Consciousness Live! with Philip Goff (S2 E10)

0:00 the returning champion Philip Goff he's a third time if you bid on so you've definitely been on more than anyone else that not that that's a huge but still yeah that's why you're the returning champion anyway Philip like anyone who doesn't know already can you say a little bit about who you are and what you do I am a philosopher at Durham University and I guess I mainly focus on philosophy of mind consciousness I'm interested in how to fit consciousness into our overall theory of reality I'm

0:35 just in general I think I'm interested in things that are hard to fit into our standard scientific picture of the world things like value mathematics abstract objects freewill not because I'd you know not because I like things that don't fit in because I like I want everything to fit in it's a sort of anal thing I want it all to fit together how does it all fit together so kind of thing keep me awake at night so that's my am that's that's that's me I suppose okay well very good and so you

1:09 congratulations on your book this is Galileo's error for those people who don't know it's now officially out on the fifth right it was when it officially came out fifth in the in the US seventh in the UK oh I see okay uh-huh and so this is a really good book by the way I enjoyed reading it kind of very very clear concise statement of your view in a way that's accessible to people who may not be in to all the familiarities of the you know Post Chalmers area and philosopher in philosophy brilliant thanks yeah I was

1:44 trying to do is just you know everything so specialized these days and you can have ideas that the you know that's causing a lot of excitement within a particular branch of academia but you know nobody knows about them outside of you know your particular you know area of philosophy even so I was just trying to write an ultra excites I've already published an academic book called consciousness and fundamental reality a few years ago so I'm just trying to publish really really accessible book you know to get these ideas out to more people I

2:18 think it'll work so it'll either have one of two impacts it'll either make people realize pen psychism should be taken seriously or it'll make people think well so much for philosophy at least felt at least they'll know you know the happy be able to make an informed judgment about whatever it's all [ __ ] something to this I mean you do make a good case for the the role of philosophy I think anybody wanted the nice things about the book even though obviously there's a lot I disagree with there's so I thought a lot of that I

2:51 found to agree with and one of the things I thought was really nice was your defense of the role of philosophy in Theory choice and in scientific advances generally so whatever side of the bay you come on it's nice to just have a kind of clear statement that yeah philosophy is important it's made some contributions yeah thanks Richard sorry before I before I got on to the the chapter where I talk about the arguments against materialism you know I just imagined there's such a skepticism that you know the I even the idea that philosophy has

3:24 any role to play in finding out what the universe is like people just amused by that idea they think you know you look to scientists to do experiments and you know maybe philosophers then come in and make us feel a bit better but the world sciences resigned as to but they they don't people don't tend to think they play a role in actually finding out stuff so before I got on to these arguments anticipating this I spent a lot of time yeah discussing were philosophy can can demonstrate Eve at least negative facts for example our

4:01 Galileo's famous proof that that a certain part of Aristotelian physics was incoherent you know he you know I think he's in us in a way the only perhaps one of the few philosophers who's had an argument that is almost completely uncontested you know he seemed to prove this contradiction in this in this bit of Aristotelian physics that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects that everyone believed for thousands years and and he showed it was contradictory should just you know just sitting in an armchair he showed it was it was an incoherent view so so there's

4:35 at least one example were you know sitting in an armchair you can discover an important truth about reality or being a negative one I wonder so I was yeah I mean I know the thought experiment and the one you described in your books is nicely you know you do not Java putting together where they tied that two objects together so D treated as one object or two objects right you get different predictions from each one of those ways of thinking about it it also is the fact true that Galileo had a lot of empirical data though I mean he did he never did the Pisa experiment as far as I know but he did do a lot of

5:10 experiments with falling bodies especially with pendulums of balls of different weights and stuff so I wonder if it were just the philosophical aspect would it have gained as much traction because again just sort of the two together right there because yeah this is the Plessy empirical friction yeah I imagine so yeah of course I'm never saying you know of course for finding out about consciousness in particular you know physical science is absolutely crucial I would never say we should just be sitting around trying to work

5:43 everything out from the armchair but I think you do need both together particularly in times where there's areas of uncertainty about the rules of the game or how they should work out such as there was at the beginning of the Scientific Revolution you know Galileo was not just doing experiments but rethinking the rules of the game reimagining the framework that the philosophical framework that underlies science and and the philosophical framework he proposed you

6:17 know wasn't justified by experiments it was I don't know how it was justified he just proposed it and it worked and we've been using that ever since so as I think you know where things are really established where the methodology is really established maybe there's a less of a role for philosophers you can just get on with the science but what were those areas where you know things are a little bit uncertain what the rules of the game were what the framework you need philosophers and I think that's particularly true you know right now with the problem of consciousness yeah that's why I think it's not just another

6:51 scientific problem it's a problem where that arises I think from the philosophical framework that underlies science yeah yeah and I think that's a that's an interesting point so I mean I want to get to the discussion between dualism and materialism but I feel like we've been over that to a large extent and there's there are some things I want to ask particular about it better knew in the book I think but generally I want to ask about some of the implications of Pan psychism and some of the things which I was sort of still puzzled about after reading the book so so let's just

7:24 put a pin in that you have the whole first part of the book which is dialectic between dualism materialism you think both of them fail for various reasons so you want to explore the pan psychist option yeah so one of the I mean one very basic thing I was kind of puzzled about and this may be an easy thing to resolve was so you take Galileo starting-point the mental qualities go into the mind so the question about does the tree make a sound when no one's around he says no it's in the mind of the perceiver so I was a little bit curious about what your answer to that

7:57 question is so on the on the pan psychist view you have is the tree making a sound when it falls I mean it so I just wasn't sure like what the your answer to the original question was right so this seems like it poses a little bit of a difficulty no matter which way you go there so I'm just curious what you are really so why I guess I'm a little bit got different feelings on this at different times but why couldn't I just take the answer Galileo gifts as a pun psychist that um so that the the sound of the tree isn't

8:35 really out there in the forest it's just in the consciousness of the person listening to it but why can't I just give the same because I mean you know the pants like is view structurally very similar to materialism right you've just got you know you accept all the structure that physical science gives us just add this extra view about what underlies that structure so what yeah what I'm curious to know why you think I can't agree with Galileo on that point that the sound is in the consciousness

9:07 of the observer rather than well I guess because you could maybe I was just confused about this but it seemed like you were trying to motivate that this was kind of a mistake on his part or it happened there was a mistake on the part either somehow saying that the world was devoid of these qualities but sure you say you're saying you agree with them that they're in the mind but they have to well then I understand really see what the what the puzzle is supposed to be but there is yes no I think the error is so I think the arrow was I mean I I

9:41 it's obviously a provocative title like that i i'm absolutely in or of galileo in so many ways for you know the framework he set up has been incredibly successful but I think the the well I think that there's actually two errors two ways of understanding the error one I give later on in the book but the initial way of understanding it is designing science in such a way that consciousness is outside of the domain of science the consciousness is essentially something mysterious and inexplicable so that's the error so it's

10:17 not it's not taking necessarily taking the qualitative I you know so initially we think qualities are on the surfaces of objects colors you know on the surface of objects smells floating through the air tastes in food sounds floating and emanating through the air Galileo strips them from the environment from the way they seem to be in our perception I'm not necessary disagreeing with that but then what he does with them as he puts them outside of the domain of science and I suppose that's

10:52 what I find problematic although you know I don't want to say like Oh idiot he should matter you know maybe it was necessary maybe it was necessary to carve things off for a period so that you know I think what Galileo essentially did is give a more limited focused task of you know constructing mathematical models to describe the behavior of matter and that's gone really well so maybe it was necessary to hive off consciousness for a few hundred years from science so we

11:25 could focus on that stuff but I think now we're getting to the point where you know we need to bring it back yeah so I mean there's two things that I guess I would ask you about so the first is that you so you do I mean there is it this is a kind of error theory then it turns out the view that you have is that you know we're wrong about the fact that there's redness in the environment yeah I so I guess I don't really actually go into that in the in the book yeah it's a good point I mean if you ask me in my view I suppose I'm happy to say in in some

12:01 sense we can now say sounds and colors are out there in the world but I think we can do that only because we've redefined the concepts you know so I think our initial pre theoretical concept of color is what David Chalmers calls endemic colors your colors as they seem to be in our experience that the actual quality is out there on the surface of the object I don't think colors exist in that sense but I think now in in contemporary

