Consciousness Live! with Geoffrey Lee (S3 E11)

0:00 special guest jeff lee jeff thank you very much for joining me uh for those who don't know you i wonder if you could say a little bit about who you are and what you do sure um yeah first of all it's just a pleasure to be here thanks for inviting me um yeah so um uh i am a professor at the university of california berkeley in philosophy um and my speciality is philosophy of mind um and particularly consciousness so it's no coincidence that richard

0:33 [Laughter] to be on uh on this show um yeah and uh my my current work is that i've been um working on a book um about consciousness um which i think we'll be talking about today yeah very much so i mean i got a sneak peek at this book and i have to say it's it's excellent i really enjoyed it it's a really great work of philosophy i like the whole sort of approach that you take in it i mean um it's it's challenging but thorough and very thought-provoking uh so um part of i mean the whole project is sort

1:08 of motivated by exploring materialist theories of consciousness taking them seriously and sort of seeing where they where they run aground are what strangeness they uh result in and where they don't result in strangeness so now is that because you think materialism is true are you just interested in the question or how do you situate this with respect to site non physical theories of consciousness i mean i think it's foolish to have like very high credence in any of the main kind of metaphysics of mind because we're in pretty speculative territory um so but but yeah i guess i probably i

1:43 have highest credence in materialism type views um and kind of yeah as you just said the part of the main point of the project was to um kind of explore materialistic views both from a kind of defensive point of view um so i'm kind of an optimist about the prospects of a kind of materialist explanatory theory of consciousness um but there's also a kind of pessimistic side um i think materialism has some really weird features that maybe haven't been fully appreciated

2:15 um and again in a way uh um um i think materialists sort of overestimate the significance of consequence of consciousness if materialism is true um so uh it seems like consciousness is this kind of deep divide in the universe there's highly morally significant and so on and i think that materialism is true we might have to revise those types of beliefs so although we can have a materialist theory of consciousness um in some ways that undermines the significance of what we were talking about in the first place

2:48 yeah so that's your deflationary pluralism that we're gonna start talking about at some point later i think but uh what would you say about someone who who said that you know i know you don't like it when people tolens your opponents but what would you say if someone said well look if this is where materialism leads and that's good evidence against it well um so i think with any of the any of these views like in the end we have to just look at the cost benefit analysis

3:20 um i do think that um all of the views uh of consciousness have strange features um so merely pointing out the uh materialism has some counterintuitive consequences is not enough you have to like compare them with the counterintuitive consequences of other views um i tend to think that a big cost of some of the other views is that uh their initial motivations often can't in the end be sustained so um

3:55 so dualist views for example often are motivated by just taking certain types of assumptions as initial data um typically claims about consciousness that just end up being incompatible with materialist reduction um like what kind of claims do you have in mind um let's take um claims about the intentionality of experience like let's say you think that having a greenish experience involves being acquainted with a special qualitative property of

4:29 greenness okay so um i think even just that that simple starting point of thinking of uh consciousness involving acquaintance with greedness already creates a big problem for materialism because it's hard to see for example how there's anything in your brain that looks like acquaintance with greenness [Laughter] so um so then we face a kind of choice either we agree with uh that initial premise that consciousness involves acquaintance with greenness and

5:02 then maybe materialism's already in trouble um or we look at what the credentials are of that initial data um and i think that um the way to defend materialism often is to argue that we weren't really justified in believing in the initial data that was used to motivate non-materialist views so maybe experiment doesn't really involve acquaintances with greatness it just seems like that right so more generally i think materialists should go on a kind of aggressive debunking campaign against the kinds of things that people

5:35 have said to motivate non-reductive views so so in the first chapter of the book you lay out a lot of uh sort of comments like theses uh that try to get at what the notion of consciousness that you're talking about is and then it seems like your overall explanatory strategy to say well consciousness is going to be whatever satisfies most of those or all of them or so i'm wondering if you could say a little bit about what theses you think or we do need to satisfy with the theory of consciousness oh i see um yeah so um i think the way that people proceed in both the philosophy and the science

6:10 of consciousness is that we have to start with some just initial assumptions about what kind of thing consciousness is um i think there's a bit of a tendency for people to sort of underestimate some of our initial beliefs about consciousness there's all sorts of things that we believe about it like um we have beliefs about the kind of contents that it has you know the way that it presents things to us we have beliefs about its epistemic properties like it can justify our beliefs we can justif about the environment our introspective beliefs

6:43 we think it's unified we think it's dreams and flows over time so on and so forth there's lots of things that we believe initially about him um and it seems to me inevitably that what the project really amounts to is sort of explaining how that could be at least for the materialist is explaining how there could be a thing in the natural world that satisfies well enough that kind of initial picture that we have of consciousness um but in the process of trying to carry out that project we may well have to clarify what those initial beliefs were um processified them in various ways um and maybe even throw some of them out

7:18 when we realize that you know that their credentials were suspect once we think things through um so that's sort of how i see you know the most abstract level of how i see the explanatory project is playing out and so one like one of those that may be thrown out is the acquaintance thesis yeah that'd be that's an example of something that i think probably we might want to throw out um or at least either throw it out or give it a kind of deflationary reading where it doesn't play an important role in metaphysics so um so yeah i'm a fan i'm kind of basically i'm a fan of the old-fashioned identity

7:50 theory um the conscious states are just brain states and i don't think brain states in any kind of inflationary way involve acquaintance with qualitative properties so if you hold that kind of view you have to explain why we tend to to talk that way [Music] and uh i think we can explain that i think if you think about the functional role of experience the way that it um uh its role basically is to guide perceptual judgment you can sort of get a sense of why it might be tempting to

8:22 describe it in terms of acquaintance even if really it's just a brainstorm nice okay so it's nice to talk to people who are interested in the identity theory because that's one of my that's probably my strongest commitment and philosophy is excellent consciousness our brains yeah i think maybe sorry go ahead i mean i should i should be clear like uh i'm fine with functionalism when i say the identity theory i really might mean the sort of more broader claim that consciousness is identical with something physical or functional that can be sort of spelled out in

8:54 objective terms of some kind right and so i mean i guess i'm a little less fine with functionalism uh but uh it's not my immortal anime or anything like that but so it's still nice i mean because i thought you know talking about identity theory then you talk about identification theories um and so identification theories you can you could be uh you could be a dualist and still endorse a a claim like that i mean you know even someone like philip gough who's a pan psychist puts his view in terms of identity claims that's between you know conscious and identical to something

9:26 yeah so i have to clarify for people what i mean by identification theory that's just a specific proposal about what um consciousness is as opposed to the identity theory which is just this general claim that it is some kind of brain state right so uh yeah even a dualist could have what i call an identification theory because they could give some kind of objective account of what you know the material souls are or or what um non-physical phenomenal properties are like but so when you were saying you're a fan of the identity theory you didn't mean

9:58 an identification theory or a specific kind of a man-owned materialist reductive materialist uh identity theory yes and so one of the really core commitments of any kind of identity theory in this sense is the hidden nature uh view which i think has a lot of interesting consequences plays a real interesting role in your argument so can you tell us yeah um right so um right so notoriously physicalists think that uh conscious consciousness and sort of conscious states more generally um

10:31 have um a nature that it isn't totally transparent to us introspectively um obviously it doesn't seem to it doesn't seem to you like your conscious experience uh is constituted by a pattern of neural firings or something like that um and uh that's the kind of thing that's been the source of the notorious hard problem um so one of one of the things that i bang on a little bit about at the beginning of the book is that um even before we get to questions of materialism and so on um there's just this general issue of

11:04 whether we're going to be committed to consciousness and particular types of experience having some kind of hidden nature of the kind that physicalists believe in um and i actually just think it's quite hard to avoid um that kind of thing even if you're a duelist and i think that's maybe that's quite a powerful consideration because if people are using this hidden nature idea as an argument against physicalists which some people do some fans of the heart problem and so on then um i think they're in danger of

11:37 being hypocrites basically because um they may well be committed to that in another way so let's just that's very abstract just give you some examples um uh there's lots of debates about um what just basically in general what kind of things experiences are the dualists partake in as well and also what kind of structure they have um so actually what we were just talking about a minute ago does experience involve acquaintance with qualitative properties that'll be a good example i think um

12:09 um i i think it's doubtful whether you can just resolve that a priori just by reflecting on your experiences um i think that's partly an empirical question but if that's right then whether experience involves acquaintance with qualitative features is not is it is a kind of a fact about its hidden nature right and i think but i think there's lots of examples like that some of which are very simple like one that i really like that talk a fair bit about is um [Music] the similarity relations between qualitative properties in your experience so

12:41 let's say you're seeing three different uh colored surfaces um and have different brightnesses um there's presumably uh some fact about the relationship between those brightnesses um and we can make rough and ready judgments about that we have some access to those that kind of structure in our experience um but i don't think that we have infallible sort of a priori access to those similarity relations just by having concepts

13:13 of those um experiences um i think there can be a there's a sense in which that's somewhat beyond our ken um but that would still be a kind of necessary structural feature of experience of the same kind the materialists believe in when they say that experiences are identical with with uh neural states so i just think that it's quite hard to avoid the conclusion that we're kind of up to our eye is hysterical so that can't be a legitimate complaint

13:45 against materialism you kind of cut out there at the last second so you said we're up to our ears and these kind of things yeah my my view is that um almost all theorists are going to be up to their ears in commitments um to as it were hidden features of experience that um that we can't know about just by introspection and april or eye reflection so can i ask about this yeah the complaint materialists um uh materialism has that feature i think is um therefore not really a problem for them

