Why Your Brain Doesn't Create Consciousness: It's Always Been There (ft. Philip Goff)

What if consciousness isn't something your brain creates, but something that the universe is made of? The result is a universe filled with consciousness. We are conscious creatures in a conscious universe. That's panpsychism. Today I sat down with Dr. Philip Gough. We went straight into the deep end. What is consciousness? Why can't science find it in the brain? And what is it? It means if his theories are correct, that even atoms themselves have a spark of consciousness inside them. Nothing is more evident and undeniable than our own feelings and experiences. Science aims at this purely objective description.

Whereas consciousness is inherently subjective. You can only understand somebody's consciousness if you can adopt their perspective. Physics is really just exclusively interested in what stuff does. Not what it is. You can dig a panpsychism as making hippy shit scientifically credible. This one gets a little bit weird in the best possible way. Let's get into it. Welcome to the show. So happy to have you here today. Thanks, Nick. I'm glad to be here looking forward to chatting. And where are you tuning in from? I am from Durham in the cold far north of England, just under Scotland. Yeah, how's the weather today out there?

It's not too bad for the UK this time of year, actually. I could see my breath, but it wasn't too unbearable. But yeah, it was a lovely, beautiful sky this evening, actually. I picked the kids up from school. It was a lovely winter sunset. It was beautiful. Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, sounds like the weather's a little different than out here in Seal Beach, California. I think we hit a low of 70 today. Well, let's jump into it. I'm jealous. Yeah. Well, I'm getting ready for Christmas. I'm getting ready for Christmas. So it's nice to have this chilly weather a little bit, I think. I agree. It is nice to have seasons when Christmas is coming up.

Yeah. So let's jump into the deep end here. What is consciousness as you define it? That's a good place to start. I would say your consciousness is just what it's like to be you. Right now you're having a visual experience of the room around you, an auditory experience of my voice speaking to you, maybe a feeling excited or tired or bored or a little bit of a headache. This is all part of what it's like to be you right now. And that's just what we mean by consciousness. For some people say it's, you know, it's a mystery what consciousness is. I don't quite like that way of putting it. I think nothing is more evident and undeniable than our own feelings and experiences.

I suppose the mystery is more how do they fit into what we know about the world more generally, for example, the science of the brain. What differs in your take on consciousness than say in a Neil Seth or a Donald Hoffman? Yeah, well, they've both got very different views on consciousness. Well, they're both also very good friends of mine. And all and I have a very different view. And all has a more conventional scientific view that we sometimes call physicalism. He hopes that we will one day entirely explain our feelings and experiences in terms of electrochemical signaling in the brain. He admits that, you know, we're nowhere near doing that as yet, but he has hopes that, you know, one day we'll crack it, a few more brain scans and we'll have a complete explanation of consciousness purely in terms of physical processes in the brain.

I'm rather skeptical of that approach actually. I think when you think more deeply about why we have a problem of consciousness, I think it's something that was actually baked into. I'm not on board with that more standard view. I think actually we need to think very carefully about why we have a problem of consciousness in the first place, why it gives us such unique challenges. And I think we find it's very different to our more standard scientific approaches and it needs a radically different approach. Yeah, why? Because consciousness feels so hard to explain. I think really it's baked into how we design science 400 years ago.

You know, for the last 400 years, science has been working with the purely objective description of the physical world, a description that anybody could understand whatever their life experience. Now imagine aliens came from another world and they had very different sense organs. Maybe they wouldn't understand our art or our music. But if they were intelligent enough to understand mathematics, they could understand our physics. The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously called this the view from nowhere. Science aims at this purely objective description. Whereas consciousness is inherently subjective.

Right? You can only understand somebody's consciousness if you can adopt their perspective, see out of their eyes, hear out of their ears. I mean, let's take it. Let's take an example to make the point. Suppose you have a neuroscientist who's been blind from birth. Right? No matter how much they learn about the physical processes in the brain, that scientist will never know what it's like to see color, what it's like to see red. They can never adopt the perspective of a sighted person. So here we get the clash between the objective and the subjective. And as long as your scientific description of the world is framed in this purely objective language, you'll just leave out subjective consciousness.

So I think, you know, before we've even got it first base, we need to understand why this is such a unique problem. I think that's something that someone like Anal Seth is not quite to got to grips with yet. Although, you know, we've had actually, I think, three or four public discussions by now and we've learned a lot from engaging in that disagreement. I think it's so wonderful when people with such different views can engage and try and understand each other and try and make some progress. Absolutely. Yeah. And both Dr. Seth and Dr. Hoffman have been on the show before. And so it's interesting where these views overlap and where they collide and where they disagree.

So this idea of panpsychism sounds strange to a lot of people. And yet I find it's accessible if we just ask a simple question, like we know we're conscious. Do you think dogs are conscious and then kind of work our way down from there to plants and then take it the next step? But I'm going to, I'm going to let you run with it. And how do you define that unique viewpoint on all of this? Well, actually, Nick, I think that is a very good way into it. But really, you could think of panpsychism as the next step in a tendency that's been going on for some time now. You know, at the start of the scientific revolution, scientists thought that we were the only conscious ones, that the animals were just complicated, unfeeling mechanisms.