12:35 science when we talk about color or heat or sound being out there we've redefined it to mean you know that the physical causes of our color sound experiences you know I'm happy I don't really so I guess this is more or less David Chalmers view is I sort of pluralism that there are a different color concepts maybe almost natural color concepts with respect to our most natural color concepts we have I would go for a narrow theory the colors in

13:07 that sense don't really exist but we can slightly revised our color concepts so that we can coherent ly talk about colors existing out there in the physical world so I mean so that is a kind of a it's all kind of a weak illusion ISM about about consciousness it's not the strong kind of illusionism that says consciousness doesn't exist but a weak sense in which the way we introspect the properties the color is not as they really present themselves I mean is that illusion is about consciousness or about color I mean this

13:40 it's a its wealth illusionism is just kind of the claim that the way we introspect our our conscious experiences doesn't give us a full and accurate account of their natures or that they seem other than they are so in this case it would seem I mean I guess I find it hard to put myself into the well maybe I'm overstepping a couple of jumps of ones so the first is that when you introspect the color experiences there's a sense of once they appear to be

14:15 properties of the environment that's a right and but they aren't I mean you had to sort of force yourself back to kind of have them as be pure properties of the mind or something like that's it I guess that's a that's a move that you can make but it seems like a second step yeah um I was on I was talking to again Keith Frankish on Twitter yeah this is coming from actually I guess it in the book and when I taught you know if I talk all the time about consciousness

14:50 involving qualities yeah but I suppose I think that's slightly oversimplifying what I think I mean I guess I think maybe a color experience has a qualitative character you know which we refer to when we say what it's like to have the color experience and that qualitative character represents a quality out there in the world and I'm

15:23 having a looking at a tomorrow having a red experience my red experience has a qualitative character and the red quarter but then that represents a red quality out there on the surface of the tomato and these are maybe slightly different things I think what we most naturally call the quality is something that if it exists it's out there in the world and what were what what the conscious experience have I would perhaps more if I'm gonna be more precise talk you know

15:57 then I'd say it's it's the qualitative character rather than the quality but I tend to think for most purposes that doesn't really matter and it's a bit simply know if we're just getting at the problem of consciousness I think it's just a bit simpler to talk about the qualities and people know what you talkin spirit so people know what you're talking about but if you wanted character is like the record the way it represents the quality or something what's the qualities it is well it's the it is what it is it's it's what it's like to have the experience

16:29 I think that's experiences are essentially defined by their character and I think you know I always talk about experience being qualitative but actually I'm not necessarily not necessarily committed to all experiences having a qualitative character you know like so I I mean I believe in a cognitive flower yeah cognitive phenomenology I believe you know there's these debates about yep I believe there's a kind of consciousness involved in thought so when you thinking about mathematics there's a kind of character to your thought but it just feels a bit

17:03 wrong just linguistically to call that qualitative right although some people are happy to but then again I'm just you know it depends what you're trying to do and I just think the most obvious way of pressing the problem of consciousness in a vivid way is with respect to the kind of qualitative characters we have in sensory experiences and you can slightly oversimplify calling them qualities so what is the Quantico but so I think there's the qualitative character but that essentially involves representing a

17:37 quality out there in the environment known and that quality out there in the environment doesn't exist right but but our conscious experience represents it as though it and that's what charm is cause II Zdenek but it doesn't so this is where I get confused so it's not representing a quality since the qualities are as we you were just saying not these kinds of properties there are some physical property which causes in us this thing so it's representing a qualitative character which it sounds like you're

18:09 saying no it's represent a quality but this might not make sense some you know these are the subtle issues that I'm still sort of working out to a degree and I'm happy to revise my view on this but no so the qualitative character exists that's a prop that's a property of the conscious experience right a qualitative character represents a quality in the environment which doesn't in fact exist but so but there are qualities in the environment so what the little red object is

18:46 physically red because it has the quality I thought that's what you were just saying and then we well that's what I mean we've just got these different concepts of colors I think you know our most natural pre theoretical concept of color which David Chalmers gauzy Zdenek colours i think yeah i guess i think our conscious experiences represent those and they don't really exist but we can slightly revise what we mean by colors to mean just you know what the physical properties are cause our color

19:20 experiences and when we make that revision to our concepts call those you know color star ray but then but that's where the weak illusionism comes in because we're the identity properties are represented as being qualities not qualitative characters but why is that that seems to and I'm happy to to be a weekly properties of objects properties of experience but why is that illusion isn't about experience rather than so that we get the experience right that it

19:52 represents qualities in the environment or wrong that those things exist yeah right but you're wrong about the thing out there in the world but we're not wrong about the experience the experience represents an ID any color property out there in the world that doesn't exist but we get the experience right that the experience represents the Eternity being out there in the world well we don't have we don't have access to its to its nature introspectively

20:26 send to what to the nature put to the cult positive character yeah we do well well because it's misrepresenting the way the external environment is we don't there's a sense in which access to it is inaccurate no certainly it's presented to us as an experience of equality in the environment so we we get it it's it's we get its nature right and it's it's nature involves what it

20:58 represents and we know what it represents we just don't know whether that representation is accurate or not but that's about the world outside the mind whether or whether the minds representations are accurate or not depends on the world outside the mind not that not the mind itself I think if they were accurate you would have direct access to the environment I mean that's so in an endemic world you that's what the kind of oh yeah I suppose so that's how presents things to you and that's wrong so there's no case – I

21:32 suppose yeah we have direct access to the qualitative character and to the quality that would exist if the perception were wholly accurate but the reception isn't wholly accurate so not only do we know what it is for the conscious you know the nature of the conscious experience the nature of the qualitative character we also grasp the nature of the identic quality the Zdenek quality out there in the world what it would be if it existed but it but it

22:09 doesn't exist but that's consistent with grasping its nature you know I can grasp the nature of God while being an atheist you know I can oh you know what it is I know what it would be for God to exist it would be for an all-knowing all-powerful perfectly good being to exist but God doesn't exist similarly I can know what it would be for this I Zdenek color property to exist out there in the world even though it doesn't I think this yeah so you don't think so you deny that this is even a weak kind of illusionism I think so although you know I am how I am happy I've never said

22:42 you know that we never make any mistakes about consciousness so we know that you know but but I'm I'm still thinking about these things but I'm not yet seeing why this is the kind of illusionism about why we get consciousness wrong in any sense here okay all right so I don't want to I mean let's let's pass on that first again so when we're talking about that so you allow for invert cases right so I mean you can have color inversions on the way you think of these

23:17 things or is that I don't talk much about color inversions I suppose the you know I guess it seems to me primarily possible yeah so people who have the what you see I mean it's the old thing you have when you the teenager you think oh what I see is red might be what you see is you know and we'd never know about it I suppose a prima facie that seems to be possible but I'm open to you know learning more about colors and color experience actually that couldn't

23:51 really happen I don't know why do you so do you think there's reason to think that couldn't be yeah I think it's complicated but more I was gonna worry about this as a kind of relation to the combinational problem which was more alright alright so I wonder if you could say a little bad just in case people don't know what the combination problem is this is the hard problem for a pan psychism what you say some interesting things about your book in your book so I wanted to just press you a little bit on some of that stuff but can you say a little bit about it first the combination book yeah so the pants I kiss you know the essence upon psychism is that the basic constituents of the

24:28 physical world perhaps electrons and quarks have incredibly simple forms of experience and they're the building blocks of reality and ultimately the very complex experience of the human and animal brain is somehow derived from the simple experience of the most basic parts of the brain there are various ways of framing the accommodation problem in the basic intuitive starting point is just how the hell does that happen how did you get know we sort of

25:00 have a sense of how parts of a car engine make up an engine or parts of an organism make up a functioning organism but how do we make sense of little minds coming together to make a big mind that seems something that it's hard to make sense of and even something that seems unintelligible or incoherent so that's that and there are more different ways of making more specific the challenge I've published papers arguing that we can have a kind of conceivability argument that you could conceive of pants I kissed zombies that

25:33 you know physical duplicates of us and all their parts are conscious but there's no consciousness corresponding to the the organism or the brain or whatever and so that's night that's nice because it well it's not nice for a pants I guess it's it's a pretty good way of having having a devastating object a problematic big a big objection to the pants I kiss because once I kiss usually reject physicalism with things like the zombie argument right and then you say oh we be pants I kiss instead but then if I kind of if the if the