14:17 because it's a it's a feature of pretty much any view it's ubiquitous in your view so can i ask about these blue shades because i was i was a bit unclear about this when i was reading the chapter as well but so it's is the idea supposed to be that the three shades of blue are so similar that we can't discriminate the differences between them even though there is like objectively a similarity difference between them or how that could be an example i'm thinking almost any example though where you just have three what any number of um items that you're experiencing and then

14:51 um there's some fact about how they're related in a similarity space um my view is that uh we have do have some access to those similarity facts we can introspect on the structural experience but we don't have um infallible access to that uh i see yeah and part of my case of that is empirical so if you look at um work on uh psychophysical scaling there's all sorts of different ways in which you can prompt people to make judgments that reveal the similarity structure of their

15:24 experience um but different ways of probing that result in incompatible um incompassible results about what their similarity structure is which suggests that people are like a little bit inconsistent in the way that they make these judgments they don't um depending on how you probe them in response to exactly the same experience um so i think there's a strong empirical case that uh um there's a kind of fallible process whereby we make these respective judgments it's not um this isn't just

15:58 totally transparent to us right okay yeah that's interesting yeah i guess i was slightly misunderstanding the case there it's more general than i thought it was and this is just one example of the kinds of hidden structures that you talk about so it's like you know is holism tool about conscious experience or is it uh yeah there's lots of examples here like uh whether we have a kind of single holistic field of which everything else is an aspect or whether it's built up law atoms that'd be another example things like exclusion relations so can you have a reddish and greenish

16:31 experience um or experience this reddish and greenish um or do those exclude each other i don't think you can settle that uh just by thinking about registers and greenish and something that's an empirical question yeah there's some actual work that was done on that which can be interpreted as producing those kinds of experiences exactly yeah yeah it seems like we can only decide that by actually looking at the kinds of brain states that underwrite those experiences and seeing whether they are themselves compatible or incompatible um so yeah maybe sorry maybe i should just say a little bit more about why

17:03 this is significant for okay so traditional debates that people have been having so i think i think it matters a lot for how we think about the hard problem um so um so many of us including me have these explanatory gap intuitions about consciousness um and so the idea basically is is that however much you know about the physical constitution of some system um and however much you know about

17:34 correlations between um these physical states and conscious states um there will still be this residual feeling that we don't understand why they're connected in the way they are or even why consciousness exists exists at all um that's the classic explanatory gap um now i don't want to deny that we have these intuitions but i'm a bit skeptical as to whether we've given an adequate account of what the underlying explanatory problem is that these intuitions are supposed to track

18:06 um and the way i see things is that um the debate's gone down a very specific path um influenced by people like uh frank jackson and dave chalmers whereby the idea is that the what the explanatory problem consists in is this lack of a priority usability of consciousness facts from physical facts and because we can't deduce them that we feel like there's this explanatory problem um now i think that uh

18:38 um that's explanation of the explanatory problem um and my reason for that is that i think there's loads of examples where we have that same structure but we don't feel like there's any kind of explanatory problem and so these and in fact these all these examples of these sort of uh possible hidden natures to experience that we're just talking about provide really nice examples um so um yeah go with like uh similarity structure again it um [Music]

19:10 if i think this experience exists this experience exists and this experience exists or pointing to three brightness experiences um that might then lead as a necessity necessitate that there's a certain structure in that experience because they exist and they have that structure um but it's not a priori for me that if they exist then they have that structure that's a hidden feature of them but if i'm told that i don't feel like there's some kind of explanatory gap that i'm not like why why do they have

19:43 that structure um and similarly for these other if i'm told that holism's true or if i'm told the experience involves acquaintance with qualitative features or if i'm told that redness excludes greenness or whatever it is um in many of these cases we're not going to think but why how could it be even though i think that they'll all involve analogous inferential epistemic gaps um so i think that i think that's a good strong argument that it's a kind of a red herring that at best the epistemic gap thing is more

20:15 like a component of the explanatory problem it's not um the full source of it um and i kind of strongly suspect that really what makes people have these explanatory gap intuitions is not the epistemic gap thing it's um something more like leibniz's law basically our experience seems to have certain features and brains or larger physical systems don't seem to have features like that and so there's just they just seem to be very different kinds of things right and that's why we have explanatory gap intuition not the epistemic gap thing so

20:48 just i think that was that's been a little bit of a red herring that's descartes second argument i mean right i mean it's the one that convinces undergraduates yeah yeah i mean it's time people aren't aware that that makes it puzzling i just think that that's where the emphasis should have been all along yeah so i mean do you think that this kind of inferential gap is gonna hold for even like sort of an ideal and idealized rational agent that has all the relevant information or is it just a kind of a symptom of our impoverished

21:20 access to conscious experience i mean is it something that's going to hold in the limit um yeah because i think the source of it is uh the special kinds of uh concept i i believe in a phenomenal concepts idea where we have these special concepts of experience that um um have their basis in introspection um and then then the way that we understand other people having experiences is basically by the analogy to our own case we imagine them having experiences right for example um

21:53 and however much you know about the physical constitution of some other system you can imagine that they don't have experiences um so that's fairly i think that's fairly trivially true um and that's really that's why there's this zombie thing but i also think that we don't need uh that is the idea that it's conceivable that a system is a zombie however much you know about its physical constitution it's conceivable but it lacks conscious experience um but i do think it's yeah it's important not to kind of um overplay the significance of that even though i agree that

22:26 zombies are conceivable um i do nonetheless think that um we can um once we have a more complete understanding of how brains work and we've gone through this process of thinking really carefully about how we understand consciousness what we really mean by a lot of these sort of initial data that we take as important to preserve in a theory of consciousness um i think that um in theory we can see we will be able to see how a physical

22:59 system can have something that satisfies that sort of initial theory that we have of consciousness and in that way i think satisfactory explanatory account of how it could exist in the physical world it won't be a priori but if it has this physical state then it's conscious but that doesn't mean that we don't have a fully satisfactory explanatory theory so in that way right that way my view is somewhat similar to analytic functionalities that just think that once you have the physical knowledge

23:30 then you can just deduce everything about consciousness um is this the way you're going to get around the liveness law kind of worries yeah i think for any example of an argument like that we we have to think okay well what do we really mean by consciousness having this weird feature that seems to be on um and try to um well either just uh either explain how something natural could have that feature or probably more likely engage in some kind of debunking

24:03 where we argue that we didn't really know in the first place that consciousness had that awkward feature um yeah so um i just so basically i think there's enough kind of uh the materials has a lot of strategies up their sleeve for dealing with that kind of problem right so and each one of these strategies is going to lead to kind of a deflationism or is it do you think it's not possible to have these sort of strategies and preserve a kind of inner life special divide consciousness view um

24:34 well in theory we could um in theory we could uh go through this whole process of trying to figure out what consciousness it is and then conclude that we have a material salt and then um there would be some really deep distinction in the world between the things that are conscious and the things that aren't i just doubt numerically that's what we're going to find yeah right so that's the only thing that would do it though there's no so the basic i mean you know i i even think

25:07 that immaterial souls might not actually cut it in terms of really giving us the difference between conscious things and unconscious things that we seem to want i mean um i feel like um the intuition is that we have a special subjective qualitative thing going on and that other entities that don't have that just don't have anything special and subjective and qualitative um you know there's this tradition of trying to do justice to that by just sort of throwing something non-physical into the mix but i think that's not enough i mean

25:40 just because you've got some weird non-physical doodah that doesn't imply that it has special subjective qualitative features right so you you could have a view where you have some kind of non-physical property which didn't confer the kind of status that we think consciousness does imagine that materialism is true for us and then um i don't know some angels turn up or something and they're non-physical um so we're on the wrong side as it were of the deep divide and nature between the non-physical and the physical beings i don't think in that situation would be

26:13 like oh no like we're zombies yeah we're lacking this special thing just because they have some weird non-physical thing no it would just be they've got a special version of mentality that has a non-physical substrate we have one that has a physical substrate but other than that pretty much one of heart so even dualism doesn't necessarily do justice to consciousness at least it doesn't do justice to the intuitions about it that we have that make us feel like we don't understand how it fits in the natural world yeah and even if there were non-physical zombies which showed up

26:46 that wouldn't that would just show that you have the other side of that that problem as well right that they uh they're non-physical but they lack consciousness then it's not non-physicality that's doing anything yeah yeah certainly right just non-physicality alone isn't enough to give you the special thing for sure yeah but so i mean i find obviously i'm sure you get a lot of puzzled uh looks when you talk about this stuff because i but i do find it puzzling so uh we've got to work our way into it i think to to really get to the question i want to ask but so part of the large

27:20 part of the argument is that there's this hidden nature and that this can be objectively accessed um even by creatures that lack consciousness so you know you famous martian scientists that lack consciousness uh could still pick out our states in in roughly the same way latch onto the same states not in the same way because they're like consciousness but they they would latch on to the same sort of states that we talk about when we talk about conscious experience yeah i do think i do think that we should think of it that way but in theory we can form objective

27:54 concepts of these subjective states and i think that's going to be true across a wide variety of different metaphysics like whether you're a reductive materialist or your list or whatever and so but and then they they would have an equally good access to those sorts of uh i mean that objective access is equally good i guess that's where i'm equally good for what is the issue um right yeah i do think that if you're trying to understand something like the um the significance of consciousness in the natural world just as a natural phenomenon um

28:27 like its causal role its explanatory role like what type of thing it really ultimately is that kind of thing um then you're actually better off we're this is weird i agree this is counterintuitive but i just think you're actually better off thinking of it objectively so so it seems to us like we're in this privileged position understanding the nature of it it's just this kind of thing whose nature is just revealed in having it um but um [Music] in nature and um

29:01 that head of nature is best described objectively then there's a sense in which we don't really know what it is subjectively through introspection um if we really want to know what it is we have to describe it in this other way so yeah so a zombie martian scientist can know better than elsewhere consciousness is i do think that but better in the sense that they could have a more objective access to its intrinsic nature to its like ultimate metaphysical status or something like that yeah something like that yeah so why why is that bet knowing it better than we do though so i guess that's what i'm

