Consciousness Live! with Philip Goff and Bernardo Kastrup (S3 E17)

0:01 well maybe one thing we should do a lot of the audience is not aware that philip has uh his position has evolved they are still thinking in terms of the last discussion we had so maybe it's good that already in the beginning philip explained what what his views are now because i already read it probably you already read it richard but the audience has to catch up yeah sorry i accidentally pressed live so we are actually live oh okay sorry sorry yeah right way that you said oh hold on i had already hit the button so sorry about that but yeah uh yeah i'll definitely read

0:35 the paper i was at his talk to where he presented this uh then reworked it so we'll definitely get to that so let's go ahead and start uh um we are live i guess that's what i normally say but everyone already knows so joining me today two very special guests uh bernardo castro and philip gough i want to thank you guys for joining me you've been on before i love talking to you guys it's always a pleasure discussing this stuff with you um just uh in case there's anybody out there who doesn't know you guys would you like to say a little bit about who you are and what you do um i assume you need no introduction but you know you never know

1:08 you're very kind richard go on bernardo after bernardo castro i'm a philosopher and computer engineer still do a bit of both and i'm heading our new foundation around the philosophy it's not public yet we don't have a website yet but that's what i will be doing from now on oh that sounds interesting i didn't know about it you said a new foundation yes essentia foundation it's a new foundation uh focused on promoting certain philosophical views that currently are not mainstream but we think they have every reason to

1:41 be mainstream so that's what we'll be working on it's a well-funded initiative i think we have a good chance um you should know more about it towards the end of the year beginning next year amazing very cool i look forward to checking that out all right that sounds great look forward to hearing about that um i'm philip gough i'm a philosopher at durham university mainly interested in consciousness but questions about reality in general how everything fits together how you fit tricky things in morality free will maths stuff like that

2:18 the grand old tradition of metaphysics asking the that's what it's called yeah but yeah if you say sometimes people think metaphysics is sort of like spooky or something like contacting the dead or something but yeah yeah none of that well i appreciate uh your guys's work and um even though we disagree about many things i think it's uh these kind of conversations are very important and i assume that between you guys most of the disagreement is mostly in-house fighting um you guys will probably agree more on uh than you disagree on

2:51 um so maybe maybe i don't know do you guys think that's accurate or i think there are lots of points where we agree especially now having read the latest paper by philip but i wouldn't characterize it as in-house uh fighting i think there are some issues that that are pretty significant where we have disagreements it's not negligible the point where we disagree i don't think they are insignificant i think yeah that makes it i was joked on twitter that it might be like this you know the scene in life of brian were this this big fight between the people's front of jupiter and the judean people's front

3:24 that you know i guess i guess we both think the fundamental thing is a conscious mind and so you know that is a point of similarity um but yeah yeah they're important differences and okay well definitely i'm the odd man out as a you know me i'm i'm a friend to serious thinking about heart issues although my heart lies with uh physicalism i'm not here to defend that i'm more interested in trying to understand your dispute between you guys and

3:56 and what we can uh try to make some progress hopefully on on this debate and one of the things that bernardo was just talking about at the beginning i think it's a good place to start actually because he was mentioning the way that philip you've changed your view recently um i guess you've uh and i've always been a little bit unclear myself to be honest about the relationship between psychism and cosmopsychism um you talk sometimes as though pansagism is is like a version of cosmopsychism or vice versa so i wonder if you could just say what what your view has evolved to as bernard

4:31 suggested would be good and then maybe give us a little bit of uh the relationship between that and pan psychos and generally yeah i'm not sure it's che i'm not sure this new view is since we me and bernardo last discussed actually i'm not sure but um i guess it's the last year or so maybe um yeah so i guess in terms of cosmos psychism and pan psychos my guess i take those to be um well i guess i i the way i define things you know this is just how you use words i think of pan psychism as covering both a microcyclist version where the

5:05 the uh the basic things are at the micro level the basic conscious entities at the micro level or cosmo psychism where the the basic conscious entity is the universe i think of them as both forms of uh pan psychism um and if i i mean so i think i think the difference between me and bernardo perhaps is that i think that the fundamental conscious mind is the universe whereas he thinks i think he this it underlies in some sense the physical you know but

5:39 anyway maybe we'll get on to that but i mean i think the the thing that's changed i've always been open to both micropsychism and cosmopsychism i guess i you know you tend to talk in terms of microcyclism because it's sort of simpler in some sense but um i've always been open to it but but then my new view i guess it is a form of cosmic psychism but the idea well maybe if i could just start with what i think a theory of consciousness has to achieve so i think it ethereal consciousness has to satisfy two constraints

6:12 that i call an internal constraint and an external constraint so the external constraint is just to fit the empirical data and the internal constraint is to get rid of explanatory gaps so i think it's easy to do one of these but it's the trick is to do both so i think you know dualism is easily like david chalmers style dualism easily gets around the explanatory gap just by postulating fundamental laws of nature that bridge the gap between the physical and the mental i think that's a perfectly fine explanation but then it gets into trouble with the external

6:47 constraint because the neuroscience doesn't seem to show evidence of the impact of non-physical properties in the brain so it's got a sort of tension with the empirical data whereas physicalism the other way around i think it does fine with the matching the empirical data but it seems to have this huge explanatory gap between the purely quantitative properties of physical science and the qualitative properties of consciousness so so so the trick is to match both and i think um pan psychism has trouble in this regard as well so basically there's a big

7:20 division in pancakes and between strong and weak emergentists so strong emergent is postulate fundamental laws of nature to bridge the gap between fundamental kinds of consciousness and emergent kinds of consciousness so you might just have a basic law of nature that when conscious particles are combined in a certain kind of way you get a consciousness associated with the system as a whole uh whereas weak emergentists try to do the job without recourse to these special laws of nature they just you know they might just say just

7:52 when you've got conscious particles arranged in a certain way you've got um a conscious brain or something um so and what what people have argued in the recent literature is that strong emergentism has all the problems of dualism and weak emergencies and has all the problems of physicalism so strong emergencies has the problems of dualism because we don't seem to see in neuroscience any evidence of these right strongly emerging properties um weak emergent has mergentism has problems of physicalism because it seems

8:23 to be an explanatory gap say between facts about conscious particles and facts about a conscious brain or conscious system um so what i've been exploring this is really the the the innovation i've gone back and forward with cosmo psychism you know my first book in 2017 was cosmo cyclist but the new innovation is a sort of hybrid view where we're strong emergentists about subjects of experience but weak emergentists about their phenomenal properties so there's just basic laws of nature that ensure in certain

8:56 circumstances new subjects of experience emerge but these new subject experience don't come with their own brand new forms of consciousness they as it were inherit streams of consciousness that already exist at the fundamental level and i see conceiving of this in cosmocyclist terms so you've got you know the universe having these streams of consciousness and when emergent subjects appear they inherit um streams of consciousness from the fundamental level so so this is supposed to satisfy sorry going on a little bit nearly finished