26:07 zombie argument comes right back at us is like this pants psycho zombie argument then it seems you've got no worse so that's one where I pushing it other people Sam Coleman's given an argument that mental combination is unintelligible so that so yeah I mean I and I think most of the effort of the pants I guess research program is trying to address this and yeah so and what do you think is the best I mean the best response that you can give to the combination so my first academic book I talked about Cosmo psychist views I think I'm now I think I'm now being more

26:42 attracted to a sort of strut well this is not the terminal that you are using the book but I think a better terminology is to think so you think of the combination problem as what is the relationship between particle consciousness and systems level consciousness right right and roughly two possibilities are strong emergence or weak emergence so the strong emergence says smoke strong emergence view is that we need basic principles of nature basic laws of nature to bridge

27:15 the gap from particle level consciousness to systems of a consciousness whereas the weak emergent is says no you just you don't need that you just just having part of conscious particles arranged in the right way is enough in itself to constitute a macro level conscious mind I guess I'm being more attracted to the strong emergent is view partly because I'm being less persuaded that we have empirical reason to doubt that I think with my academic book I was pretty persuaded that that was empirically implausible but I'm now

27:47 being less persuaded that so you know one way of working that out as I talked about in the book is had a hassle Merck's view a way of interpretating interpreting the integrated information theory along these lines so roughly we get just we get the view there's just a basic law of nature that you have consciousness at the level of a system at which there's the most integrated information no don't quite agree with that theory but yeah I'm less and less persuaded that there's there's good reason not to think there are some extra principles of nature bridging the gap

28:22 might be partly because I'm a Durham where there's there's some heterodox philosophy of science going on like my my colleague Robin Hendry who's a philosopher of chemistry who defends a kind of emergentist view about chemistry and Nancy Cartwright who's you know famously think we've got no reason to think this kind of reductionist picture everyone assumes we've got no grounds for thinking so I might be a little bit and say it but yeah that's probably what most inclined to you know one question I

28:56 have is is why you don't feel like you can kind of Mary's revenge type arguments in these cases and why it doesn't bother you as much so you know if Mary knew all of the all of the details about micro physical experiences she wouldn't be able to work out what it's like to see red so it seems like you get the similar kind of what she sees red the first time she's gonna learn something about red she didn't know from even the complete phenomenal truths you know he's like you don't get the same exact problem but it seems like

29:32 a similar kind of hard problem that you want that seems like what you want to avoid isin at a cost for the theory yeah I talked about a little bit about this in a forthcoming route late the route llege encyclopedia entry on pon psychism that was originally written by ice Timothy Sprague and I've done a replacement entry that I'm not sure if that's online you actually anyway but the way I set it up is you know pants psychism is supposed to avoid all the problems of physicalism and all the problems of dualism but then you

30:05 might think well are we a strong emergentist pants psychist or a weak emergentist pants psychist and then the worry is if you're a strong emergentist pants I kissed you get in all the same worries dualism has also closure and so on if you're a weak emergentist pants I kissed you get in all the same problems the physicalist house so that's a nice way of seeing the dial I mean now I'm setting up problems myself yeah I guess what I ultimately say in this opinionated survey say in each case the problems seemed to me much less than the problems facing dualism and physicalism

30:39 I just think so well you know in in the case of the strong emergentist I mean it if there was an immaterial so do they have all the same problems as dualism if there were an immaterial soul [Music] interacting impacting on the brain every second and waking life and I kind of think that would kind of really show up in our neuroscience but if there are just some principles linking basic physical states in the brain to more complicated physical states in the brain

31:11 it's less obvious to me that that was show up empirically so that's why I think the problems that the empirical problems the strong emergent of spaces are less severe than the dualist faces coming to the weak emergentist well actually what I say in in the in this encyclopedia piece is sort of the opposite what you said I said actually although it seems like you have a zombie argument which we talked about earlier I don't think you seem to have a corresponding knowledge argument it's so like I think it's very powerful thought that well for a start that seems less of a gap so you know that the the gap that

31:48 the physicalist face is between quantitative objective properties getting to qualitative subjective properties you know this just seems like such different kinds of concepts whereas the pants ideas gap is just between simpler forms of consciousness and more complex forms of consciousness and then coming to the knowledge argument I think it's pretty just so plausible that you know it a colorblind neuroscientist you know if you've never experienced any kind of color and you're just looking at

32:23 the quantitative neuroscience that you could work out from that what it's like to see color just seems crazy but no one thinks that nothing that's not the view by the way but all right what's the view well no one thinks that you should be able to work out what it's like without having the relevant constant oh yeah we had this I mean yeah no I don't think it's a very good we had this discussion last the first yeah it's it's it's a very good point your emphasis on that that you could yes why would that matter I think it's the same

32:55 with the Mary and with the pants I kissed because she has a color concept from micro experience but I don't work out so there's still so physical expand psychism is it's false because she shouldn't learn anything new about the colors unless you'd be able to work out which combinations result in I guess it just seems more plausible that you could I mean so then we could talk about Mariana right latina need a room Ellen's character who has the has the color so she's in her black in my room but

33:27 someone slips her in some color samples so she has an experience of red experience of blue and all the other colors and then she has to work out which of these is the color of the sky which of these callosum oh yeah that amazing that would be easy oh yeah how so well because she'd be if Jesse have access to her own brain if so then she just he's figured out what brain stay she enters in an honest that's cheating it's not really cheating because it takes takes advantage of the structural

33:58 similarities of the color space what she knows about so she knows that blue is more like purple than it is like pink and so she can work out that color space and she can work out the responses that people have which by the way you know that's the nice work from Adam Powell shows that they they map more closely to the structure the brain states map have a similar structure to the color space more so into the physical color spaces external to us you know so those spaces would be I think she would be it wouldn't be that difficult to work out which one was blue

34:30 given that she knows what blue is like and what brain sakes people go into and they see blue what but that doesn't sound like he's going through her own Bay but if she just knows kind of this I mean could she be looking at someone else's brain and you know the structure of the color spaces and someone else's brain and yes she would need to figure out from her own case what the blue was like and so she had the concept of it and then from there I think the deduction is pretty much a priori so she knows the color from looking at the

35:03 color sample so what why are you talking about looking at her own brain so she can try to deduce which which experience she's had but could she look at so could she look at – she has the experience and the color sample and then she looks at someone else's brain right can she do it from that could she do it from that without yeah I mean that's a that's a harder case I think she could do it for

35:38 herself she could know would think Oh seems to me cheating though I mean I'd say she ought to be getting it from the neuroscience not sort of seeing which bit of her brain is activated that yeah well maybe but I mean I don't want to get dragged into this too much but this just sorry babe 'it wean type A and type B physicalism right so you so type a and you have an appendix on type B where you sort of I guess I'd say a little dismissive that's the type of strategy but that's a big debate and I just think you get Type B is perfectly good theory

36:11 so yeah the deductions you need you know they're gonna go through but not conceptually because they sort of already admit a kind of epistemic gap right right so if you yeah so but if we're the pun psychos were presumably gonna be looking for some kind of type anything yeah where there is yeah it just seems to me less of a gap more plausible that you could have some kind of explanation of complex properties in terms of simpler properties that you could deduce complex

36:44 properties some simpler properties whatever however you want to phrase the explanatory gap then that you could explain or deduce qualities from pure quantitative structure I mean that it seems well but as I say I am becoming more attracted anyway to the strong emergent is view in which case you wouldn't need the deductions anyway because you're just postulating basic principles of nature to bring its if it's strong emergence I guess I don't really understand the difference between

37:16 that and non reductive physicalism non reductive physicalism I thought you're gonna say dualism netic I would think you've not non reductive physicalism is not requiring basic laws of nature that's well it depends on how non reductive it is what's the difference with proper dualism I thought so the way I think of it as you've got identity view that conscious states are identical brain States and then what's normally called non reductive physicalism is

37:48 there's no identity you can't identify a particular conscious state with a particular brain state but there's still Constitution or grounding you know the physical states still make up the conscious states without need to recourse to extra laws of nature or something whereas then the property dualist well I guess yeah you need face you need basic laws of nature to bridge the gap isn't that I mean I guess this is sort of terminological but yeah it just says well what links are what yeah anyway

