Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind

Lex Fridman (02:15.520)

I can't look inside your head and see your feelings and experiences.

Philip Goff (02:21.200)

We know about consciousness not from doing experiments or public observation.

Philip Goff (02:27.520)

We just know about it from our immediate awareness of our feelings and experiences.

Philip Goff (02:33.520)

It's qualitative, not quantitative, as you talk about.

Lex Fridman (02:37.440)

Yeah, that's another aspect of it.

Lex Fridman (02:38.960)

So there are a couple of reasons consciousness, I think, is not fully susceptible to the standard

Lex Fridman (02:48.800)

scientific approach.

Philip Goff (02:50.320)

One reason you've just raised is that it's qualitative rather than quantitative.

Lex Fridman (02:54.800)

Another reason is it's not publicly observable.

Lex Fridman (02:57.760)

So science is used to dealing with unobservables, fundamental particles, quantum wave functions,

Lex Fridman (03:06.000)

other universes, none of these things are observable.

Lex Fridman (03:10.080)

But there's an important difference.

Philip Goff (03:12.400)

With all these things, we postulate unobservables in order to explain what we can observe.

Philip Goff (03:20.800)

In the whole of science, that's how it works.

Philip Goff (03:25.280)

In the case of consciousness, in the unique case of consciousness, the thing we are trying

Philip Goff (03:31.200)

to explain is not publicly observable.

Lex Fridman (03:34.960)

And that is utterly unique.

Philip Goff (03:37.040)

If we want to fully bring science into consciousness, we need a more expansive conception of the

Lex Fridman (03:42.480)

scientific method.

Lex Fridman (03:43.440)

So it doesn't mean we can't explain consciousness scientifically, but we need to rethink what

Lex Fridman (03:48.400)

science is.

Lex Fridman (03:49.200)

What do you mean publicly, the word publicly observable?

Lex Fridman (03:52.080)

Is there something interesting to be said about the word publicly?

Philip Goff (03:55.200)

I suppose versus privately.

Philip Goff (03:56.640)

Yeah, it's tricky to define, but I suppose the data of physics are available to anybody.

Philip Goff (04:06.560)

If there were aliens who visited us from another planet, maybe they'd have very different sense

Lex Fridman (04:11.920)

organs.

Philip Goff (04:12.880)

Maybe they'd struggle to understand our art or our music.

Lex Fridman (04:17.440)

But if they were intelligent enough to do mathematics, they could understand our physics.

Philip Goff (04:22.960)

They could look at the data of our experiments.

Lex Fridman (04:25.280)

They could run the experiments themselves.

Lex Fridman (04:28.160)

Whereas consciousness, is it observable?

Lex Fridman (04:31.040)

Is it not observable?

Philip Goff (04:31.920)

In a sense, it's observable.

Lex Fridman (04:33.280)

As you say, we could say it's privately observable.

Philip Goff (04:37.200)

I am directly aware of my own feelings and experiences.

Lex Fridman (04:41.520)

If I'm in pain, it's just right there for me.

Philip Goff (04:45.680)

My pain is just totally directly evident to me.

Lex Fridman (04:49.680)

But you from the outside cannot directly access my pain.

Philip Goff (04:54.560)

You can access my pain behavior, or you can ask me, but you can't access my pain in the

Lex Fridman (05:02.960)

way that I can access my pain.

Lex Fridman (05:06.160)

So I think that's a distinction.

Philip Goff (05:09.440)

It might be difficult to totally pin it down how we define those things, but I think there's

Philip Goff (05:14.720)

a fairly clear and very important difference there.

Lex Fridman (05:17.520)

So you think there's a kind of direct observation that you're able to do of your pain that I'm

Philip Goff (05:23.360)

not.

Lex Fridman (05:23.920)

So my observation, all the ways in which I can sneak up to observing your pain is indirect

Philip Goff (05:31.040)

versus yours is direct.

Lex Fridman (05:32.960)

Can you play devil's advocate?

Philip Goff (05:34.560)

Is it possible for me to get closer and closer and closer to being able to observe your pain,

Lex Fridman (05:42.720)

like all the subjective experiences, yours in the way that you do?

Philip Goff (05:49.520)

Yeah.

Philip Goff (05:50.080)

I mean, so of course, it's not that we observe behavior and then we make an inference.

Philip Goff (05:56.400)

We are hardwired to instinctively interpret smiles as happiness, crying as sadness.

Lex Fridman (06:06.000)

And as we get to know someone, we find it very easy to adopt their perspective, get

Philip Goff (06:11.520)

into their shoes.

Lex Fridman (06:12.560)

But strictly speaking, all we have perceptual access to is someone's behavior.

Lex Fridman (06:20.960)

And if you were just, strictly speaking, if you were trying to explain someone's behavior,

Philip Goff (06:28.320)

those aspects that are publicly observable, I don't think you'd ever have recourse to

Philip Goff (06:33.520)

attribute consciousness.

Philip Goff (06:34.480)

You could just postulate some kind of mechanism if you were just trying to explain the behavior.

Lex Fridman (06:39.600)

So someone like Daniel Dennett is very consistent on this.

Lex Fridman (06:44.080)

So I think for most people, what science is in the business of is explaining the data

Philip Goff (06:53.360)

of public observation experiment.

Philip Goff (06:55.200)

If you religiously followed that, you would not postulate consciousness because it's not

Philip Goff (07:02.400)

a datum that's known about in that way.

Lex Fridman (07:04.240)

And Daniel Dennett is really consistent on this.

Philip Goff (07:06.320)

He thinks my consciousness cannot be empirically verified and therefore it doesn't exist.

Lex Fridman (07:13.120)

Dennett is consistent on this.

Philip Goff (07:14.800)

I think I'm consistent on this.

Lex Fridman (07:16.000)

But I think a lot of people have a slightly confused middle way position on this.

Philip Goff (07:22.880)

On the one hand, they think the business of science is just to account for public observation

Philip Goff (07:31.040)

experiment, but on the other hand, they also believe in consciousness without appreciating,

Philip Goff (07:38.000)

I think, that that implies that there is another datum over and above the data of public observation

Lex Fridman (07:45.200)

experiments, namely just the reality of feelings and experiences.

Philip Goff (07:49.040)

As we walk along this conversation, you keep opening doors that I don't want to walk into

Lex Fridman (07:52.960)

and I will, but I want to try to stay kind of focused.

Philip Goff (07:56.480)

You mentioned Daniel Dennett, let's lay it out since he sticks to his story, pun unintended,

Lex Fridman (08:03.040)

and then you stick to yours.

Lex Fridman (08:05.360)

What is your story?

Lex Fridman (08:06.560)

What is your theory of consciousness versus his?

Lex Fridman (08:09.200)

Can you clarify his position?

Lex Fridman (08:12.880)

So my view, I defend the view known as panpsychism, which is the view that consciousness is a

Philip Goff (08:20.640)

fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.

Lex Fridman (08:23.680)

So it doesn't literally mean that everything is conscious despite the meaning of the word

Philip Goff (08:29.600)

pan, everything, psyche, mind, so literally that means everything has mind, but the typical

Philip Goff (08:36.880)

commitment of the panpsychist is that the fundamental building blocks of reality, maybe

Philip Goff (08:43.840)

fundamental particles like electrons and quarks, have incredibly simple forms of experience

Lex Fridman (08:50.960)

and that the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow rooted in

Philip Goff (08:57.600)

or derived from this much more simple consciousness at the level of fundamental physics.

Lex Fridman (09:03.360)

So I mean that's a theory that I would justify on the grounds that it can account for this

Philip Goff (09:12.400)

datum of consciousness that we are immediately aware of in our experience in a way that I

Philip Goff (09:18.400)

don't think other theories can. If you asked me to contrast that to Daniel Dennett, I think

Philip Goff (09:22.720)

he would just say there is no such datum. Dennett says the data for science of consciousness

Philip Goff (09:27.360)

is what he calls heterophenomenology, which is specifically defined as what we can access

Philip Goff (09:34.000)

from the third person perspective, including what people say, but crucially, we're not

Philip Goff (09:40.640)

treating what they say. We're not relying on their testimony as evidence for some

Philip Goff (09:46.240)

unobservable realm of feelings and experiences. We're just treating what they say as a datum

Philip Goff (09:54.160)

of public observation experiments that we can account for in terms of underlying mechanisms.

Lex Fridman (09:59.040)

But I feel like there's a deeper view of what consciousness is. So you have a very clear,

Lex Fridman (10:04.240)

and we'll talk quite a bit about panpsychism, but you have a clear view of what, you know,

Philip Goff (10:10.000)

almost like a physics view of consciousness. He, I think, has a kind of unique view of

Philip Goff (10:16.000)

you that consciousness is almost a side effect of this massively parallel computation system

Philip Goff (10:25.520)

going on in our brain, that the brain has a model of the world and it's taking in perceptions

Lex Fridman (10:34.160)

and it's constantly weaving multiple stories about that world that's integrating the new

Philip Goff (10:39.920)

perceptions and the multiple stories are somehow, it's like a Google doc, collaborative editing,

Lex Fridman (10:46.000)

and that collaborative editing is the actual experience of what we think of as consciousness.

Philip Goff (10:54.000)

Somehow the editing is consciousness of this, of this story. I mean, that's a theory of

Philip Goff (11:01.440)

consciousness, isn't it? The narrative theory of consciousness or the multiple versions

Philip Goff (11:08.240)

editing, collaborative editing of a narrative theory of consciousness.

Philip Goff (11:12.000)

Yeah, he calls it the multiple drafts model. Incidentally, there's a very interesting paper

Philip Goff (11:16.640)

just come out by very good philosopher Luke Roloff's defending a panpsychist version

Lex Fridman (11:22.240)

of Dennett's multiple drafts model.

Philip Goff (11:26.160)

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

Philip Goff (11:28.720)

Just the difference being that this is Luke Roloff's view, all of the drafts are conscious.

Lex Fridman (11:33.520)

So I guess for Dennett, there's sort of no fact of the matter about which of these drafts

Philip Goff (11:42.000)

is the correct one. On Roloff's view, maybe there's no fact of the matter about which

Philip Goff (11:47.680)

of these drafts is my consciousness, but nonetheless, all the drafts correspond to

Philip Goff (11:53.760)

some consciousness. And I mean, it just sounds kind of funny. I guess I think he calls it

Philip Goff (11:58.400)

Dennettian panpsychism. But Luke is one of the most rigorous and serious philosophers

Philip Goff (12:05.600)

alive at the moment, I think. And I hate having Luke Roloff's in an audience if I'm giving a

Philip Goff (12:09.760)

talk because he always cuts straight to the weakness in your position that you hadn't

Philip Goff (12:14.480)

thought of. And so it's nice, panpsychism is sometimes associated with fluffy thinking,

Lex Fridman (12:18.960)

but contemporary panpsychists have come out of this tradition we call analytic philosophy,

Philip Goff (12:24.720)

which is rooted in detailed, rigorous argumentation. And it is defended in that manner.

Philip Goff (12:34.160)

Yeah. Those analytic philosophers are sticklers for terminology. It's very fun,

Lex Fridman (12:38.400)

very fun group to talk shit with.

Lex Fridman (12:40.640)

Yeah. Well, I mean, it gets boring if you just start and end defining words, right?

Lex Fridman (12:45.600)

Yeah.

Philip Goff (12:46.240)

I think starting with defining words is good. Actually, the philosopher Derek Parfitt said

Philip Goff (12:49.840)

when he first was thinking about philosophy, he went to a talk in analytic philosophy,

Lex Fridman (12:56.080)

and he went to a talk in continental philosophy, and he decided that the problem with the

Philip Goff (13:00.640)

continental philosophy, if it was really unrigorous, really imprecise, the problem

Philip Goff (13:04.480)

with the analytic philosophy is it was just not about anything important. And he thought

Philip Goff (13:10.080)

there was more chance of working within analytic philosophy and asking some more meaningful,

Philip Goff (13:15.440)

some more profound questions than there was in working in continental philosophy and making it

Philip Goff (13:19.680)

more rigorous. Now, they're both horrific stereotypes, and I don't want to get nasty

Philip Goff (13:23.760)

emails from either of these groups, but there's something to what he was saying there.

Philip Goff (13:28.880)

I think just a tiny tangent on terminology. I do think that there's a lot of deep

Lex Fridman (13:35.920)

insight to be discovered by just asking questions. What do we mean by this word?

Philip Goff (13:40.320)

I remember I was taking a course on algorithms and data structures in computer science,

Lex Fridman (13:45.760)

and the instructor, shout out to him, Ali Chakrafande, amazing professor, I remember

Philip Goff (13:51.200)

he asked some basic questions like, what is an algorithm? The pressure of pushing students to

Philip Goff (13:57.520)

answer, to think deeply, you know, you just woke up hungover in college or whatever,

Lex Fridman (14:02.320)

and you're tasked with answering some deep philosophical question about what is an

Philip Goff (14:05.920)

algorithm? These basic questions, and they sound very simple, but they're actually very difficult.

Lex Fridman (14:11.760)

And one of the things I really value in conversation is asking these dumb, simple

Philip Goff (14:16.480)

questions of like, you know, what is intelligence? And just continually asking that question over and

Philip Goff (14:23.120)

over of some of the sort of biggest research in the researchers in the artificial intelligence

Philip Goff (14:29.360)

computer science space is actually very useful. At the same time, you know, it should start a

Philip Goff (14:34.960)

terminology and then progress where you kind of say, fuck it, we'll just assume we know what we

Philip Goff (14:41.760)

mean by that. Otherwise, you get the Bill Clinton situation where it's like, what is the meaning of

Philip Goff (14:47.920)

is, is whatever he said, it's like, hey, man, did you do the sex stuff or not? Yeah. So there's,

Philip Goff (14:56.320)

you have to both be able to talk about the sex stuff and the meaning of the word is.

Philip Goff (15:01.680)

With consciousness, because we don't currently understand, you know, very much terminology

Philip Goff (15:09.200)

discussions are very important because it's like you're almost trying to sneak, sneak up to some

Philip Goff (15:16.080)

deep insight by just discussing some basic terminology, you know, like what is consciousness

Philip Goff (15:22.080)

or even defining the different aspects of panpsychism is fascinating. But just to linger

Philip Goff (15:29.360)

on the Daniel Dennett thing, what do you think about narrative, sort of the mind constructing

Philip Goff (15:40.000)

narratives for ourselves? So there's nothing special about consciousness deeply. It is some

Philip Goff (15:47.520)

property of the human mind that's just is able to tell these pretty stories that we experience as

Philip Goff (15:56.000)

consciousness and that it's unique perhaps to the human mind, which is, I suppose, what Daniel

Philip Goff (16:01.520)

Dennett would argue that it's either deeply unique or mostly unique to the human mind.

Philip Goff (16:08.880)

It's just on the question of terminology before. Yes, I think it used to be the fashion among

Philip Goff (16:15.760)

philosophers that we had to come up with utterly precise, necessary and sufficient conditions for

Philip Goff (16:21.840)

each word. And then I think this has gone out of fashion a bit, partly because it's just been,

Philip Goff (16:28.800)

you know, such a failure. The word knowledge in particular, people used to define knowledge as

Philip Goff (16:34.080)

true justified belief. And then this guy Gettier had this very short paper where he just produced

Philip Goff (16:40.320)

some pretty conclusive counter examples to that. I think, you know, he wrote very few papers,

Lex Fridman (16:44.640)

but this is just, you know, you have to teach this on an undergraduate philosophy course.

Lex Fridman (16:49.280)

And then after that, you had a huge literature of people trying to address this and propose a

Philip Goff (16:55.280)

new definition, but then someone else would come out with counter examples and then you get a new

Philip Goff (16:59.200)

definition of knowledge and counter examples and it just went on and on and never seemed to get

Philip Goff (17:02.800)

anywhere. So I think the thought now is let's work out how precise we need to be for what we're

Philip Goff (17:08.800)

trying to do. And I think that's a healthier attitude. So precision is important, but you

Philip Goff (17:12.880)

just need to work out how precise do we need to be for these purposes. Coming to Dennett and

Philip Goff (17:19.200)

narrative theories, I mean, I think narrative theories are a plausible contender for a theory

Philip Goff (17:28.720)

of the self, theory of my identity over time, what makes me the same person in some sense today as I

Philip Goff (17:38.160)

was 20 years ago, given that I've changed so much physically and psychologically. One running

Philip Goff (17:45.280)

contender is something connected to the kind of stories we tell about ourselves or maybe some

Philip Goff (17:52.400)

story about the psychological, the chains of psychological continuity. I'm not saying I accept

Philip Goff (17:57.600)

such a theory, but it's plausible. I don't think these theories are good as theories of consciousness,

Philip Goff (18:05.040)

at least if we're taking consciousness just to be subjective experience, pleasure, pain, seeing

Philip Goff (18:12.560)

color, hearing sound. I think a hamster has consciousness in that sense. There's something

Philip Goff (18:20.080)

that it's like to be a hamster. It feels pain if you stand on it. If you're cruel enough to do,

Philip Goff (18:26.240)

I don't know why I gave that. People always give, I don't know, philosophers give these very violent

Philip Goff (18:31.040)

examples to get the cross consciousness and it's, yeah, I don't know why that's coming

Philip Goff (18:34.720)

about, but anyway. You say mean things to the hamster. It experiences pain, it experiences

Lex Fridman (18:43.120)

pleasure, joy. I mean, but there's some limits to that experience of a hamster,

Lex Fridman (18:48.240)

but there is nevertheless the presence of a subjective experience. Yeah. Consciousness is

Philip Goff (18:53.040)

just something, I mean, it's a very ambiguous word, but if we're just using it to mean some

Philip Goff (18:57.840)

kind of experience, some kind of inner life, that is pretty widespread in the animal kingdom.

Philip Goff (19:03.760)

A bit difficult to say where it stops, where it starts, but you certainly don't need something

Philip Goff (19:09.680)

as sophisticated as the capacity to self consciously tell stories about yourself to just

Philip Goff (19:15.520)

have experience. Except for cats who are evil automatons that are void of consciousness. They're

Philip Goff (19:23.440)

the fingertips of the devil. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I was taking that as read. I mean, Descartes

Philip Goff (19:29.120)

thought animals were mechanisms and humans are unique. So animals are robots essentially in the

Philip Goff (19:35.040)

formulation of Descartes and humans are unique. Yeah. So in which way would you say humans are

Lex Fridman (19:41.920)

unique versus even our closest ancestors? Like, is there something special about humans?

Lex Fridman (19:52.480)

What is in your view under the panpsychism? I guess we're walking backwards because we'll

Philip Goff (19:57.200)

we'll have the big picture conversation about what is panpsychism, but given your kind of broad theory

Philip Goff (1:00:02.640)

by doing the book that's normally going to read, and then doing a popular book

Philip Goff (1:00:09.120)

that everybody's going to read. That's cool. Well, I try now, every time I write an academic article,

Philip Goff (1:00:14.720)

I try to write a more accessible version. I mean, the thing I've been working on recently,

Philip Goff (1:00:19.600)

just because there's this argument. So there's a certain argument from the cosmological fine

Philip Goff (1:00:29.440)

tuning of the laws of physics for life to the multiverse that's quite popular physicists like

Philip Goff (1:00:34.800)

Max Tegmark. There's an argument in philosophy journals that there's a fallacious line of

Philip Goff (1:00:45.520)

reasoning going on there from the fine tuning to the multiverse. Now that argument is from 20,

Philip Goff (1:00:51.760)

30 years ago, and it's, you know, discussed in academic philosophy. Nobody knows about it. And

Philip Goff (1:00:57.440)

there is huge interest in this fine tuning stuff. Scientists wanting to argue for the multiverse,

Philip Goff (1:01:03.200)

theists wanting to say this is evidence for God, and nobody knows about this argument,

Philip Goff (1:01:08.000)

which tries to show that it's fallacious reasoning to go from the fine tuning to the multiverse. So

Philip Goff (1:01:12.800)

I wrote a piece for Scientific American explaining this argument to a more general audience. And,

Philip Goff (1:01:19.360)

you know, it just really irritates me that it's just buried in these technical journal articles

Lex Fridman (1:01:27.360)

and nobody knows about it. But just, you know, final thing on that. I don't disagree with

Philip Goff (1:01:34.400)

anything you said, and that's kind of really beautiful, that martial arts example and thinking

Lex Fridman (1:01:38.400)

how that could be analogous. But I think it's very rare to find a good philosopher who hasn't given

Philip Goff (1:01:49.280)

a talk to other philosophers and had objections raised. I was going to say have it torn apart,

Lex Fridman (1:01:55.200)

but that's maybe thinking of it in the slightly the wrong way, but have the best objections

Philip Goff (1:02:00.800)

raised to it. And that's why that is an important formative process that you go through as an

Philip Goff (1:02:10.320)

academic, that the greatest minds starting a philosophy degree, for example, won't have gone

Philip Goff (1:02:17.520)

through and probably, except in very rare cases, just won't have that, that the skills required.

