah, I suppose. I mean, in a way, you might think it's.

It's.

It's just hard to imagine someone who would spend their lives doing that. But then maybe that's just because it's so evident that that is a pointless task. Whereas if we take this David Hume view seriously, it ought to be, you know, a totally possible life goal. Whereas, I mean, I. Yeah, I guess I just find it hard to shake the idea that some ways of. Some life goals are more worthwhile than others. And it doesn't mean, you know, that there's one single way you should lead your life. But. But pursuing knowledge, helping people, pursuing your own pleasure to an extent, are worthwhile things to do in a way that, you know, for example, I have. I'm a little bit ocd. I still feel inclined to walk on cracks in the pavement or do it symmetrically. Like if I step on a crack with my left foot, I feel the need to do it my right foot. And I think that's kind of pointless. It's something I feel the urge to do, but it's pointless. Whereas other things I choose to do, I think there's, it's worth doing and it's hard to make sense of metaphysically. What could possibly ground that? How could we know about these facts? But that's the starting point for me.

I don't know. I think you walking on the sidewalk in a way that's symmetrical brings order to the world. Like if you weren't doing that, the world might fall apart.

And you, it feels like that.

I think there's, there's, there's meaning in that. Like you embracing the full, like the full experience of that, you living the richness of that as if it has meaning will give meaning to it. And then whatever genius comes of that as you, as one little intelligent aunt, will make a better life for everybody else. Perhaps I'm defending the, the blades of grass example because I can literally imagine myself enjoying this task as somebody who's OCD in a certain kind of way, in quantitative.

But now you're ruining the example because you imagine someone enjoying it. I'm imagining someone who doesn't enjoy it. We don't want a life that's just full of pleasure. Like we just sit there, you know, having a big sugar high all the time. We want a life where we do things that are worthwhile. It's if for something to be worthwhile just is for it to be a basic life goal, then that mode of reflection doesn't really make sense. We can't really think, did I do things worthwhile? On the David Hume type picture, all it is for something to be worthwhile is it was a basic goal of yours or derived from a basic goal.

And yeah, yeah, I mean, I think goal and worthwhile aren't. I think goal is a boring word. I'm more sort of existential. It's like, did you ride the roller coaster of life? Did you fully experience life? And in that sense, I mean, the blades of grass is something that could be deeply joyful. And that's in that way, I think suffering could be joyful in the full context of life. It's the roller coaster. Like without suffering, without struggle, without pain, without depression or sadness. There's not the highs. I mean that's the. Yeah, that's a fucked up thing about life is that the Lows really make the highs that much richer and deeper and, and like taste better, right? Like the, like, I was, I tweeted this, I was, I couldn't sleep and I was like late at night. And I know it's like obvious statement, but like every love story eventually, you know, ends in loss, in tragedy. So like this feeling of love at the end, there's always going to be tragedy, even if it's the most amazing lifelong love with another human being. One of you is going to die, and I don't know which is worse, but both are not going to be pretty. And so that, the sense that it's finite, the sense that it's going to end in a low, that gives like richness to those kind of evenings when you realize this fucking thing ends. This thing ends. The feeling that it ends, that, that bad taste, that bad feeling that it ends, gives meaning, gives joy, gives, I don't know, pleasure is this loaded word, but gives some kind of deep pleasure to the experience when it's good. And I mean, and that's the blades of grass. You know, they have that to me. But you're perhaps right that it's like reducing it to set of goals or something like that is, is kind of removing the magic of life. Because I think what makes counting the blades of grass joyful is it's just because it's life.

Okay, so it sounds like you, it sounds like you reject the, the David Hume type picture anyway because you're saying just because you have it as a goal, that's what it is to be worthwhile, but you're saying, no, it's because it's engaging with life, riding the roller coaster. So that does sound like in some sense there are facts independent of our personal goal choices about what it means to live a good life. And I mean, coming back full circle to the start of this was what makes us different to animals. I don't think at the end of a hamster's life, it thinks, did I ride the roller coaster? Did I really live life to the full? That is not a mode of reflection that's available to non human animals. So what do you think is the.

Role of death in all of this? The fear of death? Does that interplay with consciousness? Does this self reflection? Do you think there's some deep connection between this ability to contemplate the fact that our flame of consciousness eventually goes out?

Yeah, I don't think, unfortunately, panpsychism helps, particularly with life after death. Because, you know, for the panpsychist, there's Nothing supernatural, there's nothing beyond the physical. All there is really is ultimately particles and fields. It's just that we think the ultimate nature of particles and fields is consciousness. But I guess when, when the matter in my brain ceases to be ordered in a way that sustains the particular kind of consciousness I enjoy in waking life, then in some sense I will cease to be. Although I do that. The final chapter, my book, Galileo's Era, is more experimental. So the first four chapters are the cold blooded case for the panpsychist view as the best solution to the hard problem of consciousness.