38:21 okay so I agree that's the standard way of doing it I guess I was streaming too much but I don't really get what the what Constitution is supposed to be if it doesn't invoke some kind of law linking the things which is constituted to them to the thing which does the constituting otherwise it's just stating something with Alex what else what about policy people done singing constituting a party or something yeah what about it you don't you don't need it you don't need an extra law of nature you've got people dancing and drinking

38:54 and then you get a party out of that but you don't need an extra law of nature if people are dancing and drinking then there's a party that's just sort of yeah that's reductionism about parties but it's not but you don't need identity you know I wouldn't want to I wouldn't think you can identify the so you've got rod Jayne and Freddie dancing you can't identify the state of affairs of their being a party with the state of affairs of Rod Jane and Freddie dancing because rod might rod might leave and be

39:27 replaced by Susan or you know so it's Constitution rather than identity but anyway I don't know maybe maybe we yeah no I yeah I see I see I guess I would just say they're different parties and there's but I understand there's a lot of technical leeway here I guess so that's why I hate metaphysics by the way I know you love metaphysics but it's like Mary ology is not my oh my god I don't know I don't like too much of it you defend a lot more metaphysics than I do but but I wanted to ask about the split brain case stuff in particular

40:00 okay steer us away from this treacherous sea towards other treacherous areas so you suggest that split brain cases may be a reverse engineering case that we can bootstrap a you know that it isn't so weird that combinations of minds can happen because here seems like we're one – split into two is that a fair way of characterizing the way you want to use that yeah I mean I think in the this is a book aimed at a general audience and I'm just gesturing towards Luke Roloffs work in this case which I think you know

40:38 is filled out in a much more detail in his in his book combining Minds yeah but yeah so that's what I say in the book but I suppose that's only gesturing at the his full kind of position but anyway we we can run with that okay yeah because I'm curious though I mean it's I wonder if this is just a kind of proof of principle type of claim or how serious you take the claim that the right hemisphere is is conscious because I think that's pretty debatable actually and you know some people they're just as conference on and I'm what you on this

41:12 and there are people who defend both sides but it seems like that lie I mean if you something that contentious you wouldn't want to have this much hang on it because the the Contra sides are going to say look that's an unconscious processor over there it's generating behavior and it's it's an it's intelligent behavior but there's no reason to think that all right there's conscious experience that the right side of the plane is having yeah look I mean to boot to be honest with you I don't have firm opinions on on how to understand the split brain cases so

41:46 suppose you know if we were discussing my academic book or a paper written you know this a position I've sort of worked out my reasons for supporting then I could defend it but I suppose what I was trying to do here was really just gesture it a lot of work that's going on and you know I suppose about what I'm more interesting is Luke's Oh overall position on the combination problem

42:21 which he roughly divides and which I do I use the split brain stuff to link on to which what he does is divide the combination problem into two so one is a kind of inheritance problem how do we get the composite whole having the experience of its parts and the second question is the unity question how do they have a unified experience and with reference to the former question he just wants to say well look it's just true across the board that wholes inherit

43:00 some of the property their parts you know in in a whole lot of cases it's sort of the default position not always necessarily but you know the the mass of the whole is sort of inherited from the mass of its parts so then they only remainder the combination problem is making sense of of why the whole has a kind of unified consciousness and he's thinking that you know reflection on the on the split brain case might shed some light on the conditions for unified consciousness but

43:34 as to how he defends that specific interpretation of the split brain case I'm not so sure but I'd be interested to hear why people I mean I just be curious myself it's something I should look more into what why do people not so is that not such a popular view then that there's that there's two subjects experienced here well I don't know what's popular or not but it's not why not universally accepted now it's something that's contentious I think the common sensical II people are equating

44:07 the behavior which seems intelligent to be evidence that there's conscious experience but if you take the idea that there can be intelligent unconscious behavior you know the so-called dynamic unconscious being one kind of example but in general we have you know a lots of reason to think that lots of behaviors are done unconsciously and so there's that's kintyre lee consistent with what's going on with my brain case but it but if this was a normal patient right not behaving in this strange way that you know their left hand does something in their right

44:39 hand does something get you know gives a contradictory answer or something right if it if it if if there was not the way cons behavior we would think this was an expression of consciousness no well what it's not clear that we would so if they deny seeing it we usually take that as evidence that they didn't consciously see it and so if you know you take a case like a neglect or something like that where a person you know is ignoring something on the right side of their visual field or the left side I guess is

45:12 more typical or whatever but so it it's a no it's usually taken as evidence that they didn't experience it although people ask the question well how do we know they didn't experience you know there's all this debate about overflow or whatnot but commonsensical II I don't think it's it's quite clear that we would say if you deny seeing it that the behavior overrides that kind of sincere report but if you you if you if you ask someone did they see something and they draw a picture of it we tend to think that was in addition they say yeah I saw

45:48 and into a picture but yeah they say no I didn't see anything and then draw a picture then you have the issue you have the problem is there any reason to positively think that there's not consciousness associated with well other than the fact that they deny having the conscious experience yeah that's that's the problem so again that's why it's contentious and people are still debating this yeah okay so it's not clear how how you would resolve that unless you had some kind of theory of

46:21 consciousness you could yeah or if you just want to say well look you know the behaviors are too skillful or something like that but that just seems to make the question I think to say isn't it the case that integrated information theory IIT does predict that you'd have two subjects of experience yeah yeah there's two centers of I mean you know IIT I don't know I don't think it's really very CLE tested lis MYSA testable myself or what that's a different question but it certainly does predict where ever there is a locus of Phi which is not subsumed in another higher fights system

46:55 then you get conscious screens so as far as that is going on they would predict that but of course you know my problem with IIT is it seems like just a general criticism it seems more to do with intelligence it seems more to do with content of consciousness and consciousness so that's and that's kind of net blocks general criticism of it I think that's a little responses to it but I just don't think it doesn't really look like a theory of consciousness to me it looks like a theory of being alert and aware and having some content right right so why doesn't that mean if it's but I

47:31 guess they claimed to predict you know like periods of waking periods of sleep without consciousness and periods of epileptic seizures where you don't have consciousness or bits of which parts of the brain are associated with consciousness which plants arms like which theories don't predict that they predict that the cerebellum is unconscious and then look it doesn't have integrated information but guess what

48:02 stand a hand also predicts it's not conscious and it doesn't globally broadcast it's either yeah you know yeah I suppose it's all the theories of consciousness are gonna be able explain that yeah I suppose it's just kind of sits it's such early days and I guess uh you know it's trying to give it I mean what's nice about it is it is it's it's giving you know a nice simple put it on a t-shirt account and you might think well we really don't have the evidence to support that very general claim but

48:36 you might think on the other hand well what we should do is we should form you know we very simple stay on a t-shirt correlation and then you know keep doing experiments trying to I mean the piety is that it assumes a certain theory of consciousness in the way it sets up the axioms I mean that's this had totally different discussion but the axioms assume a certain a certain set of facts about consciousness which would like for instance that its unified or for instance that it's a first-order phenomenon doesn't involve any kind of

49:09 higher-order awareness those are assumptions that the axioms make and then and that's fine you can a theory which encode your assumptions but you shouldn't say that your characterize our consciousness in a neutral way when you're mirroring all these assumptions about its fundamental nature yeah we we had to come back we had a conference on IIT in Nye a few years ago and I mean what caring a lot of it you could just take out what a lot of the philosophers opposing is you know you could just take out thin ìit which is rather kind of the basic claim

49:42 um consciousness is correlated with integrated information or maximal integrated or just something in that arena or consciousness has something to do with intugo information and and then and then this broader thing that involves these axioms and this starting off methodology and certain kind of metaphysical framework that Nonie likes and Ray exactly he wasn't too keen on this proposal no I know I was at a workshop where this stuff yes in Keene this was a lack of display was not evident yeah but yeah we

50:15 yeah look I mean I'm and I'm enjoying chatting about the these things but this to be clear it's not like I'm really committed to an interpret other to IIT or an interpretation of a split brain case it's probably I should think more about the split brain cases to be honest one reason to think why I mean so just kind of it's as is percolating you know one reason to think that the right side of the brain is not conscious is simply because it sort of conceptually doesn't seem to make sense to take one mind and suddenly end up with two because we do