9:27 this is supposed to satisfy the internal constraint get rid of explanatory gaps because it just postulates basic laws of nature to ensure the existence of these um emergent subjects and that they inherit the right streams of consciousness i know it would be an empirical question what those what those basic goals are so so you solve the explanatory gap in the way the duelist like david chalmers does but avoid the external satisfy the external constraint because i mean basically this view can accommodate quite easily the fact that

10:01 systems involving emergent subjects behave pretty much the same as systems not involving emergent subjects which is what we seem to see empirically that's you know that's the tricky thing for the duelist or the strong emergency pansys but because these emergent subjects are just inheriting you know the properties of fundamental physics the properties fundamental physics tracks that's quite explicable that they're not going to behave uh very much differently so yeah so that's so that that's that's the view i've been defending that makes sense um i mean so

10:35 i don't know if bernardo wants to jump in here and say anything but i mean my view has been stable for a while so if the audience knows it it is it is what i have always put forward i think uh the basis of reality there is one spatially unbound field of phenomenality or universal consciousness if you want to call it i think living beings uh are dissociated elders of of this universal consciousness and physical bodies that metabolize are the appearance of these altars are the way these alters

11:09 present themselves to observation on the screen of perception and i think we can make sense of everything in terms of patterns of excitation of this one especially unbound field we can make sense of our individual experiences of our shared experiences of the laws of physics of everything based solely on excitations of this underlying field so it what's not clear to me at this stage is whether philip you're going to count

11:42 a view like bernardo's as a version of pan psychism i mean given the way you so broadly defined the term that does this is this a pancetta's view on your account i mean this is this is one of the things i wanted to talk about really i suppose um as i think of the difference um the difference is that i think so we both think there's a conscious mind at the fundamental basis of reality but i would say it is the physical universe whereas i think but i don't say maybe i'm saying it not quite right it underlies the physical universe or the physical universe is not

12:15 anyway it's not identical with the physical universe it's the physical universe is how it presents or something um yeah so suppose i mean i'm not sure whether i i want to ask spenato why he goes his way rather than my way i'm very curious i'm not sure although i'm not sure what my answer would be i guess i think of my my position as the sort of default position but i can see ways you could think bernardo's position is the default as well um and then i also wonder wherever they are two different ways of just saying the same thing i'm you know that might turn out to be the case i don't know i was about to to say just that um from

12:49 my perspective uh these are two different ways of saying the same thing the division the separation i'm making is very traditional in western philosophy it goes back to kant it's the separation between phenomena and numenor between representation and the thing in itself between the contents of the screen of perception and the world as it is in itself independent of observation so i think yeah there is a world out there it presents itself to us along the lines that we have called matter

13:20 things that we can measure actually matter is even a description of what appears on the screen of perception it's not the screen of perception in itself but there is a way the world appears to us and what is missing is what is the world in and of itself independently of how it appears to an individual subject looking at it that is then the essence of the world i would say the essence of the world is phenomenal experiential these are transpersonal endogenous experiences but they are qualitatively different

13:52 from what appears on the screen of perception the way the world presents itself to us is different from the way the world feels from a first person perspective and the reason for that difference is one there is a boundary there is a dissociative boundary that explains why there are individual subjects with seemingly private conscious in their life and evolution the way we evolved as organisms um have imposed certain processing of how the world impinges on us such that we would have a a higher

14:26 survival advantage and that's encoded in our cognitive processes associated with perception the way i see the world is different from the way a b sees the world the screen of perception of a b will have contents that are qualitatively very different from what appears on the screen of my perception and the world as it is in itself is neither because it's not being modulated by cognitive processes that have evolved over time it has a first person perspective it is endogenous i think it would be mostly

14:57 the best way to visualize it from an entrepreneur perspective would be to think of it as a sort of a universal thought or a universal feeling that appears to us as objects moving about in space-time with color weight you know that can be described according to the quantities of physics so i would say the world as it is in itself is consciousness and it appears to us in a different way but that too is consciousness because what is uh what are the contents of the screen of perception but

15:30 conscious experiences of the observing individual subject so in in both cases there is only universal consciousness but but we can talk about it from these two perspectives yeah i'm happy that i guess i'm happy with a lot of that i suppose it's just i guess i'm i guess i'm sort of defending an indirect perception view you know does this so some philosophers think you know naive realists think we directly perceive the world we're in direct perceptual content we both deny that but i suppose i want to say i can still say i perceive the physical universe

16:03 indirectly you know by having a state that represents um an entity out there and and so i can say um the physical you know the fundamental mind is this thing i can perceive uh it it is in so far as the image of a process only exists by virtue of the process existing the world you see around you is consciousness i can say that coherently under analytic idealism i can say the physical world is consciousness okay but it

16:36 is consciousness by being the thing that underlies the representations of the world in my individual mind so in that sense it also underlies the physical world if i call the physical world the representation in my mind then the world out there is not the physical world because the physical world is a representation in my individual mind but it would still underlie the physical world in the sense that it is that which is represented in my mind through color shape melody and all that so it underlies the physical world if the

17:11 physical world is a representation in my mind and it is the physical world insofar as you can say that the physical world is really out there it's a language thing you know how do you define the terms and would you so if we're saying that this is just a view that could be described in panzykus terms in so far as you say uh it's it's the physical thing out there or in idealist terms and so far as you're thinking of the physical thing as what is the representation in your mind i mean would you say well could we say

17:45 the same about that the particle type panpsychism could we say well in a sense in a sense this is idealism too because the the consciousness of the particles in the same sense i think it seems to me that it's the same in both i mean i don't want to get too hung up about this and maybe we shouldn't waste too much time on it yeah i'm happy with everything that i said i think but but it seems like it seems like we should say the same thing either way um i you know i'm inclined to say the physical it's the physical unit the conscious thing is the physical universe but i can see

18:16 a sense in which you could say no it underlies a physical universe but it seems to me exactly the same with conscious particles we could say that that it's the it's the particles that it conjures all we could say the consciousness sort of underlies the part i'm happy with that too i would say that more recently in physics um we've come to a point i mean look at the work of physicists like marcus miller who has impressed me he has just won the tqxi essay prize one of the most i saw you tweeted that actually yeah um so if you look at what physics is saying recently it's

18:49 basically an admission that physical realism is is gone you have to postulate an infinity of the parallel universe is emerging every fraction of a femtosecond uh to to still postulate some kind of physical realism so for serious physicists not publicly committed to a certain position it's basically a done deal now so it's difficult to say that the physical world as described in terms of objects with defined properties is really about what's up there i think that that view is

19:22 is refuted now so there is something out there obviously but the physical world arises from a measurement in other words from an observation of that thing that is out there and it is the way that thing presents itself to us upon measurement but what is really out there is not constituted of objects with defined properties so that's what motivates me to say what is out there underlies my perceptions and the physical world is my perceptions and the perceptions of others as well so so i mean it sounds like this is a

19:55 largely terminological issue because what i'm hearing bernardo saying is that so you know one way of getting at this difference maybe is to to rewind the clock back before there were um living organisms uh you know five billion years ago there was no earth and you know like so let's suppose there are no other um planets with uh living organisms maybe that's a far-fetched i don't know but anyway so we could find some time in the universe's history when there was no life um so at that point there's a there's a universe