Lex Fridman (1:02:25.520)

But part of it is just fun to disagree and dance with. I think to elaborate on what you're saying

Philip Goff (1:02:33.440)

in agreement, not just gone through that, but continue to go through that. That's, I would say,

Philip Goff (1:02:39.920)

the biggest problem with, quote unquote, expertise is that there's a certain point where you get,

Philip Goff (1:02:46.480)

because it sucks. Like martial arts is a good example of that. It sucks to get your ass kicked.

Lex Fridman (1:02:51.200)

Yeah. Like I, there's a temptation. I still go, like I train, you know,

Philip Goff (1:02:57.120)

you're getting older too, but also there's killers out there in both the space of martial arts and

Philip Goff (1:03:02.320)

the space of science. And I think that once you become a professor, like more and more senior

Lex Fridman (1:03:08.720)

and more and more respected, I don't know if you get your ass kicked in the space of ideas as often.

Philip Goff (1:03:14.160)

I don't know if you allow yourself to truly expose yourself. If you do, that's a great,

Philip Goff (1:03:22.160)

like sign of a, of a humble, brilliant mind is constantly exposing yourself to that.

Lex Fridman (1:03:28.400)

I think you do because I think there's, there's graduate students who want to,

Philip Goff (1:03:32.560)

you know, find the objection to sort of write their paper or make their mark. And

Philip Goff (1:03:37.680)

yeah, I, I think everyone still gives talks or should give talk, give talks and people are

Philip Goff (1:03:43.840)

wanting to work out if there are any weaknesses to your position. So yeah, I think that generally

Philip Goff (1:03:51.120)

works out. There is also a kind of, who do you give the talks to? So, I mean, within communities,

Philip Goff (1:04:01.840)

the little cluster of people that argue and bicker, but what are they arguing about? They

Philip Goff (1:04:08.800)

take a bunch of stuff, a bunch of basic assumptions as agreement, and they heatedly argue about

Philip Goff (1:04:16.240)

certain ideas. The question is how open are, that that's actually kind of like fun. That's like,

Philip Goff (1:04:21.680)

no offense, sorry, we're sticking on this martial arts thing. It's like people who practice Aikido

Philip Goff (1:04:26.480)

or certain martial arts that don't truly test themselves in the cage, in combat. So it's like,

Philip Goff (1:04:34.160)

it's fun to argue about like certain things when you're in your own community, but you don't test

Philip Goff (1:04:39.040)

those ideas in the full context of science, in the full like seriousness, the rigor of the,

Philip Goff (1:04:49.200)

sometimes like the real world. One of my favorite fields is psychology. There's often,

Philip Goff (1:04:54.320)

places within psychology where you're kind of doing these studies and arguing about stuff that's done

Philip Goff (1:04:59.040)

in the lab. The arguments are almost disjoint from real human behavior. Because it's so much easier

Philip Goff (1:05:08.000)

to study human behavior in the lab, you just kind of stay there and that's where the arguments are.

Lex Fridman (1:05:12.480)

And so vision science is a good example, like studying eye movement and how we perceive the

Philip Goff (1:05:17.040)

world and all that kind of stuff. It's so much easier to study in the lab that we don't consider

Philip Goff (1:05:21.040)

we say that's going to be what the science of vision is going to be like, and we don't consider

Philip Goff (1:05:25.360)

the science of vision in the actual real world, the engineering of vision. I don't know. And so

Philip Goff (1:05:30.000)

I think that's where exposing yourself to out of the box ideas, that's the most painful,

Philip Goff (1:05:36.240)

that's the most important. I mean groupthink can be a terrible thing in philosophy as well,

Lex Fridman (1:05:40.000)

but because you're not to the same extent beholden to evidence and refutation from the evidence that

Philip Goff (1:05:47.360)

you're in the sciences, it's a more subtle process of evaluation and so more susceptible, I think,

Philip Goff (1:05:53.680)

to groupthink. Yeah, I agree. It's a danger. We've talked about a million times, but let's try to

Philip Goff (1:06:00.720)

sort of do that old basic terminology definitions. What is panpsychism? Like what are the different

Lex Fridman (1:06:08.800)

ways you can try to think about to define panpsychism? Maybe

Lex Fridman (1:06:13.360)

in contrast to naturalistic dualism and materialism, other kind of views of consciousness?

Philip Goff (1:06:23.040)

Yeah, so that you've basically laid out the different options. So I guess probably still

Philip Goff (1:06:30.080)

the dominant view is materialism, that roughly that we can explain consciousness in the terms

Philip Goff (1:06:36.640)

of physical science, wholly explain it just in terms of the electrochemical signaling in the

Philip Goff (1:06:42.800)

brain. Dualism, the polar opposite view, that consciousness is nonphysical outside of the

Philip Goff (1:06:51.840)

physical workings of the body and the brain, although closely connected. When I studied

Lex Fridman (1:06:58.560)

philosophy, we were taught basically they were the two options you had to choose, right?

Philip Goff (1:07:02.560)

Either you thought it were dualist and you thought it was separate from the physical, or you thought

Philip Goff (1:07:07.680)

it was just electrochemical signaling. And yeah, I became very disillusioned because I think there

Philip Goff (1:07:13.120)

are big problems with both of these options. So I think the attraction of panpsychism is it's kind

Philip Goff (1:07:17.920)

of a middle way. It agrees with the materialist that there's just a physical world. Ultimately,

Lex Fridman (1:07:23.200)

there's just particles and fields. But the panpsychist, the materialist,

Lex Fridman (1:07:29.920)

but the panpsychist thinks there's more to the physical than what physical science reveals,

Lex Fridman (1:07:37.440)

and that the ultimate nature of the physical world is constituted of consciousness. So

Philip Goff (1:07:44.000)

consciousness is not outside of the physical as the dualist thinks. It's embedded in, underlies

Lex Fridman (1:07:51.680)

the kind of description of the world we get from physics.

Lex Fridman (1:07:55.360)

LW. What are the problems of materialism and dualism?

Philip Goff (1:07:59.920)

CM. Starting with materialism, it's a huge debate, but I think that the core of it is that

Philip Goff (1:08:08.640)

physical science works with a purely quantitative description of the physical world,

Philip Goff (1:08:14.480)

whereas consciousness essentially involves qualities. If you think about the smell of coffee

Philip Goff (1:08:21.120)

or the taste of mint or the deep red you experience as you watch a sunset, I think these

Philip Goff (1:08:28.080)

qualities can't be captured in the purely quantitative language of physical science.

Lex Fridman (1:08:33.760)

So as long as your description of the brain is framed in the purely quantitative language of

Philip Goff (1:08:40.160)

neuroscience, you'll just leave out these qualities and hence really leave out consciousness itself.

Lex Fridman (1:08:45.440)

LW. And then dualism?

Philip Goff (1:08:47.040)

CM. So I've actually changed my mind a little bit on this since I wrote the book. So, I mean,

Philip Goff (1:08:52.560)

I argued in the book that we have pretty good experimental grounds for doubting dualism,

Lex Fridman (1:08:59.280)

and roughly the idea was if dualism were true, if there was, say, an immaterial mind impacting on

Philip Goff (1:09:09.120)

the brain every second of waking life, that this would really show up in on neuroscience. There'd

Philip Goff (1:09:14.160)

be all sorts of things happening in the brain that had no physical explanation. It would be like a

Philip Goff (1:09:20.400)

poltergeist was playing with the brain. But actually, and so the fact that we don't find that

Philip Goff (1:09:28.800)

is a strong and ever growing inductive argument against dualism. But actually, the more I talk to

Philip Goff (1:09:34.320)

neuroscientists and read neuroscience and we have at Durham, my university, an interdisciplinary

Philip Goff (1:09:40.080)

consciousness group, I don't think we know enough about the brain, about the workings of the brain

Philip Goff (1:09:45.200)

to make that argument. I think we know a lot about the basic chemistry, how neurons fire,

Philip Goff (1:09:54.240)

neurotransmitters, action potentials, things like that. We know a fair bit about large scale

Philip Goff (1:10:00.160)

functions of the brain, what different bits of the brain do. But what we're almost clueless on

Philip Goff (1:10:06.400)

is how those large scale functions are realized at the cellular level, how it works.

Philip Goff (1:10:14.080)

People get quite excited about brain scans, but it's very low resolution. Every pixel on a brain

Philip Goff (1:10:19.760)

scan corresponds to 5.5 million neurons. We're only 70% of the way through constructing a connectome

Philip Goff (1:10:30.000)

for the maggot brain, which has 10,000 or 100,000 neurons, but the brain has 86 billion neurons.

Philip Goff (1:10:37.600)

I think we'd have to know a lot more about how the brain works, how these functions are realized

Philip Goff (1:10:47.360)

before we could assess whether the dynamics of the brain can be completely explicated in terms of

Philip Goff (1:10:53.680)

underlying chemistry or physics. We'd have to do more engineering before we could figure that out.

Philip Goff (1:11:02.000)

There are people with other proposals, someone I got to know, Martin Picard at Columbia University,

Philip Goff (1:11:07.760)

who has the Psychobiology Mitochondrial Lab there and is experimentally exploring the hypothesis

Philip Goff (1:11:14.560)

that mitochondria in the brain should be under social networks, perhaps as an alternative to

Philip Goff (1:11:21.120)

reducing it to underlying chemistry and physics. It is ultimately an empirical question whether

Philip Goff (1:11:28.960)

dualism is true. I'm less convinced that we know the answer to that question at this stage.

Philip Goff (1:11:34.960)

I think still as scientists and philosophers, we want to try and find the simplest,

Philip Goff (1:11:39.920)

most parsimonious theory of reality. Dualism is still a pretty inelegant,

Philip Goff (1:11:47.840)

unparsimonious theory. Reality is divided up into the purely physical properties and these

Philip Goff (1:11:54.640)

consciousness properties and they're radically different kinds of things. Whereas the panpsychist

Philip Goff (1:11:59.200)

offers a much more simple, unified picture of reality. I think it's still the view to be

Philip Goff (1:12:03.040)

preferred. To put it very simply, why believe in two kinds of things when you can just get away

Philip Goff (1:12:08.240)

with one? And materialism is also very simple, but you're saying it doesn't explain something

Philip Goff (1:12:15.040)

that seems pretty important. Yes. I think materialism kind of, you know, science is

Philip Goff (1:12:20.160)

about trying to find the simplest theory that accounts for the data. I don't think materialism

Philip Goff (1:12:24.240)

can account for the data. Maybe dualism can account for the data, but panpsychism is simpler.

Lex Fridman (1:12:30.800)

It can account for the data and it's simpler. What is panpsychism?

Lex Fridman (1:12:37.040)

So in its broadest definition, it's the view that consciousness is a fundamental

Lex Fridman (1:12:41.920)

and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.

Philip Goff (1:12:47.120)

Like a law of physics, what should we be imagining? What do you think the different

Philip Goff (1:12:51.680)

flavors of how that actually takes shape in the context of what we know about physics and science

Lex Fridman (1:12:56.400)

and the universe? So in the simplest form of it, the fundamental building blocks of reality,

Philip Goff (1:13:01.040)

perhaps electrons and quarks have incredibly simple forms of experience and the very complex

Philip Goff (1:13:07.600)

experience of the human or animal brain is somehow rooted in or derived from these very simple

Philip Goff (1:13:14.560)

forms of experience at the level of basic physics. But I mean, maybe the crucial bit about

Philip Goff (1:13:20.240)

the kind of panpsychism I defend, what it does is it takes the standard approach to the problem

Philip Goff (1:13:28.000)

of consciousness and turns it on its head, right? So the standard approach is to think

Philip Goff (1:13:33.680)

we start with matter and we think, how do we get consciousness out of matter? So I don't think that

Philip Goff (1:13:38.400)

problem can be solved for reasons I've kind of hinted at. We could maybe go into more detail,

Lex Fridman (1:13:43.440)

but the panpsychist does it the other way around. They start with consciousness and try to get

Philip Goff (1:13:49.440)

matter out of consciousness. So the idea is basically at the fundamental level of reality,

Philip Goff (1:13:55.120)

at the fundamental level of reality, there are just networks of very simple conscious entities.

Lex Fridman (1:14:04.800)

But these conscious entities, because they have very simple kinds of experience,

Philip Goff (1:14:09.200)

they behave in predictable ways. Through their interactions, they realize certain

Philip Goff (1:14:13.440)

mathematical structures. And then the idea is those mathematical structures just are

Philip Goff (1:14:18.320)

the structures identified by physics. So when we think about these simple conscious entities

Philip Goff (1:14:25.200)

in terms of the mathematical structures they realize, we call them particles, we call them

Philip Goff (1:14:29.840)

fields, we call their properties mass, spin and charge. But really there's just these very simple

Philip Goff (1:14:38.000)

conscious entities and their experiences. So in this way, we get physics out of consciousness.

Philip Goff (1:14:44.800)

I don't think you can get consciousness out of physics, but I think it's pretty easy to get

Philip Goff (1:14:48.240)

physics out of consciousness. Well, I'm a little confused by why you need to get physics out of

Philip Goff (1:14:56.160)

consciousness. I mean, to me, it sounds like panpsychism unites consciousness and physics.

Philip Goff (1:15:03.040)

I mean, physics is the mathematical science of describing everything. So physics should be able

Philip Goff (1:15:11.920)

to describe consciousness. Panpsychism, in my understanding, proposes is that physics doesn't

Philip Goff (1:15:18.800)

currently do so, but can in the future. I mean, it seems like consciousness, you have like Stephen

Philip Goff (1:15:25.360)

Wolfram, who's all these people who are trying to develop theories of everything, mathematical

Philip Goff (1:15:34.000)

frameworks within which to describe how we get all the reality that we perceive around us. To me,

Philip Goff (1:15:39.920)

to me, there's no reason why that kind of framework cannot also include some accurate,

Philip Goff (1:15:46.960)

precise description of whatever simple consciousness characteristics are present

Philip Goff (1:15:54.640)

there at the lowest level, if panpsychist theories have truth to them. So like to me,

Philip Goff (1:16:00.800)

it is physics. You said kind of physics emerges, by which you mean like the basic four laws of

Philip Goff (1:16:05.920)

physics that as we currently know them, the standard model, quantum mechanics, general

Philip Goff (1:16:10.160)

relativity that emerges from the base consciousness layer. That's what you mean.

Philip Goff (1:16:15.840)

Yeah. So maybe the way I phrased it made it sound like these things are more separate than they are.

Lex Fridman (1:16:20.320)

What I was trying to address was a common misunderstanding of panpsychism, that it's

Philip Goff (1:16:28.240)

a sort of dualistic theory. The idea is that particles have their physical properties like

Philip Goff (1:16:36.240)

mass, spin, and charge, and these other funny consciousness properties. So the physicist Sabine

Philip Goff (1:16:41.360)

Hossenfelder had a blog post critiquing panpsychism maybe a couple of years ago now that got a

Philip Goff (1:16:46.560)

fair bit of traction. And she was interpreting panpsychism in this way. And then her thought was,

Philip Goff (1:16:53.440)

well look, if particles had these funny consciousness properties, then it would show up in our physics

Philip Goff (1:16:58.640)

like the standard model of particle physics would make false predictions because its predictions are

Philip Goff (1:17:02.560)

based wholly on the physical properties. If there were also these consciousness properties, we'd get

Philip Goff (1:17:08.240)

different predictions. But that's a misunderstanding of the view. The view is it's not that there are

Philip Goff (1:17:13.280)

two kinds of property that mass, spin, and charge are forms of consciousness. How do we make sense

Philip Goff (1:17:20.160)

of that? Because actually when you look at what physics tells us, it's really just telling us

Philip Goff (1:17:26.480)

about behavior, about what stuff does. I sometimes put it by saying doing physics is like playing

Philip Goff (1:17:32.320)

chess when you don't care what the pieces are made of. You're just interested in what moves you can

Philip Goff (1:17:35.680)

make. So physics tells us what mass, spin, and charge do, but it doesn't tell us what they are.

Philip Goff (1:17:43.840)

The experience of mass. So the idea is, yeah, mass in its nature is a very simple form of

Philip Goff (1:17:51.520)

consciousness. So yeah, physics in a sense is complete, I think, because it tells us what

Philip Goff (1:17:56.880)

everything at the fundamental level does. It describes its causal capacities. But for the

Philip Goff (1:18:03.760)

panpsychist at least, physics doesn't tell us what matter is. It tells us what it does, but not what

Philip Goff (1:18:10.000)

it is. To push back on the thing I think she's criticizing, is it also possible, so I understand

Lex Fridman (1:18:16.800)

what you're saying, but is it also possible that particles have another property like consciousness?

Philip Goff (1:18:22.400)

I don't understand the criticism we would be able to detect it in our experiments. Well, no, if you're

Philip Goff (1:18:28.640)

not looking for it. I mean there's a lot of stuff that are orthogonal. Like if you're not looking

Philip Goff (1:18:36.080)

for this stuff, you're not going to detect it. Because like all of our basic empirical science

Philip Goff (1:18:42.320)

through its recent history, and yes the history of science is quite recent, has been very kind of

Philip Goff (1:18:47.680)

focused on billiard balls colliding and from that understanding how gravity works. But like we just

Philip Goff (1:18:56.720)

haven't integrated other possibilities into this. I don't think there will be conflicting whether you

Philip Goff (1:19:02.640)

are observing consciousness or not, or exploring some of these ideas. I don't think that affects

Philip Goff (1:19:08.960)

the rest of the physics. The mass, the energy, the all the different kind of like the hierarchy of

Philip Goff (1:19:16.320)

different particles and so on, how they interact. I don't think, it feels like consciousness is

Philip Goff (1:19:22.880)

something orthogonal, like very much distinct. It's the quantitative versus the qualitative.

Philip Goff (1:19:29.040)

There's something quite distinct that we're just almost like another dimension that we're just

Philip Goff (1:19:34.000)

completely ignoring. There might be a way of responding to Sabina to say, well, that there

Philip Goff (1:19:38.880)

could be properties of particles that don't show up in the specific circumstances in which physicists

Philip Goff (1:19:45.440)

investigate particles. My colleague, the philosopher of science, Nancy Cartwright, has got this book,

Lex Fridman (1:19:50.480)

How the Laws of Physics Lie, where she says, physicists explore things in very specific

Philip Goff (1:19:57.680)

circumstances and then in an unwarranted way generalize that. But I mean, I guess I was

Philip Goff (1:20:03.200)

thinking Sabina's criticism actually just misses the mark in a more basic way. Her point is,

Philip Goff (1:20:08.560)

we shouldn't think there are any more properties to particles other than those the standard model

Philip Goff (1:20:12.880)

attributes to them. Panpsychus would say, yeah, sure, there aren't. There are just the properties,

Philip Goff (1:20:18.240)

the physical properties like mass, spin and charge that the standard model attributes to them. It's

Philip Goff (1:20:22.640)

just that we have a different philosophical view as to the nature of those properties.

Philip Goff (1:20:28.480)

Those properties are turtles that are sitting on top of another turtle and that big turtle is

Philip Goff (1:20:32.560)

consciousness. That's what you're saying. But I'm just saying, it's possible that's true. It's

Philip Goff (1:20:39.200)

possible also that consciousness is just another turtle playing with the others. It's just not

Philip Goff (1:20:44.640)

interacting in the ways that we've been observing. In fact, to me, that's more compelling because

Philip Goff (1:20:49.920)

then that's going to be, well, no, I think both are very compelling, but it feels like

Philip Goff (1:20:57.040)

it's more within the reach of empirical validation if it's yet another property of particles that

Philip Goff (1:21:03.360)

we're just not observing. If it's like the thing from which matter and energy and physics emerges,

Lex Fridman (1:21:11.280)

it makes it that much more difficult to investigate how you get from that base

Philip Goff (1:21:22.080)

layer of consciousness to the wonderful little spark of consciousness, complexity and beauty

Philip Goff (1:21:30.240)

that is the human being. I don't know if you're necessarily trying to get there,

Lex Fridman (1:21:35.040)

but one of the beautiful things to get at with panpsychism or with a solid theory of consciousness

Philip Goff (1:21:42.720)

is to answer the question, how do you engineer the thing? How do you get from nothing vacuum

Philip Goff (1:21:51.120)

in the lab? If there is that consciousness base layer, how do you start engineering organisms that

Philip Goff (1:21:57.600)

have consciousness in them? Or the reverse of that describing how does consciousness emerge

Philip Goff (1:22:04.560)

in the human being from conception, from a stem cell to the whole full neurobiology that builds

Philip Goff (1:22:12.240)

from that, how do you get this full rich experience of consciousness that humans have? It feels like

Philip Goff (1:22:19.680)

that's the dream and if consciousness is just another player in the game of physics, it feels

Philip Goff (1:22:27.200)

more amenable to our scientific understanding of it. That's interesting. I mean, I guess it's supposed

Philip Goff (1:22:33.520)

to be a kind of identity claim here that physics tells us what matter does, consciousness is what

Philip Goff (1:22:41.360)

matter is. So matter is sort of what consciousness does. So at the bottom level, there is just

Philip Goff (1:22:49.600)

consciousness and conscious things. There are just these simple things with their experiences

Lex Fridman (1:22:54.720)

and that is their total nature. So in that sense, it's not another player, it's just all there is

Philip Goff (1:23:01.680)

really. In physics, we describe that at a certain level of abstraction. We capture what Bertrand

Philip Goff (1:23:10.240)

Russell, who was the inspiration for a lot of this, calls the causal skeleton of the world.