The last chapter, we talk about meaning.

Yeah, I talk about meaning, I talk about free will and I talk about mystical experiences. So I always want to emphasize that panpsychism is not necessarily connected to anything spiritual. You know, a lot of people defending this view, like David Chalmers or Luke Roloff's, are just total atheist secularists, right? They don't believe in any kind of transcendent reality. They just believe in feelings, you know, mundane consciousness and think that needs explaining in our conventional scientific approach can't cut it. But if for independent reasons you are motivated to some spiritual picture of reality, then maybe a panpsychist view is, is more consonant with that. So if you, if you have a mystical experience where you, it seems to you in this experience that there is this higher form of consciousness at the root of all things. If you're a materialist, you've got to think that's a delusion. You know, there's just something in your brain making you think that it's not real. But if you're a panpsychist and you already think the fundamental nature of reality is constituted of consciousness, it's not that much of a leap to think that this higher form of consciousness you seem to apprehend in the mystical experience is part of that underlying reality. And you know, in, in many different cultures, experienced meditators have claimed to have experiences in which it becomes apparent to them that there is an element of consciousness that is universal. So though this is sometimes called universal consciousness, so on this view, your mind and my mind are not totally distinct. Each of our individual conscious minds is built upon the foundations of universal consciousness. And universal consciousness, as it exists in me, is one and the same thing as universal consciousness as it exists in you. So I've never had one of these experiences. But if one is a panpsychist, I think one is more open to that possibility. I don't see why it shouldn't be the case that that is Part of the nature of consciousness, and maybe something that is apparent in certain deep states of meditation. And so what I explore in the experimental final chapter of my book is that could allow for a kind of impersonal life after death. Because if that view is true, then even when the particular aspects of my conscious experience fall away, that element of universal consciousness at the core of my identity would continue to exist. So I'd sort of be, as it were, absorbed into universal consciousness. So, I mean, Buddhists and Hindu mystics try to meditate to get rid of all the bad karma to be absorbed into universal consciousness. It could be that if. If there's no karma, if there's no reverb, maybe everyone gets enlightened when they die. Maybe you just sink back into universal consciousness. So I also, coming back to morality, suggest this could provide some kind of basis for altruism or non egotism. Because if you think egotism implicitly assumes that we are utterly distinct individuals, whereas on this view, we're not. We overlap to an extent that something at the core of our being is.

Even in this life, we overlap.

That would be this view that some experienced meditators claim becomes apparent to them that there is something at the core of my identity that is one and the same as the thing at the core of your identity, this universal consciousness.

Yeah, there is something very like you and I in this conversation. There's a few people listening to this. All of us are in a kind of single mind together. There's some small aspect of that or maybe a big aspect about us humans. So certainly in the space of ideas, we kind of meld together for time, at least in a conversation, and kind of play with that idea. And then we're clearly all thinking like, if I say pink elephant, there's going to be a few people that are now visualizing a pink elephant. We're all thinking about that pink elephant together. We're all in the room together thinking about this pink elephant, and we're like rotating it, like, you know, in our minds together. What is that? Is there a different instantiation of that pink elephant in everybody's mind? Or is it the same elephant and we have the same mind exploring that elephant? Now if we in our mind start petting that elephant, like touching it, that experience that we're now thinking, what that would feel like, Is that all of us experiencing that together, or is that separate? So there's some aspect of the togetherness that almost seems fundamental to civilization, to society. It's a whole, hopefully, that's not too strong but to, like, some of the fundamental properties of the human mind, it feels like the social aspect is really important. We call it social because we think of us as individual minds interacting. But if we're just like one collective mind with, like, fingertips that are, like, touching each other as it's trying to explore the elephant. But that could be just in the realm of ideas and intelligence and not in the realm of consciousness. And it's interesting to see maybe it is in the realm of consciousness.