20:27 nonetheless right um that and there's a according to both of you a conscious subject um a center of experiences and that's the that's the thing which underlies our experience it is the physical universe is the way i'm hearing bernardo say it is the physical universe but the language of it underlying comes in when they're perceived once there are perceivers so if you want to differentiate the physical universe from the thing that is objectively out there then then it isn't the physical universe but if you conflate the two then you can

20:59 say it is the physical universe it yeah do do the laws of physics i mean here's one way in which you could get at the difference between ideas and psychisms i've been talking to donald hoffman a lot recently and i mean so i think it you know that that physics gets the true fundamental structure of the universe of fundamental reality whereas i think donald hoffman thinks there's some to be discovered um mathematical structure underlying physics there's

21:31 going to be a deeper story that's going to involve conscious agents as he calls them so that's a sense in which you can really see that it's a very clear sense in which there's something underlying the physical universe in the sense that there's a deeper structural story in physics but do you think that the that the laws of physics completely describe the behavior of fundamental universal consciousness i mean i don't think a physicist a serious physicist would even claim that it completely describes the behavior of the world

22:04 because we know that there are gaps in today's physics we know that the laws that apply at the micro level uh contradict the laws that certainly apply at the macro level when yeah we have to find a way to reconcile them and the way to do that is to dig deeper is to go to ever more fundamental levels in physics so the narrative you just you just explained it is the narrative of physics of ever digging deeper into their underlying patterns but i i think physics is accurate in so far as what we can

22:39 reason about and empirically measure today i don't think physics is an illusion it i think it accurately describes the physical world in other words the representations on the screen of perception even when you use instrumentation in physics like a telescope or microscope those are only useful in so far as you perceive their outputs i think is the physics is the the best we can currently do to describe the behavior of the perceived universe well this might be a difference then because you seem to be one saying it's concerned with

23:10 you know the representation in our minds but i suppose i'm inclined to think physics is on its way to giving the complete causal structure of the fundamental conscious mind i mean it's not the physicist physicists aren't aware that that's what they're doing they're just you know they're just focusing on um you know there's this thing that there's this thing or and we trying to capture its mathematical structure but i want to say they're on their way to capturing the mathematical structure of that reality as it is in and of itself

23:42 um not obviously they're not there yet there's a lot you know there's a lot of problems making quantum mechanics so that's a real sense in which it's it's closer to materialism it's it's you know physics capturing the causes is on its way to capturing the causal structure reality so can i just i mean can i just i don't want to interrupt anyone but i guess i just did so sorry but so philip are you so it sounds like you're denying what bernardo was saying about basically quantum mechanics as i understand it because uh you're saying that there is some way that the universe is that goes beyond

24:17 what we can say about it in quantum mechanical terms whereas i think the the point that bernardo we're trying to make is that we have pretty good reasons to to deny that from quantum mechanics itself that there is no um i know you're a fan of relational quantum mechanics i'm not a huge fan of that but you know anyway some version of copenhagen interpretation says you know there just aren't these properties out there there is no way the universe is until it's measured it sounds like you're denying that well yeah i mean i suppose i wouldn't be attracted to the

24:50 straightforward copenhagen interpretation i mean i am i guess i'm a fan of the bohmian view which gets rid of all that crap but even if you um even if you have say that even if you have say the many worlds view or or or a collapse view where you have um um the wave function is the fundamental thing that then the wave function is determinate okay i mean states of the wave function correspond to indeterminate um i mean yeah even if you

25:25 have the copenhagen view i think still in so far as we're thinking of the we could think of the wave function as the thing that's out there in and of itself and it has determinate states those determinate states of the wave function correspond to you know what we think of as indeterminate locations of particles and so on but that you know but it's determinant states of the but they correspond to determinate states of the wave function so even on the copenhagen interpretation i think you can think um there's um there is a determinate way reality is in

25:58 and of itself it's just not determinate particles and determinant observables but even the wave function although you can describe it it's basically a wave of probabilities there is very little and there has been i mean this is an argument in physics the discussion you are bringing forward is the dispute between people who think the wave function is on tech and those i think the way function wave function is epistemic in other words are we describing our best knowledge of the world or is that thing something that exists objectively as a wave if you look at how the wave function is

26:30 derived it's hard to say that it's objective because it it's a probabilistic equation it gives us a sense of what might happen next so you could say well but those probabilities exist objectively it it it's an open question it gets difficult but it is a question that can be debated within the constraints of physics itself in other words there are approaches to this that are physically incoherent and therefore should be discarded on a physical basis not only a philosophical

27:02 basis i tend to think of the wave function as an epistemic thing it captures the best we can know about the world i do think there is an objective world out there which presents itself to us upon measurement in a certain way that we call a physical world of objects with defined properties and i think physics can describe the the regularities the patterns and regularities of this representation quite accurately i mean it's not even an opinion right this is an empirical fact we can describe those regularities very accurately and

27:35 in doing so i do think physics is telling us a lot about the world that underlies the representation in other words about that which is represented because if the representation is an image of that thing then by capturing the regularities of the image we are accumulating knowledge about that thing because the image correlates with it it's an image of it it may be distorted it may be incomplete but if we know the image well then there there is something we know about what underlies the image

28:08 because it's an image of it so um i i do think that what physics is telling us is phenomenal and it has never had as many philosophical implications that it has uh now over the past decade or so and and and and despite that i think it's very useful in and of itself physics in and of itself is useful and is informing us something valuable about the underlying natures of reality despite its limitations yes that's interesting so i can see how

28:40 you know certain ways of understanding quantum mechanics um might fit better with it with a kind of idealist view then and you know i think that's really interesting um yeah i guess so so my my question here is kind of what you were just bringing that drill up i wonder if if it goes one way excuse me if it goes one way versus another uh with respect to the way we should understand quantum mechanics is that going to cut against one of these views like for example if bohmian

29:13 i don't like saying that word will um but if if some interpretation like that turns out to be correct that seems to favor you um some version of relational cubism copenhagen something like that seems to favor bernardo well is that is that a way to settle this dispute or is there something left i don't i'm not sure this is so much this to me this is not where the important things lie i don't think i mean what what i'm interested you know what i wanted a theory of consciousness talked about you know getting rid of the explanatory gaps and um and um what was the other thing fitting the empirical data

29:46 you know so uh it's your theory phillip yeah i described a view you know that i think you could interpret in in idealist or or or cosmopsychist terms and i'm not too bothered about that that's not really where my energies are focused um so yeah i mean i think yeah in a way it's it's it's it's not really a dispute i feel particularly but yeah i think i think it could somewhat depend on the interpretation of quantum

30:18 mechanics which way which way you go on that i mean to me that's interesting because it suggests an empirical edge to this discussion which is what i i'm interested in philosophy has a a knack for going around empirical limitations um i think analytic idealism could still be i think it would still be the most tenable uh plausible alternative even if the world were entirely classical because then i would say those definite states of the world out there are the representation of