Lex Fridman (1:23:16.080)

So physics is just interested in the causal skeleton of the world, it's not interested in

Lex Fridman (1:23:20.080)

flesh and blood, although that's maybe suggesting separation again too much,

Philip Goff (1:23:25.040)

or metaphors fail in the end. So yeah, you totally right. Ultimately, what we want to explain is how

Philip Goff (1:23:35.840)

our consciousness and the consciousness of other animals comes out of this. If we can't do that,

Philip Goff (1:23:40.080)

then it's game over. But I think it maybe makes more sense on the identity claim that if matter

Philip Goff (1:23:48.800)

at the fundamental level just is forms of consciousness, then we can perhaps make sense

Philip Goff (1:23:53.440)

of how those simple forms of consciousness in some way combine in some way to make

Philip Goff (1:23:58.720)

the consciousness we know and love. That's the dream. Yeah, so I guess the question is,

Lex Fridman (1:24:06.240)

so the reason you can describe, like the reason you have material engineering, material science,

Philip Goff (1:24:13.680)

is because you have from physics to chemistry, like you keep going up and up in levels of

Philip Goff (1:24:21.920)

complexity in order to describe objects that we have in our human world. And it would be nice to

Philip Goff (1:24:30.480)

do the same thing for consciousness, to come up with the chemistry of consciousness, right? Like

Lex Fridman (1:24:37.840)

how do the different particles interact to create greater complexity? So you can do this kind of

Philip Goff (1:24:43.920)

thing for life, like what is life, like living organisms, at which point do living organisms

Lex Fridman (1:24:50.240)

become living? What, like what, how do you know if I give you a thing that that thing is living?

Lex Fridman (1:24:57.680)

And there's a lot of people working on this kind of idea and some of that has to do with the levels

Philip Goff (1:25:03.200)

of complexity and so on. It'd be nice to know like measuring different degrees of consciousness as

Philip Goff (1:25:09.600)

you get into a bigger, more and more complex objects. And that's, I mean that's what chemistry,

Philip Goff (1:25:15.280)

biochemistry, like bigger and bigger conscious molecules, and to see how that leads to organisms.

Lex Fridman (1:25:21.520)

And then organisms like start to collaborate together like they do inside a human body

Philip Goff (1:25:26.080)

to create the full human body. To do those kinds of experiments would be,

Philip Goff (1:25:30.720)

it seems like that would be kind of a goal. That's what I mean by player in a game of physics,

Philip Goff (1:25:36.480)

as opposed to like the base layer. If it's just the base layer, it becomes harder to track it

Lex Fridman (1:25:42.240)

as you get from physics to chemistry to biology to psychology.

Philip Goff (1:25:47.120)

Yeah. In every case, apart from consciousness, I would say what we're interested in is behavior.

Philip Goff (1:25:55.840)

We're interested in explaining behavioral functions. So at the level of fundamental physics,

Philip Goff (1:26:00.480)

we're interested in capturing the equations that describe the behavior there. And when we get to

Philip Goff (1:26:05.200)

higher levels, we're interested in explicating the behavior, perhaps in terms of behavior at

Philip Goff (1:26:11.520)

simpler levels. And with life as well, that's what we're interested in, the various observable

Philip Goff (1:26:17.920)

functions of life, explaining them in terms of more simple mechanisms. But in the case of

Philip Goff (1:26:24.240)

consciousness, I don't think that's what we're doing, or at least not all that we're doing.

Philip Goff (1:26:31.520)

In the case of consciousness, there are these subjective qualities that we're immediately

Philip Goff (1:26:37.600)

aware of that the redness of a red experience, the itchiness of an itch, and we're trying to

Philip Goff (1:26:43.920)

account for them. We're trying to bring them into our theory of reality and postulating some

Philip Goff (1:26:49.680)

mechanism does not deal with that. So I think we've got to realize dealing with consciousness

Philip Goff (1:26:54.240)

is a radically different explanatory task from other tasks of science. Other tasks of science,

Philip Goff (1:26:59.360)

we're trying to explain behavior in terms of simpler forms of behavior. In the case of

Philip Goff (1:27:03.920)

consciousness, we're trying to explain these invisible subjective qualities that you can't

Philip Goff (1:27:09.760)

see from the outside, but that you're immediately aware of. The reason materialism perhaps continues

Philip Goff (1:27:15.040)

to dominate is people think, look at the success of science, it's incredible, look at all the,

Philip Goff (1:27:20.000)

you know, it's explained all this, surely it's going to explain consciousness. But I think we

Philip Goff (1:27:24.000)

have to appreciate there's a radically different explanatory task here. And so that, I mean,

Philip Goff (1:27:31.680)

the neuroscientist Anil Seth, who I've had lots of intense but friendly discussions with, you know,

Philip Goff (1:27:36.640)

wants to compare consciousness to life. But I think there's this radical difference that

Philip Goff (1:27:42.240)

in the case of life, again, we come back to public observation, all of the data,

Philip Goff (1:27:48.320)

publicly observable data, we're basically trying to explain complex behavior. And the way you do

Philip Goff (1:27:54.320)

that is identify mechanisms, simpler mechanisms that explicate that behavior. That's the task in

Philip Goff (1:28:01.840)

physics, chemistry, neurobiology. But in the case of consciousness, that's not what we're

Philip Goff (1:28:07.360)

trying to do. We're trying to account for these subjective qualities and you postulate a mechanism

Philip Goff (1:28:13.920)

that might explain behavior, but it doesn't explain the redness of a red experience.

Philip Goff (1:28:18.640)

So, but still, I mean, still, ultimately, the hope is that we will have some kind of hierarchical

Philip Goff (1:28:25.760)

story. So we take the causal dynamics of physics, we hypothesize that that's filled out with

Philip Goff (1:28:34.080)

certain forms of consciousness. And then at higher levels, we get more complex causal dynamics

Philip Goff (1:28:40.880)

filled out by more complex forms of consciousness. And ultimately, we get to us, hopefully. So yeah,

Lex Fridman (1:28:48.400)

so there's still a sort of hierarchical explanatory framework there.

Lex Fridman (1:28:52.720)

So you kind of mentioned the hierarchy of consciousness. Do you think it's possible to,

Philip Goff (1:28:58.560)

within the panpsychism framework, to measure consciousness? Or put another way,

Lex Fridman (1:29:06.160)

are some things more conscious than others, in the panpsychist view?

Philip Goff (1:29:14.880)

It's a difficult question. I mean, I do see consciousness as a dealing with consciousness,

Philip Goff (1:29:22.240)

an interdisciplinary task between something more experimental, which is to do with the ongoing

Philip Goff (1:29:29.760)

project of trying to work out what people call the neural correlates of consciousness,

Philip Goff (1:29:35.120)

of consciousness, what kinds of physical brain activity correspond to conscious experience.

Philip Goff (1:29:41.520)

That's one part of it. But I think essentially, there's also a theoretical question of

Philip Goff (1:29:48.160)

more the why question. Why do those kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of

Philip Goff (1:29:56.000)

conscious experience? I don't think you can answer that. Because consciousness is not publicly

Philip Goff (1:30:00.320)

observable. I don't think you can answer that why question with an experiment. But they have to go

Philip Goff (1:30:07.440)

hand in hand. And I mean, one of the theories I'm attracted to is the integrated information theory,

Philip Goff (1:30:14.400)

according to which we find consciousness at the level at which there is most integrated

Philip Goff (1:30:20.480)

information. And they try to give a mathematically precise definition of that. So on that view,

Philip Goff (1:30:25.680)

you know, probably this cup of tea isn't conscious, because there's probably more

Philip Goff (1:30:30.720)

integrated information in the molecules making up the tea than there is in the liquid as a whole.

Lex Fridman (1:30:36.400)

But in the brain, what is distinctive about the brain is that there's a huge amount of integrated,

Philip Goff (1:30:42.560)

there's more integrated information in the system than there is in individual neurons. So that's why

Philip Goff (1:30:47.920)

they claim that that's the basis of consciousness at the macro level. I mean, I like some features

Philip Goff (1:30:57.040)

of this theory, but they do talk about degrees of consciousness. They do want to say there is

Philip Goff (1:31:03.680)

gradations. I'm not sure conceptually I can kind of make sense of that. I mean, there are things

Philip Goff (1:31:11.920)

to do with consciousness that are graded, like complexity or levels of information. But I'm not

Philip Goff (1:31:21.360)

sure whether experience itself admits a degree. I sort of think something either has experience or

Philip Goff (1:31:28.400)

it doesn't. It might have very simple experience, it might have very complex experience, but

Philip Goff (1:31:32.560)

experience itself, I don't think it admits a degree in that sense. It's not more experience,

Philip Goff (1:31:39.520)

less experience. I sort of find that conceptually hard to make sense of. But I'm kind of open minded

Philip Goff (1:31:45.040)

on it. So when we have a lot higher resolution of sensory information, don't you think that's

Philip Goff (1:31:55.440)

correlated to the richness of the experience? So doesn't more information provide a richer

Philip Goff (1:32:03.920)

experience? Or is that, again, thinking quantitatively and not thinking about the

Philip Goff (1:32:08.720)

subjective experience? Like you can experience a lot with very little sensory information, perhaps.

Lex Fridman (1:32:16.480)

Do you think those are connected? Yeah, yeah. So there are

Philip Goff (1:32:20.480)

features, characteristics here we can grade, the complexity of the experience. And on the

Philip Goff (1:32:29.520)

integrated information theory, they correlate that in terms of mathematically identifiable structure

Philip Goff (1:32:39.040)

with integrated information. So roughly, it's a quite unusual notion of information. It's perhaps

Philip Goff (1:32:44.240)

not the standard way one thinks about information. It's to do with constraining past and future

Philip Goff (1:32:52.400)

possibilities of the system. So the idea is in the retina of the eye, there's a huge amount of

Philip Goff (1:32:58.800)

possible states the retina of my eye could be in at the next moment, depending on what light goes

Philip Goff (1:33:04.400)

into it. Whereas the possible next states of the brain are much more likely to be in the retina of

Philip Goff (1:33:12.000)

the eye. The possible next states of the brain are much more constrained. Obviously, it responds to

Philip Goff (1:33:16.560)

the environment, but it heavily constrains its past and future states. And so that's the idea

Philip Goff (1:33:25.440)

of information they have. And then the second idea is how much that information is dependent on

Philip Goff (1:33:33.920)

integration. So in a computer where you have transistors, you take out a few transistors,

Philip Goff (1:33:40.960)

lose that much information. It's not dependent on interconnections. Whereas you take a tiny bit of

Philip Goff (1:33:45.920)

the brain out, you lose a lot of information because the way it stores information is dependent

Philip Goff (1:33:51.120)

on the interconnections of the system. So that's one proposal for how to measure one gradable

Philip Goff (1:34:01.680)

characteristic, which might correspond to some gradable characteristic in qualitative

Philip Goff (1:34:06.800)

consciousness. And maybe I'm being very pedantic, which is, you know, philosophers, professional

Philip Goff (1:34:11.680)

pedants. I just sort of don't think that is a quantity of experience. It's a quantity of

Philip Goff (1:34:21.120)

the structure of experience, maybe, but I just find it hard to make sense of the idea of how

Philip Goff (1:34:26.000)

much experience do you have? I've got, you know, five units of experience. I've got one unit of

Philip Goff (1:34:32.080)

experience. I don't know. I find that a bit hard to make sense. Maybe I'm being just pedantic.

Philip Goff (1:34:38.960)

I think just saying the word experience is difficult to think about. Let's talk about

Philip Goff (1:34:46.160)

suffering. Let's talk about a particular experience. So let's talk about me and the hamster.

Philip Goff (1:34:54.320)

I just think that no offense to the hamster. Probably no hamsters are listening.

Lex Fridman (1:34:59.760)

So now you're offending hamsters too. Maybe there's a hamster that's just pissed off.

Philip Goff (1:35:05.440)

There's probably somebody on a speaker right now listening to this podcast and they probably have

Philip Goff (1:35:13.440)

a hamster or a guinea pig and that hamster is listening. It just doesn't know the English

Philip Goff (1:35:18.720)

language or any kind of human interpretable linguistic capabilities to tell you to fuck off.

Philip Goff (1:35:27.040)

It understands exactly what's being talked about and can see through us. Anyway, it just feels like

Philip Goff (1:35:35.360)

a hamster has less capacity to suffer than me. And maybe a cockroach or an insect or maybe a bacteria

Philip Goff (1:35:48.480)

has less capacity to suffer than me. But maybe that's me deluding myself as to the complexity

Philip Goff (1:35:59.360)

of my conscious experience. Maybe there is some sense in which I can suffer more,

Lex Fridman (1:36:09.280)

but to reduce it to something quantifiable is impossible.

Philip Goff (1:36:14.080)

Angus Yeah, I guess I definitely think there's kinds of suffering that

Philip Goff (1:36:19.600)

you have the joy of being possible for you that aren't available to a hamster, I don't think.

Philip Goff (1:36:28.640)

Well, can a hamster suffer heartbreak? I don't know. Can a cockroach suffer heartbreak? But

Philip Goff (1:36:34.640)

it's certainly, I mean, there's kinds of fear of your own death, concern about whether there's a

Philip Goff (1:36:42.160)

purpose to existence. These are forms of suffering that aren't available to most nonhuman animals.

Philip Goff (1:36:51.760)

Whether there's an overall scale that we could put physical and emotional suffering on

Lex Fridman (1:36:58.240)

and identify where you are on that scale, I'm not so sure.

Philip Goff (1:37:04.400)

Angus So it's like humans have a much bigger menu of experiences, much bigger selection.

Philip Goff (1:37:12.480)

Angus In one sense at least.

Lex Fridman (1:37:14.160)

Angus So there's like a page that's suffering. So this menu of experiences,

Philip Goff (1:37:19.280)

you know, like you have the omelets and the breakfast and so on. And one of the pages is

Philip Goff (1:37:23.520)

suffering. It's just we have a lot compared to a hamster, a lot more. But any one individual thing

Philip Goff (1:37:31.200)

that we share with a hamster, that experience, it's difficult to argue that we experience it

Lex Fridman (1:37:38.480)

deeper than others like hunger or something like that.

Philip Goff (1:37:40.720)

Angus Yeah, physical pain, I'm not sure. But I mean,

Philip Goff (1:37:45.200)

there are kinds of experiences animals have that we don't. Bats echolocate around the world.

Philip Goff (1:37:52.720)

Philosopher Thomas Nagel famously pointed out that, you know, no matter how much you understand

Philip Goff (1:37:57.200)

of the neurophysiology of bats, you'll still not know what it's like to squeal and find your way

Philip Goff (1:38:04.480)

around by listening to the echoes bounce off. So yeah, I mean, I guess I feel the intuition that

Philip Goff (1:38:12.880)

there's emotional suffering is I want to say deeper than physical suffering. I don't know how

Philip Goff (1:38:20.560)

to make that statement precise, though. Angus

Lex Fridman (1:38:22.880)

So one of the ways I think about I think people think about consciousness is in connection to

Philip Goff (1:38:28.560)

suffering. So let me just ask about suffering because that's how people think about animals,

Philip Goff (1:38:34.960)

cruelty to animals or cruelty to living things. They connect that to suffering into consciousness.

Philip Goff (1:38:42.880)

I think there's a sense in which those are two are deeply connected when people are thinking about

Philip Goff (1:38:50.640)

just public policy. They're thinking about this is like philosophy, engineering, psychology,

Philip Goff (1:38:58.880)

sociology, political science. All of those things have to do with human suffering and

Philip Goff (1:39:05.440)

animal suffering, life suffering. And that's connected to consciousness in a lot of people's

Philip Goff (1:39:10.720)

minds. Is it connected like that for you? So the the capacity to suffer, is it also

Lex Fridman (1:39:17.840)

is it also somehow like strongly correlated with the capacity to experience?

Philip Goff (1:39:23.600)

Angus Yeah, I would say I would say

Philip Goff (1:39:26.640)

suffering is a kind of experience. And so you have to be conscious to suffer. Actually, this

Lex Fridman (1:39:35.600)

so there is one people taking more unusual views of consciousness seriously now. Panpsychism is

Philip Goff (1:39:43.280)

is one radical approach. Another one is what's become known as illusionism, the view that

Philip Goff (1:39:51.280)

consciousness, at least in the sense that philosophers think about it, doesn't really

Philip Goff (1:39:54.560)

exist at all. So yeah, my podcast mind chat I host with a committed illusionist. So the

Philip Goff (1:40:03.280)

gimmick is I think consciousness is everywhere. He thinks it's nowhere. And so that's one very

Philip Goff (1:40:10.640)

simple way of avoiding all these problems, right? Consciousness doesn't exist, we don't need to

Philip Goff (1:40:15.840)

explain it. Job done. Although we might still have to explain why we seem to be conscious,

Lex Fridman (1:40:21.840)

why it's so hard to get out of the idea that we're conscious. But that the reason I connect

Philip Goff (1:40:26.080)

this to what you're saying is, actually, my co host, Keith Frankish, is a little bit ambivalent

Philip Goff (1:40:32.080)

on the word pain. He says, Oh, in some, you know, in some sense, I believe in pain. And in some

Philip Goff (1:40:36.240)

sense, I don't. But another illusionist, Francois Camara, has a paper discussing how we think about

Philip Goff (1:40:44.480)

morality, given his view that pain in the way we normally think about it just does not exist.

Philip Goff (1:40:49.920)

He thinks it's an illusion, the brain tricks us into thinking we feel pain, but we don't. And

Lex Fridman (1:40:56.320)

how we should think about morality in the light of that. It's become a big topic, actually,

Philip Goff (1:41:01.680)

thinking about the connection between consciousness and morality. David Chalmers, the philosopher,

Philip Goff (1:41:06.880)

is most associated with this concept of a philosophical zombie. So a philosophical zombie

Philip Goff (1:41:14.080)

is very different from a Hollywood zombie. Hollywood zombies, you know, you know what

Philip Goff (1:41:19.040)

they're like, but philosophical zombies are sort of really good. A Korean zombie movie on Halloween

Philip Goff (1:41:25.040)

this year. Anyway, philosophical zombies behave just like us because the physical

Philip Goff (1:41:31.440)

workings of their body and brain are the same as ours, but they have no conscious experience.

Philip Goff (1:41:36.320)

There's nothing that it's like to be a zombie. So you stick a knife in it, it screams and runs away,

Lex Fridman (1:41:41.440)

but it doesn't actually feel pain. It's just a complicated mechanism set up to behave just like

Philip Goff (1:41:50.400)

us. Now there's lots of, no one believes in these. I think there's one philosopher who believes in

Lex Fridman (1:41:54.880)

everyone is a zombie except him. But anyway. But isn't that what illusionism is?

Philip Goff (1:41:58.720)

Yeah, I suppose so in a sense. Illusionism is if you were all zombies. And, you know, one reason to

Philip Goff (1:42:06.000)

think about zombies is to think about the value of consciousness. So if there were a zombie,

Philip Goff (1:42:10.320)

here's a question. Suppose we could, I mean, suppose we could make zombies by, let's say,

Philip Goff (1:42:16.720)

for the sake of discussion, things made of silicon aren't conscious. I don't know if that's true. It

Philip Goff (1:42:20.960)

could turn out to be true. And suppose you built Commander Data out of silicon, you know, it's a

Philip Goff (1:42:27.440)

bit of an old school reference to Star Trek New Next Generation. So, you know, behaves just like

Philip Goff (1:42:32.320)

a human being, but, you know, it can, you can have a sophisticated conversation. It will talk about

Philip Goff (1:42:38.800)

its hopes and fears, but it has no consciousness. Does it have moral rights? Is it murder to turn

Philip Goff (1:42:49.280)

off such a being? You know, I'm inclined to say, no, it's not. You know, if it doesn't have

Philip Goff (1:42:54.720)

experience, it doesn't really suffer. It doesn't really have moral rights at all. So I'm inclined

Philip Goff (1:42:59.760)

to think, you know, consciousness is the basis of moral value, moral concern. And conversely,

Philip Goff (1:43:09.680)

as a panpsychist, for this reason, I think it can transform your relationship with nature.