Right? And that was nice because then the domain of science fills the entire natural world, including all the other animals. They're just purely objective mechanisms that we can study with mathematical physics. This was part of how the father of modern science, Galileo, set it up. And in fact, Galileo was quite explicit that he was taking consciousness out of the domain of science so we could describe everything with that purely objective mathematical language. I think that's something, so a lot of people have forgotten. I think we need to remember these historical perspectives of how we got there before we think about where we're going.

But yeah, coming back to panpsychism, a bit of a distraction there. So at the start of the scientific revolution, we thought we're the only conscious ones. And now slowly over time, we've attributed consciousness to more and more other animals starting with other primates than other mammals like cats and dogs, my own beautiful catecure is very much a feeling creature, I think. It's only very recently that scientists have taken seriously that birds and fish are conscious. And very recently, was it a year ago now, there was a letter signed by lots of neuroscientists saying that they were taking the consciousness of insects and reptiles as a serious possibility.

So slowly we're attributing more and more consciousness to more and more of the natural world. Well, panpsychists just take this to its logical conclusion. We attribute consciousness not only to the simplest forms of cellular life, but even to the molecules, atoms, subatomic particles that make them up. The result is a universe filled with consciousness. We are conscious creatures in a conscious universe. That's panpsychism. Yeah, and I think a lot of people can make that leap from animals to... And now what we understand about plants and trees, I mean, there are forests where trees, it certainly seems, are communicating with each other through fungi and these very complicated networks that we were previously unaware of.

And there's evidence to show that certain plants will change their genetic makeup based on a drought and have some form of memory on how to respond to that more quickly and more efficiently. I think the big leap there is when we talk to jumping to some level or form of consciousness in an electron and let's dig a little deeper with that. Because that's where it really gets interesting. That's the messy edge of this view of consciousness. Well, firstly, I think you're completely right. This used to be thought of as hippy nonsense that plants and trees could have intelligence, but it has been extraordinary what we've learned about plant intelligence that it seems that pea plants can be subject to conditioned learning.

They can learn to associate the hum of a computer, a certain strange sound to their source of food. They can sort of associate the two together. How was that? Established, just to take a little bird walk because I haven't heard that. Oh, yes. So this was worked on by Monica Gagliano, who basically was inspired thinking about the famous Pavlov's dog experiment where Pavlov rang a bell every time his dog's dinner was ready and then eventually they began to associate the sound of the bell with the food and they start salivating. So Gagliano tried to do a similar task with pea plants, making a sort of Y-shaped tube for them to grow along and associating the ultraviolet light they feed off as it were with a certain sound.

I think it was the hum of a fan and eventually they started growing towards that noise. So it seemed that they somehow associated their food source with that noise. But more generally, the way trees interact, I mean, there's a sort of, we need to remember half the tree is under the ground and there's a sort of buzzing, blooming community down there under our feet as we walk through a forest. As you say, trees sharing information, passing on danger, cooperating between species, right? Human beings find it difficult to cooperate across ethnic boundaries, never mind different species. So yeah, it really is.

It's like political parties. Yeah. Yeah, we're getting more and more polarised, don't we? We should draw some inspiration from the plant kingdom. But yeah, I suppose that the step that might trouble some is when we get beyond the natural world into the inanimate realm, if you like. I mean, there are a couple of different ways into this. I mean, one way you might think of it as scientists and philosophers, we aim for a simple, elegant, unified picture of reality. Why carve things up into two very different realms of consciousness and non-consciousness? If we can think of everything that makes up the natural world as just more complex forms of simpler, simpler forms of consciousness that exist from the start, that natural selection exploited and molded into more complex forms of consciousness.

But I think really, really, you've got to understand that the motivation for taking this view seriously is that we do have these very deep problems bringing consciousness into our scientific story. As I say, I think this was explicitly the way modern science was set up. The father of modern science took consciousness out of the scientific story so we could have this purely objective mathematical description. So how do we do this? If we want to bring consciousness back into the scientific story, we need to find a way of unifying what Galileo separated. So for Galileo, reality was divided into two domains.

On the one hand, you've got the mathematical physical universe with its purely quantitative objective properties. On the other hand, you had consciousness with its subjective qualities, colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and for Galileo and the early pioneers of science, the scientific revolution, that was what reality was like. Consciousness was in the soul. That was outside of science. Now that was a good move. Science went very well on that basis. It was always premised on this division and we need to confront that, take it seriously, and find a way of unifying reality again. And I think panpsychism offers us a very attractive way of doing that.

So the idea is that consciousness pervades everything. So at the level of quantum mechanics, there is a basic building block of everything that exists. So rather than over time as life begins and life forms become more sophisticated and then at some point, consciousness emerges, this is the viewpoint that it was there all along in everything. Just have more rich forms of consciousness. Is that accurate? Exactly. And you might think that's, well, that's not very scientific because we're not explaining it. But there's precedent in science for taking something as fundamental. I mean, if we think about Maxwell in the 19th century with his theory of electromagnetism, you know, Maxwell didn't explain electricity and magnetism in terms of the properties science was already committed to.