30:53 transpersonal experiential states so so a classical world in which quantum mechanics never existed and doesn't need to exist i think would still be best explained in ontological terms through analytic idealism now it is of course a fact that quantum mechanics raises empirical problems for physicalism at least for the naive realist view of many physicalists out there so that that plays in in our favor mine

31:28 and phillips by excluding certain alternative ontologies uh but i think uh both analytical idealism and philips uh new uh cosmos i can hybrid cosmos psychism sorry yeah hybrid cosmopsychism um now there are ways to to make even phillips a new cosmos psychism into a classical view of the world oh certainly and and for analytic idealism that holds as well right but i mean so i guess i would push back on the claim about physicalism but i certainly agree that

32:00 naive versions of physicalism that take the world to be classical are brought into question by this but still so i mean because i i thought that part of the argument for maybe it's just an ancillary argument in your view bernardo but i thought that part of the argument for idealism relied on interpreting quantum mechanics or that was part of the evidence that you gave for what we should accept of you yeah yeah i don't think look i would feel a lot more comfortable with the bohmian mechanics too it would satisfy

32:33 it would close the story in my mind much better than what we have to deal with right now and um analytic idealist idealism would be perfectly consistent with a fully classical world it would just say that the essence of the world out there is experiential and matter is the way that experience presents itself from across a dissociative boundary so everything would still hold the advantage for analytic idealism of quantum mechanics is that it's differentiating for naive physicalism in other words it refutes

33:06 naive physicalism and then it can be construed as positive evidence for analytic idealism because it doesn't refute the latter this differentiation is is an empirical case for analytic idealism but the reverse doesn't work in the sense that you can you wouldn't exclude analytical idealism if quantum mechanics were not true it would still hold but it would be less easy this wouldn't have the evidence for it though yes yes differentiating evidence i'm just thinking bringing in the quantum mechanics do you think and if the wave function is kind

33:39 of epistemic um does that mean we can't get it fully get a grip on uh reality as it is in and of itself uh i will now i will repeat the words of marcus miller who is my new favorite physicist um what he says is uh he would answer this question in the negative no we cannot get a grip on reality as it is in and of itself which shouldn't be surprising why would primates evolved on a you know peripheral planetary system of

34:12 of a typical galaxy have the cognitive apparatus uh to unveil the inner structure of reality itself but what he would say is that we can know everything that there is to be known and if it turns out that what there is to be known are probabilities then we can know those and that's already a great advancement okay so i so i still aspire i think and maybe this is partly my attraction to the bohmian view or some kind of hidden variables

34:45 lee smolin who i talk to but has his own kind of hidden variables view in which which time is is is real but not space so i suppose why i'm afraid i'm still aspiring to you know a view where we can say look this is reality as it is in itself we've got it and so what i worry about um with for example to give a vivid example the bohmian view i don't like where you just have the wave function and one single particle and you and the wave function is understood as a very high dimensional kind of possibility

35:18 space and then each location in that space corresponds to what we think of as a a global arrangement of all the particles in the universe so so we it's all all that matters is where that one particle is so on this view that is reality is just this high dimensional space and this one particle and if that was the whole of reality the fundamental structure i don't think you could you would have consciousness you know you know my consciousness has a rich sort of temporal structure that

35:50 just doesn't fit into that kind of ontology and i worry whether you know some of these again you know the views where we don't have space and time at the fundamental level are are the same um so so so so i do think it maybe if we want a theory of reality where we can explain account for consciousness and satisfy those two constraints i was talking about and give and completely understand what's going on then maybe we do need something more like a hidden variables

36:22 view then we can accommodate consciousness into the physical world um so so i don't know so maybe i know that's going against the trend of of of certain prominent theoretical physicists um so maybe these are just different bets on on how things are going to go and it is interesting as which it says that you know how this connects with the physics so you know and it's good to have people placing different bets so i'm still i guess i want to place a bet on um you know i mean so you might say oh how can i go against what what the

36:54 these leading theoretical physicists are doing but i don't think they they give a [ __ ] about consciousness i mean i just don't think that's what they're not taking it as a constraint that we need to find a place for consciousness in reality i think you know galileo said just do the maths and forget about consciousness and and it's it's long forgotten so yeah but i mean just to finish up the i mean i'm not i'm not um you know as it's above my pay grade to assess some of these considerations but i wonder how to these theoretical physicists things would look

37:28 if i mean like lee smolin is doing lee smolin is partly motivated by the need to accommodate consciousness i wonder whether the theories you're attracted to would look very different so so i still hope for you know if we do if we could have some kind of hidden variables um and then we could still accommodate consciousness and have a theory reality where we completely get what's going on sorry richard i interrupted you yeah no no big deal i'd rather hear what you had to say but i mean so to me this this is sort of symptomatic of a larger issue which is this kind of pining away for the classical world to come back uh so people like me think you know

38:00 that's just gone gotta give up on it so all of this tinkering you know reiner all of this physical collapse hidden variables all of that is just symptomatic of uh of a pining for a bygone era when there were classical properties out there with determinate values and it just quantum mechanics seems to say just let go of that i mean there's some question about the math on um hidden variable stuff whether you can actually reproduce some of the predictions it gets quite subtle but the map it's not clear 100 percent that it reproduces the exact same theory of quantum mechanics the cleanest

38:34 most simplest version of it is um just rejecting all that stuff so i mean certainly consciousness is important i take consciousness just as seriously as you guys i hope as you guys do i hope but uh um if if if yeah there's pining away for the classical world we should let go of it i mean it's just uh 17th century is gone we're here in the 21st century and we're not going back can i just say something in response to oh sorry i i just because i guess uh sorry to interrupt bernardo but i guess i guess i'm i'm i'm the um the opponent there just um it's not like

39:09 it's not it's not pining for a classical world for the sake of it it's pining for a theory of reality we can completely understand the nature of um and and yeah if you're a physicalist and real reductionist about consciousness then this is not a problem you can you know you can probably reduce conscious journey and i guess a lot of these theoretical business i just have some materialist picture in the background and yet then it's not a problem i i'm not intrinsically bothered about into you know quantum indeterminacy or whatever um it's just i think if you do think human

39:42 consciousness is in some sense irreducible um then it's it's it's it's a challenge how it could be incorporated into those weirder kind of um quantum worlds and and then okay okay so we can then we could have some kind of mis what i call a mysterian view uh okay we're relating to reality isn't it itself but we can't really penetrate it be bernardo's going that way but okay i mean that might be where we have to end up but

40:14 i don't think it's just nostalgia to yeah to try and get a complete theory of reality sorry no it's okay uh um i think look we shouldn't make the our philosophical debate contingent on an obscure issue of foundations of physics so i'm perfectly comfortable to go ahead today by granting that at the end some global hidden variables theory will win and and then mystery is gone it's just some states of the world up there and then and and then you you will be happy uh philip and i'm perfectly comfortable

40:47 uh debating under that assumption for the sake of the exercise i'm not ignoring the empirical part of it but for the for the sake of the exercise i would conceive that so so we can continue to talk without referring to things that we have no control over uh the only thing i would add and then i'll stop talking about it is this mysterious quantum things is that there are physicists today who are surprisingly enough adopting a constructivist view of the objective world which flirts with solipsism but they