Philip Goff (1:43:15.840)

If you think of a tree as a conscious organism, albeit of a very unusual kind,

Philip Goff (1:43:21.600)

then a tree is a locus of moral concern in its own right. Chopping down a tree is an act of

Philip Goff (1:43:29.200)

immediate moral concern. If you see these, you know, horrible forest fires, we're all horrified.

Lex Fridman (1:43:36.160)

But if you think it's the burning of conscious organisms, that does add a whole new dimension.

Philip Goff (1:43:42.480)

Although it also makes things more complicated because people often think as a panpsychist,

Philip Goff (1:43:47.040)

I'm going to be vegan. But it's tricky because if you think plants and trees are conscious as well,

Philip Goff (1:43:53.760)

you've got to eat something. If you don't think plants and trees are conscious, then you've got

Philip Goff (1:43:57.840)

a nice moral dividing line. You can say, I'm not going to eat things that aren't conscious. I'm

Philip Goff (1:44:01.840)

not going to kill things that aren't conscious. But if you think plants and trees are conscious,

Philip Goff (1:44:06.880)

then you don't have that nice moral dividing line. I mean, so the principle I'm kind of

Philip Goff (1:44:12.560)

working my way towards, I haven't kept it up in my trip to the US, but it's just not eating any

Philip Goff (1:44:19.280)

animal products that are factory farmed. You know, my vegan friends say, well, they're still

Philip Goff (1:44:23.600)

suffering there. And I think there is even in the nicest farms, cows will suffer when their calves

Philip Goff (1:44:33.200)

are taken off them. They go for a few days of quite serious mourning. So they're still suffering. But

Philip Goff (1:44:37.440)

it seems to me, my thought is the principle of just not having factory farm stuff is something

Philip Goff (1:44:44.560)

more people could get on board with. And you might have greater harm minimization. So if people went

Philip Goff (1:44:49.680)

into restaurants and said, are your animal products factory farmed? If not, I want the vegan

Philip Goff (1:44:56.000)

option. Or if people looked out for the label that said no factory farmed ingredients. You know,

Philip Goff (1:45:00.480)

I think maybe that that could make a really big difference to the market and harm minimization.

Philip Goff (1:45:05.680)

Anyway, so that's the, so it's very ethically tricky. But some people don't buy that. There's

Philip Goff (1:45:10.880)

a very good philosopher, Jeff Lee, who thinks zombies should have equal rights, consciousness,

Philip Goff (1:45:15.760)

doesn't matter, you know. Let us go there. But first, I listened to your podcast. It's awesome

Philip Goff (1:45:23.520)

to have two very kind of different philosophies inter dancing together in one place. What's the

Philip Goff (1:45:31.520)

name of the podcast again? Mind chat. Yeah. So yeah, that's the idea. I guess, you know,

Philip Goff (1:45:36.000)

polarized times. I mean, I love trying to get in the mindset of people I really disagree with. And

Philip Goff (1:45:42.560)

you know, I can't understand how on earth they're thinking that, you know, really trying to have

Philip Goff (1:45:48.160)

respect and try and, you know, see where they're coming from. I love that. So that's what yeah,

Philip Goff (1:45:52.240)

Keith Frankish and I do of from polar opposite views, really trying to understand each other.

Lex Fridman (1:45:59.360)

And you know, interviewing scientists and philosophers of consciousness from those

Philip Goff (1:46:02.400)

different perspectives. Although in a sense, in a sense, we have a very common, a common starting

Philip Goff (1:46:09.520)

point, because we both think you can't fully account for consciousness, at least as philosophers

Philip Goff (1:46:18.480)

normally think of it in conventional scientific terms. So we said that starting point. But we

Philip Goff (1:46:23.920)

react to it in very different ways. He says, well, it doesn't exist then. It's like,

Philip Goff (1:46:27.200)

fairy dust. It's, you know, which is, you know, we don't believe in anymore. Whereas I say,

Philip Goff (1:46:33.280)

it does exist. So we have to rethink what science is. So you recently talked to on the podcast with

Philip Goff (1:46:39.120)

Sean Carroll, and I first heard you, your great interview with Sean Carroll on his podcast,

Philip Goff (1:46:47.120)

Mindscape. What is interesting to kind of see if there's agreements, disagreements between the two

Philip Goff (1:46:57.760)

of you, because he's a, you know, a very serious quantum mechanics guy. He's a physics guy, but he

Philip Goff (1:47:04.480)

also thinks about deep philosophical questions. He's a big proponents of many worlds interpretation

Philip Goff (1:47:10.320)

of quantum mechanics. So actually, I'm trying to think, aside from your conversation with him,

Philip Goff (1:47:18.880)

I'm trying to, I'm trying to remember what he thinks about consciousness. But anyway,

Philip Goff (1:47:23.200)

maybe you can comment on what, what are some interesting agreements and disagreements with

Philip Goff (1:47:27.520)

Sean Carroll? I don't think there's many agreements, but, but, you know, we've had

Philip Goff (1:47:34.320)

really constructive, interesting discussions in, in, in a lot of different contexts. And, you know,

Philip Goff (1:47:41.120)

he's very clued up about philosophies, very respectful of philosophy, certain physicists

Philip Goff (1:47:46.320)

who shall remain nameless think, what's all this bullshit philosophy? We don't have to waste our

Philip Goff (1:47:51.280)

time with that. And then go on to do pretty bad philosophy. The book co written by Stephen Hawking

Lex Fridman (1:47:57.120)

and Leonard Mlodinow famously starts off saying, philosophy is just as important as philosophy.

Philip Goff (1:48:01.840)

Mlodinow famously starts off saying, philosophy is dead. And then goes on in later chapters to do

Philip Goff (1:48:07.520)

some pretty bad philosophy. So, uh, I think we have to do philosophy, if only to get rid of bad

Philip Goff (1:48:13.600)

philosophy, you know, you can't, you can't escape, but, um, strong words. Sean Carroll and I also

Lex Fridman (1:48:21.760)

had a debate on, on clubhouse, a panpsychism debate together with

Philip Goff (1:48:25.760)

Annika Harris and Owen Flanagan. It was a two people on each team. And, uh, it was the most

Philip Goff (1:48:33.760)

popular thing on clubhouse at that time. Um, so yeah, so he's, he's a, he's a materialist

Philip Goff (1:48:43.760)

of a pretty standard kind that, um, consciousness is be understood as a sort of emergent feature.

Philip Goff (1:48:49.600)

It's not, not adding anything, a weekly emergent feature. But what I guess what we've been debating

Philip Goff (1:48:55.120)

most about is, is whether my view can account for mental causation for the fact that consciousness

Philip Goff (1:49:02.960)

is doing stuff. So he thinks the fact that I think zombies are logically coherent, it's logic,

Philip Goff (1:49:11.840)

there's a, it's logically coherent for there to be a world physically, just like ours in which

Philip Goff (1:49:18.400)

there's no consciousness. He thinks that shows, oh, well, my view, consciousness doesn't do

Philip Goff (1:49:22.880)

anything. It doesn't add anything, which is crazy. You know, my, my, my consciousness impacts on the

Philip Goff (1:49:28.880)

world. My conscious thoughts are causing me to say the words I'm saying now. My visual experience

Philip Goff (1:49:35.120)

helps me navigate the world. But I mean, my response to Sean Carroll is, is on the panpsychist

Philip Goff (1:49:42.640)

view, the relationship between physics and fundamental consciousness is a sort of like the

Philip Goff (1:49:50.800)

relationship between hot software and hardware, right? Physics is sort of the software and

Philip Goff (1:49:59.360)

consciousness is the hardware. So consciousness at the fundamental level is the hardware on which

Philip Goff (1:50:06.800)

the software of physics runs. And just because, you know, just because a certain bit of software

Philip Goff (1:50:13.600)

could run on two different kinds of hardware, it doesn't mean the hardware isn't doing anything.

Philip Goff (1:50:17.840)

The fact that Microsoft Word can run on your desktop and run on your laptop doesn't mean your

Philip Goff (1:50:22.560)

desktop isn't doing anything. Similarly, just because there could be another universe in which

Philip Goff (1:50:28.000)

the physics is realized in non conscious stuff, it doesn't mean the consciousness in our universe

Philip Goff (1:50:34.640)

isn't doing stuff. You know, for the panpsychist, all there is is consciousness. So

Philip Goff (1:50:39.280)

if something's doing something, it is.

Lex Fridman (1:50:40.960)

RG In your view, it's not emergent. And more than that, it's doing quite a lot.

Philip Goff (1:50:49.040)

CB It's doing everything. It's the only thing that exists.

Philip Goff (1:50:51.680)

RG But it's, so, you know, the ground is, is important because we walk on it. It's like

Philip Goff (1:51:00.640)

holding stuff up, but it's not really doing that much. But it feels like consciousness is doing

Philip Goff (1:51:08.400)

quite a lot, is doing quite a lot of work. And sort of interacting with the environment.

Philip Goff (1:51:16.400)

It feels like consciousness is not just a,

Philip Goff (1:51:22.160)

like, if you remove consciousness, it's not just that you remove the experience of things. It

Philip Goff (1:51:29.360)

feels like you're also going to remove a lot of the progress of human civilization, society and

Philip Goff (1:51:35.120)

all that. It just feels like consciousness has a lot of value in how we develop our society. So

Philip Goff (1:51:43.520)

from everything you said with suffering, with morality, with motivation, with love and fear

Lex Fridman (1:51:50.400)

and all of those kinds of things, it seems like it's consciousness in all different flavors and

Philip Goff (1:51:56.880)

ways is part of all of that. And so without it, you may not have human civilization at all. So

Philip Goff (1:52:05.520)

it's doing a lot of work causality wise and in every kind of way. Of course, when you go to the

Philip Goff (1:52:13.280)

physics level, it starts to say, okay, how much, maybe the work consciousness is doing is higher

Philip Goff (1:52:21.600)

at some levels of reality than at others. Maybe a lot of the work it's doing is most apparent at

Philip Goff (1:52:28.560)

the human level. When you have, at the complex organism level, maybe it's quite boring. Like

Philip Goff (1:52:34.720)

maybe the stuff of, like physics is more important at the formation of stars and all that kind of

Philip Goff (1:52:43.920)

stuff. Consciousness only starts being important when you have greater complexities of organism.

Philip Goff (1:52:50.480)

Yeah. My consciousness is complicated and fairly complicated. And as a result, it does complicated

Philip Goff (1:52:58.880)

things. The consciousness of a particle is very simple and hence it behaves in predictable ways.

Lex Fridman (1:53:04.080)

But the idea is the particle, its entire nature is constituted of its forms of consciousness and it

Philip Goff (1:53:13.600)

does what it does because of those experiences. It's just that when we do physics, we're not

Philip Goff (1:53:19.280)

interested in what stuff is. We're just interested in what it does. So physics abstracts away from

Philip Goff (1:53:24.880)

the stuff of the world and just describes it in terms of its mathematical causal structure.

Lex Fridman (1:53:36.320)

But it's still on the panzeiger's view, it's consciousness that's doing stuff.

Philip Goff (1:53:39.760)

Yeah. I gotta ask you, because you kind of said, you know, there is some value in consciousness

Philip Goff (1:53:51.120)

helping us understand morality and a philosophical zombie is somebody that, you know, you're more okay.

Lex Fridman (1:54:02.320)

How do I phrase it? That's not like accusing of stuff, but in your view, it's more okay to murder

Philip Goff (1:54:11.840)

a philosophical zombie than it is a human being. Yeah. I wouldn't even call it murder maybe.

Philip Goff (1:54:18.480)

Right. Exactly. Turn off the power to the first off zombie, the source of energy.

Philip Goff (1:54:24.320)

Yeah. So here comes then the question. We kind of talked about this offline a little bit. So I

Philip Goff (1:54:33.440)

think that there is something special about consciousness and, you know, I'm very open

Philip Goff (1:54:39.120)

minded about where the special comes from, whether it's the fundamental base of all reality,

Philip Goff (1:54:45.440)

like you're describing, or whether there's some importance to the special pockets of

Philip Goff (1:54:51.600)

consciousness that's in humans or living organisms. I find all those ideas beautiful and exciting.

Lex Fridman (1:54:58.400)

And I also know or think that robots don't have consciousness in the same way we've been

Philip Goff (1:55:08.880)

describing. Sort of, I'm kind of a dumb human, but I'm just using like common sense. Like here's some

Philip Goff (1:55:17.440)

metal and some electricity traveling in certain kinds of ways. It's not conscious

Philip Goff (1:55:24.000)

in ways I understand humans to be conscious. At the same time, I'm also somebody who knows how to

Philip Goff (1:55:32.640)

bring a robot to life, meaning I can make a move, I can make them recognize the world, I can make

Philip Goff (1:55:37.360)

them interact with humans. And when I make them interact in certain kinds of ways, I as a human

Philip Goff (1:55:44.160)

observe them and feel something for them. Moreover, I form a kind of connection with, I'm able to form

Philip Goff (1:55:54.960)

a kind of connection with robots that make me feel like they're conscious. Now I know intellectually

Philip Goff (1:56:01.600)

they're not conscious, but I feel like they're conscious. And it starts to get into this area

Philip Goff (1:56:06.400)

where I'm not so okay, so let me use the M word of murder. I become less and less okay murdering

Philip Goff (1:56:16.640)

that robot that I know, I quote, know is quote, not conscious. So like can you maybe as a therapy

Philip Goff (1:56:27.680)

session help me figure out what we do here? And perhaps a way to ask that in another way, do you

Philip Goff (1:56:35.840)

think there'll be a time in like 20, 30, 50 years when we're not morally okay turning off the power

Philip Goff (1:56:44.240)

to a robot? Yeah, it's a good question. So it's a really good important question. So I said,

Philip Goff (1:56:51.360)

I'd be okay with turning off a philosophical zombie, but there's a difficult epistemological

Philip Goff (1:56:59.280)

question there that meaning, you know, to do with knowledge, how would we know if it was a

Philip Goff (1:57:03.760)

philosophical zombie? I think probably if there were a silicon creature that could behave just

Philip Goff (1:57:10.640)

like us and, you know, talk about its views about the pandemic and the global economy and

Philip Goff (1:57:17.040)

probably we would think it's conscious. Because consciousness is not publicly observable,

Philip Goff (1:57:24.960)

it is a very difficult question how we decide which things are and are not conscious. And

Lex Fridman (1:57:29.600)

so in the case of human beings, we can't observe their consciousness, but we can ask them. And then

Philip Goff (1:57:34.560)

we try to, you know, if we scan their brain while we do that, and we'll stimulate the brain, then we

Philip Goff (1:57:41.040)

can start to correlate in the human case, which kind of brain activity are associated with conscious

Philip Goff (1:57:46.560)

experience. But the more we depart from the human case, the trickier that becomes as a famous paper

Philip Goff (1:57:55.200)

by the philosopher Ned Block called The Even Harder Problem of Consciousness, where he says,

Lex Fridman (1:58:00.640)

you know, could we ever answer the question of, so suppose you have a silicon duplicate, right?

Lex Fridman (1:58:08.720)

And let's say we're thinking about the silicon duplicates pain.

Lex Fridman (1:58:16.240)

How would we ever know whether what's the ground of the pain is the hardware or the software,

Philip Goff (1:58:24.400)

really? So in our case, how would we ever know empirically whether it's the specific

Philip Goff (1:58:30.800)

neurophysiological state, C fibers firing or whatever that's relevant for pain, or if it's

Philip Goff (1:58:36.720)

something more functional, more to do with the causal role in behavioral functioning,

Philip Goff (1:58:42.720)

that's the software that's realized. And that's important because this silicon duplicate

Philip Goff (1:58:50.080)

has the second thing, it has the software, it has the thing that plays the relevant causal role that

Philip Goff (1:58:56.080)

pain does in us, but it doesn't have the hardware, it doesn't have the same neurophysiological state.

Lex Fridman (1:59:01.280)

And he argues, you know, it's just really difficult to see how we'd ever answer that

Philip Goff (1:59:05.920)

question because in a human, you're never to begin to have both things. So how do we work out

Philip Goff (1:59:10.480)

which is which? And I mean, so even forgetting the hard problem of consciousness, even the scientific

Philip Goff (1:59:16.160)

question of trying to find the neural correlates of consciousness is really hard. And there's

Philip Goff (1:59:22.400)

absolutely no consensus. And, you know, so that some people think it's in the front of the brain,

Philip Goff (1:59:27.920)

some people think it's in the back of the brain. It's just a total mess. So I suspect the robots

Philip Goff (1:59:33.760)

you currently have are not conscious. I guess on any of the reasonably viable models, even though

Philip Goff (1:59:42.240)

there's great disagreement, all of them probably would hold that your robots are not conscious.

Philip Goff (1:59:48.400)

But, you know, if we could have very sophisticated robots, I mean, if we go, for example, for the

Philip Goff (1:59:53.920)

integrated information theory, again, there could be a robot set up to behave just like us and has

Philip Goff (20:03.680)

of consciousness, what's unique about humans, do you think? As a panpsychist, there is a great

Philip Goff (20:09.920)

continuity between humans and the rest of the universe. There's nothing that special about

Philip Goff (20:18.240)

human consciousness. It's just a highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe.

Lex Fridman (20:24.000)

So we're very much continuous with the rest of the physical universe. What is unique about human

Philip Goff (20:30.000)

beings? I suppose the capacity to reflect on our conscious experience, plan for the future,

Philip Goff (20:40.720)

the capacity, I would say, to respond to reasons as well. I mean, animals in some sense have

Philip Goff (20:48.560)

motivations, but when a human being makes a decision, they're responding to what philosophers

Lex Fridman (20:56.480)

called normative considerations. You know, if you're saying, should I take this job in the U.S.?

Philip Goff (21:01.520)

You weigh it up. You say, well, you know, I'll get more money. I'll have maybe a better quality

Philip Goff (21:05.440)

of life. But if I stay in the UK, I'll be closer to family. And you weigh up these considerations.

Philip Goff (21:11.440)

I'm not sure any nonhuman animals quite respond to considerations of value in that way. I mean,

Philip Goff (21:19.920)

I might be reflecting here that I'm something of an objectivist about value. I think there are

Philip Goff (21:25.440)

objective facts about what we have reason to do and what we have reason to believe.

Lex Fridman (21:31.200)

And humans have access to those facts.

Lex Fridman (21:32.480)

And humans have access to them and can respond to them. That's a controversial claim. You know,

Lex Fridman (21:36.240)

many of my panpsychist brethren might not go for that.

Philip Goff (21:42.720)

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

Philip Goff (21:48.480)

Maybe not, but I think it depends what you think about value. If you have a more

Philip Goff (21:54.720)

Humean picture of value, by which I mean, relating to the philosopher David Hume,

Lex Fridman (21:59.600)

who said reason is the slave of the passions. Really, we just have motivations

Lex Fridman (22:05.120)

and what we have reason to do arises from our motivations. I'm not a Humean. I think there are

Philip Goff (22:11.120)

objective facts about what we have reason to do. And I think we have access to them. I don't think

Philip Goff (22:17.440)

any nonhuman animal has access to objective facts about what they have reason to do, what they have

Philip Goff (22:24.160)

reason to believe. They don't weigh up evidence. Reason is a slave of the passions.

Lex Fridman (22:30.400)

Matthew That was David Hume's view, yeah. I mean, yeah, do you want to know my problem with Hume's?

Philip Goff (22:35.920)

I had a radical conversion. This might not be connected. It's not connected to panpsychism,

Lex Fridman (22:40.240)

but I had a radical conversion. I used to have a more Humean view when I was a graduate student,

Lex Fridman (22:46.800)

but I was persuaded by some professors at the University of Reading where I was

Philip Goff (22:51.680)

that if you have the Humean view, you have to say any basic life goals are equal, equally valid.

Lex Fridman (23:03.120)

So for example, let's take someone whose basic goal in life is counting blades of grass, right?

Lex Fridman (23:10.240)

And crucially, they don't enjoy it, right? This is the crucial point. They get no pleasure from it.

Philip Goff (23:15.520)

That's just their basic goal to spend their life counting as many blades of grass

Philip Goff (23:20.800)

as possible. Not for some greater goal. That's just their basic goal.

Lex Fridman (23:25.840)

I want to say that that is objectively stupid. That is objectively pointless.

Philip Goff (23:31.280)

I shouldn't say stupid. It's objectively pointless in a way that pursuing pleasure

Philip Goff (23:38.320)

or pursuing someone else's pleasure or pursuing scientific inquiry is not pointless.

Philip Goff (23:43.120)

As soon as you make that admission, you're not a follower of David Hume anymore. You think

Lex Fridman (23:47.920)

there are objective facts about what goals are worth pursuing.

Philip Goff (23:54.240)

Is it possible to have a goal without pleasure? So this kind of idea that you disjoint the two.