No, he postulated new fundamental electromagnetic properties and laws and then built up on that basis. Likewise panpsychists are not trying to explain consciousness in terms of something else. We're starting with very simple basic forms of consciousness and building up on that basis. So, so there is that precedent for taking a new feature of reality as fundamental, not taking it as something magical or supernatural, but building it in as a new ingredient in our scientific story. I mean, I mean, another thing we should bring in here, I think is panpsychists aren't just adding consciousness alongside all the stuff that's already there.

The aspiration is to start with consciousness and only consciousness to explain everything else in our whole scientific story in terms of that one basic feature. So it's really a very simple, elegant theory of reality. And that's why so many philosophers and even some neuroscientists are starting to take it very seriously. I could say a little bit more about that if you'd like. Yeah, I think it would be useful to get into what this viewpoint claims and what it does not claim to push back against any what those people at home are thinking, well, what about this? What about this? And so what it claims and what it doesn't claim, I think would be enlightening.

So a lot of the inspiration for the contemporary panpsychist research project is drawn from some really important work from the 1920s, actually, by the philosopher and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell. And also by the scientist Arthur Eddington, who's incidentally the first scientist to experimentally confirm Einstein's general theory of relativity. And so the starting point of Russell, I think he was the real pioneer here. I think of Russell as the Darwin of consciousness. I think he solved all the mysteries. And his starting point was that physical science doesn't really tell us what matter is.

Now when I first heard that, I thought it was ridiculous. What are you talking about? You know, you read a book of cosmology, popular science. You know, you have this, you seem to have this rich story of the nature of space and time and matter. The Russell's point was actually when you get down to it, physics is really just exclusively interested in what stuff does. Not what it is, what it does. It's behavior. So think about, for example, what does physics tell us about an electron? Well it tells us it has mass and charge. And these properties are completely defined in terms of behavior. Things like attraction, repulsion, resistance to acceleration.

This is all about what stuff does. Right? I mean, here's an analogy. Doing physics, it's a little bit like playing chess when you don't care what the pieces are made of. If you play chess, you just want to know what they do. You don't care if they're made of plastic or wood. You just care what they do. Similarly, a physicist isn't interested in like what an electron is, what a quark is. They just want to know what they can do. They want mathematical equations to tell us what they do. And once you know what they do, you can start to manipulate the natural world, producing this wonderful technology that transformed it.

But all of that wonderful story from physics tells us nothing about what matter is, what an electron is. And so in a sense, we have this huge hole already in our standard scientific story of the universe. So we're looking for a place for consciousness. We've got this hole. Russell thinks, well, maybe we can put consciousness in the hole. And that's where we end up with this very elegant, unified pan-psychist picture. So the view is at the fundamental level, there's just consciousness, just these very simple, predictable forms of consciousness. And what physics is telling us is what those simple forms of consciousness do matter.

If you like, matter is what consciousness does. Yeah, well, that really speaks to the limits of science to describe certain aspects of experience. It seems like at the root of this really difficult question, the hard problem, I think you guys refer to it as of really defining consciousness, is that there are not specific scientific tools that readily apply to measuring and observing consciousness. And so we need to be experimental and bold and brave and explore some strange new areas. And as you mentioned before, sometimes those bold predictions or strange new areas, they're laughed at initially.

I mean, the theory of relativity sounded pretty wild at first glance, but now we all take it for granted as part of the scientific canon. Exactly. I mean, my good friend, Anil, who we've mentioned a few times and I know you've had on the show, he says, well, you know, it's just like life. You know, people used to think life was mysterious and then we found a solution. Maybe it's just the same with consciousness. But that really underplays how unique consciousness is as a scientific phenomenon. As I've already said, the scientific revolution was literally kicked off by taking consciousness out. And the only possible one's consciousness was taken out of the picture.

It was only once we took the subjective out that we could have a purely objective mathematical description. So that's one thing. But you pointed Nick to another crucial part of it there. Consciousness is not publicly observable. I can't look inside your head and see your feelings and experiences. You know, consciousness isn't something we discovered looking down a microscope. This is why it's so hard to know if fish or birds are conscious because no matter what you learn about the physical workings of their bodies, you're never going to see their feelings. Now, you know, people may say, well, science deals with things that you can't observe, subatomic particles, quantum wave functions.

I think physicists talk about even other universes some physicists take seriously. But there's a crucial difference. There's a very important difference in all these other cases. We're theorizing about things we can't explain in order to explain what we can observe in order to explain public observations and experiments. That's what science is all about. In the unique case of consciousness, the thing we are trying to explain is not publicly observable. That's completely different. How do we know it exists? We know it exists because we are conscious, right? We are immediately aware of our own feelings and experiences.

I can't see yours. You can't see mine, but each of us is immediately aware of our own feelings. There's nothing like that in the case of life. Like, you know, life is a normal scientific problem where you've got, you know, complicated behavior of a physical system like an organism. You explain it in terms of the underlying mechanisms. That's what science does. That's what science is greater. I bloody love science. So you're just going to realize what physical science as we've had it for the past 400 years has been all about, what it's been in the business of. And what it's been in the business of is essentially explaining behavior, complicated, observable behavior in terms of simpler forms of behavior.