41:20 have run their equations and what it turns out to be the case is that if the world that we perceive is actually constructed by us through inferential steps and we know perceptual perception is inferential we know even that is a necessary isn't is a necessity in principle carl fristen has demonstrated that otherwise we would dissolve in an into an entropic soup if perception weren't inferential so what these physicists have done is they have run models

41:52 in which the physical world is constructed by by by inference by induction and then it turns out that if that were the case uh the result would be exactly what we observed today we all think we are inhabiting the same world with objective patterns and regularities of behavior that would emerge by itself as a product of this construction by uh induction inferential induction but okay i'll i'll leave it at that today and and then we can say okay suppose uh

42:27 global hidden variables will win so the world has a definite state and we can we would say that state is physical i'm happy to to continue the discussion under that assumption yeah and just to say concessionary but you know i can see how these music quantum mechanics lend support to idealism and fit well with idealism and um uh just one quick thing on richard's point then yeah let's let let's move on to other issues whether the maths i mean there are there are people who you know claim to be able to make

42:58 um bohemianism fit with quantum field theory and um relativistic and but you know there are issues here the impression i've got talking to lee smolen is that you know people haven't been that bothered on working on that you know i mean you know they're not they're just why would you why would you be but he's bothered i guess partly because of philosophical motivations that he thinks time is real on philosophical grounds but so unless you have some kind of need to sort of accommodate fundamental consciousness you know so i wonder whether you know i think he was talking

43:30 about the certain tricky infinities that you know maybe no one's kind of got the bohemian theory around so so i wonder whether it could be i just you know whether they i just think we're not we don't as a scientific community in general take consciousness seriously uh you know i mean i guess i wonder if if if if there was less of a materialist dominance and people you know more people took consciousness as sort of fundamental whether that would impact on how theoretical physicists think but anyway yeah i think i mean i'm a little

44:03 skeptical appealing to i mean no offense to lee but some people consider him less than reputable i guess i'd say to put it nicely i am not one of them for the record i i am i think he's verges on the crackpot but anyway okay so let's um there's something that i think uh maybe before we get off of the fundamental physics stuff um i have one question which is about the m theory stuff and string theory uh and in particular the employee so i sort of know what both of your guys's views are here and i think you guys are

44:36 both sort of against it maybe um but in particular the implications of the multiverse the swampland um you know the uh the landscape as they call it etc all of that sort of stuff so i i think that you guys are both skeptics with respect to the multiverse uh but suppose for an instance that it came that we had good good reasons to accept it for instance i think we do um then would that impact your view because for example on cosmo psychism there's you postulate there's one fundamental entity the subject but in the multiverse

45:09 there'd be many of them and i think something might be true on you know if the multiverse were real and bernardo's view as well that the uh that that maybe there'd be multiple subjects or maybe that the you know what we call the universe is itself a dissociated altar from the so i just wonder if you guys have thought about this um or if you just think it's not worth thinking about because of the state of string theory currently uh so i'm just i'm just curious about your response to this since we're on the topic of fundamental physics what do you think bernardo i am sympathetic to the idea of a

45:44 multiverse i suspect there are parallel universes but not for the reason that for instance for instance shan caro puts it forward um there are four reasons for postulating uh multiverses in physics today and they are completely different one of them is just to say if space time is is infinite then the there there is a limited number of combinations of states that can exist and in that infinitude of

46:17 space-time that combination is bound to occur again so there would be a parallel universe in which you and i philip are having this discussion but it's just beyond the horizon of space-time so like this there are several different reasons for postulating a multiverse one of them is to salvage physical realism from the clutches of experimental evidence and that's the reason shan caro puts it forward i think that reason is not only wrong it is laughable almost

46:50 it is it is the most implausible unlikely thing one could come up with while still being consistent with the equations of physics um so i don't think there are parallel universes being being created at every fraction of a femtosecond in which everything that could possibly happen actually does happen and that thing is branching out into infinity of the branches within a fraction of a second i think i think that's outright crazy um but i do think there might be parallel dreams in in the universal mind uh uh other

47:27 thoughtscapes or experiential fields in which physics is different in which logic is different uh there is nothing holy about aristotelian logic by the way it doesn't matter how intuitive it is uh even humans have come up with alternatives like intuitionism and other things um do i think that can be the case i think that can be the case but not for the reason that parallel universes are put forward today by the likes of shankara so but for just a jump sorry but so there's two things that you might be

47:59 criticizing sean for so one maybe the mini world's interpretation but two the more standard like the argument from inflation um so the mathematics of inflation suggests once it starts it's going to keep going uh which is one of the reasons for postulating the multiverse do you take that line of reasoning series i take that is plausible yeah so so thanks for that richard i am i'm rejecting only the first thing you mentioned i think there are other plausible reasons for thinking of multi multiple universes one of them has to do with the fine

48:31 tuning which is a subject close to philip's heart uh there is an idea that you know universes collapse at the other side of black holes there are whole universes emerging in which the laws of physics are the constants at least are shaken up and they can acquire different values and then there is an evolutionary theory of how the the the the physical quantities came to be so fine-tuned because they would have been favored in this cycle of universes emerging out of black holes in other universes so it's kind of crazy it's far out but it's not incoherent and and and

49:07 although they are implausible the problems we are dealing with today require implausible answers because nothing that is possible solves them so i'm open to all that i'm even open to m theory which i think is beautiful i think it's mathematical philosophy not physics because it doesn't have enough empirical grounding grounding but i'm in love with it and i think ultimately we will find out that the hyper-dimensional brain underlying all existence is universal consciousness and then we would marry ontology with m theory the only thing i reject is the many

49:39 worlds interpretation so then just before we get phillips take on this um so then it is your view then that the fundamental subject is a unified thing in that these many different many universes would be um parallel streams or dreams or other alters or what's the terminology the right way to characterize the relationship multiverses to the mind if they are dissociated from each other cognitively then you could call them alters if you want to stick with the terminology of m theory they are different

50:12 brains different cross sections of that hyperdimensional object that is at the root of everything and if they are that then our universe is a certain brain which could conceivably even collapse with another there are some ideas that that's how our universe started from the collapse from the contact between i said collapse but what i mean is contact you know hitting upon another brain and having given rise to two hours so under that scenario i would say that what universal consciousness consciousness is is the hyper-dimensional brain

50:44 of which cross-sections are seemingly separate universes what's your take on this philip yeah so on the quantum mechanical multi many worlds i i can see the case for it i don't think i agree with barnardo that it's just some desperate attempt you know it's very popular i'm just saying anecdotally talking to philosophers of physics among philosophers physics i think because you you don't you just have the schrodinger equation you don't have collapse and also because um you know um what's it called decoherence alone as i

51:18 understand it uh can explain the the uh two-split experiment um so so then collapse sort of seems redundant so i think a lot of philosophers say look it's just it's just the simplest interpretation quantum mechanics i can see the force of that two worries i have with it though you know one the familiar probability worries how do you make sense of probabilities if kind of everything happens but i haven't really thought about that very much um but but also my my worry about it and i have a paper on this in this forthcoming