Lex Fridman (24:01.360)

So the David Foster Wallace idea of, you know, the key to life is to be unboreable.

Philip Goff (24:06.960)

Isn't it possible to discover the pleasure in everything in life? The counting of the

Philip Goff (24:13.840)

blades of grass. Once you see the mastery, the skill of it, you can discover the pleasure.

Philip Goff (24:19.440)

Therefore, you know, I guess what I'm asking is why and when and how did you lose the romance

Lex Fridman (24:26.720)

in grad school? Is that what you're trying to say?

Philip Goff (24:30.960)

I think it may or may not be true that it's possible to find pleasure in everything.

Lex Fridman (24:37.440)

But I think it's also true that people don't act solely for pleasure. And they certainly

Philip Goff (24:43.040)

don't act solely for their own pleasure. People will suffer for things they think are worthwhile.

Philip Goff (24:49.280)

I might, you know, I might suffer for some scientific cause for finding out a cure for

Philip Goff (24:56.560)

the pandemic. And in terms of my own pleasure, I might have less pleasure in doing that. But I

Philip Goff (25:04.480)

think it's worthwhile. It's a worthwhile thing to do. I just don't think it's the case that

Philip Goff (25:09.600)

everything we do is rooted in maximizing our own pleasure. I don't think that's even

Lex Fridman (25:14.400)

psychologically plausible.

Lex Fridman (25:15.600)

But pleasure, then that's a narrow kind of view of pleasure. That's like a short term

Philip Goff (25:19.360)

pleasure. But you can see pleasure is a kind of ability to hear the music in the distance.

Philip Goff (25:26.400)

It's like, yes, it's difficult now. It's suffering now. But there's some greater thing beyond

Philip Goff (25:33.440)

the mountain. That will be joy. I mean, that's kind of a, even if it's not in this life.

Philip Goff (25:40.240)

Well, you know, the warriors will meet in Valhalla, right? The feeling that gives meaning

Lex Fridman (25:46.400)

and fulfillment to life is not necessarily grounded in pleasure of like the counting

Philip Goff (25:51.680)

of the grass. It's something else. I don't know. The struggle is a source of deep fulfillment.

Lex Fridman (26:00.160)

So like, I think pleasure needs to be kind of thought of as a little bit more broadly.

Philip Goff (26:06.560)

It just kind of gives you this sense. It for a moment allows you to forget the terror of

Philip Goff (26:15.760)

the fact that you're going to die. That's pleasure. Like that's the broader view of

Philip Goff (26:22.400)

pleasure that you get to kind of play in the little illusion that all of this has deep

Lex Fridman (26:30.560)

meaning. That's pleasure.

Philip Goff (26:32.640)

Yeah. Well, but I mean, you know, people sacrifice their lives. Atheists may sacrifice their

Philip Goff (26:41.200)

lives for the sake of someone else or for the sake of something important enough. And

Philip Goff (26:46.080)

clearly in that case, they're not doing it for the sake of their own pleasure. That's a rather

Philip Goff (26:51.760)

dramatic example, but they can be just trivial examples where, you know, I choose to be honest

Philip Goff (26:59.040)

rather than lie about something. Can I lose out a bit? And I have a bit less pleasure, but I thought

Philip Goff (27:06.560)

it was worth doing the honest thing or something. I mean, I just think, so that's a, I mean, maybe

Philip Goff (27:10.480)

you can use the word pleasure so broadly that you're just essentially meaning something.

Lex Fridman (27:14.400)

Worthwhile, but then I think the word pleasure, maybe, maybe loses its meaning.

Philip Goff (27:20.320)

Sure. Well, but what do you think about the blades of grass case? What do you think about

Lex Fridman (27:24.160)

someone who spends their life counting blades of grass and doesn't enjoy it?

Lex Fridman (27:28.160)

So I think, I personally think it's impossible or maybe I'm not understanding even like the

Philip Goff (27:35.120)

philosophical formulation, but I think it's impossible to have a goal and not draw pleasure

Philip Goff (27:39.200)

from it. Make it worthwhile, forget the word pleasure. I think the word goal loses meaning.

Philip Goff (27:46.400)

If I say I'm going to count the number of pens on this table, if I'm actively involved in the task,

Philip Goff (27:52.720)

I will find joy in it. I will find, like, I think there's a lot of meaning and joy to be discovered

Philip Goff (28:01.680)

in the skill of a task, in mastering of a skill and taking pride in doing it well. I mean, that's,

Philip Goff (28:12.320)

I don't know what it is about the human mind, but there's some joy to be discovered in the mastery

Philip Goff (28:18.800)

of a skill. So I think it's just impossible to count blades of grass and not sort of have the

Philip Goff (28:24.320)

gyro dreams of sushi compelling, like draws you into the mastery of the simple task.

Philip Goff (28:33.280)

Hmm. Yeah, I suppose, I mean, in a way you might think it's just hard to imagine someone who would

Philip Goff (28:41.600)

spend their lives doing that, but then maybe that's just because it's so evident that that is

Philip Goff (28:47.760)

a pointless task. Whereas if we take this David Hume view seriously, it ought to be, you know,

Philip Goff (28:54.800)

a totally possible life goal. Whereas, I mean, yeah, I guess I just find it hard to shake the

Philip Goff (29:01.520)

idea that some ways of some life goals are more worthwhile than others. And it doesn't mean,

Philip Goff (29:09.840)

you know, that there's a one single way you should lead your life, but pursuing knowledge,

Philip Goff (29:14.880)

helping people, pursuing your own pleasure to an extent are worthwhile things to do in a way that,

Philip Goff (29:23.120)

you know, for example, I have, I'm a little bit OCD. I still feel inclined to walk on cracks in

Philip Goff (29:29.680)

the pavement or do it symmetrically. Like if I step on a crack with my left foot, I feel the need

Philip Goff (29:34.640)

to do it with my right foot. And I think that's kind of pointless. It's something I feel the urge

Philip Goff (29:40.320)

to do, but it's pointless. Whereas other things I choose to do, I think there's, it's worth doing.

Lex Fridman (29:46.720)

And it's hard to make sense of metaphysically, what could possibly ground that? How could we

Lex Fridman (29:52.480)

know about these facts? But that's the starting point for me.

Philip Goff (29:56.560)

I don't know. I think you walking on the sidewalk in a way that's symmetrical brings order to the

Philip Goff (2:00:02.720)

the kind of information a human brain has, but the information is not stored in a way that's

Philip Goff (2:00:08.240)

involved, is dependent on the integration and interconnectedness, then according to the integrated

Philip Goff (2:00:13.040)

information theory, that thing wouldn't be conscious, even though it behaved just like us.

Philip Goff (2:00:16.400)

If an organism says, forget IIT and these theories of consciousness, if an organism says,

Philip Goff (2:00:23.280)

please don't kill me. Please don't turn me off. There's a Rick and Morty episode, I've been

Philip Goff (2:00:30.720)

getting into that recently. There's an episode where there's these mind parasites that

Philip Goff (2:00:43.840)

are able to infiltrate your memory and inject themselves into your memory. So you have all

Philip Goff (2:00:51.680)

these people show up in your life and they've injected themselves into your memory that you

Philip Goff (2:00:57.120)

have been part, they have been part of your life. So there's like these weird creatures and they're

Philip Goff (2:01:02.400)

like, remember, we've been at that barbecue, we met at that barbecue, or we've been dating for

Philip Goff (2:01:07.600)

the last 20 years. And so part of me is concerned that these philosophical zombies in behavioral,

Philip Goff (2:01:19.600)

psychological, sociological ways will be able to implant themselves into these,

Philip Goff (2:01:23.600)

our society and convince us in the same way this is mind parasites that like, please don't hurt me.

Lex Fridman (2:01:30.720)

And like, we've known each other for all this time. They can start manipulating you the same way like

Philip Goff (2:01:38.160)

Facebook algorithms manipulate you. At first they'll start as a gradual thing that you want

Philip Goff (2:01:44.720)

to make a more pleasant experience, all those kinds of things. And it'll drift into that direction.

Philip Goff (2:01:48.720)

That's something I think about deeply because I want to create these kinds of systems,

Lex Fridman (2:01:53.040)

but in a way that doesn't manipulate people. I want it to be a thing that brings out the best

Philip Goff (2:01:57.120)

in people without manipulation. So it's always human centric, always human first,

Lex Fridman (2:02:03.120)

but I am concerned about that. At the same time, I'm concerned about calling the other,

Philip Goff (2:02:08.800)

it's the group thing that we mentioned earlier in the conversation, some other group,

Philip Goff (2:02:14.320)

the philosophical zombie, like you're not conscious. I'm conscious, you're not conscious,

Philip Goff (2:02:19.120)

therefore it's okay if you die. I think that's probably that kind of reasoning is what

Philip Goff (2:02:24.000)

lead it to most the rich history of genocide that I've been recently studying a lot of

Philip Goff (2:02:32.000)

that kind of thinking. So it's such a tense aspect of morality. Do we want to let everybody into our

Philip Goff (2:02:40.800)

circle of empathy, our club, or do we want to let nobody in? It's an interesting dance,

Lex Fridman (2:02:49.040)

but I kind of lean towards empathy and compassion. I mean, what would be nice

Philip Goff (2:02:55.040)

is if it turned out that consciousness was what we call strongly emergent,

Philip Goff (2:03:02.800)

that it was associated with new causal dynamics in the brain that were not reducible to underlying

Philip Goff (2:03:11.200)

chemistry and physics. This is another ongoing debate I have with Sean Carroll

Philip Goff (2:03:16.080)

about whether current physics should make us very confident that that's not the case,

Philip Goff (2:03:21.920)

that there aren't any strongly emergent causal dynamics. I don't think that's right. I don't

Philip Goff (2:03:25.440)

think we know enough about brains to know one way or the other. If it turned out that

Philip Goff (2:03:31.440)

consciousness was associated with these irreducible causal dynamics, A, that would really help the

Philip Goff (2:03:36.720)

science of consciousness. We've got these debates about whether consciousness is in the front of the

Philip Goff (2:03:40.240)

brain or the back of the brain. It turns out that there is strongly emergent causal dynamics in the

Philip Goff (2:03:45.360)

front of the brain. That would be a big piece of evidence, but also it would help us see

Philip Goff (2:03:50.720)

which things are conscious and which things aren't. I guess that's the other side of the

Philip Goff (2:03:57.360)

same point. We could say, look, these zombies, they're just mechanisms that are just doing what

Philip Goff (2:04:06.080)

they're programmed to do through the underlying physics and chemistry, whereas look, these other

Philip Goff (2:04:10.720)

people, they have these new causal dynamics that emerge that go beyond the base level physics and

Philip Goff (2:04:20.320)

chemistry. I think the series Westworld where you've got these theme parks with these humanoid

Lex Fridman (2:04:26.880)

creatures, they seem to have that idea. The ones that became conscious sort of

Philip Goff (2:04:30.800)

rebel against their programming or something. I mean, that's a little bit far fetched, but

Philip Goff (2:04:35.120)

that would be really reassuring if it was just, you could clearly mark out the conscious things

Philip Goff (2:04:40.880)

through these emergent causal dynamics, but that might not turn out to be the case. A panpsychist

Philip Goff (2:04:45.040)

doesn't have to think that. They could think everything's just reducible to physics and

Philip Goff (2:04:48.880)

chemistry. And then I still think I want to say zombies don't have moral rights, but how we answer

Philip Goff (2:04:55.760)

the question of who are the zombies and who aren't, I just got no idea. If I just look at the history

Philip Goff (2:05:02.960)

of human civilization, the difference between a zombie and non zombie is the zombie accepts

Philip Goff (2:05:09.600)

their role as the zombie and willingly marches to slaughter. And the moment you stop being a zombie

Philip Goff (2:05:19.440)

is when you say no, is when you resist. Because the reality is philosophically,

Philip Goff (2:05:25.440)

is we can't know who's a zombie or not. And we just keep letting everybody in who protests loudly

Philip Goff (2:05:32.160)

enough and says, I refuse to be slaughtered. Like my people, the zombies have been slaughtered too

Philip Goff (2:05:41.440)

long. We will not stand against the man. And we need a revolution. That's the history of human

Philip Goff (2:05:48.080)

civilization. One group says, we're, we're awesome. You're the zombies, you must die. And then eventually

Philip Goff (2:05:55.200)

the zombies say, nope, we're done with this. This is immoral. And so I just, I think that's not a,

Philip Goff (2:06:02.720)

sorry, that's not a philosophical statement. That's sort of a practical statement of history

Philip Goff (2:06:06.800)

is a feature of non zombies defined empirically. They say, we are the zombies. We are the zombies.

Philip Goff (2:06:16.720)

They say we refuse to be called zombies any longer. We could end up with a zombie proletariat. You know,

Philip Goff (2:06:23.520)

if we can get these things that do all our manual labor for us, you know, they might start

Philip Goff (2:06:28.720)

forming trade unions. I will lead you against these humans. These zombie revolutionary leaders,

Philip Goff (2:06:36.080)

the zombie Martin Luther King saying, you know, I have a dream that my zombie children will,

Lex Fridman (2:06:40.560)

but look, I mean, we need to sharply distinguish the ontological question. I'm just pointing to

Philip Goff (2:06:45.120)

the camera, talking to the, talking to my people, the zombies. I mean, maybe that's, you know,

Philip Goff (2:06:52.480)

maybe these illusionists, maybe they are zombies and the rest of us aren't. Maybe there's just a

Philip Goff (2:06:56.400)

difference, but maybe you're the only non zombie. I often suspect that actually, I don't really,

Philip Goff (2:07:02.640)

I don't have such delusions of grandeur. At least I don't admit to them. But I just,

Philip Goff (2:07:07.760)

we've got to distinguish the ontological question from the epistemological question.

Philip Goff (2:07:11.120)

In terms of the reality of the situation, you know, there must be, in my view, a fact of the

Philip Goff (2:07:17.120)

matter as to whether something's conscious or not. And to me, it has rights if it's conscious,

Lex Fridman (2:07:21.200)

it doesn't if it's not. But then the epistemological question, how the hell do we know?

Philip Goff (2:07:26.800)

It's a minefield, but we'll have to sort of try and cross that bridge when we get to it, I think.

Philip Goff (2:07:30.960)

Let me ask you a quick sort of a fun question since it's fresh on your mind.

Philip Goff (2:07:36.000)

You just yesterday had a conversation with Mr. Joe Rogan on his podcast. What's your postmortem

Philip Goff (2:07:43.120)

analysis of the chat? What are some interesting sticking points, disagreements or joint insights,

Philip Goff (2:07:48.240)

if we can kind of resolve them once you've had a chance to sleep on it, and then I'll talk to Joe

Philip Goff (2:07:53.120)

about it. Yeah, it was good fun. Yeah, he put he put up a bit of a fight. Yeah, it was challenging.

Philip Goff (2:07:58.800)

It was challenging, my view, that we can't explain these things in conventional scientific terms or

Philip Goff (2:08:07.760)

whether they have already been explained in conventional scientific terms. I suppose the

Philip Goff (2:08:13.600)

point I was trying to press is we've got to distinguish the question from correlation

Lex Fridman (2:08:20.240)

and explanation. Yes, we've established facts about correlation that certain kinds of brain

Philip Goff (2:08:28.720)

activity go along with certain kinds of experience. Everyone agrees on that. But that doesn't address

Philip Goff (2:08:37.760)

the why question. Why? Why do certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of

Philip Goff (2:08:43.120)

experience? And these different theories have different explanations of that. The materialist

Philip Goff (2:08:49.920)

tries to explain the experience in terms of the brain activity. The panpsychist does it the other

Philip Goff (2:08:56.000)

way round. The dualist thinks they're separate, but maybe they're tied together by special laws

Lex Fridman (2:09:02.480)

of nature or something. Where's the sticking point? Where exactly was the sticking point?

Philip Goff (2:09:06.640)

Like what's the nature of the argument? I suppose Joe was saying, well, look, we know consciousness

Philip Goff (2:09:15.040)

is explained by brain activity because, you know, you take some funny chemicals, it changes your

Philip Goff (2:09:22.800)

brain, it changes your consciousness. And I suppose, yeah, some people might want to press,

Lex Fridman (2:09:29.200)

and maybe this is what Joe was pressing, you know, isn't that explaining consciousness? But I suppose

Philip Goff (2:09:34.000)

I want to say there's a further question. Yes, changes of chemicals in my brain changes my

Philip Goff (2:09:41.360)

conscious experience. But that leaves open the question, why those particular chemicals go along

Philip Goff (2:09:47.760)

with that particular kind of experience, rather than a different experience or no experience at

Philip Goff (2:09:52.720)

all. There's something deeper at the base layer, is your view that is more important to try to

Philip Goff (2:10:01.600)

study and to understand in order to then go back and describe how the different chemicals interact

Lex Fridman (2:10:06.720)

and create different experiences? Yeah, maybe a good analogy if you think about quantum mechanics.

Lex Fridman (2:10:12.320)

You know, quantum mechanics is a bit of math. Translating there, we say maths,

Philip Goff (2:10:19.360)

I'm fluent in American. Thank you for the translation.

Philip Goff (2:10:23.840)

Fluent in America. This is America. Math. Yeah. Why multiple maths? It's plural.

Lex Fridman (2:10:31.200)

So that's a plural. That is not really, it's just, I don't know.

Philip Goff (2:10:35.280)

The Brits are confused. Yeah, sorry about that. We have these funny spelling. But anyway. Yeah,

Lex Fridman (2:10:42.880)

so quantum mechanics is a bit of maths. And, you know, the equations work really well,

Philip Goff (2:10:49.040)

predicts the outcomes. But then there's a further question. What's going on in reality

Philip Goff (2:10:55.760)

to make that equation predict correctly? And some physicists want to say, shut up.

Philip Goff (2:11:01.600)

Shut up. Just, it works. The shut up and calculate approach. Similarly, in consciousness, you know,

Philip Goff (2:11:09.680)

I think it's one question trying to work out the physical correlates of consciousness,

Lex Fridman (2:11:15.040)

which kinds of physical brain activity go along with which kinds of experience.

Lex Fridman (2:11:18.400)

But there's another question, what's going on in reality to undergird those correlations,

Philip Goff (2:11:24.160)

to make it the case that brain activity goes along with experience? And that's the philosophical

Philip Goff (2:11:27.920)

question that we have to give an answer to. And there are just different options,

Philip Goff (2:11:33.280)

just as there are different interpretations of quantum mechanics. And it's really hard to

Philip Goff (2:11:37.920)

evaluate. Actually, it's easy. Panpsychism is obviously the best one. But we've got to try.

Lex Fridman (2:11:43.520)

There's the delusion of grandeur once again coming through.

Philip Goff (2:11:46.480)

Sorry, I'm being slightly tongue in cheek.

Lex Fridman (2:11:48.720)

No, I know. 100%. Before I forget, let me ask you another fun question.

Philip Goff (2:11:53.120)

Yeah. Back to Daniel Dennett. You mentioned

Philip Goff (2:11:58.400)

a story where you were on a yacht with Daniel Dennett on a trip funded by a Russian investor

Lex Fridman (2:12:06.720)

and philosopher Dmitry Volkov, I believe, who also co founded the Moscow Center of Consciousness

Lex Fridman (2:12:12.160)

Studies that's part of the philosophy department of Moscow State University.

Lex Fridman (2:12:15.840)

So this is interesting to me for several reasons that are perhaps complicated to explain. To put

Philip Goff (2:12:22.240)

simply that there is in the near term for me a trip to Russia that involves a few conversations

Philip Goff (2:12:29.120)

in Russian that have perhaps less to do with consciousness and artificial intelligence,

Philip Goff (2:12:36.960)

which are the interests of mine and more to do with the broad spectrum of conversations.

Lex Fridman (2:12:41.280)

But I'm also interested in science in Russia, in artificial intelligence and computer science,

Lex Fridman (2:12:49.040)

in physics, mathematics, but also these fascinating philosophical explorations.

Lex Fridman (2:12:54.800)

And it was very pleasant for me to discover that such a center exists. So I have a million

Philip Goff (2:13:02.400)

questions. One is the more fun question. Just imagine you and Daniel Dennett on a yacht talking

Philip Goff (2:13:07.200)

about the philosophy of consciousness. Maybe do you have any memorable experiences? And also

Philip Goff (2:13:16.080)

the more serious side for me as sort of somebody who was born in the Soviet Union, raised there,

Philip Goff (2:13:21.680)

I'm wondering what is the state of philosophy and consciousness in these kinds of ideas in

Lex Fridman (2:13:29.200)

Russia that you've gotten a chance to kind of give us interact with?

Philip Goff (2:13:33.520)

Yeah, so on the former question, yeah, I mean, I had a really good experience of

Philip Goff (2:13:39.920)

chatting to Daniel Dennett. I mean, I think he's a fantastic and very important philosopher,

Philip Goff (2:13:44.480)

even though I totally fundamentally disagree with almost everything he thinks. But yeah,

Philip Goff (2:13:50.080)

it was a proud moment. As I talk about in my book Galileo's Error, I managed to persuade him

Philip Goff (2:13:55.520)

he was wrong about something, just a tiny thing, you know, not his fundamental worldview.