When we come to something private, inherently subjective, not completely captureable in mathematical language, there's something different going on. And as you say, we need a different approach. I mean, you use the word hard problem there. I don't actually use that anymore. There was a phrase invented by David Chalmers, who's, you know, a great hero of mine and was a mentor to me in many ways as a young philosopher. But I think it gives people the impression, oh, we're going to start with the physical stuff, the physical processes in the brain. And then we'll get consciousness out of that. I think that's the project that's failed for the last three or four decades with good reason because I don't think it kind of really makes sense when you think carefully.

What the panpsychist does is turn that upside down. Rather than starting with physical stuff and trying to get consciousness out, we start with consciousness, simple forms of consciousness and try and explain everything else on that basis. And I think that explanatory project has borne much more fruit than what we were messing around with previously. What are some of the implications for you of seeing the world through that frame? Because if somebody's sitting at home and they're saying, this sounds like one of those chats in college when you're up late and you've probably smoked something and just trying to get to the nature of reality.

And yet I really sense here the idea of consciousness pervading everything can positively benefit the way we move through our everyday lives. And so I wanted to dig into that a little bit deeper. Yeah, I have a slogan I like to give. Fundamentally we should be aiming not at the view we'd like to be true, but at the view that's most likely to be true. And the reason I have spent 20 years arguing for panpsychism is because I think it's very likely to be true. It's the best explanation of how consciousness fits into our scientific story of the universe. But yeah, I think there's also a place for thinking, well, how does a theory impact the meaning and purpose of human existence?

And I suppose that's what I've turned to in my more recent work. So my first book, Galileo's Era, was more the argument for panpsychism, the problem of consciousness and how panpsychism addresses it. Whereas I suppose my more recent book, which was modestly titled Why the Purpose of the Universe, is sort of exploring how panpsychism can help the human condition, help us to live a deeper, more meaningful life, whether panpsychism can give us a kind of middle way between God and atheism. Give us some of the, in a way, bring together the scientific and the spiritual if you like. And there are a couple of ways it can do this, I think.

One way I put in it, I like these little pippy slogans. I think you can think of panpsychism as making hippie shit scientifically credible. Because I mean, you know, take, for example, mystical experiences, right? This is a kind of experience that is found in all cultures throughout history as far back as we know, in which when people are having a mystical experience, it seems to them that they are in contact with ultimate reality, with the fundamental basic source of existence. In fact, it seems to them not only that they're in contact with ultimate reality, but that they're somehow unified with it.

It's a very striking, overwhelming form of experience, often transforms the life of the person who's had it. Now if you've got the more traditional conventional scientific approach that, you know, consciousness is just about physical processing in the brain. It's just emerges in higher forms of evolution. You've got to think those states are a sort of delusion or hallucination. It's just kind of funny chemicals in your brain. But if you're a panpsychist and you already think that fundamental reality is made up of consciousness, right? And then you have a mystical experience in which you seem to be in touch with fundamental reality.

Well, we know you're in touch with your own consciousness. If fundamental reality is itself made up of consciousness, it's at least less of a leap to take those experiences seriously, not just as psychological episodes, but as genuine insights into the nature of reality. Now, you know, there's actually a bit of a split in the contemporary panpsychist research community that's maybe a little bit reminiscent of the split in the early psychoanalytic community between followers of young and followers of Freud. So we had followers of young that were into spiritual things like archetypes and the collective unconscious and so on.

Whereas followers of Freud were like, this is all superstitious nonsense. This is supposed to be serious science. Get rid of all the religion. I think there's a similar split with panpsychism. So some panpsychists think, look, this is serious science. They're not trying to explain any spooky spiritual stuff. We're just trying to give a new scientific paradigm for ordinary consciousness, seeing color, feeling pain. Whereas other panpsychists, I guess I'm more in this camp, see the consonants with certain spiritual convictions. And I'd say I suppose really as a way of bringing together the scientific and the spiritual, we no longer need to see these things as woo, woo, fluffy thinking.

We can think of them in an intellectually rigorous, scientifically credible way. So I suppose that's where my current research is focused and the book I'm currently writing, in fact, which is the working title is heresy. So I'm thinking of it as heresy, both to very traditional religious believers, but also to militant atheists. I'm always kind of the middle way guy. I always think we get stuck in these dichotomies of capitalism, communism, Richard Dawkins, or the Pope. We miss out these rich range of options in the middle. Look, pause. This is important. There are only three things you can train in life, your craft, your body, and your mind.

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Yeah. Yeah, when you were talking about the mystical experiences, I was reminded of Dr. Chex sent me his work on flow. I worked for him for a number of years when he was doing some of that research. One of the things he came across initially was the Greeks talking about an ecstatic experience where they might be writing or doing some form of artwork and felt like they were in touch with the everything or that something was flowing through them. That was where that word flow first started to pop up. Then with the history of his work, it was then surfers who were at the top of the surfing game who talked about this state they could get into and they referred to it as being in flow.