29:32 doing well it's knowing about it in one respect it's sort of knowing better what it is i mean i agree uh yeah i mean there's a sense in which we know it really intimately because we're in these states and we have the special way of knowing about them introspectively and so right uh of course they don't have that um so if that's what you care about is sort of having it and knowing it in that special way then yeah they completely lack that right if you want to know sort of um what it really is um then i think um you're better off being the zombie motion scientist but

30:06 why is that so why is that a better way of knowing so you you agree that there's a way that we have of knowing about our conscious experiences which is they can't have um and why isn't that the way so maybe you don't know about its ultimate metaphysical nature you can't tell of what state it is you know these various things will be hidden from us um but why isn't the important way of knowing about it the way we know about it why isn't that more important well it should say important for one purpose or

30:41 um foreign and well this gets me so yeah i think people are going to say well it's important for understanding why it's significant or something like that i think they are going to say that like because you know i say some things that sound initially quite crazy like um [Music] you don't have to be conscious to have a life that is worth living yeah that's and people are going to say no no i have the inner light of awareness and if you don't have that then just complete darkness within um and so you obviously

31:13 lack this really amazing important special subjective thing um yeah um but i think um yeah i think uh that's misleading and we see things more clearly we see what's going on more clearly if we think of everything objectively from the in the eyes of the zombie martian scientist um why do you think that because they see the nature of these things in the way that we don't so let's so to compare us listen let's look at like some ai or something that's really smart yeah it has very different kind of

31:46 hardware and sufficiently different cognitive architecture that it's doubtful whether they are conscious even if they're they have um some similarly sophisticated um form of perception and cognition um then uh looked at objectively let's just if we compare me with this ai then you've just got these two uh really fancy control systems there um the zombie martian scientist isn't going to see some special internal light inside me

32:19 and see just only darkness inside the ai system no they're just going to say let's just these these two different types of architectures and other than that they're kind of on a path there's not something really special going on with these humans and um i think that would be right i think they have the correct insight into that and this idea that we're in this idea that there's this kind of inner light and uh that gives us this really special thing i think is kind of an illusion yeah and so i i want to get to that but i was i

32:52 guess i'm trying to ask a slightly different question at this point so why isn't it the case that introspectively we have access to something like the experiential nature of the thing so we may not have access to its full fundamental nature but but we have access to something which is an essential part of what the thing is right i mean yeah if it's a pain and if it got um oh accident i'm aware of the pain in my and my knee then it being painful is part of it's uh it's essential nature

33:25 well yeah we know yeah we do know some things about conscious experience through introspection for sure but we like we have special way of being uh yeah referring to it with these phenomenal properties as for a normal concept sorry right we have knowledge of its sort of structural features we have knowledge of the kind of content that it has and so on and so forth so we can yeah we can give these rich descriptions of the kinds of experiences that we have introspectively and that that massively constrains the kind of thing

34:01 but it doesn't tell us everything it doesn't tell us i mean i guess i think that i think the zombie martian scientist can in a way uh have access to all that as well that's the thing not using the same concepts for sure they can't use phenomenal concepts to describe that but anything that we can point to and describe introspectively they can also describe just using different concepts right but they're missing out on like an important feature of the thing no i don't agree with that so like yeah you might say oh yeah there's the painfulness of pain and looking at our brain they don't see the painfulness of

34:33 pain but i but i think the painfulness of pain just is a pattern of neural firing or something like that and they can describe that so they do know about the painfulness of pain but just under a different mode of presentation right now i agree with all that because i have sympathy with the identity theory but they're still i mean i guess i don't want to beat a dead horse and i know uh no no no i think this is pretty crucial yeah so so they they can pick out the same state um in terms of neural firing they they don't know what it's like to be in that state but they don't have

35:06 access to that um even though they can describe our access to it in completely objective terms but right but yeah if sorry go ahead do i go ahead it means intro i'm sorry well no i mean i'm just rambling on this point but i think it just seems like if it's an identity theory then it goes both ways so it's fundamental nature is being a brain state but it's also being painful right the painfulness is what the brain state is so there would be missing out on that aspect of the identity the other side of the identity claim and that

35:40 seems like a a part of the essential thing let's see yeah this is a really tricky point um notoriously tricky um if we go down the road of saying that there's some special qualitative feature of experience the painfulness of the pain and that that's a feature of it that is not even described from an injective point of view then we're on really dangerous territory because it seems like there's a special feature that it has that we just can't even access by objective means um

36:14 that's like the famous max black objection to the identity theory so i think the root what we have to do is avoid making that initial step of saying that there's this some special feature of it but um can't be described objectively it's just the painfulness of the pain true but that is just is um something that can also be described fully described in objective terms yeah so i guess i'm skeptical of that move uh if if the only reason deposit that is to avoid like not being a duelist or something then i

36:48 guess i'd rather i don't know it just seems like that's part of the eject that's the part of the way the objective data that we're trying to capture here is that there's this thing there that we we may not know its ultimate metaphysical nature but we know its experiential nature by acquaintance or something close to it right i mean yeah no okay um well i think to make progress here we maybe need to talk a little bit more about what the options are for understanding what kind of thing the painfulness of pain is so yeah example some people think um um that uh

37:24 the painfulness of pain is the special special kind of intrinsic feature of the experience and that when we describe the experience objectively we just sort of describe it purely structurally and that doesn't give us access to this sort of intrinsic qualia that sort of fill in the the structure um and uh as you know like that leads some people to believe in things like pan psychism yes ultimately i'm going to get into the arguments right now but but you know physics physical descriptions are purely structural and therefore

37:56 leave something out about what they're describing namely its intrinsic nature but but uh introspection can reveal the intrinsic nature of pain or what have you um so that's one way you could think of it um but i'm not sure that we're just forced down that road by acknowledging there's this thing the painfulness of pain that we're aware of i mean i'm not really i'm not neces particularly strongly committed to denying uh that um the painfulness of pain is this intrinsic thing that uh is not fully described using objective concepts but

38:29 i'm also not committed to accepting that because the painful pain just could be this structural thing that can be described fully using structural concepts i don't see that um yeah i don't wanna i mean i'm not a pants i guess i'm not i mean i guess i uh taken that view seriously but i don't believe it really or the motivation for it but so i'm not trying to suggest that but i'm just trying to suggest that there seems to be something that the martian scientist is missing which is important to understanding the nature of the physical state that

39:02 they're describing well i think they can't they're not able to introspect it and therefore be aware of it in the way that we are but that's more like they lack a particular way of epistemically accessing it but i would distinguish that from lack of knowledge of the type of thing that it is like what its metaphysics is what kind of thing it is and so on it's a bit like um um if you've never um [Music] seen or touched some water there's a way of accessing water that you haven't

39:35 enjoyed as it were and someone who merely knows the physics of water um doesn't know it in that way and kind of can't imagine touching it and so on um but um that doesn't mean that they lack knowledge of what the kind of thing the water is it just means that they lack a particular way of accessing water and i think that you'd say about um introspection of consciousness too yeah i mean i like that analogy except for that i guess i would say it seems that in in the water case

40:08 the way that it feels is not essential to its watery nature i mean there's dry earth and all these you know we can imagine these other enough okay i mean sorry go ahead no go ahead you finish your thought um yeah no agree that there's a way in which uh the case that i just gave is a little bit parasitic on the consciousness case because maybe what you're lacking if you have never seen water is the special kind of experiences people have when when they see you or touch water um but still the abstract point holds

40:41 the uh um there's a special way of accessing water through perception right um i guess you're going to say well there aren't in the consciousness case it seems like there's features of the phenomenon that you don't know about why isn't we we don't necessarily want to say that uh you the features of water that um you get access to only by seeing water rather than reading a book about water right

41:13 yeah they're they're contingent in the way that painfulness is not yeah i get the intuition but i also think that basically i think we can see our way past that we can just entirely explain this in terms of um our access to the phenomenon so i guess maybe at this point it would what would you i mean i know you're kind of skeptical of views that build access into the nature of phenomenal consciousness or consciousness in general um but what would you say to someone who says at this point well access is built into it right so that

41:47 you can't distinguish them in this way and this gets to kind of the mythological puzzle i know you have some things to say about you know ned's uh your argument there and uh so anyway yeah so what what do you think about this uh this idea that part of what it is to experience something is to have access to the experience so that you can't separate those things um yeah i mean there's a there's definitely a sense in which i'm committed to denying that because uh yeah if consciousness has some nature that uh you can't just automatically access

42:21 by um having the experience then then there's a kind of access consciousness view that i'm um [Music] my committed it to nine but there you may be but it could still be the um um access as a kind of weaker role to play in uh individuating experiences so it could be like um um it you know it could be the uh to have phenomenal character at all uh there has to be some kind of cognitive access um that the subject has two

42:54 aspects of the content of the experience or something so i could i could you could say that kind of thing but still think that uh experiences i have a hidden nature so i'm not i'm not just fully committed to denying any form of view on which cognitive assets access to experiences or part of what makes it what it is um but i certainly think there's a lot of versions of that view that are too strong yeah um yeah but it's not even necessarily cognitive access i mean that's one form of access but there may be other forms that aren't cognitive which still count as a kind of access uh

43:26 sorry can you say a little bit more about what you have in mind well you know it's no one's really done any good work on this i'd say but you know sometimes uh people like ned say that you can have a self representational kind of thing that doesn't involve cognitive access but just involves a kind of experiential access um sometimes it allows you to know you know that the meishness part of the experience or whatever which isn't cognitive so i think that's a possibility i don't think i've seen anyone flesh it out in any serious way but i don't know if that's contradictory or self-refuting in