Yeah. So it's obviously certainly true in some sense that there are these phenomena that you're talking about, of collective consciousness. In some sense. I suppose the question is, how ontologically serious do we want to be about those things, by which I mean, are they just a construction of out of our minds and the fact that we interact in the standard, standardly scientifically accepted ways, or is, as someone like Rupert Sheldrake would think, that there is some metaphysical reality, there are some fields beyond the scientifically understood ones that are somehow communicating this. I mean, I think that. I mean, the view I was describing was that this element we're supposed to have in common is. Is some sort of pure impersonal consciousness or something, rather than. So, actually, I mean, an interesting figure is the Australian philosopher Miri Al Bahari, who defends a kind of mystical conception of reality rooted in Advaita Vedanta mysticism. But like me, she's from this tradition of analytic philosophy. And so she defends this in this, you know, incredibly precise, rigorous way. She defends the idea that we should think of experienced meditators as providing expert testimony. So, you know, I think humans are causing climate breakdown. I have no idea of the science behind it, you know, but I trust the experts, or, you know, that the universe is 14 billion years old. You know, most of our knowledge is based on expert testimony. And she thinks we should think of experienced meditators, these people who are telling us about this universal consciousness at the core of our being, as a relevant kind of expert. And so she wants to defend, you know, the rationale, acceptability of this mystical conception of reality. So it's what, you know, I think we shouldn't be ashamed. You know, we shouldn't be worried about dealing with certain views as long as it's done with rigor and seriousness. You know, I think sometimes terms like, I don't know, New Age or something can function a bit like racist terms. You know, a racist term picks out a group of people, but then implies certain negative characteristics. So people use this term, you know, to Pick out a certain set of views like mystical conceptual reality, and imply it's kind of fluffy thinking or. But, you know, you read Miri Albahari, you read Luke Roloff's this is serious rigorous thought, whether you agree with it or not, obviously it's hugely controversial. And so, you know, the Enlightenment ideal is to follow the evidence and the arguments where they lead. But it's kind of very hard for human beings to do that. I think we get stuck in some conception of how we think science ought to look. And, you know, people talk about religion as a crutch, but I think a certain kind of scientism, a certain conception of how science is supposed to be gets into people's identity and their sense of themselves and their security and makes things hard. If you're a panpsychist and even the.

Word expert becomes a kind of crutch. I mean, you use the word expert, you have some kind of conception of what expertise means. Oftentimes that's, you know, connected with a degree, a particular prestigious university or something like that. Or it's, you know, expertise is a funny one. I've noticed that anybody sort of that claims they're an expert is usually not the expert. The biggest quote unquote expert that I've ever met are the ones that are truly humble. So the humility is a really good sign of somebody who's traveled a long road and been humbled by how little they know. So some of the best people in the world at whatever the thing they've spent their life doing are the ones that are ultimately humble in the face of it all. So, like, just being humble, how little we know, even if we travel a lifetime. I do like the idea. I mean, treating sort of like, what is it? Psychonauts, like an expert witness, you know, people who have traveled with the help of DMT to another place where they got some deep understanding of something and their insight is perhaps as valuable as the insight of somebody who ran rigorous psychological studies at Princeton University or something like those psychonauts, they have wisdom if it's done rigorously, which you can also do rigorously within the university, within the studies now with. With psilocybin and those kinds of things. Yeah, that's a fact. That's fascinating.

Still, probably the best. One of the best works on mystical experience is the chapter in William James's Varieties of Religious Experiences. And most of it is just a psychological study of trying to define the characteristics of mystical experience as a psychological type. But at the end, he considers the question, if you Have a mystical experience, Is it rational to trust it? To trust that it's telling you something about reality? And he makes an interesting argument. He says if you say no, you're kind of applying a double standard because we all think it's okay to trust our normal sensory experiences, but we have no way of getting outside of ourselves to prove that our sensory experiences correspond to an external reality. We could be in the Matrix, this could be a very vivid dream. You know, you could say, oh, we do science, but a scientist only gets their data by experiencing the results of their experiments. And then the question arises again, how do you know that corresponds to a real world? So, so he thinks there's a sort of double standard in saying it's okay to trust our ordinary sensory experiences, but it's not okay for the person on DMT to trust those experiences. It's very philosophically difficult to say why is it okay in the one case and not the other. So I think there's an interesting argument there, but I would like to just defend experts a little bit. I mean, I agree it's very difficult, but especially in an age, I guess, where there's so much information, I do think it's important to have some protection of sources of information, academic institutions that we can trust. And then that's difficult because of course there are non academics who do know what they're talking about. But if I'm interested in knowing about biology, you can't research everything. So I think we have to have some sense of who are the experts we can trust. The people who've spent a lot of time reading all the material that people have read written, thinking about it, having their views torn apart by other people working in the field. I think that is very important. And also to protect that from conflicts of interest, there is a so called think tank in the UK called the Institute of Economic affairs who are always on the BBC as experts on economic questions and they do not declare who funds them. Right. So we don't know who's paying the piper. I think, you know, you shouldn't be allowed to call yourself a think tank if you're not totally transparent about who's funding you. So I think that's the, and I mean this connects to panpsychism because I think the reason people, you know, worry about unorthodox ideas is because they worry about how do we know when we're just losing control, we're losing discipline. So I do think we need to somehow protect academic institutions as sources of information that we can trust. And you Know, in philosophy there's, there's, you know, there's, there's no, not much consensus on everything. But you can at least know what people who have put the time in to read all the stuff, what they think about these issues. I think that is important.