51:51 volume on quantum mechanics and consciousness um if i just don't think if you're fun so i mean what a lot of people a lot of lay people miss is that you know the worlds aren't fundamental right they're uh what is fundamental is is that is the wave function which some people understand as this very high dimensional space uh that's sort of a possibility space relative to what we think of the physical world so people like sean carroll say well the physical world isn't like tables and

52:23 chairs are emergent but what they mean by that is just that there's a kind of mathematical mapping um so i don't think actually i don't think the structure of the wave function could accommodate the structure of human consciousness and i think my my my human consciousness has a sort of concrete reality that we couldn't just account for its existence via a map of mathematical mapping to to the fundamental physical story so my worry is on the many worlds interpretation you you can't accommodate consciousness

52:56 in there on the kind of psychist picture i i would aspire to um so that's what i think about on the um the inflationary model so uh as i under so yeah i mean look it's i i i'm not in don't have the expertise to assess these the empirical reasons to think to accept eternal inflation but as i understand it there's nothing in the physics um there's nothing in no empirical ground for thinking these different bubble universes have different

53:29 values of their parameters uh you know there's just there's just no empirical grounds for thinking that string theory opens up the possibility because you you know you think of just how the strings vibrate um could you know could make the consonants different but there's no empirical reason for thinking that is the case i i think and i'm hoping for correction is what people are doing is looking at the fine tuning you know the fact that all the constants in the universe we can observe are exactly as they need for life to be possible and they're saying okay well we already

54:02 believe in internal inflation you know maybe if there's some kind of random process when a new bubble starts that makes the strings vibrate differently and get different concepts that would that would remove the mystery of the fine-tuning i think that's what they're doing and if that's what they are doing i think there's a logical fallacy there i so this is what's what's called the the inverted gamblers fallacy and this has been in the in the in the philosophical literature for 20 years um in is ian hacking or hacking came up with it but then

54:32 a famous paper of roger white from the year 2000 but you know philosophers don't reach out enough it's just in these technical bayesian papers but you know so the basic idea and this is what i would like to write more about both at a popular level on an academic level so you know the basic argument is you know so the the gambler's fallacy is where you've you've been playing cards all night and you've got really bad hands and you think oh well i'm i'm really likely because i've had such a bad run of luck i'm really likely to have a good run of luck now and obviously that's that's a fallacy because how likely your

55:08 next hand of cards will be is is not dependent on what's going on yeah yeah the inverted gambler's fallacy so it's it's hacking gave the example you know you go into a casino and you see someone with a really just been given a really good hand of cards and you think oh they must have been playing all night because you know if they've been playing lots of times it'll make it more likely that but but it won't because all you've observed is one hand and whatever happened before doesn't make it any more likely that that hand is gonna come out good so that's the

55:41 inverted gambler's fallacy and roger white has argued um you know quite influentially amongst academic philosophers it hasn't really got out further that the multiver the inference from fine tuning to a multiverse commits that fallacy so we sort of think you know what all we've observed is our universe that's what we need explained why our universe is fine-tuned so you say oh there must be all these other universes um but you know no matter how many other universes are it doesn't make it any more likely that our universe is fine you know that's what we need

56:13 explaining just i mean another analogy i thought might be more vivid if you wake you've got um you wake up you've had amnesia and you don't know where you are or how you got there and there's just a monkey on a typewriter typing perfect english you'd say wow that needs explaining you know maybe it's a trained monkey maybe it's a trick uh say you're in sorry i forgot say you're in a sort of a room in an apartment block what you wouldn't say is oh there must be lots of other monkeys with typewriters in the other rooms in this building writing nonsense because that would make it more likely

56:46 that this monkey's right because what you need explaining is why this monkey is is typing english and the postulation of other monkeys and tell them so so people say that the the multiverse theory is um is committing that logical fallacy and now a lot of people i've nearly finished a lot of people say what about the selection effect but white's got quite persuasive reasons to think the selection effect doesn't make a difference with this i mean i guess i think that's a little unfair because they're really two prongs as i understand the argument here so one is inflation which suggests

57:19 multiverse possibility um i mean there's only one universe but then there are these bubbles where the laws where we can't uh communicate or there's no like you know way of transfer of information back and forth then the other prong is the landscape which is that m theory string theory predicts um that there are all these different fundamental constants that they vary uh so that does it there's a reason to think that i i i don't it doesn't give us a reason to think it allows that they're actually instantiated does it that that but if it's around them at the root then

57:52 you would expect the throw of the dye should produce different constants and there's a lot of evidence that in foundations of physics that stuff is really random at that level oh right exactly so so it's those two things kind of combined which lend credence to the idea that the there are different laws in the different universes um uh of course it doesn't necessarily guarantee that so the idea is that there be many universes where the laws are similar to ours but also ones in which they differ and that so string theory gives us some reason to

58:24 expect that and inflation gives us some reason to expect that it might be instantiated and those two together function as a reason to think that uh the fine tuning is explained in this way i just wanted to comment on two things that you guys said very quickly uh you philip you alluded to to the idea that uh the multiverses interp multiverse interpretation is the most parsimonious because it requires the least mathematics you just have one equation and that's it you don't have that separate process of collapse or yeah the many worlds yeah um i of course i have thought about this

58:59 and i would try to illustrate how i feel about this with with an analogy imagine you are a ptolemaic astronomer uh and you would say well my view of how the planets move is the most partimonious because it only uses circles and never mind that there are circles and happy circles and episode circles of happy circles and the thing explodes in untenable complexity but you could still sit there and say but it's only circles i think what shankara is doing is to say hey guys it's only circles it doesn't matter that the whole thing is absurd

59:33 it's only circles now another quick comment um i used to until very very very short while ago i'm very vexed by the the fine tuning problem it makes me very uncomfortable um and until a very short time ago i used to think in terms of this evolutionary black holes uh thing i thought again i thought as far out as it is it was the only thing that i could find that i thought okay there is some sense in this

1:00:06 but more recently i've i'm more inclined now to think along the the constructivist line being put forward by marcus miller and others in which they say look there is something out there but our view of the physical universe is constructed by induction and induction even explains why we see the same thing why we seem to measure the same thing now if that's constructed by induction of our cognitive processes then of course the constants will be fine-tuned because it has to account for our existence it would happen sort of automatically now i do not understand the mathematical details of that yet

1:00:39 it's heavy stuff we have to make a bridge with constructivist foundations as well which most physicists are not aware of but it has there has been an attempt in philosophy for at least 100 years now to explain the world we perceive from a sort of third person perspective out of first person experience while avoiding solipsism so we need to bridge that but i see that as a potential way of tackling the fine tuning the vexing problem of fine tuning that's really interesting i haven't heard of that approach interesting okay so i mean i could talk about this all day because i really love