44:00 any way oh so are you talking about something like a same-order view of consciousness where just the state kind of represents itself in some sense yeah that's one version of this that's one version of it right yeah yeah so they're right that doesn't involve any kind of cognitive access necessarily right exactly even have a completely inaccessible experience that had that kind of reflexive representational nature right yeah so then yeah no i mean i'm i'm open to that i'm not saying anything that would conflict with that i don't think well so but if you did have a view like

44:33 that then wouldn't it put pressure on these martian scientists because they they would be they wouldn't have access to i mean they'd have access to the state but they might miss its self-representational character entirely okay we're imagining they have some kind of objective omniscience so you know they look inside our brains and they see that there's these states that have the special reflexive representational feature so it's assuming that that's the kind of thing that could be described objectively somehow

45:05 why they essentially why they couldn't know about that um yeah why would you assume it could be described objectively if that's what the phenomenal aspect of it is um well yeah it's tricky because um i mean basically in the end i think that uh everything that exists is just part of the objective world and so in some very thin sentence um you can describe it objectively um but just go on the go but to going back to the more specific example of self-representation i just uh presumably

45:38 like if we can given a clear account of what it even means for a state to represent itself um that will just be in something like um functional terms maybe it has a structure where it has one part that kind of relates to the other part in some way the like that but it seems like any kind of account of what that even means will just spell that out in objective terms um i suppose i see you're thinking maybe no no no

46:10 so i'm losing my voice you're thinking though um you could have a self self-representational theory where there's just something inherently subjective or phenomenal about the notion of self-representation yes i mean sometimes i think that's like what ned's view it amounts to that there's a physical state that has that that property but then so then then i would play the same game with self-representation that will just play from consciousness in

46:43 general so i would say okay yeah we've got the special subjective concept of self-representation but whatever it picks out is just some feature of the objective world that can in theory be described in objective terms also right i agree with all that but i guess the only thing i'm trying to press you on this whole time is that the martians would be missing something uh and it wouldn't be and if it was just a matter of that they had different access to it but that might be the thing that matters well i mean i think you have to say what's missing because i think if you're if you're sorry

47:16 it's quite unfortunate that i'm losing my thoughts um that's okay sorry um i must be like shouting or something um oh there's blessing it won't save you jeff come on now yeah well i mean okay so if you think that there's something that they don't know then i think one way of getting this is just to think okay well what kind of metaphysical picture would imply that uh knowing all the objective structure of the brain means you don't know everything um

47:49 and i agree that there's this there's this kind of approach where you say um there's this intrinsic nature to physical matter that is not revealed by those kinds of structural descriptions and so um that's not actually you know he had a sort of resilient kind of picture of the physical world i see how that would be a one way to say that there's something um missing from the zombie martian scientists understanding of the brain that could potentially be relevant for consciousness so i agree there's that root

48:20 but then then one thing to say there then is that it's not really the uh that you have that kind of picture then it's not just that they don't know everything about consciousness they don't know everything about anything right it's like a rock or something then they don't know the nature of the rock either so so if they can have an understanding of consciousness that is just as good as the understanding that they can have of things like rocks they're still doing pretty well yeah okay so i mean i understand the view it's i guess i guess i just really have it's probably

48:52 my shortcoming um because but i just have real trouble understanding how they have just as good an understanding of the state but lacking the experiential aspect of it um to me that's that's part of what the state is that's that is what it is uh i think if you really like if you really are consistent identity theorist then you say though all these you know the what it's likeness the qualitative nature blah blah blah all that just is it is nothing above and beyond uh this physical activity

49:24 and so if you know about the physical i mean yeah i agree it's counterintuitive because it seems like if you describe it quay physical activity you uh in a certain sense haven't mentioned its qualitative character but yeah we have to say that what that amounts to is that you just haven't described it using certain concepts not that you right not there actually is something about its metaphysics that you've left out yeah i guess because i think about it from the other point of view so what that brain state really is is a pain so you can do it both ways it's an

49:57 identity right i mean the pain is nothing but the brain state but the brain said it's nothing but a pain so it seems like they don't really grasp the id they don't grasp the state in its full nature because they are missing half of it they're missing the part where it's experiential uh and that is an essential aspect of that state um that that's what it is it's an experience yeah obviously i feel the intuition that's driving you to say things like that you're just not being a fully consistent identity theorist you say that kind of

50:29 thing because you're making it sound like it in something in the metaphysics of the experience has been left out by the objective description but that can't be right if you really are if you really are identity theorists then you're committed to saying no no no everything about it has been described objectively yeah everything about its ultimate uh i see what you're saying but it i don't know we've been going on about this for a while yeah i'm sorry that i'm not saying anything no it's my it's my fault because i don't think i'm being very articulate but

51:03 anyway so um let's let's suppose we grant the point that the uh martian scientists can understand everything there is about the state in in the full way and they go back to your example about the ai um and you and the martian is looking at the two of you uh and you say well there's nothing special about you you system versus that system they're just complex control things so isn't one i mean this is kind of like take it part of the point that that ned makes in his response to you and where he coins the hegemony of the third person uh charged at you so is it but

51:36 isn't one of the things that's different is the fact that we go on you know for an hour talking about how puzzling consciousness is and um that they're gonna notice that we use these terms in a certain way that the ai system is not using and there's going to be something that they're going to know well there's got to be won't they infer that there's something about this state that they're missing out on because of the way we talk about it basically i guess well yeah so they're going to note that we talk about these states with great puzzlement at least if we're people in philosophy departments in the united states america

52:12 and um that's right and it could be the uh when they look at this ai system the aso system is not similarly puzzled about its own internal states but it could be actually i mean um it's not it seems to me that we can't rule out that you could have a system that has some analog of phenomenal concepts and and what have you um some analog of the psychological features of us that make us puzzled about consciousness but they have it directed at some other kind of internal state um

52:43 so it's not obvious that uh as it were the kind of puzzlemen that we have requires consciousness rather than something else yeah that's an interesting point but even if they don't aren't puzzled by their internal states in the way that we are um [Music] um that will be a that will be one asymmetry between us but i don't think that's uh when we think about the asymmetry of like the lights on and then the darkness um over there we don't think that it consists in the fact that we're puzzled about consciousness rather that we think that

53:16 the puzzlement is a sort of uh insight into this special kind of internal state that we're in um but they're not going to see anything like that they're just going to see that we have some quirky functional architecture that leads us to be puzzled and they'll fully explain why we're puzzled just in functional terms um and so now it's starting to sound like you're like this is a kind of illusionism that once you explain like the things we say about consciousness then you've explained

53:47 consciousness um i don't quite think that because um i think that uh we can be realist about consciousness we can say that it exists we can say that uh there's some internal state of us or maybe some state of some larger system um that uh it basically satisfies enough of our ordinary thinking about consciousness that it's totally reasonable to say that just is consciousness so in that sense i'm a realist about consciousness um

54:19 but um but yeah when it comes to the explanatory worries and so on um a big you know big part of it is just causally explaining why we have those intuitions um explaining where they come from but also looking at what they actually track that's real right um and yeah i think the thing that's distinct about illusionists is they just think that uh most of our insurance just don't track anything yeah um but i don't yeah i think you can sort of explain have you can you can buy into quite a lot of that kind of debunking project without going

54:51 as far as being a completely anti-realist right precisely not enough of what we ordinarily think about consciousness does apply to some real thing so because right because why wouldn't the martian infer that there is something that they're so what you're sounds like what you're saying is well the martian is going to be able to explain all the things that we say they're going to say oh well this guy says he's puzzled about consciousness ah that's because this state's connected to that state there's this functional blah blah that produces the utterance um and then they'd be done they'd be satisfied and say okay we're done but

55:25 why wouldn't they be led to the conclusion that they're missing something mainly whatever is the source of this uh puzzle mean i i sort of see that both options are there but why would the martian go one way versus the other because my intuition would be like they would sort of they would infer gee there must be some aspect of this we're not getting well but um if they can fully explain why we have these intuitions that we have the special insight into this thing um purely in physical terms it's hard to see why they would then be

55:57 tempted to conclude nonetheless the uh [Music] um you know it's a bit like um um let's say we're studying people who believe in ghosts and we can fully satisfactorily explain why they think that they're a ghost just in terms of uh things that don't involve ghosts um but they say no no we have some special insight that they're really all these ghosts or like actually religious belief is a little bit like this people just think that they have this direct connection to god that kind of thing um if you can explain why they have that

56:31 sense of a direct connection to god in a way that doesn't like involve actually believing that there really is some special insight there then that's how that's fully satisfactory so similarly uh or it's question making yeah okay well yeah it could be question begging so yeah i mean what i should say one thing i kind of do think uh about this whole business philosophy of consciousness is that it is possible that there are there are kind of multiple um sort of equilibrium points that you could end up with that's sort of the end

57:04 of ideal theorizing right so maybe someone could flesh out a kind of non-reductive or jeweler's view or something like that with a special epistemology and so on where it all kind of ends up being kind of an internally coherent package where there really is something that we have special insight into that there's a zombie martial scientists can't see and so um but i think it's really hard to do that i think um you'd need some really weird metaphysics and epistemology to get all that all to work yeah so the whole package may may be

57:37 self-consistent but it may just be so like hodgepodge and stuck together that it's not well yeah if it was too hodgepodge then it wouldn't have all the theoretical virtues so i'm imagining that yeah i'm being generously imagining that you could really flesh it out in such a way okay it's sort of um has those theoretical virtues but it would be but i think it would be much more alien than uh a lot of the kind of jubilee views you see on on the market these days okay partly because you'd have to have i think you'd have to have some really weird kind of supernatural epistemology to explain how we can know