Push back on your pushback. Who are the experts on Covid?

Oh, they're getting into dangerous territory now.

Well, let me just speak to it because I am walking through that dangerous territory. I'm allergic to the word expert because in my simple mind it kind of rhymes with ego. There's something about experts. If we allow too much to, to have a category expert and place certain people in them, those people sitting on the throne start to believe it and they start to communicate with that energy and the humility starts to dissipate. I think there is value in a lifelong mastery of a skill and the pursuit of knowledge within a very specific discipline. But the moment you have your name on an office, the moment you're an expert, I think you destroy the very aspect, the very value of that journey towards knowledge. So some of it probably just reduces to like skillful communication, like, of communicating in a way that shows humility, that shows an open mindedness, that shows an ability to really hear what a lot of people are saying. So in the case of COVID what I've noticed, and this is true, this is probably true with panpsychism as well, is so called experts and they are extremely knowledgeable, many of them are colleagues of mine. They dismiss what millions of people are saying on the Internet without having looked into it with empathy and rigor, honestly understand what are the arguments being made. They say, like there's not enough time to explore all those things. Like there's so much stuff out there. Yeah, I think that's intellectual laziness. If you don't have enough time, then don't speak so strongly with dismissal. Feel bad about it. Be apologetic about the fact that you don't have enough time to explore the evidence. For example, with the heat I got with Francis Collins is that he kind of said that lab leak, he kind of dismissed it, showing that he didn't really deeply explore all the sort of the huge amount of circumstantial evidence out there, the battles that are going on out there. There's a lot of people really tensely discussing this and being. Showing humility in the face of that battle of ideas I think is really important. And I just been very disappointed in so called expertise in the space of science, in showing humility, in showing humanity and kindness and empathy towards other human being. That's, that's at the same time obviously I love your dreams of sushi. Lifelong pursuit of like getting like in computer science. Don Knuth like some of my biggest heroes are people that like when nobody else cares, they stay on one topic for their whole life and they just find the beautiful little things about their puzzles they keep solving. And yes, sometimes a virus happens or something happens where that person with their puzzles becomes like the center of the whole world because that puzzles becomes all of a sudden really important. But still there's possibilities on them to show humility and to be open minded to the fact that they, even if they spent their whole life doing it, even if their whole community is telling, giving them awards and giving them citations and giving them all kinds of stuff where like they're bowing down before them, how smart they are, they still know nothing relative to all the stuff, the mysteries that are out there.

Yeah, I wonder how much we're disagreeing. I mean these are totally valid issues and of course expertise goes wrong in all sorts of ways. It's totally fallible. I suppose I would just say what is the alternative? What do we just say? All information is equal Because I, you know, as a voter I've got to decide who to vote for and that, you know, I've got to evaluate and I can't look into all of the economics and all of the relevant science. And so I just think there's, I think maybe it's like Churchill said about democracy. You know, it's the worst system of government apart from all the rest. I think about panpsychism as well as the worst theory of consciousness apart from all the rest. But you know, I just think expertise, the peer review system, I think it's terrible in so many ways. Yes, people should show more humility, but I can't see a viable alternative. I think philosopher Bernard Williams had a really nice nuanced discussion of the problems of titles but how they also function in a society. They do have some positive function. The very first time I lectured in philosophy before I got a professorship was teaching at a continuing education college. So it's kind of for retired people who want to learn some more things. And I just totally pitched it too high and Gate talked about Bernard Williams on titles and hierarchies and these kind of people in their 70s and 80s were just instantly started interrupting, saying what is philosophy? And it was a disaster. And I just remember in the breaks a sort of elderly lady come up and said I've decided to take Egyptology instead. And so but that was, that was my introduction to teaching anyway.

But sort of titles and accomplishments is a nice starting point, but doesn't buy you the whole thing. So. And you don't get to just say this is true because I'm an expert. You still have to convince people. One of the things I really like, so I practice martial arts and for people who don't know Brazilian Jiu jitsu is one of them. And you sometimes wear these pajamas, pajama looking things, and you wear a belt. So I happen to be a black belt in Brazilian Jiu jitsu and I also train in what's called no gi. So you don't wear the pajamas. And when you don't wear the pajamas, nobody knows what rank you are. Nobody knows if you're a black belt or a white belt or if you're a complete beginner or not. And when you wear the pajamas called the gi, you wear the rank. And people treat you very differently when, like when they see my black belt, they treat me differently. They kind of defer to my expertise. If, if they're kicking my ass, that's probably because I am working.