50:49 have this kind of conception that minds are not the sorts of things that decompose into smaller mind so it does seem like already somehow to build in a favorable answer to the question that's being asked yeah yeah so maybe it depends you know maybe how how you think about this but we'll partly depend on your background theory of consciousness you know maybe if you if you've already

51:23 got a theory of consciousness were this kind of subjects of experience everywhere then it's you know that that might push you more in the direction of thinking there are two subjects experienced here I guess I don't see particularly a conceptual problem with with subject splitting Institute is you saying that's incoherent or and don't know how to make sense of it yes I don't know if it's incoherent but I'm not sure that it makes sense to me it's that although what that would mean yeah you read Derek Parfit talking about

51:59 fishing in fusion and right seems to make sense no it's not two subjects I mean it's just a few it's a generation of a new subject yeah yeah I mean one splitting into new two one rise into another one which we can understand right I mean that could be it so the two possibilities in the split brain case isn't it there's there's both three possibilities one you know there aren't two subjects here one there are two

52:31 subjects and they resulted from a single subject splitting into two but three that the first subject disappears and is replaced by two new subjects right might start to worry about personal identity or exactly but if you're you know I'm a game and strossen type view of subjective experience is not lost busting very long anyway right so you it seems like I mean that's sort of a general theme as that as you explore

53:05 these views you end up making all the same choice the choice points that the material is does or that it's the same set of choices basically so if you're deflation it's about personhood then yeah you can say all sorts of things and but but each view requires it like there's a there's a similar set of Hoops that each of you has to jump through at familiar points and so it's it's other than the fundamental G there's consciousness at the fundamental level so therefore it looks like less of a gripe it doesn't look like you're buying

53:38 all that much with this kind of radical reinterpretation of everything that might I mean that might might be true to a largely truth I mean I think you know I think what we're largely doing in neuroscience is mapping correlations trying to systematize them trying to come up with systemic theory but as I've said a lot you know that in itself is not a theory

54:16 of consciousness even if you've got some kind of systemic account of the correlations between brain activity and consciousness not itself it's not a theory we we we need a theory that explains why you know why consciousness and physical states are correlated in this way and just doing neuroscience isn't gonna get you to that I mean that's that's the that's the loading I don't want to cut you off but when you're getting ramped up here but that's pre loading the dice so that the alternative is that you don't get

54:51 exponent I mean you posit identities in order to get explanations so you don't you don't get the explanations without positing the identity so while that's if I water and h2o because otherwise we can't explain how water freezes so otherwise we would just have this weird if we had to correlation there we would explain why h2o freezes and then it would be like oh it's correlated with water freezing well that's too weird so we identify the two and then we get the explanation but it doesn't go the other

55:26 way what you saw what you seem to be requiring I wasn't meaning to rule that out I would take that to be Warnock one explanation so neuroscience gives us correlations and then we have to give an explanation of those correlations one explanation is identity right I suppose I have philosophical problems with those kinds of identities but that's something we have a philosophical argument about but what I'm saying is I mean it could be I think it's important to move beyond the correlations in neuroscience just because it's important to have a worldview that's consistent and explains

56:03 what we find the data we find but it might be that it to a large extent it doesn't make a difference actually in practice to building the theory of consciousness I mean it's like you know quantifying it's very similar to the case in quantum mechanics where you've you know you've got the the the equations and the way of predicting what's going on so much about technology relies upon and then you've got but you think we need an expiration of what the hell is going on whoa you know what's going on in reality and you've got your different theories many-worlds Copenhagen bohmian and so on you know

56:40 some physicists think well why are we worrying about all this that don't make any difference to what we're actually doing but I think it is important to science isn't just about building bridges and curing disease it's about having a worldview that makes sense of uh of the data and explains what our best guess about what reality is like based on that so even if even if as you say pun psychism wouldn't you know it could be a lot of the time it doesn't

57:12 make a difference to doing the neuroscience whether we're pants i kiss or materialists or Judas or whatever so I think it's it's still an important fight between those different positions but but it could be that it does make differences right it could be that it you're more likely to interpret the split brain case in one way or another it could be that you know especially if you're a weak emergentist pants Tigers it could be that you're you're trying to build models of explanation here it might make a difference whether you think certain you're a strong emergentist and in either in a dualists

57:46 or a pun psycho sense and you think certain levels have a kind of autonomy you know that might make a difference to what kind of theory so you know so I think it could make a difference that at a number of points but even if it doesn't I still think it's important to work out the most plausible theory of what's going on yeah no I understand that but I mean so yeah I guess so let me leave that because I can get hung up on this all day and I know you have a you have limited time today so I want to ask about a couple other things there's two things I want to talk about at least

58:20 hopefully we'll have time to touch on them but one is your review about clients what you I think it's very interesting part of the book you proof talk about Monica Galliano's work which I I've talked to her she I think my work is really interesting and good and then I also want to ask about some things about string theory which I've I've asked you about before but I I think they're still kind of an issue there so I want to touch on and see what your claims there were so I wonder about do I talk about string theory in the book no all right sorry there's kind of an objection that I would say start from

58:57 a thinking about string theory all right okay cool but first I want to talk about the plants okay because I think it's first of all the part of point of agreement I think it's important and what's nice about your book is that you highlight this important work about what we're learning about plants that they're actually a kind of intelligent system which should not be that surprising if you really endorse evolution and given it wouldn't it doesn't seem all that surprising that we're gonna find you know in between cases along the way and so but people are generally not very aware of this

59:31 work and very skeptical attributing any sorts of these properties of plants so I think that's very cool that you you touch on that what are you I guess the part where I disagree with you is is and maybe this is just rhetoric in the book but you say look you know it's only it's only a prejudice that's gonna stop us from giving assigning mental lives to the plan and so the way I wanted to challenge that was that what we what I think the science shows is that plants can be conditioned they can learn they can retain information which are all the things that we know can be done

1:00:04 unconsciously in humans right classical conditioning doesn't require any consciousness you don't have to be aware of the stimulus or anything like that to get those sorts of behavioral dispositions so it isn't all that surprising that we find some kind of not so what we typically think of as non unconscious learning in plants why should we leap from that to assigning a consciousness to them I guess would be the question yeah yeah I mean I mean well I'd like I will argue back with you but again just jump aside in the start I

1:00:38 suppose in contrast to whatever written in academic book and academic papers that you know that I'm more sort of loosely and just trying ideas you know okay it's not necessarily like I'm really strongly committed you know I partly just wanted to as you say talk about the really interesting work that I think people are completely unaware of that the extent to which there's a interaction a bit of trees under the ground you know right passing back and forth food and minerals you know and

1:01:12 redistribution creation from the preferential to their own youngin and redistribution between species you know it's incredible thing that the the evergreen trees during winter give to the the river and give to the just deciduous trees and and it's reciprocated in the summer and so on and but yeah maybe I don't want to stand by that it's maybe that was a bit over overblown that way of putting it I suppose that just it's my I do I just really believe plants of consciousness

1:01:46 actually and it's I would not say like it Simpson question do you believe your philosophical I just saw a paper was published on whether it's immoral to philosophically defend views you don't believe yeah and then they ended up saying do I believe the argument I'm making here doesn't matter but I'm saying yeah I mean I I do think puns like ISM is our best guess but whoever not strong enough to actually believe it I'm not sure but I do actually believe plants are conscious

1:02:21 and I suppose I just think I I can't see the reason the principled reason why we're drawing the distinction between animals being conscious and plants being not conscious I kind of especially seen it I supposing I'm I'm more attracted to a sort of emergentist view why does that make a difference I don't know and that makes it seems to make a difference to me but yeah I guess I'm just suspicious if the grounds for our are thinking the plants are not conscious so what's

1:02:56 thinking what are those grounds well exist well exact well what do what what do you think do you think we do doubt consciousness to plants why do I think that yeah well what do you think uh I guess I'm just don't think there is any good reason to mock make the distinction between conscious things and non conscious things at that point I don't think there is any good reason to but it's more of those what what like what are the lack of good reasons is it because they process information is it because they're behaviorally responsive to the environment or is it just because

1:03:28 they're live or what is it that singles them out and not like chairs and you know I mean it might be sort of more the Sun more like a kind of Sur I t's case you know if you kind of get to simpler in simpler forms of life I think common sense draws a gray area like do you think flies are conscious do you think bedbugs have some kind of inner life and I sort of think any point where we sort of draw a line there just seems kind of arbitrary and and probably based on just