58:11 um that consciousness has all these special qualitative intrinsic features that are physically irreducible and so on um so to me to me it's like just more attractive to explore this kind of materialist option where it seems like metaphysics and the epitomization so on is gonna be more straightforward even though it's true that there's gonna be an element of kind of deflation and debunking that goes into that yeah okay so now let's get into the i mean we've been talking about deflationism for a long time but let's get into the significance aspect of it because i mean so it's one thing to say

58:46 that the ai system and and you can't be distinguished in any deep and important way by the martian scientist but you go further that and say well actually you're both equally valuable like there's no significant moral status which attaches to the consciousness so they may lack consciousness but they may have something which which plays enough of a role i mean you mentioned that in a second ago so i guess i'm a bit puzzled by what you mean by what state could play the role and yet not be conscious yes this is a little bit this is definitely quite tricky territory so

59:18 let's go slowly um yeah so um so i've got this idea that uh we can talk about the consciousness role um but let's be um i need to be clear about what i mean by that i don't think that there's a sort of single kind of nice unified functional role that we associate with consciousness then can be kind of multiple realized in different instances if there was then actually it'd be plausible just to say that's what consciousness is right um instead we've got something like um this kind of complex set of

59:50 pre-theoretical ideas about consciousness that can be clarified in different directions depending on what we discover empirically um and um you can sort of just you can process find if anything in different directions and you can just take different subsets of that um and also different aspects of what we discover empirically about it and basically see that there could be other systems that resemble us in these different respects and so we could say they have a consciousness like state but they may but different beings with consciousness like states might resemble us in totally

1:00:24 different ways so my way of thinking because system a isn't a consciousness like state and system b is in a consciousness like state that doesn't mean that they actually have anything very interesting in common because they may resemble us in different ways um so so i do think that there's this sort of universe of consciousness like properties but it's kind of um they're they're more kind of related by family resemblance and resemblance to us in different ways not by all having some single nice unified functional feature or something like that so i mean is the distinction between

1:00:57 pseudo consciousness and quasi consciousness it's playing a role here just important that's how i'm thinking about consciousness like states because um that's a pretty good reason i think for denying that they all are conscious and because they don't have some nice natural feature all in common um you could here's the thing so uh you could just decide that you're going to use the term consciousness to refer to this very kind of superficial somewhat disjunctive kind of family resemblance

1:01:31 [Music] of features and in a way i don't have a problem with that you can just talk that way if you want yeah say that they're all conscious but then you'd be using the term just in a way that was really very superficial um so an analogy analogy that i give is um the concept of representation so uh we kind of start off with a pretty vague kind of folk concept of representation and then we um processify and clarify in various ways and discover empirically that they're

1:02:05 more specific kinds of representations exist and play important roles in cognitive systems and i mean art you know in various kinds of artifacts and so on um and all these things do sort of have something in common that make us call them representations but it's more like a kind of family resemblance thing and it's pretty vague um the more interesting explanatory kinds of representation of the more specific ones that we then characterize in in theory and i sort of think of consciousness a bit like that um when we try and figure out what

1:02:36 consciousness is what we're doing is figuring out what thing in us um that can be more clearly characterized and play an important role in our cognitive system uh is the thing that matches closely enough our sort of initial way of thinking about what consciousness is um but um just like with representation in different contexts we could we could discover different states um using that same methodology like if some aliens have something a bit like our initial beliefs about consciousness but then do the science of consciousness on themselves

1:03:09 i don't think they'll necessarily um in the long run conclude that consciousness is the same thing we think that it is um instead i think the right picture is just that there's this family of states that different systems can be in that all resemble each other in various ways um and if you like say they're all consciousness-like so but just to be clear the notion of consciousness like states um doesn't involve phenomenality right there's nothing that it's like to be in these states for for the for the creatures that have them yeah i mean

1:03:43 yeah i think sort of that's right i mean if by what it's likeness you mean the thing in us that is this natural property that uh whose nature we can uncover put through philosophical scientific investigation yeah they don't necessarily have that um but i have some pretty i have some pretty big hedges on this these days okay good let me hear the hedges i mean one thing is um so one thing that's going on when we say like the lights are on or off is that we are sort of extending our imaginative reach to some system saying you can kind of step into its shoes and picture things

1:04:16 from its point of view um now i'm a little bit this is a bit of a um i'm a little bit tempted at least i don't know how high my credence really is in this in this particular move but i'm a little bit tempted to say that we can legitimately step into the shoes of beings that don't have the thing in us that we call consciousness that is you can legitimately imagine their point of view um because as long as there's enough similarity between their internal state and your internal state

1:04:49 then it's reasonable to sort of simulate them using your internal state um because you are in what way is the similarity what dimension along along which dimension is the similarity well yeah they might have some kind of structural functional similarity to you such that if you simulate their internal state using your internal state it's similar enough that you get some interesting um purchase on them that way in the way that you do it with other people when you simulate their internal state with yours so you can do this with like the google self-driving car well maybe that's just so different from

1:05:22 us that it's we're not really going to get much purchase on it by trying to imagine its point of view but if it was something like a ai system that had something like the architecture that we have at least very abstractly then maybe you could get enough purchase on it that um it would be worthwhile as it were to imagine its point of view um and i'm not even trying to say that's all there's ever going on when you imagine the point of view of things you're just sort of successfully simulating them and then for that purpose it doesn't really matter whether they have the thing that we call consciousness they just have to be similar enough to

1:05:53 you that there's some point to doing them um so in that way like a kind of if you if you go down that route you can kind of deflate the lights on things if you think of the space of all the things that you can successfully simulate using your own internal state they might not all have some deep property in common they just have to resemble you and enough of enough that it's worthwhile to simulate them um

1:06:25 so yeah and you could if you like say oh well they're the conscious things but that would that would be to sort of use the concept of consciousness to mean the things whose point of view i can step into so i mean clearly you don't buy nagel's like argument that uh you know points of view come in types and uh there are concepts that applied like to the bats phenomenology that we can't take up uh no word yeah no i'm i do think there are different types of experience so yeah if the bat has some kind of qualitative um has some kind of um way of sensing that's qualitatively quite different

1:06:58 from ours then that's a way in which i can't successfully simulate them right they might be able to successfully stimulate the structure of their experience something like that so the states being similar to other states the quality spaces or whatever yes in general it's going to be easier to simulate things structurally than it is to simulate them like intrinsically but all that structure is phenomenal structure though so i'm still or well in or at least in the case of conscious beings um when it comes to things like these non-conscious but consciousness-like creatures then

1:07:30 conscious uh creatures who have consciousness like like um internal states then it's a little bit more tricky to think about how to describe that but i still don't even in those cases i kind of think well why not why can't i do the same thing with them that i do when i imagine the internal state of a conscious being so they'd like to argue the lights are on even though they're not conscious i know that sounds i know that sounds very strange so it sounds like you're saying they're they have they're conscious but just in a way that's different than us but anyway here's one way of thinking

1:08:04 about my picture so i think we can just distinguish different concepts of phenomenal consciousness that have different emphasis so one way of thinking of it is it's like this natural property um this deep natural property that we have um that has a bunch of these features that initially we think consciousness has sort of satisfies our focus picture of consciousness well enough um call that the kind of natural property of consciousness um i tend to think that is how most people

1:08:35 in philosophy are thinking of it i don't know whether most ordinary people think of it that way but um that's certainly a dominant strain in thinking about phenomenology absolutely yeah um but then you can have the concept of the being such that i can i can imagine their point of view um in a way that wouldn't grossly misrepresent him and there's also the being such that they have something that matters morally in in the way that consciousness does that's another space of beings there's the space of beings that

1:09:08 have something that is superficially functionally kind of like consciousness so like again like if you um think about sort of uh the project of locating consciousness in us um like starting with your initial beliefs and then taking all the empirical input and then figuring out what it is you can de-center that whole project on different beings like some aliens could do the signs of consciousness thing on themselves or like some fish could do on themselves or we can do on the fish um it's not clear that that same

1:09:40 methodology will yield the same answer to what the thing is in all these different ways in fact i don't think it will so you could be by consciousness you could mean just the disjunction of all the things that you could by some method like that ascertain as being what consciousness is in all the different contexts it's just a little big disjunction as it were and that's fine you can talk about it that way i don't have a problem with using the concept of consciousness that way but then you have to admit that that would be in some ways a revisionary of ordinary thinking because there wouldn't necessarily be some deep thing that they

1:10:13 all have in common it would just be more like a kind of tangled web of like resemblances right i guess i don't really see how why it's a deep revision given that the state satisfied most of the things that are a lot of the things that we ordinarily associate with consciousness and there's a point of view involved and there's something that is like to be in those states for those creatures even if it's so it doesn't seem where's the revision the revision is just that there's a unifying well they don't you made it sound like they do have some deep thing in common but that's kind of

1:10:45 what yeah it sounds like they did it but i'll be fine with that but i'm thinking um it's not really like that because i think about um let's go with the yeah let's just try let's try a different example um um yeah so influencer again because that's the thing that philosophers are used to thinking about so say that again the thing that plays the watery role on our planet oh sorry water let's think about water yeah it's just okay okay so like

1:11:18 um there's this thing that plays the watery roll on planet earth it's the thing that fills legs it's this clear liquid it's the thing that we drink and so on so we can imagine uh being in some situation where something else played that role um and what the role is is itself kind of up for grabs like you could when you say there's something else that plays a role do you mean it's the thing you find in lakes do you mean that's the thing that's part of your body that you drink is it the thing that comes out of the sky and it was rain okay um so um i could take the disjunction of all the things that could be in some