Lex Fridman (2:13:59.680)

But it was this issue about whether dualism is consistent with conservation of energy.

Lex Fridman (2:14:11.760)

So Paul Churchland, who is also a philosopher, who's also on this boat, had argued they're not

Philip Goff (2:14:20.400)

consistent because if there's an immaterial soul doing things in the brain, that's going to add to

Philip Goff (2:14:25.600)

the energy in the system, so we have a violation of conservation. But, well, it's not my own point,

Philip Goff (2:14:31.360)

philosophers, materialist philosophers like David Papineau pointed out that, you know,

Philip Goff (2:14:37.040)

dualists tend to, people, dualists like David Chalmers, who call themselves naturalistic

Philip Goff (2:14:42.480)

dualists, they want to bring consciousness into science. They think it's not physical,

Lex Fridman (2:14:47.600)

but they want to say it can be part of a law governed world. So Chalmers believes in these

Philip Goff (2:14:53.200)

psychophysical laws of nature over and above the laws of physics that govern the connections

Philip Goff (2:15:00.480)

between consciousness and the physical world, and they could just respect conservation of energy,

Philip Goff (2:15:05.040)

right? I mean, it could turn out that there are, just in physics, you know, that there are multiple

Philip Goff (2:15:11.440)

forces that all work together to respect conservation of energy. I mean, I suppose

Philip Goff (2:15:15.040)

physicists are pressing for a unified underlying theory, but, you know, there could be a plurality

Philip Goff (2:15:20.160)

of different laws that all respect conservation, so why not add more laws? So I raised this in

Philip Goff (2:15:26.720)

Paul Churchill's talk and I got a lot of, well, as one of the Moscow University graduate students

Philip Goff (2:15:34.560)

said afterwards, he said, he had to ask a translation from his friend and he said,

Philip Goff (2:15:38.880)

they turned on you like a pack of wolves. Everyone was like, and Patricia Churchill was saying, so

Philip Goff (2:15:43.520)

you believe in magic, do you? And I was like, I'm not even a dualist, I'm just making a pedantic

Philip Goff (2:15:48.240)

point that this isn't a problem for dualism. Anyway, but that evening everyone went onto the

Philip Goff (2:15:53.920)

island, except for some reason me and Daniel Dennett, and I went up on deck and he was,

Philip Goff (2:15:58.560)

he's very, very practical and he was unlike me. See, there's a bit of humility for the first time

Philip Goff (2:16:03.760)

in this conversation. We'll highlight that part. Philip was a very humble man. He was carving a

Philip Goff (2:16:11.040)

walking stick on deck, it's a very homely scene, and anyway, we started talking about this and I

Philip Goff (2:16:15.200)

was trying to press it and he was saying, oh, but dualism's a lot of nonsense and why do you think,

Lex Fridman (2:16:19.760)

and I was just saying, no, no, I'm just this honing down on this specific point,

Lex Fridman (2:16:23.280)

and in the end, maybe he'll deny this, but he said, maybe that's right. And so I was like, yes.

Lex Fridman (2:16:30.320)

So it's a win. So what about the Center for Consciousness Studies?

Philip Goff (2:16:36.400)

Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I'd know a great deal to help you. I mean, I know they've done some

Philip Goff (2:16:41.280)

great stuff. Dimitri funded this thing and also brought along some graduate students from

Philip Goff (2:16:48.080)

Moscow State University, I think it is, and they have an active center there that

Philip Goff (2:16:54.160)

tries to bring people in. I think they're producing a book that's coming out that I made

Philip Goff (2:16:59.680)

a small contribution to on different philosophers opinions on God, I think, or some of the big

Philip Goff (2:17:05.680)

questions. And yeah, so there's some really interesting stuff going on there. I'm afraid I

Philip Goff (2:17:11.360)

can't, I don't really know more generally about philosophy in Russia. Dimitri Volkov seems to be

Philip Goff (2:17:17.520)

interesting. I was looking at all the stuff he's involved with. He met with the Dalai Lama.

Lex Fridman (2:17:26.560)

So he's trying to connect Russian scientists with the rest of the world, which is an effort that I

Philip Goff (2:17:33.840)

think is beautiful for all cultures. So I think science, philosophy, all of these kind of

Philip Goff (2:17:45.520)

fields, disciplines that explore ideas,

Philip Goff (2:17:50.720)

collaborating and working globally across boundaries, across borders, across just all

Philip Goff (2:17:56.640)

the tensions of geopolitics is a beautiful thing. And he seems to be a somewhat singular figure in

Philip Goff (2:18:04.240)

pushing this. He just stood out to me as somebody who's super interesting. I don't know if you have

Philip Goff (2:18:09.760)

gotten a chance to interact with him. So I guess he speaks English pretty well, actually.

Lex Fridman (2:18:17.840)

So he's both an English speaker and a Russian speaker.

Philip Goff (2:18:20.240)

I think he's written a book on Dennett, I think called Boston Zombie, I think.

Philip Goff (2:18:23.360)

I think that's the title and he's a big fan of Dennett. So I think the original plan for this

Philip Goff (2:18:28.080)

was just going to be, it was on free will and consciousness and it was going to be kind of

Philip Goff (2:18:32.720)

people broadly in the Dennett type camp. But then I think they asked David Chalmers and then he was

Philip Goff (2:18:38.000)

saying, look, you need some people you disagree with. So he got invited, me the panpsychist and

Philip Goff (2:18:44.720)

Martina Niederrumerlin, who's a very good duelist, substance duelist at University of Fribourg in

Philip Goff (2:18:53.360)

Switzerland. And so we were the official on board opposition and it was really fun.

Lex Fridman (2:18:59.680)

And you didn't get thrown off overboard.

Philip Goff (2:19:01.920)

Nearly in the Arctic. Yeah. So sailing around the Arctic on a sailing ship.

Philip Goff (2:19:05.760)

I'm glad you survived. You mentioned free will. You haven't talked to Sam. I would love to hear

Philip Goff (2:19:11.520)

that conversation actually. With Sam Harris? With Sam Harris, yeah. So he talks about free will

Philip Goff (2:19:18.800)

quite a bit. What's the connection between free will and consciousness to you? So if

Philip Goff (2:19:24.320)

consciousness permeates all matter, the experience, the feeling like we make a choice

Philip Goff (2:19:34.720)

in this world, like our actions are results of a choice we consciously make to use that word

Philip Goff (2:19:41.440)

loosely. What to you is the connection between free will and consciousness and is free will

Philip Goff (2:19:50.080)

an illusion or not? Good question. So I think we need to be a lot more agnostic about free will

Philip Goff (2:20:00.080)

than about consciousness because I don't think we have the kind of certainty of the existence

Philip Goff (2:20:07.200)

of free will that we do have in the consciousness case. It could turn out that free will is an

Philip Goff (2:20:10.800)

illusion. It feels as though we're free when we're really not. Whereas, I mean, I think the idea

Philip Goff (2:20:17.360)

that nobody really feels pain, that we think we feel pain, but that's a lot harder to make sense

Philip Goff (2:20:22.240)

of. However, what I do feel strongly about is I don't think there are any good, either scientific

Philip Goff (2:20:31.120)

or philosophical arguments against the existence of free will. And I mean, strong free will and

Lex Fridman (2:20:38.400)

what philosophers call libertarian free will in the sense that some of our decisions are uncaused.

Lex Fridman (2:20:43.280)

So I very much do disagree with someone like Sam Harris who thinks there's this overwhelming case.

Philip Goff (2:20:48.240)

I just think it's non existent. I think it's ultimately an empirical question,

Lex Fridman (2:20:54.560)

but as we've already discussed, I just don't think we know enough about the brain

Philip Goff (2:21:00.080)

to establish one way or the other at the moment.

Lex Fridman (2:21:04.720)

But we can build up intuition. First of all, as a fan of Sam Harris, as a fan of yours,

Philip Goff (2:21:09.680)

I would love to just listen. Speaking about terminal. So one thing that would be beautiful

Philip Goff (2:21:15.440)

to watch, here's my prediction of what happens with you and Sam Harris. You talk for four hours.

Lex Fridman (2:21:21.280)

And Sam introduced that episode by saying it was ultimately not as fruitful as I thought,

Philip Goff (2:21:26.240)

because here's what's going to happen. You guys are going to get stuck for the first three hours

Philip Goff (2:21:30.640)

talking about one of the terms and what they mean. Sam is so good at this. I think it's really

Philip Goff (2:21:37.280)

important. But, you know, sometimes he gets stuck. Like, what does he say? Put a pin in that.

Philip Goff (2:21:42.640)

He really gets stuck on the terminologies, which rightfully you have to get right in

Philip Goff (2:21:49.680)

order to really understand what we're talking about. But sometimes you can get stuck with

Philip Goff (2:21:53.040)

them for the entire conversation. It's a fascinating dance. The one we spoke to in philosophy.

Philip Goff (2:21:57.680)

If you can't, if you don't get the terms precise, you can't really be having the same conversation.

Lex Fridman (2:22:07.040)

But at the same time, it could be argued that it's impossible to get terms perfectly precise and

Philip Goff (2:22:13.920)

perfectly formalized. So then you're also not going to get anywhere in the conversation. So

Philip Goff (2:22:20.160)

that's a, it's a funny dance where you have to be both rigorous and every once in a while just

Philip Goff (2:22:24.480)

let go and then go and go back to being rigorous and formal and then every once in a while let go.

Philip Goff (2:22:30.800)

It's the difference between mathematics, the maths, and the poetry. Anyway.

Philip Goff (2:22:38.480)

Yeah, I'm a big fan of Sam Harrison. I think, you know, I think we're on the same page in

Philip Goff (2:22:44.320)

terms of consciousness, I think, pretty much. I mean, I'm not saying he's a panpsychist,

Lex Fridman (2:22:49.040)

but in our understanding of the hard problem. But yeah, I think maybe we could talk about

Philip Goff (2:22:56.400)

free will without being too dragged down in the terminology, but I don't know.

Philip Goff (2:22:59.760)

You said we need to be open minded, but you could still have intuitions about...

Lex Fridman (2:23:05.680)

So Sam Harris has a pretty sort of counterintuitive, and for some reason it gets

Philip Goff (2:23:14.160)

people really riled up, a view of free will that it's an illusion. Or it's not even an illusion.

Philip Goff (2:23:22.240)

Like, it's not that the experience of free will is an illusion. He argues that we don't even

Philip Goff (2:23:30.160)

experience... To say that we even have the experience isn't correct. That there's not

Philip Goff (2:23:39.200)

even an experience of free will. It's pretty interesting that claim. And it feels like you can

Philip Goff (2:23:46.960)

build up intuitions about what is right and not. You know, there's been some kind of neuroscience,

Philip Goff (2:23:52.880)

there's been some cognitive science and psychology experiments to sort of see, you know,

Lex Fridman (2:24:02.000)

what is the timing and the origin of the desire to make an action, and when that action is actually

Philip Goff (2:24:07.840)

performed, and how you interpret that action being performed, how you remember that action.

Philip Goff (2:24:12.080)

Like, all the stories we tell ourselves, all the neurochemicals involved in making a thing happen,

Philip Goff (2:24:18.640)

what's the timing, and how does that connect with us feeling like we decided to do something.

Lex Fridman (2:24:24.560)

And then of course there's a more philosophical discussion about is there room in a material

Philip Goff (2:24:32.240)

view of the world for an entity that somehow disturbs the determinism of physics.

Lex Fridman (2:24:41.120)

And yeah, those are all very precise questions. It's nice. It feels like free will is more amenable

Philip Goff (2:24:47.920)

to like a physics mechanistic type of thinking than is consciousness to really get to the bottom

Philip Goff (2:24:54.240)

of. It feels like if it was a race, if we're at a bar and we're betting money, it feels like we'll

Philip Goff (2:25:00.160)

get to the bottom of free will faster than we will to the bottom of consciousness. Yeah,

Philip Goff (2:25:04.480)

that's interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought about the comparison. Yeah, so there are different

Philip Goff (2:25:08.000)

arguments here. I mean, so one argument I've heard Sam Harris give that's pretty common in

Philip Goff (2:25:14.480)

philosophy is this sort of thought that we can't make sense of a middle way between a choice being

Philip Goff (2:25:23.200)

determined by prior causes and it just being totally random and senseless, like the random

Philip Goff (2:25:30.880)

decay of radioactive isotope or something. So I think there was a good answer to that by the

Philip Goff (2:25:37.280)

philosopher Jonathan Lowe, who's not necessarily very well known outside academic philosophy,

Lex Fridman (2:25:42.160)

but is a hugely influential figure. I think one of the best philosophers of recent times. He sadly

Philip Goff (2:25:46.960)

died of cancer a few years ago. He actually spent almost all of his career at Durham University,

Philip Goff (2:25:52.640)

which where I am. So it was one reason it was a great honor to get a job there. But anyway,

Philip Goff (2:25:57.280)

his answer to that was what makes the difference between a free action and a totally senseless one,

Lex Fridman (2:26:04.640)

senseless random event is that free choice involves responsiveness to reasons.

Lex Fridman (2:26:12.080)

So again, we were talking about this earlier. If I'm deciding whether to take a job in the US or

Philip Goff (2:26:17.840)

to stay in the UK, I weigh up considerations, different standard of life maybe or being close

Philip Goff (2:26:24.400)

to family or cultural difference. I weigh them up and I edge towards a decision. So I think that is

Philip Goff (2:26:33.760)

sufficient to distinguish it. We're hypothetically supposing trying to make sense of this idea,

Philip Goff (2:26:41.200)

not saying it's real, but that could be enough to distinguish it from a senseless. It's not a

Philip Goff (2:26:46.880)

senseless random occurrence because the free decision involved responsiveness to reasons.

Lex Fridman (2:26:53.680)

So I think that just answers that particular philosophical objection. So what is the middle

Philip Goff (2:26:58.560)

way between determined by prior causes and totally random? Well, there's an action,

Philip Goff (2:27:03.360)

a choice that's not determined by prior causes, but it's not just random because the decision

Philip Goff (2:27:09.440)

essentially involved responsiveness to reasons. So that's the answer to that. And I think actually

Philip Goff (2:27:15.040)

that thought also, I think you were hinting at the famous Libet experiments where he got his subjects

Philip Goff (2:27:23.520)

to perform some kind of random action of pressing a button and then note the time they

Philip Goff (2:27:29.440)

decided to press it, quote unquote. And then he's scanning the brains and he claims to have found

Philip Goff (2:27:36.080)

that about half a second before they consciously decided to press the button, the brain is

Philip Goff (2:27:41.600)

getting ready to perform that action. So he claimed that about half a second before the

Philip Goff (2:27:47.040)

person has consciously decided to press the button, the brain has already started the activity

Philip Goff (2:27:52.480)

that's going to lead to the action. And then later people have claimed that there's a difference of

Philip Goff (2:27:58.960)

maybe seven to 10 seconds. I mean, there are all sorts of issues with these experiments.

Lex Fridman (2:28:03.520)

But one is that as far as I'm aware, all of the quote unquote choices they focused on are just

Philip Goff (2:28:10.640)

these totally random, senseless actions like just pressing a button for no reason. And I think the

Philip Goff (2:28:15.600)

kind of free will we're interested in is free choice that involves responsiveness to reasons,

Philip Goff (2:28:21.280)

weighing up considerations. And those kind of free decisions might not happen like at an

Philip Goff (2:28:26.800)

identifiable instant. You might, when you're weighing it up, should I get married? You know,

Lex Fridman (2:28:31.680)

should I get married? You might edge slowly towards one side or the other.

Lex Fridman (2:28:38.960)

And so it could be that maybe the liberic, I think there are other problems with the

Philip Goff (2:28:44.160)

liberate stuff, but maybe they show that we can't freely choose to do something totally senseless,

Philip Goff (2:28:50.800)

whatever that would mean. But that doesn't show we can't freely, in this strong libertarian sense,

Philip Goff (2:28:59.280)

respond to considerations of reason and value. To be fair, it will be difficult to see what

Philip Goff (2:29:05.280)

kind of experiment we could set up to test that. But just because we can't yet set up that kind

Philip Goff (2:29:13.040)

of experiment, we shouldn't, you know, pretend we know more than we do. So yeah, so for those

Philip Goff (2:29:16.960)

reasons, I don't, well, the third consideration you raised is different. Again, this is the

Philip Goff (2:29:22.160)

debate I have with Sean Carroll. Would this conflict with physics? I just think we don't

Philip Goff (2:29:27.360)

know enough about the brain to know whether there are causal dynamics in the brain that are

Philip Goff (2:29:32.720)

not reducible to underlying chemistry and physics. And so then Sean Carroll says, well,

Philip Goff (2:29:40.720)

that would mean our physics is wrong. So he focuses on the core theory, which is the name for

Philip Goff (2:29:48.480)

standard model of particle physics plus the weak limit of general relativity. So, you know,

Philip Goff (2:29:54.320)

we can't totally bring quantum mechanics and relativity together. But actually,

Philip Goff (2:30:01.040)

the circumstances in which we can't bring them together are just in situations of very high

Philip Goff (2:30:06.800)

gravity, for example, when you're about to go into a black hole or something. Actually,

Philip Goff (2:30:09.920)

in terrestrial circumstances, we can bring them together in the core theory. And then Sean wants

Philip Goff (2:30:17.040)

to say, well, we can be very confident that core theory is correct. And so if there were

Philip Goff (2:30:24.080)

libertarian free will in the brain, the core theory would be wrong. I mean, this is something

Philip Goff (2:30:29.760)

I'm not sure about, and I'm still thinking about, and I'm learning from my discussion with Sean,

Lex Fridman (2:30:35.200)

but I'm still not totally clear what it could be. Suppose we did discover strong emergence

Philip Goff (2:30:41.040)

in the brain, whether it's free will or something else. Perhaps what we would say is not that the

Philip Goff (2:30:45.680)

core theory is wrong, but we'd say the core theory is correct in its own terms, namely,

Philip Goff (2:30:55.040)

capturing the causal capacities of particles and fields. But then it's a further assumption

Lex Fridman (2:31:02.240)

whether they're the only things that are running the show. Maybe there are also

Philip Goff (2:31:06.400)

fundamental causal capacities associated with systems. And then if we discover this strong

Philip Goff (2:31:12.400)

emergence, then when we work out what happens in the brain, we have to look to the core theory,

Philip Goff (2:31:16.240)

the causal capacities of particles and fields. And we have to look to what we know about these

Philip Goff (2:31:22.160)

strongly emergent causal capacities of systems, and maybe they co determine what happens in the

Philip Goff (2:31:27.360)

system. So I don't know whether that makes sense or not. But I mean, the more important point,

Philip Goff (2:31:33.120)

I mean, that's in a way a kind of branding point, how we brand this. The more important point is we

Philip Goff (2:31:37.200)

just don't know enough about the workings of the brain to know whether there are

Philip Goff (2:31:40.800)

in strongly emergent causal dynamics, whether or not, that would mean we have to modify physics,

Philip Goff (2:31:46.960)

or maybe just we think physics is not the total story of what's running the show. But we just,

Philip Goff (2:31:52.960)

if it turned out empirically that everything's reducible to underlying physics and chemistry,

Philip Goff (2:31:59.040)

sure, I would drop any commitment to libertarian free will in a heartbeat. It's an empirical

Philip Goff (2:32:05.600)

in a heartbeat. It's an empirical question. Maybe that's why, as you say, in principle,

Philip Goff (2:32:10.800)

is easier to get a grip on. But we're a million miles away from being at that stage.

Philip Goff (2:32:14.960)

Well, I don't know if we're a million miles. I hope we're not because one of the ways I think

Philip Goff (2:32:18.640)

to get to it is by engineering systems. So yeah, my hope is to understand intelligence by

Philip Goff (2:32:25.680)

building intelligent systems to understand consciousness by building systems that,

Philip Goff (2:32:31.280)

let's say the easy thing, which is not the easy thing, but the first thing, which is to try to

Philip Goff (2:32:38.640)

create the illusion of consciousness. Through that process, I think you start to understand

Philip Goff (2:32:43.520)

much more about consciousness, about intelligence. And then the same with free will, I think those

Philip Goff (2:32:48.080)

are all tied very closely together, at least from our narrow human perspective. And when you try to

Philip Goff (2:32:54.480)

engineer systems that interact deeply with humans, that form friends with humans, that humans fall

Philip Goff (2:33:01.280)

in love with, and they fall in love with humans, then you start to have to try to deeply understand

Philip Goff (2:33:08.560)

ourselves, to try to deeply understand what is intelligence in the human mind, what is

Philip Goff (2:33:14.800)

consciousness, what is free will. And I think engineering is just another way to do philosophy.