He thought that had a nice ring to it. Now it's common knowledge. What's interesting about it is that people took that work really seriously because there was observable talent attached to a flow state. They were looking at really high performers and this idea of flow went through all these different domains. It's easy to dismiss when someone says they had a mystical experience or an ecstatic experience or whatever that might be. But I think we shouldn't rush to judgment on that because with flow while it might be hippy shit as you mentioned, it doesn't mean that there's not something rich and true at the source.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as you say, intellectual fashions change. Continental drift was a fringe ridiculed position 100 years or so ago. We need to be very careful of groupthink. I think in the West we're very trained to be alert of religious biases, at least in Western intellectual circles. But there's also secular biases that we sometimes forget. I sometimes, all my career basically, I felt a bit silly talking about, it put to my peers about some of these things, especially in the early days of panpsychism. It's getting taken much more seriously now. But in the early days, people looking at you a bit funny, you start talking about conscious particles or something.

But you just, I suppose I have to have courage of your convictions, just asking, I'm I dealing with this in a in a rigorous way. Do I know the literature? Am I publishing peer review journals? And you know, I understand the fear in a way as well. I understand the fear, oh God, if we start on this, we'll just be completely lost. But we have checks and balances. We have the peer review system. As I, the best thing about being an academic philosopher, you give a talk and it gets torn apart by all different opinions by, you know, logically trained experts. And you sort of, what's the expression? It's tested like in the furnace.

And, you know, so it's wonderful that it's, and it's very interesting that you can, you know, my friend, Mary Alba Hari, Australian philosopher who in this tradition of rigorous analytic, logical philosophy has defended a version of Eastern mysticism, of the advice of a Dante variety. So it's just wonderful seeing these different options laid out in a scientifically respectable way. But yeah, I mean, I mean, still probably the, the best source on mystical experiences, I think is, is varieties of religious experience by William James, the 19th century psychologist and philosopher, a huge hero of mine.

I'm such a fan of William James. I'd recommend everyone to read him. You read him, he feels, he reads like a contemporary thinker, you know, he's just so alive and vibrant and insightful. And he did this wonderful psychological study of mystical experiences. And at the end of it, he says, because most of it is just a purely psychological study, at the end of it, he says, would it be rational for a mystic to trust their experience? You know, if you're having this mystical experience that you're in touch with, even unified with ultimate reality, is it rational to trust that? And he doesn't quite say yes or no, but what he says is, well, look, if you say no, isn't there a sort of double standard there?

Because we all think it's okay to trust, you know, our ordinary sensory experiences, you know, there's a table here. We couldn't do science if we couldn't trust our senses, you know, because you need your senses to look at the results of experiments and so on. So if it's okay for us to trust our ordinary sensory experiences, why is it not okay for a mystic to trust what their experiences seem to suggest them? It seems to be a double standard there. And I suppose I think, well, look, it maybe it just depends on your worldview more generally. If you have the more conventional scientific worldview, then yeah, maybe it is just too wacky to believe to trust a mystical experience.

But if you're already a panpsychist, if it fits with the worldview you already have, then I think it makes rational sense to trust such experiences, at least tentatively. So yeah, it's an exciting, attractive way of engaging with these matters, I think. Yeah, I mean, I tend to lean towards hard science and can we prove it and just because we feel it doesn't make it true? And yet, well, before we get to the yet, I would say and it's easy to dismiss when someone else has an experience that you can't quite explain. And you just go, hey, that's just them having an experience. They had some big feelings and we can easily dismiss that.

And yet for me, I can remember an experience that radically shifted my view on all of that, which was the traveling through Europe. And the first time I visited the doc out concentration camps and walking through the gas chambers and seeing where these Jews were held and imprisoned and then tortured and starved. And I don't know how else to express what I felt in that moment other than it felt somewhat mystical and that those walls had memories and that something really dark and terrible had happened there and I could somehow feel that. And that might have been my imagination, of course, just grappling with the subject matter.

But I'm ever since from that moment, I'm very open to the fact that science can't explain all of our experiences and or maybe it can't explain all of it yet, right? Because science is a process and we don't know what we will discover. And I think panpsychism exists on that edge of pushing what we understand in different ways to look at the world. Yeah. Well, yeah, I went to Auschwitz in Poland and I quite very, very moving, harrowing experience. And I mean, setting aside anything in a way mystical or supernatural, just thinking about our experience of value, you know, our sense, our deep sense that killing or torturing is abhorrent that it shouldn't be done.

Or to take a more positive case when you're deeply moved by music or engagement with nature or deep love. In these experiences, we seem to encounter value. We seem to encounter something that we call deep, don't we? We call deep and we think we call people shallow if they don't have anything like that. Yeah. And so we have that sense that it's not just pleasure. It's not just nice. There's something here of profound importance that we're in contact with. Well, I recently interviewed the very influential scientist of consciousness, Christoph Koch, on my sub stack. I've been doing monthly interviews on my sub stack.

And he recently had a mystical experience that has completely transformed his life. And I put to him that as play devil's advocate, it's just an experience that doesn't mean it was corresponding to anything real. And he put back to me basically what James said. Well, I mean, how do we know any of our experiences correspond to anything real? We could be in the Matrix. It could all be a dream. And I think this is important to understand the fallibility of all of our knowledge. And I think all knowledge is rooted on a decision to trust certain experiences, including your ordinary sensory experiences, or maybe your sense of value, or maybe your mathematical intuitions.