1:11:51 vague way water-like um like if they come out of clouds on some alien planet or they're part of the body that's the liquid that's the predominant thing that's part of the body of the aliens or whatever it is um but if you take that massive disjunction of all the vaguely watery like things they don't necessarily have anything in common with each other maybe they're all liquids maybe even make or something like that but that doesn't um distinguish them from other liquids right similarly i can take this disjunction of all the things that

1:12:24 are vaguely consciousness like that in some way or other important way resemble what we have when we're conscious um but if you take any two random two of them they don't necessarily have anything uh um really deep in common that's that's the point like yeah metaphysically they don't have a lot in common yeah so they accept that they resemble us so you know and one way of putting this is that if you do it this way it's very kind of anthropocentric it's like there's our consciousness and there's just the things that resemble it in various ways um but not necessarily in the same way whereas um i think

1:12:59 the way that i've been thinking about consciousness over the years it's not like that it's not like this anthropocentric thing it's more like it's this deep natural property um and then there's this project of figuring out what it is what its essential nature is and so on um a bit like there's a project of figuring out what water is or lightning um so yeah you can use the concept of water just to refer to whatever is vaguely as watery in some way like that's to use it in a very nominal or superficial way and that's fine you can just stipulate that's how you're using the concept and similarly with consciousness

1:13:31 i could just stipulate that i'm using it in this really superficial way um so why can't we have both ways though i mean so you know you can bring the two the tools of two-dimensional semantics and so say one is the primary intention one's a secondary intention to take tomorrow's way of talking about things but you know yeah i'm actually okay with that yeah okay yeah so then what consciousness is for us i mean so but the key move there is that whatever we pick out by it is the for us the important one the rest are

1:14:03 kind of not as important so is there water on twin earth um sure does that mean that water is not necessarily h2o no we're using different ways of picking it out in both those two cases but it's still true that water is necessarily h2o because we're here and that's what water picks out here so yeah you can use it in that kind of natural kind of way and then you pick up the thing that is the complete the consciousness role in us yeah i tend to think that's how ordinary thinking of consciousness is the thing that plays that role in us and then once you do that though you can say well it's necessarily that's what it is

1:14:34 yeah but then i'm going to argue that that's not what's important and that also that's not the same thing as what you can access through imagination um so um so if you have a concept of consciousness it's like having the thing that uh matters in the way that consciousness does then i would i mean we haven't i haven't made the case of this yet in our conversation but i would argue that uh we should extend our moral concern beyond just the things that have the state that plays the consciousness role in us right um yeah i mean i i like that let's yeah go

1:15:08 ahead sorry go ahead oh no sorry i'll keep sorry though i'm just gonna say i like that that part of your view i think that's really an important cool part of it but anyway go ahead thank you yeah yeah i mean so what i don't know one way you can think of my view as more like a conceptual pluralism so it's like we can distinguish these different concepts that are in the ballpark of what we ordinarily think of as phenomenal consciousness um and according to me they're not a priori equivalent and also when we think it through we can argue that they don't pick out exactly the same set of beings um

1:15:40 and so i tend to think it the the one that the concept that treats consciousness as a natural property or something like that the one that we're ordinarily using but in a way someone denied that and don't have a huge beef with them um because because i still think that there's these different concepts that are not equivalent and pick out different things and so in some in some way or other we're going to have some kind of interesting revisionary picture yeah so so is what you're saying then right now that even if you even if you succeed in sort of um somehow keeping the idea that

1:16:13 it's we're in the center right uh so to speak that i guess i would let's put i know you have like these edgelings in the center and all that i think that parts that's interesting but i think what we really want is just that we're typical um that conscious the kind of you know the basic aspects of our conscious experience are typical in some sense of conscious beings um maybe that means we're in the center maybe it doesn't but so suppose you grant that you're still saying though that there are these other states um that are not like that but that have the same kind of moral weight then we should respect those creatures just as much as

1:16:45 we respect so-called yeah well there's two things there there's the thing about the center and then this thing the thing about um the moral importance of consciousness i mean let me just say the thing about us being really stereotypical examples of conscious beings i think we have this kind of natural kind view of consciousness then we're not guaranteed to be like super stereotypical i think we can certainly say that we're not like extremely peripheral like what kind of borderline cases because just semantics probably be hard to explain how we're even referring to

1:17:16 consciousness if we're right on the borderline but yeah but nonetheless if you are kind of realistic about it in this natural kind of way we might not be particularly stereotypical um cases of conscious beings um so just let me just make that point um okay whereas if you've got this view where um what makes something conscious is just that it resembles us in some way then that just guarantees that we're right in the middle um but let me go let me i think you want to talk about the moral important stuff right yeah yeah let's do that okay excellent

1:17:49 um yeah so um so i think a lot of people are going to think that their beliefs about the moral importance of consciousness are kind of bedrock like they really care about being conscious if they lost phenomenal consciousness that would be to lose everything if some being doesn't have it then they just don't have moral status i don't have a life that is important in the way that the life of a conscious being is and so on so and i agree that these are very basic bedrock kind of moral principles that we seem to have um

1:18:22 and so any project that tries to kind of argue that we can dig below that bedrock and revise them admittedly is on somewhat um 10 dangerous ground so i'm just going to first of all say that i don't think i've got like a really strong argument for a revision um but nonetheless i do think that um there's some ways of getting into this where you can sort of talk yourself into a position where something's gonna have to give some kind of revision's gonna have to happen and a revision in the direction of granting moral status to non-conscious beings is not a crazy way

1:18:54 of resolving that tension so let me just say why i think there's attention yeah well let me give you first of all i'd like to use a lot of analogies here to get people's intuitions going so one analogy is with um imagine um fairly realistically that's why i'm losing my voice again imagine a bunch of people who think that the property of being a human being is super morally significant like human beings matter and no one else matters um and

1:19:26 um then uh after a period of time they discover some other beings that are really rather similar to human beings so imagine for example there's actually some neanderthals that still exist on planet earth they've just been hiding away somewhere that when we discover them um and you know an intelligent member of this shoot this human worshiping group might think oh my god actually these these neanderthals are actually rather similar to human beings and they might think that they might realize that all along they have this kind of picture whereby

1:19:59 metaphysically human beings are kind of on a pedestal they're just totally different from other kinds of beings and there's no chance that anything could be even vaguely similar to a human being um and that was part of what was driving their sort of faith in this in the moral supremacy of human beings and then so when they discover that actually that metaphysical belief was wrong and you can have a thing that is really very similar to a human being that's not a human being um it seems like they'll kind of yeah that could produce a kind of crisis of faith in them where

1:20:30 they work okay well i really don't want to think anymore and one fairly reasonable way forward would be to extend the sphere of moral concern to the non-humans but there are other ways forward too they could just kind of dig their heels in and say no no being a human is what matters even though there are these other creatures that are very similar to humans so they i think they could do that too i don't think there's like anything like rational consistency that would force one way or the other i just think that um a natural way to proceed in that in that circumstance would be to extend moral

1:21:04 [Music] um and so similarly his that's how i'm thinking about consciousness so um take like let's suppose that we've got like um i don't know a certain fairly simple kind of fish or something um and we conclude that it's not actually phenomenally conscious but it has a state that plays a similar role as a pain okay let's imagine that we just grant granted knowledge of that somehow um then um the intuitive picture is that uh

1:21:40 we have this thing that hurts and feels really bad and what they have is just totally different metaphysically it's just it's darkness within yes it's functionally the same but it just lacks the thing that makes conscience makes pain bad like the hurtfulness um and it's because the thing it has is just so totally different in that way that it's reasonable to say that pain really matters and that what they have doesn't matter at all i think that's our intuitive picture right um but here's the thing like one once you've got this kind of materialist uh

1:22:13 world view and you agree with me that you get a clearer view on the nature of these things from the outside not from the inside so you take up the perspective of the zombie martian scientist then you look at this fish and you look at us and it's not really that different it's just like they've got a thing that plays the pain role and we've got a thing that plays the pain role and actually metaphysically they're really rather similar and once you see that it's really could be like that even though they don't technically count as having pain in the sense that we use that word they still have a thing that's pretty kind of like pain um

1:22:47 and uh i think uh that means that one of the things that as it were was propping up our belief in the supremacy and importance of consciousness it sort of kicked away a little bit rather in a situation where i think one reasonable way to proceed once that's kicked away is to say okay well let's extend our concern to these beings because of the thing that's a lot like pain even though it's not pain um and yeah it's puzzling because um if you've got this like lights on lights off kind of binary deep divided picture

1:23:19 you might think well how can it be like pain if the lights are not on but then then my response to that is to say well that lights on the lights off picture is kind of like misleading you need to just forget that and just think of it all objectively and then you'll really see what's going on um i mean so what i mean yeah i this this part i this part of your view i think is you don't need the other part of it to maintain it so i'm wondering what you think about someone who might say well look i think there is a lights on lights off divide but i also think that the the argument for treating the fish

1:23:55 morally is strong even if they lack what we call pain because they have something that that plays the pain roll so damage is still bad to them in some sense just not phenomenally bad but it's still bad so i don't see what what where the conflict with the you could still say well the lights are off lights are on here a little over there but we still have good argument reason for expanding the sphere of moral consideration well i mean if someone says that then i'm like great i was thinking uh kind of what's driving

1:24:27 our willingness to sort of exclude the fish from moral concern was this idea that what they have is just totally different from what we have and in that because it lacks the you know the internal light or something like that right um but then the thought is that oh actually when you really see what's going on metaphysically from this external point of view and you see that actually there's not that kind of deep difference between us and then then um that's a reason for thinking we should extend moral concern much like the human neanderthal case

1:25:00 yeah right and so i i that part of the martian scientist i think that part of the argument seems very forceful to me i think that's a a very strong argument but i don't see like why it has to come with this idea that there's no significance to consciousness so so would it be wrong i guess it is wrong but on your view there's no ordering here right so that it's not like more wrong to harm a conscious creature than it is to harm or unconscious creature or something like that oh well yeah this gets into a different issue which has to do with what the