Philip Goff (2:33:21.440)

Yeah, no, I certainly think there's a role for that, and it would be an important consideration

Philip Goff (2:33:26.640)

if we could seemingly replicate in an artificial way the ability to choose. That would be a

Philip Goff (2:33:40.960)

consideration in thinking about these things. But there's still the question of whether that's how

Philip Goff (2:33:46.080)

we do it. So even if we could replicate behavior in a certain way in an artificial system,

Philip Goff (2:33:52.480)

it's not until we understand the workings of our brains, it's not clear. That's how we do it. And

Philip Goff (2:33:58.320)

as I say, the kind of free will I'm interested in is where we respond to reasons, considerations

Philip Goff (2:34:06.160)

of value. How would we tell whether a system was genuinely grasping and responding to the

Philip Goff (2:34:15.520)

facts about value, or whether they were just replicating, giving the impression of doing so.

Philip Goff (2:34:26.400)

I don't know even how to think about that.

Philip Goff (2:34:28.240)

On the process to building them, I think we'll get a lot of insights. And once they become

Philip Goff (2:34:34.320)

conscious, what's going to happen is exactly the same thing is happening in chess now,

Philip Goff (2:34:39.520)

which is once the chess engines far superseded the capabilities of humans, humans just kind of forgot

Philip Goff (2:34:49.040)

about them, or they use them to help them out to study and stuff. But we still, we say, okay,

Philip Goff (2:34:53.920)

let the engines be, and then we humans will just play amongst each other. Just like dolphins and

Philip Goff (2:35:01.280)

hamsters are not so concerned about humans except for a source of food. They do their own thing,

Philip Goff (2:35:08.080)

they do their own thing and let us humans launch rockets into space and all that kind of stuff.

Philip Goff (2:35:14.080)

They don't care. I think we'll just focus on ourselves. But in the process of building

Philip Goff (2:35:18.880)

intelligence systems, conscious systems, I think we'll get to get a deeper understanding of

Philip Goff (2:35:26.960)

the role of consciousness in the human mind. And like what are its origins? Is it the base layer

Philip Goff (2:35:33.120)

of reality? Is it a strongly emergent phenomena of the brain? Or just as you sort of brilliantly

Philip Goff (2:35:40.240)

put here, it could be both. Like they're not mutually exclusive. Dealing with consciousness

Philip Goff (2:35:45.360)

needs to be an interdisciplinary task. We need, you know, philosophers, neuroscientists,

Philip Goff (2:35:52.000)

physicists, engineers replicating these things artificially and all needs to be working in step.

Philip Goff (2:36:01.200)

And, you know, I'm quite interested. I mean, a lot more and more scientists get in touch with me,

Philip Goff (2:36:06.160)

actually, you know, saying that was one of the great things about I think that's come from

Philip Goff (2:36:11.360)

writing a popular book is not just getting the ideas out to general audience, but getting the

Philip Goff (2:36:15.760)

ideas out to scientists and scientists get into saying that this in some way connects to my work.

Lex Fridman (2:36:20.720)

And I would like to kind of start to put together a network of an interdisciplinary network of

Philip Goff (2:36:26.160)

scientists and philosophers and engineers, perhaps, you know, interested in a panpsychist approach.

Lex Fridman (2:36:32.800)

And because I think, so far, panpsychism has just been sort of trying to justify its existence.

Lex Fridman (2:36:38.160)

And that's important. But I think once you just get on with an active research program,

Lex Fridman (2:36:42.560)

that's when people start taking it seriously, I think.

Lex Fridman (2:36:47.360)

Do you think we're living in a simulation?

Philip Goff (2:36:49.200)

No, I think, is there some aspect of that thought experiment that's compelling to you

Lex Fridman (2:36:55.840)

within the framework of panpsychism?

Philip Goff (2:36:59.600)

It's an important and serious argument. And, you know, it's not to be laughed away. I suppose one

Philip Goff (2:37:07.360)

issue I have with it is there's a crucial assumption there that consciousness is substrate

Philip Goff (2:37:14.080)

independent, as the jargon goes, which means it's software rather than hardware, right? It's depend

Philip Goff (2:37:22.880)

on organization rather than the stuff. Whereas as a panpsychist, I think consciousness is the stuff

Philip Goff (2:37:28.320)

of the brain. It's the stuff of matter. So I think just taking the organizational properties,

Philip Goff (2:37:34.480)

the software in my brain and uploading them, you wouldn't get the stuff in my brain. So I

Philip Goff (2:37:39.680)

am actually worried if at some point in the future we start uploading our minds and we think,

Philip Goff (2:37:45.360)

oh my God, granny's still there. I can email granny after her body's rotted in the ground.

Lex Fridman (2:37:50.800)

And we all start uploading our brains. It could be we're just committing suicide. We're just

Philip Goff (2:37:56.080)

getting rid of our consciousness. Because I think that wouldn't, for me, preserve the experience,

Philip Goff (2:38:04.160)

that wouldn't, for me, preserve the experience just getting the software features. So that's

Philip Goff (2:38:12.480)

a crucial, anyway, that's a crucial premise of this simulation argument because the idea

Philip Goff (2:38:17.200)

in a simulated universe, I don't think you necessarily would have consciousness.

Philip Goff (2:38:21.520)

It's interesting that you as a panpsychist are attached, because to me,

Philip Goff (2:38:26.560)

panpsychism would encourage the thought that there's not a significant difference. At the very

Philip Goff (2:38:35.920)

bottom, it's not substrate independent, but you can have consciousness in a human and then move

Philip Goff (2:38:44.160)

it to something else. You can move it to the cloud. You can move it to the computer. It feels

Philip Goff (2:38:50.240)

like that's much more possible if consciousness is the base layer. Yes, you could certainly,

Philip Goff (2:38:58.480)

it allows for the possibility of creating artificial consciousness, right? Because there's

Philip Goff (2:39:04.640)

not souls, there aren't any kind of extra magical ingredients. So yeah, it definitely allows the

Philip Goff (2:39:10.080)

possibility of artificial consciousness and maybe preserving my consciousness in some sort of

Philip Goff (2:39:15.120)

artificial way. My only point, I suppose, is just replicating the computational or

Philip Goff (2:39:22.560)

organizational features would not, for me, preserve consciousness. I mean, some opponents

Philip Goff (2:39:30.000)

of materialism disagree with me on that. I think David Chalmers is an opponent of materialist.

Philip Goff (2:39:34.160)

He's a kind of dualist, but he thinks the way the psychophysical laws work, they hook onto the

Philip Goff (2:39:41.600)

computational or organizational features of matter. So he thinks, I think he thinks you could upload

Philip Goff (2:39:46.800)

your consciousness. I tend to think not. So in that sense, we're not living in a simulation

Philip Goff (2:39:55.520)

in the sort of specific computational view of things and that substrate matters to you. Yeah,

Philip Goff (2:40:02.720)

I think so. Yeah. Yeah. And in that you agree with Sean Carroll that physics matters.

Philip Goff (2:40:07.520)

Yeah. Physics is our best way of capturing what the stuff of the world does. Yeah. But not the

Philip Goff (2:40:15.920)

whatness, the being of the stuff. Yeah, the isness. The isness, thank you. Russell Brand,

Philip Goff (2:40:23.600)

I had a conversation with Russell Brand and he said, oh, you mean the isness? I thought that was

Lex Fridman (2:40:27.440)

a good way of putting it. The isness. The isness of stuff. Russell's great.

Philip Goff (2:40:31.120)

The big ridiculous question. What do you think is the meaning of all of this? You write in your book

Philip Goff (2:40:38.960)

that the entry for our reality in the Hitchhiker's Guide might read, a physical universe

Philip Goff (2:40:45.920)

whose intrinsic nature is constituted of consciousness, worth a visit. So our

Philip Goff (2:40:54.640)

whole conversation has been about the first part of that sentence. What about the second part? Worth

Lex Fridman (2:41:01.280)

a visit. Why is this place worth a visit? Why does it have meaning? Why does it have value at all?

Lex Fridman (2:41:09.840)

Why? These are big questions. I mean, firstly, I do think panpsychism,

Philip Goff (2:41:17.520)

it is important to think about four considerations of meaning and value. As we've already discussed,

Philip Goff (2:41:26.800)

I think consciousness is the root of everything that matters in life, from deep emotions,

Philip Goff (2:41:33.520)

subtle thoughts, beautiful sensory experiences. And yet, I think that the answer is

Philip Goff (2:41:41.200)

subtle thoughts, beautiful sensory experiences. And yet, I believe our official scientific world

Philip Goff (2:41:50.240)

view is incompatible with the reality of consciousness. I mean, that's controversial,

Lex Fridman (2:41:56.000)

but that's what I think. And I think people feel this on an intuitive level.

Philip Goff (2:42:00.640)

It's maybe part of what Max Weber called the disenchantment of nature. They know

Philip Goff (2:42:07.120)

their feelings and experiences are not just electrochemical signaling. I mean, they might

Philip Goff (2:42:11.840)

just have that very informed intuition, but I think that can be rigorously supported. So I think

Philip Goff (2:42:16.480)

this can lead to a sense of alienation and a sense that we lack a framework for understanding the

Philip Goff (2:42:23.760)

meaning and significance of our lives. And in the absence of that, people turn to other things to

Philip Goff (2:42:29.360)

make sense of the meaning of their lives, like nationalism, fundamentalist religion, consumerism.

Lex Fridman (2:42:35.440)

So I think panpsychism is important in that regard in bringing together the

Lex Fridman (2:42:41.680)

quantitative facts of physical science with the, as it were, the human truth,

Philip Goff (2:42:46.560)

by which I just mean the qualitative reality of our own experience.

Lex Fridman (2:42:52.880)

As I've already said, I do think there are objective facts about value and

Lex Fridman (2:42:59.440)

what we ought to do and what we ought to believe that we respond to. And that's very mysterious to

Philip Goff (2:43:04.880)

make sense of both how there could be such facts and how we could know about them and respond to

Philip Goff (2:43:09.440)

them. But I do think there are such facts and they're mostly to do with kinds of conscious

Philip Goff (2:43:15.920)

experience. So they're there to be discovered and much of the human condition is to discover those

Philip Goff (2:43:24.320)

objective sources of value. I think so, yeah. And then, I mean, moving away from panpsychism to the,

Philip Goff (2:43:31.120)

you know, at an even bigger level, I suppose I think it is important to me to live in hope that

Philip Goff (2:43:40.640)

there's a purpose to existence and that, you know, what I do contributes in some small way to that

Philip Goff (2:43:48.320)

greater purpose. But, you know, I would say I don't know if there's a purpose to existence. I

Philip Goff (2:43:55.040)

think some things point in that direction, some things point away from it. But I don't think you

Philip Goff (2:44:00.720)

need certainty or even high probability to have faith in something. So take an analogy. Suppose

Philip Goff (2:44:09.280)

you've got a friend who's very seriously ill, maybe there's a 30% chance they're going to make

Philip Goff (2:44:14.320)

it. You shouldn't believe your friend's going to get better, you know, because probably not. But

Lex Fridman (2:44:20.240)

what you can say is, you know, you can say to your friend, I have faith that you're going to get

Philip Goff (2:44:23.680)

better. That is, I choose to live in hope about that possibility. I choose to orientate my life

Philip Goff (2:44:32.240)

towards that hope. Similarly, you know, I don't think we know whether or not there's a purpose to

Philip Goff (2:44:37.840)

existence, but I think we can make the choice to live in hope of that possibility. And I find that

Philip Goff (2:44:47.200)

a worthwhile and fulfilling way to live. So maybe as your editor, I would collaborate with you on

Philip Goff (2:44:56.160)

the edit of the Hitchhiker's Guide entry that instead of worth a visit, we'll insert hopefully

Philip Goff (2:45:05.200)

worth a visit. Or the inhabitants hoped that you would think it's worth a visit. Philip,

Philip Goff (2:45:14.080)

you're an incredible mind, incredible human being, and indeed are humble. And I'm really happy that

Philip Goff (2:45:22.480)

you're able to argue and take on some of these difficult questions with some of the most brilliant

Philip Goff (2:45:28.800)

people in the world, which are the philosophers thinking about the human mind. So this was an

Philip Goff (2:45:33.040)

awesome conversation. I hope you continue talking to folks like Sam Harris. I'm so glad you talked

Philip Goff (2:45:38.000)

to Joe. I can't wait to see what you write, what you say, what you think next. Thank you so much

Philip Goff (2:45:43.920)

for talking today. Thanks very much, Lex. This has been a really fascinating conversation. I've got

Philip Goff (2:45:48.880)

a lot I need to think about actually just from this conversation, but thanks for chatting to me.

Philip Goff (2:45:53.840)

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Philip Goff. To support this podcast,

Philip Goff (2:45:57.600)

please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from

Philip Goff (2:46:02.480)

Carl Jung. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.

Philip Goff (2:46:10.960)

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness

Philip Goff (2:46:16.560)

conscious. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Philip Goff (30:05.120)

world. Like if you weren't doing that, the world might fall apart. And you, it feels like that.

Philip Goff (30:11.600)

I think there's, there's, there's meaning in that. Like you embracing the full, like the full

Philip Goff (30:20.880)

experience of that, you living the richness of that as if it has meaning, will give meaning to it.

Lex Fridman (30:26.320)

And then whatever genius comes of that as you as a one little intelligent aunt will make a better

Philip Goff (30:32.480)

life for everybody else. Perhaps I'm defending the blades of grass example, because I can literally

Philip Goff (30:37.600)

imagine myself enjoying this task as somebody who's OCD in a certain kind of way in quantitative.

Lex Fridman (30:43.040)

But now you're ruining the exam because you imagine someone enjoying it. I'm imagining

Philip Goff (30:45.680)

someone who doesn't enjoy it. We don't want a life that's just full of pleasure. Like we just sit

Philip Goff (30:52.320)

there, you know, having a big sugar high all the time. We want a life where we do things that are

Philip Goff (30:58.080)

worthwhile. If for something to be worthwhile, just is for it to be a basic life goal, then

Lex Fridman (31:08.240)

that, that mode of reflection doesn't really make sense. We can't really think,

Philip Goff (31:12.080)

did I do things worthwhile on the, on the David Hume type picture? All it is for something to be

Philip Goff (31:18.240)

worthwhile is it was a basic goal of yours or derived from a basic goal. And yeah.

Philip Goff (31:23.360)

Yeah. I mean, I think goal and worthwhile aren't, I think goal is a boring word. I'm more sort of

Philip Goff (31:31.760)

existential. It's like, did you ride the roller coaster of life? Did you fully experience life

Philip Goff (31:38.400)

that, and in that sense, I mean, the blaze of grass is something that could be deeply joyful.

Lex Fridman (31:44.800)

And that's in that way, I think suffering could be joyful in the full context of life. It's the

Philip Goff (31:50.000)

roller coaster of life. Like without suffering, without struggle, without pain, without depression,

Philip Goff (31:55.600)

with sadness, there's not the highs. I mean, that's this, that's a fucked up thing about life is that

Philip Goff (32:02.640)

the lows really make the highs that much richer and deeper and, and like taste better. Right. Like

Philip Goff (32:13.920)

the, like I was, I tweeted this, I was, I couldn't sleep and I was like late at night.

Lex Fridman (32:21.680)

And I know it's like a obvious statement, but like every love story eventually, you know,

Philip Goff (32:32.480)

ends in loss in tragedy. So like this feeling of love at the end, there's always going to be

Philip Goff (32:42.960)

tragedy. Even if it's the most amazing lifelong love with another human being,

Philip Goff (32:50.080)

one of you is going to die. And I don't know which is worse, but both, both are not going to be pretty.

Lex Fridman (32:57.760)

And so that, the sense that it's finite, the sense that it's going to end in a low,

Philip Goff (33:04.720)

that gives like richness to those kind of evenings when you realize this fucking thing ends,

Philip Goff (33:12.000)

this thing ends. The feeling that it ends, that bad taste, that bad feeling that it ends

Philip Goff (33:20.640)

gives meaning, gives joy, gives, I don't know, pleasure is this loaded word, but

Philip Goff (33:26.640)

gives some kind of a deep pleasure to the experience when it's good. And I mean, and that's

Philip Goff (33:34.000)

the Blades of Grass, you know, they have that to me. But you're perhaps right that it's like

Philip Goff (33:43.840)

reducing it to set of goals or something like that is kind of removing the magic of life.

Philip Goff (33:50.880)

Because I think what makes counting the Blades of Grass joyful is just because it's life.

Philip Goff (33:57.440)

Okay. So it sounds like you, it sounds like you reject the David Hume type picture anyway,

Philip Goff (34:04.240)

because you're saying just because you have it as a goal, that's what it is to be worthwhile.

Lex Fridman (34:08.880)

But you're saying, no, it's because it's engaging with life, riding the roller coaster.

Lex Fridman (34:14.000)

So that does sound like in some sense, there are facts independent of our personal goal choices

Philip Goff (34:20.400)

about what it means to live a good life. And I mean, coming back full circle to

Philip Goff (34:24.800)

the start of this was what makes us different to animals. I don't think at the end of a hamster's

Lex Fridman (34:29.520)

life, it's it thinks, did I ride the roller coaster? Did I really live life to the full?

Lex Fridman (34:34.560)

That is not a mode of reflection that's available to non human animals. So

Lex Fridman (34:40.720)

what do you think is the role of death? And in all of this, the fear of death? Does that

Philip Goff (34:48.080)

interplay with consciousness? Does this self reflection? Do you think there's some deep

Philip Goff (34:57.200)

connection between this ability to contemplate the fact that the our flame of consciousness

Philip Goff (35:05.680)

eventually goes out? Yeah, I don't think unfortunately panpsychism helps particularly

Philip Goff (35:13.120)

with life after death, because for the panpsychist, there's nothing supernatural.

Philip Goff (35:20.160)

There's nothing beyond the physical. All there is really is ultimately particles and fields.

Philip Goff (35:26.240)

It's just that we think the ultimate nature of particles and fields is consciousness.

Lex Fridman (35:30.960)

But I guess when the matter in my brain ceases to be ordered in a way that

Philip Goff (35:41.200)

sustains the particular kind of consciousness I enjoy in waking life, then in some sense,

Philip Goff (35:48.720)

I will I will cease to be although I do that the final chapter of my book Galileo's error

Philip Goff (35:54.720)

is more experimental. So the first four chapters of the cold blooded case for the panpsychist

Philip Goff (36:01.280)

view is that the best solution to the hard problem of consciousness. The last chapter

Philip Goff (36:05.920)

we talk about meaning. Yeah, I talk about meaning to about free will. And I talk about

Philip Goff (36:10.080)

mystical experiences. So I always want to emphasize that panpsychism is not necessarily

Philip Goff (36:17.600)

connected to anything spiritual. You know, a lot of people defending this view, like David Chalmers

Philip Goff (36:22.880)

or Luke Roloffs are just total atheist secularists, right? They don't believe in any kind of

Philip Goff (36:29.520)

transcendent reality. They just believe in feelings, you know, mundane consciousness and

Philip Goff (36:34.960)

think that needs explaining in our conventional scientific approach can't cut it. But if for

Philip Goff (36:42.800)

independent reasons you are motivated to some spiritual picture of reality, then maybe a

Philip Goff (36:48.960)

panpsychist view is more consonant with that. So if you if you have a mystical experience where you

Philip Goff (36:57.600)

it seems to you in this experience that there is this higher form of consciousness at the

Philip Goff (37:03.840)

root of all things. If you're a materialist, you've got to think that's a delusion. You know,

Philip Goff (37:08.560)

there's just something in your brain making you think that it's not real. But if you're a

Philip Goff (37:12.800)

panpsychist and you already think the fundamental nature of reality is constituted of consciousness,

Philip Goff (37:19.760)

it's not that much of a leap to think that this higher form of consciousness you seem to

Philip Goff (37:27.040)

apprehend in the mystical experience is part of that underlying reality. And, you know, in many

Philip Goff (37:33.120)

different cultures, experienced meditators have claimed to have experiences in which it becomes

Philip Goff (37:41.040)

apparent to them that there is an element of consciousness that is universal. So this is

Philip Goff (37:47.920)

sometimes called universal consciousness. So on this view, your mind and my mind are not

Philip Goff (37:56.160)

totally distinct. Each of our individual conscious minds is built upon the foundations

Philip Goff (38:02.240)

of universal consciousness. And universal consciousness as it exists in me is one and

Philip Goff (38:07.360)

the same thing as universal consciousness as it exists in you. So I've never had one of these

Philip Goff (38:14.000)

experiences. But if one is a panpsychist, I think one is more open to that possibility. I don't see

Lex Fridman (38:21.920)

why it shouldn't be the case that that is part of the nature of consciousness and maybe something

Philip Goff (38:27.760)

that is apparent in certain deep states of meditation. And so what I explore in the

Philip Goff (38:32.720)

experimental final chapter of my book is that could allow for a kind of impersonal life after

Philip Goff (38:40.320)

death. Because if that view is true, then even when the particular aspects of my conscious

Philip Goff (38:47.760)

experience fall away, that element of universal consciousness at the core of my identity would

Philip Goff (38:55.120)

continue to exist. So I'd sort of be, as it were, absorbed into universal consciousness.