1:04:08 drop them all for considerations yes the argument that I alluded to earlier namely that the things that blow the things I do who are the things that can be done unconsciously so probably they're doing it unconsciously so you think that would not be true of of things that mice do for example well if in terms of classical conditioning I think it's true but I think they do more than that so it's just the type of things that plants can do or the types

1:04:45 of things that we are have very good reason to think occur without consciousness it's a good argument look I might have to think more about it but I mean is it always the case that when organisms are doing these things it's not always the case that they are done unconsciously right as far as I know classical conditioning is always a classic alive has consciousness right yeah just a different set of brain systems I mean it depends on I guess it depends on your viewed but as far as I know

1:05:16 I mean this is not a controversial claim I'm willing to be wrong though I actually don't in the view of the sciences these things I mean so just as a related question so you know what about rumba rumba is the robot vacuum cleaner my favorite example of our friendly robot are you gonna say robust conscious – I mean I know your view is consistent with AI conscious artificial consciousness but how far how far are we gonna pair this I mean you're gonna end up saying up thermometers or conscious and like flies okay they're like simple

1:05:49 so I'm just wondering what the principled reason for thinking one but not the other would be on a view like yours yeah I suppose it's just I mean you really this is something I need to think about more I suppose it's just if you're thinking of you know going back in evolutionary history any point of drawing a line between where were consciousness begins seems kind of arbitrary whereas you know in the case of building something artificial from

1:06:23 scratch it's you know it's it's not come from the lineage it doesn't have that it's not on that chain of and so that kind of sorites type touch right ease type concern doesn't seem to apply to it but yeah I mean like these are all these are all views um you know it gets to kind of one of the claims that you want to make a lot which is that you know spoons don't aren't conscious on your video but trees are so it's just it

1:07:01 seems like there's a kind of bias towards living systems in your thinking which is a normal common sense thing I mean you know yeah I feel it too but it's I'm not sure if Roomba is alive or counts as artificial life it gets hard to draw those kinds of distinctions that you know Whitney and I teach a class on life in the universe one of the questions is the son alive is a hard question yeah it does a lot of the things that living things do stars do so it doesn't have a metabolism it's not DNA which i guess is really the default biological consideration you know if it

1:07:35 doesn't have DNA then it's but that's just really arbitrary shutting the discussion down it's not it's not clear that we really do have a good principal demarcation between the living systems and the nonliving your cell phones yeah absolutely I don't I mean so what issues it me it does make a difference in a pond psychist context I suppose the question is do you have a genuine higher-level entity a genuine I mean if you're thinking in it in an emergent us framework I suppose do you have a genuine sort of emergent entity hm I

1:08:10 guess the liability is distinctly between natural unities and mere aggregates right if you're thinking in a sort of strong emergentist framework you've got some what we think of as entities that are really just aggregates of micro level objects and then some things that are genuine unities and I suppose so if you're not a pun psychist you might think okay these plants are genuine unities but are they are they conscious maybe they're not conscious

1:08:43 and maybe but I guess if you're in a pond psychic framework as soon as you accept that it's a genuine unity that there's a sort of irreducible micro level entity then you're gonna think it's conscious so suppose and I'm just thinking on my feet here I suppose partly I'm I'm inclined to think plants are genuine unities rather than mere aggregates whereas your pet robot might be just a mere aggregate and and if it's a genuine unity a vacuum cleaner I'm sorry the back a little quite friendly

1:09:21 you know but they're baggage okay so I guess it I'd have to know about what about this unity stuff is I mean part of the problem it seems like if you have an answer to the combination problem you should be able to deduce this stuff right this stuff should be honest re not on a strong emergentist right on a straw but that's you know that seam that's even weirder but if any sort of plausible you well because you I mean it's just kind of ironic I think that you spent a lot of time hounding the material is saying we can't deduce these things and then at the end of they say yeah well

1:09:52 maybe we can to do something okay doesn't it just seems like you give up the game no but you can say they can say and you say well yours is a little bit weirder I don't know I think yours is a little bit weirder so what's weirder that that we can give a complete account of qualitative properties and quantitative terms but not understand how the two are linked or that we we can have a complete account of macro phenomenal properties in terms of micro phenomena properties but not understand how the two are linked but it's

1:10:26 different because so when physicalists if you're talking about the type b physicalist view when they say we can't give the link it's because they think there's an a an empirical identity there's an a posteriori identity I guess I you know I have what I take to be strong philosophical objections to that kind of identity they kind of you know we haven't got into that we've talked about that a lot so I just I think I I've got strong objections to that position but I don't have strong

1:10:59 objections to say a dualist view like david chalmers view where you just say sure you could you can't the identities don't work but we can postulate basic laws of nature to bridge the gap I mean that seems to me a perfectly coherent view the worries about it on the dualist view is would be a is it empirically plausible be you get a kind of bifurcated inelegant on parsimonious picture of the world where it's you know you just get this consciousness suddenly

1:11:32 appearing a very different kind of property and a tiny part of the universe so I think some get all that stuff on your view the macro phenomenal property is a different kind of property it's phenomenal but it's part seed of property then the micro ones whatever the experiments of red is it's not unimaginably simple yeah it's well it's it's do terminable determinants of the same determinable to use the terminology the jargon so yeah it's it's different forms of the same general property so I think

1:12:06 that's still a you know I think you're kind of just glossing over the fundamental problem which is how all of these individual experiences which have their own individual subjects of the experience come together to form something which has only one subject and which is an experience of bread that just seems totally a strong emergentism that's totally understandable and I don't see what how the gap is lessons by saying oh well it emerged

1:12:39 from something phenomenal so it's less of a problem so I think this no I wasn't saying that so I think that there are a number of differences it's a one advantage of the depends I guess view is the explanatory progress we have just thinking at the level of the brain state and the conscious state you know this is where what's the relationship between the two I don't buy this sort of materialist identity view what's the relation between the two the dualist says they're different things and that leads to empirical problems but what the

1:13:13 what the hands like oh this is just what I guess the more general resilient monist says is that the conscious state is the intrinsic nature of the brain state you know the brain state is when we talk about brain States to talking about behavior what it does the consciousness is its intrinsic nature so I think that's a really beautiful elegant way of bringing of resolving the correlations at just at this macro level and that is already I think you know great exponent reprogram then we got a question what's the relationship between that level and the more basic parts but

1:13:49 that's I mean that's the whole crux of the issue so the advance materialism is that you get to explain how pains caused the behaviors the feeling of pain the painfulness of pain the awfulness of pain yeah because it is the brain state it has the brain states causal powers you want to say something which tries to piggyback off of that which is that the intrinsic nature of the brain state is a kind of phenomenal

1:14:23 experience but the intrinsic nature of the brain state is not pain it is the macro-level state is paying the intrinsic nature of the particles is not pain which somehow combine to form pain and so you you don't you're not ultimately it's not clear which is doing the causal work whether the causal powers drain into the micro particles or not yeah it depends how we understand close the closure

1:14:54 yeah we understand cause a closure that everything has a physical cause or does everything have a micro physical cause so yes if you think it's if you think it's everything as a micro physical cause then yeah you've ruled out the strong emergentist plant psyche as view right but if you think it's everything as a physical cause you've ruled out dualism but you haven't ruled out the pan psychist view the emergentist pan psyche is few because they can say yeah everything has a physical cause

1:15:25 conscious states you know our brain states even if that macro level conscious state stroke brain say is not reducible to you know what's going on at the micro level and I'm just I guess I'm less persuaded that we have any reason to think you know that micro reductionist view that that I mean what would it look that everything the cerebellum does is can be completely explained in terms of its quarks and you know operating just according to the

1:16:01 four basic law basic forces you know the basic principles of physics I just what would that look like if it was true or did it look like it was false I just I mean unless convinced we have reason to think that yeah even we might still have a reason to think you know if dualism were true and there were these utterly non physical properties hitting making things happen then then that might then that might show up in on your side so yeah so I'm you know and as I say in the book we do you know we know that there are things you know things like quantum

1:16:33 entanglement which entails that I mean I think the best way to understand that is there's some kind of holism that there's some kind of power you know properties of the whole I mean that's the way we define quantum entanglement right that there's in the quantum state of the whole is not reducible to the quantum state of its parts so I mean I'm not saying you know that this has a quantum entanglement in the brain or anything but we know that that's a kind of plausibly a counter example to micro