1:01:12 foundational physics and maybe we should get back to consciousness though uh since the legend could i just just just one final thought just just on this one of course so maybe i misunderstood i mean the the other thing is that the boltzmann brain maybe let's get into the brosman brainwave but there is that worry as well for the inflationary but um as i understand it like okay so according to string theory that the constants we have depend on how the strings vibrate but i as i understood it there's no empirical reason it depends on the uh on the geometrical structure of the

1:01:45 space that they're embedded in which determines is there any reason in physics to think that does vary in such a way that there are different constants in i mean it opens it up as a possibility but but is there any empirical grounds for thinking it that that possibility is actually you're talking about a realm in which possibility and actuality are the same thing it there is only probabilities at that level so that you ask the question is there any

1:02:18 positive reason to think it would happen we can ask the question the other way around is there any positive positive reason to think it wouldn't because it's all probabilities anyway and there is nothing outside of it that could impose a constraint i mean we know now look since this year we know that at the foundational level quantum mechanics mechanics is not deterministic that's one of the winning essays of that prize i'll with it too so yeah people realize that you know at the base level of reality everything's a probability so

1:02:52 why not why not if another universe is emerging another cross-section of that brain why wouldn't we throw the dice again yeah what exactly what i mean even if there's indeterminism and there's it's probabilistic that's there's still laws that govern that and laws that have constants in them and i think we need empirical reason to think that those constants change in i mean in a way the inflationary universe is just a big universe uh and i i just like we need empirical

1:03:27 reason to think in different parts of the observable universe that the numbers in physics are different i think we i think we need empirical grounds to think even if we understand string theory how it could happen i still think we'd we'd need empirical reason to think that it does happen but philip there is empirical reason because i take it oh hello dog oh cat sorry sorry how did you think that was a dog i just saw the ear it looked like a sorry i love cats uh and dogs um but so we we have empirical reason so

1:04:02 when you make a quantum measurement there's a throw of a dice right but there's there's randomness at that level that's the indeterminism stuff that i think bernardo's talking about you can't deny that so at that level uh there's no fundamental law which determines which way it's going to come out it's random um that's empirically confirmed for one thing the bohmian view doesn't have that feature but yeah but put that on one side um put that on one side it's probability within constraints it's

1:04:38 running one of it is because the constraints only apply if you run the event multiple times but for one single row of that dice there are no constraints it can be anything yeah right not absolutely anything right that's not well you can't measure the spin of an electron to be a cat if that's what you're saying it's going to be up or down right so

1:05:12 so there are constraints here right there there are constraints there's just because there's a certain amount of indeterminism it doesn't mean it's a free-for-all there are still constraints and there's still these constants we observe to be wrapped absolutely solid in the the universe we can observe uh since i'm not sure the constants are the right way of getting at this because you can answer some mathematical trick you can set them all to one if you really wanted to um but more more more i mean so you know more interesting are like the parameters that have to be set you can call them parameters you know

1:05:46 there are certain parameters the degrees of freedom that you have etcetera with it that are that are fixed in in the observable universe as we've in the universe we've observed i think we'd need reason to think in these other bubble universes those parameters are different to anything we've observed yeah you are not there give me 30 seconds i need to take a bio break continue on i'll be right back okay okay no worries uh yeah no problem what what just while bananas wait yeah i would like to raise a couple of

1:06:17 things about about bernardo's view in the next hour so maybe not going with this too but but just what rules out the bohmian view what what's the empirical evidence that rules out the birmingham um that well this essay that bernardo was talking about which i'm not familiar with the details but uh that's uh that there are that realism is ruled out uh that there are hidden variables is incompatible i mean i would say with just uh with the general nature of the things that we've discovered about quantum mechanics

1:06:50 uh well i'm not so sure about that i i the the the stamford encyclopedia entry on bohmianism tells me you know a lot of these a lot of people talk about um the the the um the um the contextualism and and this ruling out the bohmian view and the stanford encyclopedia entry says this is just terrible objections um nobody who really knows about this stuff would make them so i mean it's you know in some sense i you know i'm not a philosopher philosopher of physics i kind of struggle with these things but

1:07:23 uh i'm not i i appreciate the bohemian view isn't isn't the fashion but i'm not sure it has been ruled out empirically but it's difficult to tell what is what is motivated by what theoretical physicists think of promising ways forward and what has been ruled out and um you know yeah anyway yeah i mean the math gets here pretty technical but so there are lots of predictions that have already been confirmed and

1:07:56 it's not clear that bulma mckennis gives the same results in fact no one's ever done the math as far as i can tell seriously no one's actually ever sat down and said okay according to the bombing of mechanics how do you reproduce the things that we already know are true about quantum mechanics and to the limited extent that i've seen people try that you get differences empirical differences differences in what you would predict um and that's something that's not really addressed uh i mean i don't know

1:08:30 so i'm not sure i mean just just remember the fact that the creator of that theory was not boom it was the de broglie and the broglie himself rejected his own theory so even the altar of that theory admitted that no it's not tenable but there's a lot of pressure sean carroll's talk about how much pressure there was to accept the copenhagen interpretation and you know real social pressure so you know everett left academia and you know i mean there was a lot of

1:09:02 you know sociological pressure to not even question the um yeah apparently there's a famous proof of uh i can't remember the details now what was it the famous proof that was supposed to just show the bohmian view is wrong that everyone accepted for years and then someone realized the main uh the main text of it one of the pages was upside down and nobody had noticed because no one read this thing anyway sorry the most outspoken physicist against uh boeing mechanics today would be

1:09:36 ludus mottle the yeah czech physicist he's very outspoken about everything including this but i think he constructed the longest list of solid arguments against bohmian mechanics one thing we can mention immediately is that it doesn't have a relative relativistic extension like classical quantum mechanics has in quantum field theory so until it has that you can't even reconcile that with uh with general relativity does this guy ward strava who who has papers oh that paper you may you sent

1:10:10 right yeah there was an attempt to do that yeah but anyway i mean most physicists today would say that would be a step back to to try to make that work i agree i appreciate it's not the fashion but then i wonder whether that's because people aren't thinking hard enough about consciousness well uh well anyway so whether it had to do with consciousness or not i don't know but i'm more interested in the mathematics of it and i've never seen a serious attempt to to reproduce the results from the mathematics of of uh that kind of theory and lubos i

1:10:44 know i don't know him personally but uh i've read some stuff by his he's as far as i know done some of the math and shown that they're empirical differences actually you know he's not everybody's cup of tea he's got a strong personality to put it mildly but he's very smart and he's very good at the math and i haven't seen anything wrong with what he's done so i don't know so that that makes it right or wrong but but i'm more interested in mathematical so if your claim is that it reproduces all of the same stuff as quantum mechanics then i want to see the math i want to see the predictions and i haven't seen it and what i have seen suggest that there's some

1:11:16 difficulties there um but anyway so that's uh but but even more generally so you were gone bernardo but we were uh talking about the the what is it f xqi the essay that you're talking about yeah yeah so that essay that um you were lauding just now um suggests that uh so the way i was hearing what you're saying is that itself counts as evidence against the bombing interpretation uh because it yeah because everything would be indeterminate in that level you could construe that way i think i may be wrong about it but i think you