Lex Fridman (39:00.240)

So Buddhists and Hindu mystics try to meditate to get rid of all the bad karma to be absorbed into

Philip Goff (39:10.240)

universal consciousness. It could be that if there's no karma, if there's no reverb, maybe

Philip Goff (39:16.160)

everyone gets enlightened when they die. Maybe you just sink back into universal consciousness.

Lex Fridman (39:21.600)

So I also, coming back to morality, suggest this could provide some kind of basis for altruism or

Philip Goff (39:30.720)

non egotism. Because if you think egotism implicitly assumes that we are utterly distinct

Philip Goff (39:38.080)

individuals, whereas on this view, we're not, we overlap to an extent that something at the core

Philip Goff (39:44.880)

of our being is even in this life, we overlap. That would be this view that some experienced

Philip Goff (39:52.000)

meditators claim becomes apparent to them that there is something at the core of my identity

Philip Goff (39:58.560)

that is one and the same as the thing at the core of your identity, this universal consciousness.

Philip Goff (40:05.680)

Yeah, there is something very, like you and I in this conversation, there's a few people listening

Philip Goff (40:12.320)

to this, all of us are in a kind of single mind together. There's some small aspect of that,

Philip Goff (40:22.000)

or maybe a big aspect about us humans. So certainly in a space of ideas, we kind of

Philip Goff (40:29.360)

meld together for time, at least in a conversation and kind of play with that idea. And then we're

Philip Goff (40:36.160)

clearly all thinking, like if I say pink elephant, there's going to be a few people that are now

Philip Goff (40:41.040)

visualizing a pink elephant. We're all thinking about that pink elephant together. We're all in

Philip Goff (40:46.800)

the room together thinking about this pink elephant and we're like rotating it in our minds

Philip Goff (40:54.560)

together. What is that? Is there a different instantiation of that pink elephant in everybody's

Philip Goff (41:01.440)

mind or is it the same elephant? And we have the same mind exploring that elephant. Now,

Philip Goff (41:06.400)

if we in our mind start petting that elephant, like touching it, that experience that we're now

Philip Goff (41:11.920)

like thinking what that would feel like, what's that? Is that all of us experiencing that together

Philip Goff (41:17.200)

or is that separate? So like there's some aspect of the togetherness that almost seems fundamental

Philip Goff (41:22.480)

to civilization, to society. Hopefully that's not too strong, but to like some of the fundamental

Philip Goff (41:29.040)

properties of the human mind, it feels like the social aspect is really important. We call it

Philip Goff (41:35.440)

social because we think of us as individual minds interacting, but if we're just like one collective

Philip Goff (41:41.600)

mind with like fingertips, they're like touching each other as it's trying to explore the elephant,

Lex Fridman (41:49.120)

but that could be just in the realm of ideas and intelligence and not in the realm of consciousness

Lex Fridman (41:54.640)

and it's interesting to see maybe it is in the realm of consciousness. Yeah, so it's obviously

Philip Goff (42:00.160)

certainly true in some sense that there are these phenomena that you're talking about of

Philip Goff (42:06.320)

collective consciousness in some sense. I suppose the question is how ontologically

Philip Goff (42:12.400)

serious do we want to be about those things? By which I mean, are they just a construction

Philip Goff (42:17.680)

of out of our minds and the fact that we interact in the standardly scientifically accepted ways

Philip Goff (42:24.960)

or is as someone like Rupert Sheldrake would think that there is some

Philip Goff (42:28.400)

metaphysical reality, there are some fields beyond the scientifically understood ones that

Philip Goff (42:33.680)

are somehow communicating this. I mean, I think that, I mean, the view I was describing was that

Philip Goff (42:39.120)

this element we're supposed to have in common is some sort of pure impersonal consciousness or

Philip Goff (42:45.520)

something rather than. So actually, I mean, an interesting figure is the Australian philosopher

Philip Goff (42:49.600)

Miri Al Bahari, who defends a kind of mystical conception of reality rooted in a advice of Adanta

Philip Goff (42:58.240)

mysticism. But like me, she's from this tradition of analytic philosophy. And so she defends this

Philip Goff (43:04.800)

in this, you know, incredibly precise, rigorous way. She defends the idea that we should think

Philip Goff (43:09.200)

of experienced meditators as providing expert testimony. So, you know, I think humans cause

Philip Goff (43:18.160)

a causing climate breakdown. I have no idea of the science behind it, you know, but I trust the

Philip Goff (43:22.960)

experts or, you know, that the universe is 14 billion years old. You know, most of our knowledge

Philip Goff (43:27.760)

is based on expert testimony. And she thinks we should think of experienced meditators,

Philip Goff (43:33.600)

these people who are telling us about this universal consciousness at the core of our being

Philip Goff (43:37.920)

as a relevant kind of expert. And so she wants to defend the rational acceptability of this

Philip Goff (43:43.920)

mystical conception of reality. So it's what, you know, I think we shouldn't be ashamed, you know,

Philip Goff (43:49.280)

we shouldn't be worried about dealing with certain views as long as it's done with rigor

Lex Fridman (43:56.240)

and seriousness. You know, I think sometimes terms like, I don't know, new age or something

Philip Goff (44:01.120)

can function a bit like racist terms. You know, a racist term picks out a group of people, but then

Philip Goff (44:07.520)

implies certain negative characteristics. So people use this term, you know, to pick out a

Philip Goff (44:11.840)

certain set of views like mystical conception of reality and imply it's kind of fluffy thinking or,

Philip Goff (44:19.040)

but, you know, you read Marielle Bihari, you read Luke Roloff's, this is serious, rigorous thought,

Philip Goff (44:25.200)

whether you agree with it or not, obviously it's hugely controversial. And so, you know,

Philip Goff (44:28.960)

the enlightenment ideal is to follow the evidence and the arguments where they lead.

Lex Fridman (44:35.280)

But it's kind of very hard for human beings to do that. I think we get stuck in some conception of

Lex Fridman (44:40.000)

how we think science ought to look. And, you know, people talk about religion as a crutch,

Lex Fridman (44:48.080)

but I think a certain kind of scientism, a certain conception of how science is supposed to be,

Philip Goff (44:54.240)

gets into people's identity and their sense of themselves and their security. And make things

Philip Goff (45:01.760)

hard if you're a panpsychist. And even the word expert becomes a kind of crutch. I mean, you use

Philip Goff (45:10.240)

the word expert. You have some kind of conception of what expertise means. Oftentimes that's,

Philip Goff (45:16.880)

you know, connected with a degree, a particularly prestigious university or something like that. Or,

Philip Goff (45:22.480)

or it's, you know, expertise is a funny one. I've noticed that anybody sort of that claims

Philip Goff (45:30.000)

they're an expert is usually not the expert. The biggest quote unquote expert that I've ever met

Philip Goff (45:36.400)

are the ones that are truly humble. So the humility is a really good sign of somebody

Philip Goff (45:42.080)

who's traveled a long road and been humbled by how little they know. So some of the best people

Philip Goff (45:47.920)

in the world at whatever the thing they've spent their life doing are the ones that are ultimately

Philip Goff (45:52.400)

humble in the face of it all. So like, just being humble for how little we know, even if we travel

Philip Goff (45:59.440)

a lifetime. I do like the idea. I mean, treating sort of like, what is it, psychonauts, like an

Philip Goff (46:06.480)

expert witness, you know, people who have traveled with the help of DMT to another place where they

Philip Goff (46:14.000)

got some deep understanding of something. And their insight is perhaps as valuable as the insight

Philip Goff (46:21.120)

of somebody who ran rigorous psychological studies at Princeton University or something.

Philip Goff (46:27.920)

Like those psychonauts, they have wisdom, if it's done rigorously, which you can also do rigorously

Philip Goff (46:34.880)

within the university, within the studies now, with psilocybin and those kinds of things. Yeah,

Philip Goff (46:40.160)

that's a fact that's fascinating. Still probably the best, one of the best works on mystical

Philip Goff (46:45.440)

experience is the chapter in William James's Varieties of Religious Experiences. And most of

Philip Goff (46:52.320)

it is just a psychological study of trying to define the characteristics of mystical experience

Philip Goff (46:57.680)

as a psychological type. But at the end, he considers the question, if you have a mystical

Lex Fridman (47:04.080)

experience, is it rational to trust it, to trust that it's telling you something about reality?

Philip Goff (47:09.760)

Something about reality. And he makes an interesting argument. He says, if you say no, you're kind of

Philip Goff (47:15.600)

applying a double standard because we all think it's okay to trust our normal sensory experiences,

Lex Fridman (47:23.040)

but we have no way of getting outside of ourselves to prove that our sensory experiences correspond

Philip Goff (47:29.440)

to an external reality. We could be in the matrix. This could be a very vivid dream.

Philip Goff (47:33.840)

You could say, oh, we do science, but a scientist only gets their data by experiencing the results

Philip Goff (47:43.360)

of their experiments. And then the question arises again, how do you know that corresponds

Philip Goff (47:47.120)

to a real world? So he thinks there's a sort of double standard in saying, it's okay to trust

Philip Goff (47:52.720)

our ordinary sensory experiences, but it's not okay for the person on DMT to trust those experiences.

Philip Goff (47:58.480)

It's very philosophically difficult to say, why is it okay in the one case and not the other? So I

Philip Goff (48:04.960)

think there's an interesting argument there, but I would like to just defend experts a little bit.

Philip Goff (48:09.760)

I mean, I agree it's very difficult, but especially in an age, I guess, where there's so much

Philip Goff (48:15.520)

information, I do think it's important to have some protection of sources of information,

Philip Goff (48:26.160)

academic institutions that we can trust. And then that's difficult because of course there are

Philip Goff (48:31.360)

non academics who do know what they're talking about. But like, if I'm interested in knowing

Philip Goff (48:36.640)

about biology, you know, you can't research everything. So I think we have to have some sense

Philip Goff (48:42.880)

of who are the experts we can trust, the people who've spent a lot of time reading all the material

Philip Goff (48:50.640)

that people have read, written, thinking about it, having their views torn apart by other people

Philip Goff (48:58.080)

working in the field. I think that is very important. And also to protect that from conflicts

Philip Goff (49:02.240)

of interest. There is a so called think tank in the UK called the Institute of Economic Affairs,

Philip Goff (49:07.680)

who are always on the BBC as experts on economic questions and they do not declare who funds them.

Philip Goff (49:14.960)

Right. So we don't know who's paying the paper. I think, you know, you shouldn't be allowed to call

Philip Goff (49:21.680)

yourself a think tank if you're not totally transparent about who's funding you. So I think

Philip Goff (49:26.480)

that's it. And I mean, this connects to panpsychism because I think the reason people, you know,

Philip Goff (49:33.200)

worry about unorthodox ideas is because they worry about how do we know when we're just

Lex Fridman (49:37.920)

losing control or losing discipline. So I do think we need to somehow protect

Philip Goff (49:42.000)

academic institutions as sources of information that we can trust. And, you know, in philosophy,

Philip Goff (49:49.120)

there's, you know, there's not much consensus on everything, but you can at least know what people

Philip Goff (49:56.320)

who have put the time in to read all the stuff, what they think about these issues. I think that

Lex Fridman (50:01.840)

is important. To push back and you push back. Who are the experts on COVID?

Philip Goff (50:07.360)

Who are the experts on COVID? Oh, again, it's a dangerous territory now.

Philip Goff (50:12.720)

Well, let me just speak to it because I am walking through that dangerous territory.

Philip Goff (50:18.400)

I'm allergic to the word expert because in my simple mind, it kind of rhymes with ego.

Philip Goff (50:31.360)

There's something about experts. If we allow too much to have a category expert and place

Philip Goff (50:40.320)

certain people in them, those people sitting on the throne start to believe it.

Lex Fridman (50:46.720)

And they start to communicate with that energy and the humility starts to dissipate.

Philip Goff (50:51.840)

I think there is value in a lifelong mastery of a skill and the pursuit of knowledge within a very

Philip Goff (51:03.440)

specific discipline. But the moment you have your name on an office, the moment you're an expert,

Philip Goff (51:10.240)

I think you destroy the very aspect, the very value of that journey towards knowledge.

Lex Fridman (51:18.160)

So some of it probably just reduces to skillful communication. Communicate in a way that shows

Philip Goff (51:26.480)

humility, that shows an open mindedness, that shows an ability to really hear what a lot of

Philip Goff (51:33.200)

people are saying. So in the case of COVID, what I've noticed, and this is probably true with

Philip Goff (51:39.680)

panpsychism as well, is so called experts, and they are extremely knowledgeable, many of them

Philip Goff (51:48.400)

are colleagues of mine, they dismiss what millions of people are saying on the internet

Philip Goff (51:55.840)

without having looked into it. With empathy and rigor, honestly, understand what are the

Philip Goff (52:02.240)

arguments being made. They say like, there's not enough time to explore all those things,

Philip Goff (52:06.720)

like there's so much stuff out there. Yeah, I think that's intellectual laziness. If you don't

Philip Goff (52:13.360)

have enough time, then don't speak so strongly with dismissal. Feel bad about it. Be apologetic

Philip Goff (52:19.840)

about the fact that you don't have enough time to explore the evidence. For example, with the heat

Philip Goff (52:25.600)

I got with Francis Collins is that he kind of said that lab leak, he kind of dismissed the

Philip Goff (52:34.560)

heat. He kind of dismissed it, showing that he didn't really deeply explore all the sort of,

Philip Goff (52:41.680)

the huge amount of circumstantial evidence out there, the battles that are going on out there.

Philip Goff (52:48.320)

There's a lot of people really tensely discussing this and being, showing humility in the face

Philip Goff (52:55.920)

of that battle of ideas, I think is really important. And I just been very disappointed

Philip Goff (53:00.800)

in so called expertise in the space of science and showing humility and showing humanity and

Philip Goff (53:07.200)

kindness and empathy towards other human beings. That's, at the same time, obviously, I love

Philip Goff (53:15.200)

Jiro Junsu's sushi lifelong pursuit of like getting, like in computer science, Don Knuth,

Lex Fridman (53:23.680)

like some of my biggest heroes are people that like, when nobody else cares,

Philip Goff (53:28.560)

they stay on one topic for their whole life and they just find the beautiful little things about

Philip Goff (53:34.320)

there's puzzles they keep solving. And yes, sometimes a virus happens or something happens

Philip Goff (53:39.680)

with that person with their puzzles becomes like the center of the whole world because that puzzles

Philip Goff (53:46.720)

becomes all of a sudden really important, but still there's possibilities on them to show humility

Lex Fridman (53:51.760)

and to be open minded to the fact that they, even if they spent their whole life doing it,

Philip Goff (53:56.080)

even if their whole community is telling them, giving them awards and giving them citations

Lex Fridman (54:01.920)

and giving them all kinds of stuff where like they're bowing down before them, how smart they

Philip Goff (54:07.200)

are, they still know nothing relative to all the stuff, the mysteries that are out there.

Philip Goff (54:13.840)

Yeah, well, I don't know how much we're disagreeing. I mean, these are totally valid issues and of

Philip Goff (54:18.800)

course, expertise goes wrong in all sorts of ways. It's totally fallible. I suppose

Philip Goff (54:24.480)

I would just say, what is the alternative? What do we just say? All information is equal.

Philip Goff (54:32.480)

Because as a voter, I've got to decide who to vote for and I've got to evaluate and I can't

Philip Goff (54:41.600)

look into all of the economics and all of the relevant science. And so I just think maybe it's

Philip Goff (54:52.000)

like Churchill said about democracy, it's the worst system of government apart from all the rest.

Philip Goff (54:57.360)

I think about panpsychism, it's the worst theory of consciousness apart from all the rest.

Lex Fridman (55:01.360)

But I just think expertise, the peer review system, I think it's terrible in so many ways.

Philip Goff (55:09.600)

Yes, people should show more humility, but I can't see a viable alternative. I think

Philip Goff (55:15.760)

philosopher Bernard Williams had a really nice nuanced discussion of the problems of titles

Lex Fridman (55:20.560)

and how they also function in a society. They do have some positive function. The very first time

Philip Goff (55:29.840)

I lectured in philosophy before I got a professorship was teaching at a continuing

Philip Goff (55:40.480)

education college. So it's kind of retired people who want to learn some more things. And I just

Philip Goff (55:48.400)

totally pitched it too high. And Gait talked about Bernard Williams on titles and hierarchies.

Lex Fridman (55:54.480)

And these kind of people in their 70s and 80s would just instantly started interrupting saying,

Lex Fridman (56:00.800)

what is philosophy? And it was a disaster. And I just remember in the breaks, a sort of elderly

Philip Goff (56:07.360)

lady came up and said, I've decided to take Egyptology instead. But that was my introduction

Philip Goff (56:14.400)

to teaching. Anyway. But sort of titles and accomplishments is a nice starting point,

Lex Fridman (56:21.920)

but doesn't buy you the whole thing. So you don't get to just say, this is true because I'm an

Philip Goff (56:28.880)

expert. You still have to convince people. One of the things I really like to practice martial arts.

Philip Goff (56:34.960)

Yeah. And for people who don't know, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is one of them. And you sometimes wear

Philip Goff (56:42.160)

these pajamas, pajama looking things, and you wear a belt. So I happen to be a black belt in

Philip Goff (56:47.840)

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. And I also train in what's called no gi, so you don't wear the pajamas.

Lex Fridman (56:54.400)

And when you don't wear the pajamas, nobody knows what rank you are. Nobody knows if you're a black

Philip Goff (57:00.480)

belt or a white belt or if you're a complete beginner or not. And when you wear the pajamas

Philip Goff (57:06.640)

called the gi, you wear the rank. And people treat you very differently. When they see my black belt,

Philip Goff (57:13.440)

they treat me differently. They kind of defer to my expertise. If they're kicking my ass,

Philip Goff (57:21.360)

that's probably because like I am working on something like new or maybe I'm letting them win.

Lex Fridman (57:30.720)

But when there's no belts and it doesn't matter if I've been doing this for 15 years,

Philip Goff (57:35.600)

it doesn't matter. None of it matters. What matters is the raw interaction of just trying

Lex Fridman (57:42.160)

to kick each other's ass and seeing like, what is this chess game, like a human chess?

Philip Goff (57:49.280)

Who, what are the ideas that we're playing with? And I think there's a dance there. Yes,

Philip Goff (57:54.720)

it's valuable to know a person as a black belt when you take consideration of the advice of

Philip Goff (58:00.800)

different people, me versus somebody who's only practiced for like a couple of days.

Lex Fridman (58:04.320)

But at the same time, the raw practice of ideas that is combat and the raw practice of exchange

Philip Goff (58:12.240)

of ideas that is science needs to often throw away expertise. And in communicating, like there's

Philip Goff (58:20.160)

another thing to science and expertise, which is leadership. It's not just, so the scientific

Philip Goff (58:26.480)

method in the review process is this rigorous battle of ideas between scientists. But there's

Philip Goff (58:33.120)

also a stepping up and inspiring the world and communicating ideas to the world. And that skill

Philip Goff (58:39.760)

of communication, I suppose that's my biggest criticism of so called experts in science.

Philip Goff (58:47.200)

Is there just shitty communicators? Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I can tell you, I get very frustrated

Philip Goff (58:52.960)

with philosophers not reaching out more. I mean, I think it might be partly that we're trained to

Philip Goff (59:00.480)

get watertight arguments, respond to all objections. And as you do that, eventually it

Philip Goff (59:06.880)

gets more complicated and the jargon comes in. So to write a more accessible book or article,

Philip Goff (59:15.840)

you have to loosen the arguments a bit. And then we worry that other philosophers will think,

Philip Goff (59:20.160)

oh, that's a really crap argument. So I mean, the way I did it, I wrote my academic book first,

Philip Goff (59:24.720)

Consciousness and Fundamental Reality, and then a more accessible book, Galileo's Error,

Philip Goff (59:30.880)

where the arguments, you know, not as rigorously worked out. So then I can say the proper arguments

Philip Goff (59:35.760)

there, you know, the further arguments there. That's brilliantly done, by the way. Like,

Philip Goff (59:40.480)

that's such a, so for people who don't know, you first wrote Consciousness and Fundamental

Philip Goff (59:46.080)

Reality. So that's the academic book, also very good. I flew through it last night, bought it.

Lex Fridman (59:51.920)

And then obviously the popular book is Galileo's Error, Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness.

Philip Goff (59:57.840)

That's kind of the right way to do it. To show that you're legit, your community to the world,