1:17:06 reductionism so yeah so the advantages of the view yeah I do agree that the strong emergentist pun psychist faces something like the troubles of Judaism the weak emergentist pun psychist faces something like the troubles of physicalism but I just think in both cases they're less you know the less obvious you know and the strong emergentist pun psychist is even though it like the dualist like the david chalmers star doulas it has

1:17:38 these brute laws and that's you know you'd prefer to do without them maybe but I think it's it's more empirically plausible it's more parsimonious it's more elegant and unified you've got more of an explanatory thing at the macro level so yeah I mean none of these theories are perfect I still don't know why well anyway I don't want to get rehung up on this but it's I don't know why on your view you don't you shouldn't have introspective access to the micro phenomenal properties well if there's strong emergency yeah but now it seems

1:18:13 like a lot it's really depending on the strong emergence if you're a weak and weak emergent use seems like it should go through I'm not really I think on the emergent even on the weak emergency I'm not really worried about these kind about that this sort of epistemological worry you have because yeah I think I think well well my view is as you know you know we grasped the nature of the oh I had something to say to you about transparent concepts my term anyway in

1:18:45 return we grasped the nature of the macro-level state I don't see that I don't think that entails we grasp the nature of what constitutes it you know well if that's what it is that's that's what constitutes it we're back to the metaphysics the differences in identity and constitution you know you can grasp different you can grasp or a statue is without grasping you know the nature of the materials making it up or something yeah okay let me try to transition to there I mean we're almost really at time

1:19:20 but really quickly to the string theory oh yeah right yeah that's why really I'd like to hear what I'd liked it sounds interesting so for I mean first there's the general issue of whether there are you know in string theory objects and one possible answer is probably not but but more generally I think that you know one of the things that we've learned from string theory is the concept of a duality that there are certain theories under certain descriptions which are dual to other theories with different descriptions in the most most famous

1:19:55 case all of our theories of string theory are supposed to be somehow approximations of some deeper M theory which has 11 dimensions whereas these other theories have 10 dimensions so but these theories are empirically equivalent and yet they have very different parts they're built out of different things so it seems to me like if this is the way reality is and if there's a big debate about this but then it looks like you might have a problem for the kind of theory that you have because if you have some basic elements what you want to identify as being the

1:20:30 having intrinsic nature of a kind of experience in a different dual theory it's going to be a different property and so a different experience so it looks like you don't really you get a kind of contradiction in the view that if string theory is true you're gonna end up having to say that there are you know different kinds of micro experiences postulated when there shouldn't be so that's that's very interesting I mean so every not might be

1:21:05 some enough to think about a little bit more but let me say it's something up it i've just finished writing a paper on that's perhaps kind of related and and might give a partial answer to what you're saying is so everything about a road paper on a this is gonna be this volume on quantum mechanics and consciousness yeah in fact to write something for that and I was writing about this wavefunction monism so the view that the fundamental level of reality there's just the wave function which is taken to be this field in very

1:21:42 high dimensional probability space instead of like relative to the physical universe it's certain possibility space I'm and say you've got very each location corresponds to a configuration of particles in what we think of as physical space and the number of dimensions is you take the number of particles in the universe times it by three that's the number of dimensions as re so a lot of people like a listen a and and David Albert think this is the most straightforward interpretation of

1:22:14 quantum mechanics but then there are these debates with other philosophers of physics like mind's gone blank now anyway does much you know but whether you can get kind of tables and chairs and stuff out of this and and what I was considering is you know one thing in listen a says at one point is okay maybe we can't get tables and chairs out of this so maybe we just have to say they don't exist you know who just up to and I was talking about that a little bit

1:22:46 but saying well we're that's true one thing we do have to account for his consciousness and maybe we should see that as a kind of constraint on these theories and you know people but this is I do think you know philosophers and scientists the future will think it's incredible that we didn't think more generally about the ontological implications of consciousness you've got this thing we know pretty much for certain exists um in our theorizing about the fundamental nature reality we don't spend much time

1:23:18 drawing out it's under logical implication so I was thinking you know [Music] you you I think is a struggle of getting the facts about consciousness human consciousness as we know it out of the way a function is a big argument especially if you can't get ordinary objects you know on any theory of consciousness you know if you can't kind of get brains or so I think I'm ended up being I think I'm attracted to more of the bohmian type for you now where you

1:23:52 have the wave function and particles and and I mean is not the simplest view so but simplest you know I just think by the way you know we all know that relativity and quantum mechanics are have to be reconciled so talking about field theories in quantum mechanics is fine but string theory is a possible

1:24:24 reconciliation of those bits rather than all the things you're talking about I mean one of the great hope of string theory is that at the fundamental level there are no free parameters in the theory at all everything is determined by the theory so these things are gonna dissolve away if that approach is right so it's fine to talk at that level but we all know these are effective theories at the moment that they're not the final theory so get you know III don't think wanna mechanics is running that I'm not saying that but

1:24:56 uh yeah it's a bit but look you know once I sit it's not since anything's up for grabs but I mean I won't upset ya make some constraints here so that's the kind of pointed that one of the things that it sort of seems will be telling us is that there doesn't seem to be good candidates for these properties objects that we're talking about it does make a kind of case for a sort of scientific realism so maybe you have some sort of structural realism which kind of falls down we talked about that last time but the point here is that any anyway you want to identify the experience with a

1:25:30 certain physical property there's gonna be another theory in which all the same prediction me but that property is absent and so a different conscious experience it seemed impossible and that's just part of you that doesn't go away you know one of the dualities is when you start talking about things that are very small suddenly it's dual to a theory where the distance is increasing where the objects of the space is getting larger so I mean it's just a fundamental feature of the theater and it doesn't if you're not really addresses that I've just been reading you know Shawn Carroll's view where he

1:26:02 thinks it we should start off with the wave function and try and get space and time and gravity from that so rather than taking this string theory I mean you know nobody really knows how this is going to end up right all I'm saying is I you know I think we should take the need to account for consciousness as a as a constraint on theorizing and you know that's that's what I'm most passionate about I suppose that is that we tend to think the job of science is to account for the data or observation experiment but I think you know there's

1:26:36 an extra datum we know exists and now accounting for that should be part of the job of the theory we should look for the simple theory that it has for both you know I'm terms of fundamental physics and I weird part is that consciousness is about is a biological psychological property seems like anyone I look for explanations there no we should we should have yeah I'm not assuming pun psychism this point we should have a theory that is consistent with you know consciousness existing at the biological

1:27:10 level and it's not obvious to me that some of these wacky and physical theories can do that such as wavefunction monism for example and you might think I was very parochial and dragging us back to the possum but you know I consciousness is something you know the thing we're most certain of in my view and so it should be a series constrain so actually interesting enough I've been skyping a prominent physicist who has secret views on consciousness I'm not sure this person wants to go public yeah is it quite at this point but but does think you know it's someone

1:27:45 who's prominent on these deep theoretical challenges in in physics reconciling gravity you know gravity and quantum mechanics and so on and thinks a theory of consciousness as a fundamental feature of reality will may help us make progress and these things will go hand in hand you know a theory of consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality and sorting out these deep you know quantum gravity you know we'll make progress together so that you know I mean look these are deep deep troubles and no one knows you know it's Toki

1:28:18 decades now no one knows how to move forward on these things and you know I don't know that's sort of I guess I'm in a more optimist about string theory I think that part of the reason why people are optimistic about it is because for decades now the kind of progress has been made of physics has been constraints of consistency in theoretical simplicity so the standard model was worked out before it was empirically confirmed on the basis of consistency like there had to be all of these families of properties and people

1:28:51 are like okay so then they found them which was great for the theory but string theory is just a logical kind of completion of that project so I well I'm not a I'm not an expert so for me it's very hard to understand what I mean there's this kind of only game in town argument which I take very seriously which is you know given what we know empirically if you try to build a theory which isn't a string theory you fail I don't see anyone that has succeeded at that I'm really into simplicity constraints as well but