1:25:34 consciousness is graded yeah and yeah i mean i think that it's reasonably likely that we'll discover that there is a fairly like um smooth gradient between uh shallows or shallow gradient between us and bacteria i don't i don't think we know that for sure i think it could be that there's some very sudden phase change or something like that when you get to the conscious beings but for all we know it could be like a smooth pretty smooth uh not smooth sorry shallow gradient yeah nice and then um it's a different impact on our moral

1:26:10 thinking i think so um so i yeah my view is that if that's what we discover empirically then we should be willing to talk about consciousness coming degrees um and um it would be perfectly reasonable to revise our moral thinking too to reflect that so there could be something like degrees of importance um corresponding to degrees of consciousness or something like that okay yeah that's interesting but even if there weren't degrees what if it you know what if uh there was a phase transition and you either get phenomenal consciousness or you don't and the fish don't have it but

1:26:42 they have something that plays a role that's similar to what we call the pain role so in that case is it's still more wrong to harm so you had two fish one like there's a trout and there's a bass and the trout has phenomenal consciousness and the bass doesn't or whatever the case may be um then on your view uh would it be more morally wrong to harm i forget which one i said was the conscious one but anyway the one that has phenomenal consciousness they still add up on a par morally well i mean i don't have like a subtle view about how exactly we should revise

1:27:15 ordinary thinking to accommodate these metaphysical discoveries but um yeah on the face of it though if you just have these two really similar creatures that have interests in the same kind of way and just happen to have some fairly arbitrary difference in their design so i don't mean design in a kind of a intelligent design way just in there yeah um then um then yeah on the face of it it's hard to see how there could be some justification for saying that one of

1:27:47 them matters more than the other i think that's right so but i mean i don't think a little more i think i do think that a sort of plausible way to develop our moral thinking about other beings probably would um take into account things like how smart they are how much they have interests the of the kind that we have like they have a whole life that they care about and so on rather than simple creatures that maybe don't quite have interests in quite the same way that we do so i think all those things might matter morally

1:28:19 right that's why i was thinking of two fish but it sounds so if you had a trolley problem where you had you know a zombie on one side and a typical human on the other side there'd be no reason to pull the lever one way or the other on your view it sounds like sorry just say the case again so what do you have if you had a like a trolley problem sort of case where you have one zombie on one side and a typical human on the other side you could pull the lever to divert it towards one or the other uh say it was heading towards the human or heading towards the zombie or whatever you could pull the lever and have it go the other way there would be no reason to pull the lever on your view

1:28:52 yeah yeah i mean it might depend on the details of what kind of zombie it is but yeah the mere fact that they're a zombie does not on its own autumn automatically militate in favor of saving the human yes yeah that's interesting so i guess i have i got the opposite i mean obviously i have a kind of more traditional view that would be not it would be wrong to kill the zombie but less wrong than killing the human yeah no it's a basically yeah my position is that that's a kind of uh um i know this i know this is going to be pretty hard to swallow

1:29:26 my view is that that's a kind of arbitrary prejudice in in favor of one specific way of uh um as it were realizing the consciousness role in us um and yeah i mean i find that so fascinating and uh if they the zombie basically is like an intelligent being that has a rich mental life and cares about itself and cares about other beings and so on in the way that we do it just happens to not have this fairly arbitrary feature that we have that we call consciousness

1:29:59 then i don't think that uh um that means that they matter less than us that's interesting so but why why i think they have a rich mental life since they're stipulated have no mental life i mean there's well i wouldn't wouldn't agree with that characterization i think that lacking the thing that we call consciousness is not does not mean that you like a rich mental life because they can have all sorts of cognitive states they can have um interests and desires and whims and dreams and so on um they can yeah dreams in this form of hope you mean not like

1:30:33 that yeah yeah well they can even have like functional analogues of uh of um experiences that just don't have what we call experience right so i mean i i agree with you that there's you shouldn't discount the zombie entirely because i think that those states matter and that you know intelligence rationality and those sorts of things count for something even if there's no consciousness involved at all so i agree with that part but i guess i just don't see the reason for thinking that the fact that i can suffer and it can't

1:31:07 doesn't matter somehow to the moral calculation now i get what you're saying that in ultimate reality there's a fairly arbitrary difference between me and the zombie metaphysically you know they have i have some uh physical state that they don't have or some physical quality that they don't have or something like that so that that seems fairly arbitrary from the point of view of like third person yeah but it's not fairly arbitrary from the first person yeah but then my view is that that's misleading the uh that if you really want to see in the cold light of day what's actually out there think of it from the outside and or what you're going to see is that

1:31:40 just two different beings with uh two different realizations of a similar high-level architecture um and there's no deep asymmetry between them and i think that is that is also an argument for extending concern to them i mean i imagine um imagine things from their point of view as it were not conscious beings but still um they might even have a concept of something like they might even have a concept that's somewhat like our concept of consciousness

1:32:12 um they might even have they might even have philosophers who go on about internal lights and so on yeah from their point of view they might be like oh yeah these poor humans they lack the internal light of consciousness or whatever it is that they have and they might think oh well yeah obviously that we should favor people from our race of beings in a trolley problem because they lack consciousness um we looked out from the outside like their internal light intuition and our internal light intuition is just on a path they're both equally right or both

1:32:44 equally wrong there's nothing there's no there's no asymmetry between us that could justify saying that one or other of us is better or worse in our thinking right this is doing better or worse in our thinking so this is the hegemony of that that's just a way of saying that in way there's like this just isn't this deep symmetry between us um and so uh given that i think it is reasonable to think okay well maybe what they have matters as much as what we have yeah i mean so this is the hegemony of the third person thing right this is this is it

1:33:16 yeah yeah it's that combined with some sort of simple moral reasoning right but i mean so but what i mean by that is you you're not allowing first-person data as part of our as part of the data set yeah so that's right i mean it's not it's not that i'm denying that we can know things about experience from a first person point of view i think we can know a whole bunch of talk about what experience is like and so on um [Music] but still ultimately if you have this

1:33:48 kind of objective picture of things then you know we really in the cold light of day what's actually out there um yeah cold light of day is very cold and very cold yeah and i i mean i would to be honest with you if uh if more people thought through this and took this view seriously the world would be a better place so i i think that this sort of stuff is important i think it had practical implications if i mean this is a little bit silly but like if

1:34:20 uh you know some aliens landed on planet earth and tried to live amongst us and we concluded that they lacked phenomenal consciousness that might be hugely impractical because then we might refuse to cooperate with them and and uh you know treat them with respect and so on right whereas actually i think we'd probably be better off like you know treating them as conscious as it were yeah i mean you don't even need aliens i mean you just think about ants or bees or trees even i'm not sure what your views about trees are but um plants are pretty cognitively sophisticated

1:34:54 yeah it's not unclear that they don't have something which at least would satisfy some of these constraints that you were talking about um in the ball they probably are edgelings in some sense in that sense of the term that we're talking about earlier uh but they're very very i mean they can do classical conditioning and so forth and they exchange information they favor their young um so it's it seems like there's an argument for extending even you know some sort of uh conscious like property even to plants

1:35:27 here do you agree with that or is that too far on your view no i'm not i mean i don't actually have that view necessarily as a sort of settled position but i'm somewhat sympathetic with a view of where like all life matters or something like that i'd be a little bit inclined to say there that um that would be an example of a type of view where um you know maybe a plant doesn't have the inner light in the sense that you could accurately represent its internal state through imaginative projection or something maybe it's just

1:35:58 too different from a human being so as it were kind of uh be able to um in any sense actually its internal state with your internal state right um but nonetheless maybe it matters in the way that maybe yeah you could have a view on which and nonetheless matters in the way that a conscious being does but that would be to say that would be to hold a view on which that's where the things that have the internal light in a sense that you can imagine their point of view and the things that matter morally in the way that conscious things do come apart

1:36:31 um and you might say that's not surprising because the inner light thing is really anthropocentric the inner light thing is just the things that resemble us enough that we can simulate them but what i think that what actually ultimately matters is just resembling us in some way we're like just one arbitrary creature maybe all life is what matters or something yeah yeah i mean it's not even clear to me that we can't that they are they aren't similar enough to imaginatively simulate their states i mean okay at least at some level they need nutrients they you know around the sun they are searching for

1:37:04 things underground spreading their roots i mean there's a certain basic level of need uh biological data probably that yeah you can put yourself into yeah i mean if you can if you can do it with a martian that lacks consciousness i'm not sure why i can't do it with the tree i mean uh i'm not completely closed off to that idea yeah i mean they're trying to achieve homeostasis and they're they're regulating themselves in all these ways that right very complex and maybe involved some kind of even primitive forms of emission processing yeah exactly yeah um [Music]

1:37:36 but i mean you know if i try and imagine uh if i try to imagine a plant having like perceptual experience i just think i might be going astray though right because they they don't have any kind of well i don't i don't know this for sure but i doubt that they have any kind of centralized integrated um um informational states in the way that we do which would be the kind of thing that you'd be simulating if you imagine them seeing or something like that right right yeah no i don't think you can it might be similar to worms you know

1:38:08 worms have light sensitivity but probably not visual experiences etc i mean one interesting idea in this ballpark is maybe we could like get the scale of simulating things that can't individually simulate just by um knowing more about their internal functioning and kind of maybe there's some way in which you can practice imagine you were yeah there's maybe a circus to be some kind of imaginative practice where you could kind of get closer to being in an internal state that is similar to that one so that you can still plan you can uh emulate them in the way that