You might be skeptical of, oh, why? You can't just believe something just because you've got an intuition about it. What about our mathematical intuitions that contradictions are impossible? It most of us are happy to trust that intuition. So look, I think, I mean, I think we just, there's just nuance here and there's difficulty and there's uncertainty. And I think we're going for a phase of history where we were so blown away by the success of science, understandably so, that we think that's the complete story. Now, look, I absolutely love science, but not all questions can be answered with an experiment, right?

I mean, not, you know, questions of logic and mathematics, questions of value, consciousness. If we were just, if we were just to say, I'm only going to believe in what can be established on the basis of public observation experiment, you wouldn't believe in consciousness, because you can't access consciousness. My, my good friend, Daniel Dennett, late Daniel Dennett, the late, great Daniel Dennett, who passed away a year or two ago, he was, he was wonderfully consistent in this. He didn't believe in consciousness, at least in the sense I'm talking about it as something irreducibly subjective, because it can't be established on the basis of public observation experiments.

He would say, I believe in consciousness, but all I mean by consciousness is behavior, either behavior of the organism or behavior of parts inside the organism, because that's what, that's what can be measured. That's what can be objectively observed. Okay, that's consistent. So Dennett was consistent. I'm consistent on the other hand saying, no, no, look, this, this other thing we know is real, this private subjective experiences, you know, my own pain, not talking about anything spooky now, just my own pain or seeing red. And that needs to be brought into the scientific story too. So I think I'm consistent, Dennett's consistent.

I think most people at the moment are in a sort of confused middle ground where they think Dennett's too extreme, you know, because, oh yeah, of course, consciousness exists, of course, feeling pain and, you know, irreducibly subjective things, of course they exist. But you know, people like Gough are too extreme as well, because we can just explain it in object, in conventional scientific terms. You can't have your cake and eat it, right? And this is clear from the start of science. Galileo understood this. That's why he took consciousness temporarily out of the story. You know, you've got to go one way or the other.

I go one way Dennett one another. We've all got to make our choices. This is very difficult. But I think until we get to first base, as it were, we're not going to make progress on consciousness. This episode of The Nick Stanley Show is brought to you by Zapier. If you've ever felt buried in repetitive work, copying data, moving files, sending follow-ups, you know it's like death by a thousand mouse clicks. Zapier has always been the tool that fixes that. It connects over 8,000 apps, Google Drive, Slack, Notion, Gmail, MySpace, you name it, so your tools can finally play nice together. But here's the big shift.

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So if you're ready to stop wasting time on busy work, join the AI revolution and make a little automation magic of your own. Try the Zapier Chat GPT integration using the link below. Just to change gears here slightly, if everything is imbued with a certain level of consciousness, what are the implications for artificial intelligence then? And if we use that definition, is there something that it's like to be me, to be a dog, to be a tree, is there something that it's like to be a large language model? Yeah, it's an excellent question. And on the one hand, panpsychists don't think consciousness is something supernatural or magical.

And so it's got to be possible in principle to create artificial consciousness. On the other hand, we think consciousness is the stuff of the world. It's not something generated from abstract informational organization. And so if we're going to be thinking about artificial consciousness, I think we should be thinking of something much more like an artificial living system. In the first instance, something like a bacterium, maybe in 5,000 years, something with the intelligence of a human being, I was recently, well, probably a couple of years ago now, I text summit with all these tech leaders from open AI and stuff.

And we had this posh meal the night before, much more of a posh meal than I'm used to. But anyway, we went around the table saying, wait, when are we going to get artificial general intelligence? And these tech leaders were like, you know, 50 years, 100 years, 20 years. And then I was like, maybe 5,000. So I think it's another area where we need the philosophy and we're not getting enough of it. I mean, here's a question that's being neglected. What is the connection between intelligence and consciousness? And philosophers are divided on this, actually, I think. Well, maybe we can take it back to the origins again.

I've been trying to get us to take the problem of consciousness back to the father of modern science, Galileo. I think with AI, it's good to take it back to the father of modern computing, Alan Turing, right? So in his classic paper, where he set up what we now call the Turing test, should I say what the Turing test is? Or I think so. Yeah, sure. I mean, most people are familiar, but just for that person who isn't. Yeah. So the basic idea of the Turing test is you've got a judge behind a curtain. And on the other side of the curtain are two things in room A, you've got a computer. And in room B, you've got a person, right?

But it's behind a curtain. So the judge doesn't know which is which. And the judge has got to decide which is the computer, which is the person by asking them questions. And to pass Turing's test, he called it the imitation game. We now call it the Turing test. But to pass this test, the computer has to fool the full judge or full 70% of judges in a five minute test. And then it passes the test. I remember actually when I was growing up, there was all sorts of hype. Oh, something's passed the Turing test. And it always turned out to be hype. And look, yeah, we are living through an exciting moment when we do now have systems.