1:29:22 I think there's a powerful simplicity argument for Everette e in wavefunction monism on the grounds that uh you know it's it's it's the simplest interpretation of quantum okay so you know so other physicists want to start with that and build everything else I mean I thought people were losing faith with string theory because there's all these different ways of running the mathematics and we don't but anyway I mean I you know you've got to go for simplicity but you've got to go for the surplus theory consistent with the data and while I'm repeating myself now but I

1:29:58 think no one's been thinking seriously about whether these theories are compatible with the reality of consciousness yeah but I think for a good reason I know consciousness is a psychological property that's where we first look it seems like a mister but it just seems strange to go okay consciousness so let's look at physics it just looks like you're barking up the wrong tree there now maybe you could be convinced I'll bet looking up that tree and I think you have been and you know that that is fine I'm not disparaging

1:30:31 the ultimate view but it just seems like that's yet we pushed into that view that's not that's not look there are these debates live debates about whether you can get you know whether we can deduce ordinary micro level three-dimensional objects out of say wavefunction monism that's what I've been thinking about modern string theory I don't know what you know and you might say well who cares maybe there aren't three-dimensional objects but we can't say who cares about consciousness so insofar as there's live disputes that

1:31:05 philosophers of physics take but so what's name more Dylan is it maudlin yeah Tim you know Tim maudlin yeah rejects wavefunction monism because he thinks you can't account for three-dimensional objects you can't ground three-dimensional objects this theory and three-dimensional objects are the evidence we had for physics so he thinks it's sort of empirically incoherent in a certain sense you know so I think that's a respectable debate and in that context I think uh you know

1:31:42 one crucial way of framing that and it so you could frame it in terms of really in relation to evidence if you like you know you might think of our evidence as fundamentally about the experiences we have so yeah it's a live debate about we've got to be thinking a lot of people thinking about whether we can get our ordinary world of experience out of these things it's a bit difficult understand how we think about that question one way making more precise and more focused is we've got to be able to get our conscious experiences out of it we've got to be able to get our conscious our macro level conscious

1:32:14 experiences and it's just I say I'm not assuming pom psychism or anything I'm not I'm just saying your theory of the bottom has to be consistent with what we find at the top and it you know it's it's not obvious it is with some of these more or you just invoke strong emergence and go on with your life okay that's another option yeah yeah that's another option can I can I can I just say something very briefly okay yeah yeah yeah no I was just thinking we were discussing last time about transparent concepts it's so my view you know that we grasp the essential nature of conscious experiences or you know in and

1:32:50 you were raising these issues of all this evidence that we get our conscious experience wrong yeah I was thinking mate I need to think about this more but maybe be I'm just happy to say so I am happy that we make all kinds of mistakes about a country maybe we can just frame the transparency claim as you know insofar as we accurately I don't quite how to put it insofar as we accurately track a particular phenomenal property

1:33:23 we grasp its nature insofar as we accurately hone in on a particular phenomenal property we grasp its nature so you know we might get it wrong in all sorts of ways but insofar as we get it right yeah we grasp its nature and that might sound like cheating yeah but I don't think it is because I don't I don't think it is though because every everyone agrees you know we get it right in Rogers Unger eared true belief no but I'm not trying to give a definition of accuracy

1:33:56 as me but but you know most physicists most physicalists rather so think even when we get it right we're still not grasping the metaphysical nature of it so it's a substantive claim to say when we get it right we're grasping the metaphysical nature and that sounds that sounds right to me so you know so my claim is conscious experience is essentially defined by their character and insofar as you are able to attend to and reflect on that character you know

1:34:30 the character namely you know what it's like to have the experience I think you grasp its nature because you grasp its character you grasp what it's like to have the experience that is to grasp its nature but that doesn't mean we always get then they get a sorry attend to the character accurately ray you know I don't have to say that I can just say insofar as we attend to the character accurately we grasp the essential nature experience yeah that sounds cheating it out I think it is yeah I don't like someone who endorses the frankish line of or the Dennett line which says that if it's

1:35:04 possible you can make its mistake then you never know that you aren't making a mistake I think that's really a lot of what they want to push boils down to that if it's possible you're a zombie then you can't know you're not a zombie so yeah actually I can have good knowledge that I'm not a zombie even though it's possible that you know in some sense is duplicate of me maybe I don't agree with that but that's possible but so but I thought you were you were using these examples to attack my be about phenomenal about trance the phenomenal concepts are transparent I'm suggesting a way of understanding that claim which is yeah sistent with any

1:35:38 kind of or mistakes we make all the time about our experience that was the point to your objection the objection was that the transparency is just due to an aspect of its nature you you have a cue transparently have access to its experiential nature but not I think utter I think I was thinking of a different objection in the discussion with Keith Frankie's last time I thought you were you were raising these these times we get our experience wrong and I

1:36:10 thought you were raising it as a counterexample to the claim that phenomenal concert too transparent or maybe maybe I misremembered yeah I have to check back on I don't I mean I don't doesn't seem like I maybe I was trying to help Keith or something but doesn't seem like okay okay I do think I do think that's we make mistakes I do think that sometimes we have good grasping of the experiential content so you know I'm open to there being direct phenomenal concepts and those sorts of

1:36:42 things what I do I write what I think that I object to is that you have transparent access to their metaphysical nature which seems to be the bird of the problem start because even on your view you don't really have direct access to their front to their metaphysical natures just to their experience all nature's since you can install emergentism you can you can have invert cases the same micro properties with different macro properties so you don't

1:37:17 really have access to that level as the theory predicts and even on the week one it's not it's not clear that you can't have these kinds of cases too so if you don't have introspective access to the micro phenomenal properties then I think that you have to admit you don't really have transparent access to their metaphysical natures I don't agree with that become in I I think the experience of nature is the metaphysical image is what it is is its ascent but it can't it

1:37:49 can vary with that other stuff but you're talking about what underlies it what right even in even is it we commit even in the week emerge in this case I think we've got a distinction between the conscious state itself and what underlying it but and especially in the stronger merge in this case you know where it's a kind of causal relationship there's absolutely no reason to think grasping the nature of the macro level states should involve grasping the nature it's parts but uh I should put yeah I don't see that if that's what it metaphysically is if you have access to

1:38:25 its metaphysical nature you should grasp it it's otherwise that's not what it is yeah it what it is is this is a distinction what it is and what grounds it you know I can understand that way but you know that's that's fine I go it doesn't really it sounds like you're saying you're saying the problem over but with just fancy words that people like to use like right right but you're just giving a name to the problem that's exactly so what the counter what grounding isn't but you but you haven't

1:39:03 you've just said that it's somehow depends on it about asymmetrically like can't say how so it's a big question I mean taking two two cases like you can you know you can know there's a party going on and you can know what it is for a party to go on without knowing which specific people are realizing that party or you can know you know what it what is that what a statue is with without knowing the material that makes it up or what a

1:39:37 heart is without knowing that specifics of biology that's underlies it so yeah I mean thinking all these guys think you can't so you can't know what a statue is without knowing something about its physical Constitution what it is for the they statue suppose that the so if you grasp the nature of a particular statue you don't just grab some abstract thing about the statute is a bit of makita if you if you're talking my grass or the

1:40:10 nature as I experience in general that's fine if you're talking about this in perspective access I have to this experience now it seems like the cases are different so it'd be very hard to say I know the nature of this statue but I'm confused about whether it's marble or brass I'm not meaning it's judge the question but as you know my yeah aunt is visiting yeah and I had ferati not for me but for my four-year-old so yes we bring this to an end at some point

1:40:43 but as always but that must be super-cute ik a little a four-year-old doing karate it's pretty hilarious there watch them do jumping jacks s the slide sparring is like the highlight of everyone's they know and they have to they put on the little football flag and have to run around and grab them from each other that's pretty hilarious they get all into it sometimes they're very polite like one little girl walked up to the other kid and was like excuse me and she was like sure and listen of her honor when she took the flag yeah so it's very cute but anyway I know I want to let you

1:41:17 go and we could talk about this all day I know you're uh you have interesting person to talk with and you have great ideas so I wanna thank you for and is there any final will comment or last word you want to get in before we sign off no really thanks for it's been an enjoyable for a third time as always I need to think more about what do I need to think more about something you said I need to think more about yeah okay your way of construing the knowledge argument I said a thing more about that the first

1:41:50 time and then I forgot to yeah yeah it's fine anyway thanks again I really appreciate it for them have a great day thank you very much Richard take care bye bye let me end a broadcast all right so we're