1:38:41 you couldn't before why not so and another thing that like this so this kind of brings i wonder what your view about um uploading and those kinds of uh thought experiments that people talk about with respect to uploading consciousness to a simulation it seems like on your type of view one of the worries that people has of like you know for me i'm a kind of biological guy so i feel like if i uploaded into a digital environment i'd lose consciousness um but on your view it wouldn't it shouldn't matter yeah that's exactly it so like in a way it's kind of a red herring right

1:39:13 even if you don't technically have the thing that we call consciousness when you upload you can have something that's just as good um so so if you knew that if you uploaded you would lose consciousness you'd still do it yeah that's part of my view yeah yeah i mean so i mean um yeah i mean for people listening to this who were familiar with derek perfect views about the self and personal identity my view is very similar to that it's kind of it was really just explicitly modeled on what he said about the self and personal identity so yeah it's like you read that passage

1:39:45 where he says you can't do this for consciousness he warns against people like me [Laughter] um yeah so uh yeah he thinks that um if you look at something like teletransportation even if it kills you you should just do it anyway because you have something as good as continuing to exist yeah in that case so i basically think what my view of uploading or some other

1:40:19 kinds of zombification type scenarios is similar so um even if um it doesn't have this thing that we thought was important it can have something that is similar enough that it can be a good surrogate yeah so i mean is this this is an empirical question on your i mean on your view so is it possible that you could upload like little photos you could go in and out you upload you come back out you're like holy hell that was terrible what's important an empirical question to what extent something like uploading is

1:40:51 technologically possible well that it would matter that you would lose something that that you'd have something just as good yeah if i mean if it really does emulate the brain like right down to the level of like individual neural firings and so on it's a bit hard to see how it could be just because it would be functionally the same right to the finest right so it's not conceivable on your view that you could upload then come out of the virtual world and

1:41:25 recognize that wow while i was in there it's it was terrible uh it's much better to be conscious that's not something that could happen on your view well i mean if you are functioning exactly like you would with your ordinary biological brain right down to the level of individual neural firings then um there's no possibility of like at least introspectively picking up on some important difference i mean it depends on the uploading scenario if you're like in some virtual world where you're you know the virtual environment itself is bad in ways the real

1:41:58 environment is not then of course that would be bad but that wouldn't have anything to do with the uploading part it would just have to do with being in the fair in a different environment yeah exactly but so yeah because i get what you're saying you're gonna so you're in the virtual world you're lacking consciousness you you have all the same rational functional capacities so you kind of introspect and you're saying well gee i'm tasting chocolate and there's a sunset over there um but it's possible that then you came out of the scenario out of the virtual world and and suddenly realized the lights came back on like the way in which you

1:42:31 wrecked you know you suddenly realized that the refrigerator stopped humming a second ago be like oh whoa uh i didn't realize it when i was in there but now i realize there was something that i was missing in there that's not uh if it's part of the setup that you really are just um functionally the same at a very deep level yeah load scenario and the real scenario then i think that just rolls out something like that where you realize that you're in a completely different kind of state i mean once you come out yeah how would you notice it i mean you'd have to have

1:43:04 some way of um remembering what it was like and then having some way of accessing the alleged different difference um across time or something like that but if you just absolutely just keep functioning exactly the same way over time then it just that seems to automatically roll out that kind of realization so realization in the sense of uh suddenly coming to see that you were in this other state right now sorry maybe i'm just confused about the

1:43:38 scenario that you're describing but that's how it looks no i think you got it right yeah yeah no it's uh it just seems like there'd be some so i get what you're saying you couldn't notice it in a cognitive way because all of that stuff is being simulated um but yeah no maybe i maybe it's incoherent what i'm thinking uh but it just i guess i had the intuition that there would be some sense in which there would be a difference i mean

1:44:11 obviously there would be a difference because in one case you're experiencing the taste of chocolate in the other case you're pseudo experiencing it or something like that but but it's not a difference that you could latch on to right still seems like it would make a difference oh yeah i'm having i'm stuck in this way of thinking whereas like it makes i'd rather be conscious i mean yeah no that's understandable i think 99.99 disagree with me people are like [Laughter] yeah but for not good reasons it sounds yeah i mean i see it's like once you go with the third-person route then the the

1:44:43 argument's very secure it's just the question of whether you allow that first move i think where you a lot where you admit that the immersion scientist really has a better as good an understanding of the status as uh yeah once you once you allow that this downhill from there okay well i'm glad you're considering at least that much if not the first part uh i i mean i'm probably soundly more skeptical than actually because i'm just trying to understand the view but i mean i actually think that it's it's very interesting it's a rich view and the best philosophical views are the challenging ones i mean uh so it's it's

1:45:15 really cool to have someone who's seriously thinking through these issues in a very careful way like you are so i'm not um i probably am i'm not trying to trash the view at all i think it's exciting no i'm not yeah no i'm not hearing that at all actually i feel like yeah okay yeah well i definitely enjoyed it so i'm noticing we're getting on in time i hear my children have woken up and are giving their mother a hard time so but i wonder if there's anything that you were hoping would come up that hasn't come up in this discussion

1:45:48 um i mean there's a lot more we could have talked about but that actually covered some pretty big bases in my way of thinking so that's pretty good um okay so like what could have come up that didn't uh what did we not talk about um um i guess microskepticism was one thing i that i thought was really [Music] cool i'll talk about the metaphysics like reductive materialism and non-relative materialism as i mean there's a lot i've thought a lot about um

1:46:20 the measurement of experience and how to think about individuation of normal properties um that kind of types of issues there's a lot of that in my book manuscript as well we didn't get into any of that but um but you know in some ways that's more details some of the really sort of big background issues we've hit pretty well yeah chapter eight is the measurement chapter that's a there's a lot in there yeah i kind of like took a deep dive into the old literature on psychophysical scaling and i thought a lot about just uh yeah these techniques for eliciting um judgments about the similarity

1:46:52 relationships between experiences and making inferences from that to like the real structure of the phenomenology so i think that's a i think there's a lot of fascinating work that happened in the past on that that's been maybe neglected by the philosophers but actually these days by the cognitive scientists too it seems yeah yeah and so uh yeah i think there's a lot of value to of going back and just like looking having another look at uh some of those old discussions and seeing um what some of the foundational issues there that people talking about i think

1:47:25 that's very interesting so try i've tried to sort of uh dig some of that stuff up as part of the book partly just going on in a mission to sort of get people to pay more attention to that yeah i think it works but and it's also crucial to your argument overall because one of the ways that you want to positively argue for materialism by suggesting that there's you know uh structural spaces that we can find and then find material things which kind of map onto them i mean that's part of your three-pronged defense of why you know how it is that we're going to defend

1:47:56 these ideas that something can't be physical in this way yeah exactly yeah so part of it is just part one prong of that is this sort of idea of structural matching and the project there is that yeah you somehow measure the structure of experience and then figure out what's there in the brain that has the same structure um and it was also relevant to this idea of hidden nature because i don't think that subjects can just immediately infallibly access the structure of their experience we have to use empirical methods to kind of probe what that structure really is right

1:48:27 and so um um right so it's important you know along various dimensions so i mean i guess yeah i i do have to sort of wrap this up but i do wonder like just really quickly because there are people like adam powell who does you know very careful work about this stuff too and he's interested in the structure of experience but he kind of comes up with the opposite view right so he uses it to argue against naive realism there's nothing out there that matches this structure it's internal states that massive structure but then he's not a materialist or he doesn't uh he sees the structure mapping matching

1:49:00 excuse me but doesn't think that that's a reason for accepting physicalist reduction yeah so what do you why what would tip what do you think tips us one way versus the other here so there's like one half of his way of arguing that i'm very sympathetic with where he argues for internalism based on consideration so basically the idea is we have access to the structure of experience if you look in the material world to find the states with the right structure inside the brain but outside the brain on the blood with the stimulus or something you don't have the right structure um and so that's an argument that it's

1:49:33 really all internally determined so that much i'm very sympathetic with at least you know um schematically um and then um but the other part of his case is less to do with the structural stuff and there's more to do with um this actually relates to what we're talking about right at the beginning some of this is a good way to things up so like uh he thinks that it's just intuitively obvious well he also has theoretical logins for this that uh experience has this relational structure it's like if i i'm experiencing

1:50:05 greenness then fundamentally in the metaphysics there has to be something like awareness of greenness or acquaintance of greenness or something like that a special kind of intentional relation to a qualitative property and his case against materialism and reductionism basically is that there's just nothing like that in the brain even though internalism's true but therefore we should be non-reductive so my response basically is going to be that um when you think it through in the long run that is that intuition that experience is

1:50:38 relational and also the theoretical arguments for it are not going to hold weight but we could have a kind of non-relational view where it's just a brain state that does enough justice to the kind of considerations that he gives for being a relationist um in fact does as much justice as you can do to them but without actually conceding that it really is relational it's going to be like you know it seems relational to us and we talk about it as if it's relational and so on but really something not

1:51:10 [Music] a kind of role that we can be satisfied with uh um with rejecting the kind of metaphysics that he has roughly speaking us i'm gonna say so it's kind of like let's debunk debunk and deflate that's the that's the strategy that turns out to be incompatible with i'm not thumping the desk you can see if someone comes up with a video like that and they say that blocks reduction then we need to like um see whether they really can justify

1:51:44 believing in that in that really strong inflationary way that blocks materialism and i think typically they can't justify the more inflationary reading of their data and if we give it a thinner more deflationary reading then it's not incompatible with materialism after all so time and again i think that's the kind of argument steve structure you're going to have that debunk and deflate yeah okay well on that note then let's go ahead and uh call this a day i've kept you a little bit over already so i

1:52:17 apologize for that but just thanks again for taking the time i really enjoyed reading your work and thinking through this issue so really appreciate it yeah this was great thank you so much really really appreciate it okay so just hang on for a second i'll say buy off air all right work