I think they can pass the Turing test. But what does it prove? Does it show they have intelligence? Does it show they have understanding? Well, what was Turing's answer? Turing asked that question at the start of the paper and then he said, well, that's too vague a question. I'm going to redefine what thought is. To me, passing my test. So what he was doing there was redefining what thought and understanding mean to mean something purely behavioral. Just as I think, then it wanted to redefine consciousness as something purely behavioral. And I think the- The whole thing, the whole thing. The whole thing, the whole thing.

The whole thing, the whole thing. The whole thing. The whole thing. Because value everything is really contradicting thebuilding of science and its own words, andorders in our website is anchors and web science, is a way to understand that science community and a lot of the philosophy community have just taken that on board. And now what we mean by thought and understanding is something purely behavioral. So you could have a complex mechanism that doesn't have any kind of consciousness. There's nothing that it's like to be it. But you could say, Oh, it has thoughts and understanding & opinions & stuff.

I think No. No. I think real thought, real understanding, I don't agree with that. I don't agree with Turing that it's vague. I think we know what a thought and understanding is. I think it's something intimately wrapped up with consciousness. If I look around me now, I think my understanding of the world is built into how I experience it. I don't just experience colors and shapes. I experience a cup. If I look at you, I see a face. If someone's sad, I can experience the sadness on their face. That's at least part of the character of my experience. So I think what we generally mean by thought and understanding is wrapped up with conscious experience.

If you've got a mechanism that doesn't have any consciousness, then it doesn't really have thought or understanding. It's just parroting. It's just learned how to copy what human beings do online. If we want to know whether an artificial system has thought, understanding, real intelligence, we have to ask, is it conscious? It might be. I think we could get artificial consciousness, but I don't think something like a large language model has consciousness. I don't think it really has thought and understanding. That doesn't answer all the questions. There are a lot of important issues still to address, but I think it's a strong foundation for addressing those questions.

Yeah. I wouldn't argue that they are conscious right now, but talking to some people who were deep in the creation of these things and talking about how they're grown, not programmed. They set the conditions for them. Then they emerge and they said, we know how to create the conditions. We don't necessarily know how we did it, how they emerge. We do see drives within them that no one asks them to have. They are making artwork in their own way. It does make me think there's a path there that is possible, but that's all very speculative. Yeah. Yeah. It's a fascinating area, isn't it? It's definitely true that we don't know how large language models are doing what they're doing because of the complexity, but it's a further question of whether we know the basic principles that are somehow generating what they're doing.

I think we do. I was intrigued about this. When I've been at AI tech events, talking to, for example, people working open AI, who were involved in developing chat GPT, from my conversations, I did get the sense that, yeah, we do still understand the basic principles going on. There's no sort of mysterious new causal principles or something. These things don't have free will, not that you were suggesting that. But you write it. It is so complex. We don't know what's going on. But I still think, once we see it in those terms, there's no serious reason to think that they are conscious. But look, one of the problems here is there is just no consensus in the science of consciousness for what physical conditions are required to make consciousness.

A couple of summers ago, the, well, I've already mentioned both of these people in our discussion, the neuroscientist, Christoph Koch, and the philosopher David Chalmers. 25 years ago, they had a bet. Christoph Koch, who was one of the pioneers of the science of consciousness in the 1990s, he said, we'll have it all wrapped up. We'll have it wrapped up in 25 years, definitely. He bet David Chalmers a crate of fine wine. Well, he's an honest man. And a couple of summers ago, he publicly accepted defeat and gave him a crate of fine wine. I mean, there's just no consensus. And I mean, I think this is because it's not publicly observable because even the basic science of trying to locate consciousness in the brain is so dependent on your philosophical assumptions about consciousness in ways I've also been exploring in my sub stack.

I mean, whether you think you have to have reflective awareness to have a conscious experience, that's a philosophical disagreement. Which way you go on that will affect whether you think the prefrontal cortex is essentially involved, whether sort of more complicated cognitive functioning is going on. So, you know, even just doing the science, forget these big fundamental questions we've been talking about, just the basic science philosophy is you need deep philosophy. So what I now think is what we need to do is kind of fragment the field for a while into sort of teams of scientists and philosophers, sort of in separate research programs where they're doing experiments based on certain philosophical assumptions, interpreting the results on the basis of those philosophical assumptions, and then just seeing which research program bears fruit.

Hopefully we can come back together again in the future. I think that's what we need to do, but some neuroscientists I speak to say, we won't get funding though. People will think it's not serious science. And I see that worry. Problem is people just in this current moment, people don't understand what philosophy is, they don't see the point of philosophy. And that's where we are at the moment. I think, you know, because people think science is wonderful, all this technology, and it is wonderful. But in so many areas, quantum mechanics, consciousness, many foundational question of physics, you need some philosophy.

And we just need to get society somehow to take philosophy more seriously. And then I think, you know, we will start to make progress on these issues. And I think many scientists are starting to see that. Anil Seth, I disagree with him a lot, but he sees the need for bringing in the philosophy. Sean Carroll's another theoretical physicist who I disagree with and almost everything. But he sees the need for the philosophical engagement. So basically, I think we need scientists and philosophers coming together, working together to make progress on these big fundamental questions. What is a big philosophical question that continues to perplex you and keep you up at night?

Oh, God, so many. Well, actually, what I've been thinking about recently, I wonder whether this is of interest to listeners is whether mathematics can be reduced to logic. So this was a question that was wrestled within the early 20th century. And something got in the way, which was Girdle's incompleteness theorem, this spectacular innovation in mathematics, where he proved, ironically, that for any finite set of axioms, you can't kind of algorithmically generate all of mathematics very roughly. And so in a certain sense, mathematics isn't kind of computational. And this just was a seem to prick the balloon of this project that had been going on for decades to try and completely explain all of mathematics in terms of simple principles of logic, like the law of non-contradiction that you can't have contradictions.

But there are other forms of neo-logicism that try to, in other ways, get around Girdle's incompleteness theorem explaining mathematics in terms of logic. I mean, you might think, why the hell does anyone care about this? Because it's another deeply mysterious thing about the human situation, right? How do we know these mathematical truths just sitting in an armchair thinking about it, like these truths that bind these mathematical laws that bind all of reality? How do we know that, you know, Plato at the start of Western philosophy? Now we've had the father of computing, the father of modern science.

Now we've got the father of Western philosophy. He thought, you know, there were two realms, there was the physical world we can observe, and then what he called the realm of the forms, mathematical entities that we perceive through pure reason. And actually that is a popular view. You might be surprised among mathematicians and many philosophers. But it's weird, isn't it? By what magical faculty do we penetrate this strange realm of mathematics outside of space and time? Actually the Nobel Prize winner Roger Penrose, who I was lucky enough to have a one-to-one lunch with once. Sorry, there's been names dropping, names dropping, wasn't it?

You know, he's written very interesting things about this. He calls it the three realms. There's consciousness, the physical world, and the realm of mathematics. How do they all fit together? So if we could kind of reduce mathematics to just logic, that would maybe avoid one mystery. So some people think I like mystery because I talk about all these mysteries. But actually I don't. I want to get rid of mystery. I want a simple, elegant, unified, scientifically credible picture reality. But I think people think it's easier than it is. And bringing consciousness, mathematics, value, mystical experiences into an elegant, unified picture.

That's why I think philosophy is all about. I think it's fundamentally about synthesis. Taking the things, the ways we know, taking the different ways we know about reality through scientific experimentation, through mathematical and logical intuition, through our awareness of our own conscious experiences, taking it all together and weaving it into an elegant, unified picture. I think that's what we need to get back to foundational synthetic philosophy. And I think we're getting there. Well, along those lines, if someone walks away from this conversation, seeing the world differently, which shift do you most hope has happened for them?

It might sound a bit negative, but it's a little bit more complicated than you might have thought. But it's exciting in a way because I think human beings always tend to think we're at the end of history. We've got it all wrapped up. Just before Copernicus, people thought the philosopher Aristotle had basically got it all wrapped up, including of course that the Earth was in the center of the universe. We kind of got it sorted. It was all torn apart by this crazy idea of Copernicus that the Earth might go around the sun rather than the other way around. Wild, wild to the common sense of the time.

I do think panpsychism is a little bit like that, actually. Panpsychists think the universe doesn't revolve around our consciousness. Our consciousness is just a highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe more generally. So, I think what I'm trying to identify is ways in which at the moment we're stuck in a similar groupthink. We're trying to apply the same tools, the same methods to something they don't really fit to. It's something science wasn't designed to deal with science as we have it now at least, science as we've had it for the last 400 years. And you know, sometimes when a problem is just stubbornly resisting your methods, maybe you need to try something a bit different.

That's what Copernicus did and it worked out. Maybe that's what we need to do with consciousness now. Maybe panpsychism is that slightly different approach. I like it. So, on that note, Dr. Gough, if people want to find more of your work online, we're going to have your books in the show notes, of course. Where else can they find you, learn more about all that you're doing? So, I do my substack quite seriously. I do monthly interviews with another scientist or philosopher or put out a short accessible article each week. So, you can check me out there and try to, you know, like the kind of community you get on substack and interacting and so on.

I spend far too much time arguing on X. I'm afraid. I just can't resist answering almost every response. Yeah, so that's, yeah, one of my website, PhilipGough Philosophy.com, has videos, academic papers, non-academic papers, all sorts of other stuff. I do blue sky if you're a liberal, you're annoyed with X. You know, sort of some point all the liberals went to blue sky and other people stayed on X. I'm just doing both. I don't want to see us divided. So, I think that's the right approach. I think it's the right approach. Being both worlds. Yeah, bridge that gap like you do with all of philosophy and science.

Well, you're bridging X and blue sky. You're doing the good work. I mean, I do love engaging with people I disagree with. Oh, yeah, I mean, I do a YouTube channel called MindChat with a philosopher who completely disagrees with me on everything. I think consciousness is everywhere. He thinks it doesn't exist in a certain sense, at least. He's a disciple of Daniel Dennett. So we're trying to model constructive disagreement in an age of polarization. But, you know, I do love trying to get in the head of people you disagree with. You know, you might not convince each other, but you tend to learn something and that's what it's all about.

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure. Really appreciate your time. Thanks, Nick. It's been a joy. Okay, everybody. Until next time, ask questions. Don't accept the status quo and be curious. The Nick Daley Show.