1:11:49 could constrain it that way okay there are two winners uh one of the authors is common to both um one is mostly about why the world is not deterministic at the foundational level and the other one is why physics still has a lot to say despite that uh it's a pair of essays but it neither is about this constructivist view of the objective world right some of the authors are involved with that other things but not the essays themselves right okay so i mean i i like i said i

1:12:24 could talk about this all day because i love all this stuff but i would like to sort of get us back on track to consciousness because i noticed that's dropped out a little bit here i do point out that i haven't heard phillip's response to the multiverse subject so oh yeah if if there is a multiverse are there multiple cosmos subjects are they all i was going to say i don't i don't and i think bernardo said the same thing i mean i don't think it really affects my view very much i don't uh well my thought was that it pushes you more in bernardo's direction

1:12:57 well i mean if you look if you inflationary cosmology you just have in a sense it's just one big universe isn't it with little pockets little bubbles i don't see why that what each bubble is a subject um well so it's a difficult empirical question anyway you know which which regions of the universe are also subjects in their own right i tend to think um you know we should look to neuroscience to

1:13:30 get the answers there um whether we should say the bubbles i don't know i guess i haven't thought of that um but it doesn't discriminate against your view either way i think but you do need some account i would say of why the subjects are distinct if there are multiple subjects and so this is going to sort of transitions maybe to talk about alters because one of the main arguments i think that that bernardo has um which i would like to hear your response to is this idea of dissociation and alters

1:14:03 so the way that i interpret bernardo and it's good that you're here so you can correct me if i'm wrong but um the way i interpret him is that so if we're if we're looking for something to do some explaining we want to appeal to something that's empirically established that's um got some credentials behind it and whatever you think about the id there's some evidence there i think you can interpret the evidence in different ways and bernard and i have talked about that and you know so that's fine but still there's that evidence it is a psychologically known entity so to speak um but uh fundamental laws i mean pushing

1:14:36 everything into the base and then positing laws to sort of do your your cleanup work does sort of sound a bit suspicious when you put it up against something that's empirically um got wheels like this does so what is your response to that and why don't you use the language of dissociation what is it that you have against that way of thinking um yeah so so i so i initially thought in the article i wrote on on bernardo's up i initially thought that he was taking dissociation to

1:15:08 close the explanatory gap so i thought you know the idea was this gives us a completely intelligible explanation of how human conscious minds emerge and my objection to what that view that i thought was his was you know i don't think this does close expansion gap because i don't you know just because if you just got one mind and certain subsets of its experiences become inferentially isolated from the others that doesn't entail it seems to me the the existence of another mind and when i say another mind i don't i don't mean

1:15:41 another fundamental mind or or um a mind that's wholly distinct from the original mind i just mean it doesn't entail that they're on two conscious things when they were previously won so so that was my objection that but then in our twitter discussions bernardo was saying what what you just said richard that no it's the it's just that look we we know that there is this you know empirical fact that one mind becomes two uh or comes multiple minds and so you know maybe we're thinking the most parsimonious explanation of

1:16:13 human consciousness maybe that's that that's it's a good ground stick to it it's not really that there are two lines is it bernardo on your view it's that there seems to be there seems to be but the seeming is what needs to be explained yes so so yeah so i think that's really interesting i might have false and um um i well i mean two things one i'm not i i still think we'd have to address how we satisfy those two constraints i mean that's sort of what i'm focused on

1:16:45 and i think i don't see if this doesn't close expansion gap then we've still got the question of so i mean there's two things you need to do you know in a theory of consciousness you need to work out what things are conscious and what things are not so i i don't think this answers the question satisfying the two constraints so you might still be back to the fundamental laws you don't like and whatever but in insofar as this is a this is a guide to um you know which things are conscious and which things aren't um yeah that might that might be one one

1:17:20 empirical pointer although um and i'm not opposed to it you know although there are other considerations you might have to take into account but what i was just thinking recently in preparing for this you know for this discussion i think you know trying to pin now what exact and it relates to what has just been said actually what exactly is it that is known empirically and and you know bernardo knows much more about this stuff than i do so it's not like i've got a definite view but it seems like bernardo wants to say um the altars are as he's just said sort of in some sense um substantia maintain some kind of

1:17:53 substantial identity or shared being with the mind they came from but is i mean is that really what we know empirically i mean couldn't one argue that all we know empirically is just that at an earlier stage you've got one mind at a later stage you've got in these cases of dissociation and later case you've got multiple minds and maybe it goes back to being one mind and if that is just what we know empirically it's not clear to me that that pushes in favor of bernardo's view you know or not so yeah that's that's

1:18:28 the sort of issue i would like clarification can i comment of course i think there is more to be said in favor in favor of philip's latest uh theory then then he's he's saying himself so i'll take the enormously uh arrogant step of of trying to defend his view better than than he just he just did but before i get there just to to to answer philip's uh final question what is it exactly that is empirically observed

1:19:00 okay we can answer that we empirically observe that there is a illusion by what is fundamentally one mind one person that it is in fact many and that the different singing sub minds have their own dispositions and their own memories and narratives of self including names so this is empirically observed clinically it's also empirically observed in terms of neural imaging that the the brain processes of these people are different than those of actors

1:19:33 pretending to themselves to have a dissociative identity disorder we also know empirically that there are things that are observed through neuroimaging that cannot be faked for instance this woman in germany that had multiple altars some of which were claimed to be blind when one of those altars was in executive control of the body activity in the visual cortex would disappear even though her eyes were open now you can't fake this so we know that there is something real happening we have no reason not to believe than the reports of these people

1:20:06 that they speak from different centers of consciousness depending on the time uh there is empirical evidence that the dreams of patients with dissociative identity disorder and that's the work of a famous psychology psychologist uh dieter deidre what was her name i even because i never remember her name so i wrote it down here deidre barrett from harvard um worked published already in the first publication was already in the 90s the she shows that based on reports that patients with did they experience their own

1:20:40 dreams from multiple different perspectives so they experienced the same dream but from the perspective of different characters or different avatars in the dream and and they report uh their experiences of the dream from that unique perspective which sort of matches very well with our notion right now that we are experiencing the same world from different perspectives it is also observed empirically that you can hear well yeah you can cure the id and the latest therapy that is gathering a lot of momentum because it seems to

1:21:13 to work it's called unification therapy i think is the name they're giving to this now it's the latest uh therapy full of bells and whistles that has shown some empirical promising of dealing with the id and you can have a patient that has reunified reporting to you that he has or she has the memories of the individual alters and now he or she recognizes those memories as his or her own um what we do not have and i think that's what you're alluding to mostly philip is a explicit

1:21:47 detailed explanation of how the process works what is it exactly in our cognitive processes that leads to this seeming split we know the split is illusory because it's only one mind at the end you don't really believe that a person is fundamentally multiple well maybe if you're a constitutive psychiatrist but you're not that anymore uh philip so you don't need to go there um so what's missing is exactly what the mechanism is and then i would defend your point of view now when you appeal to new fundamental laws of nature which

1:22:21 like richard i also don't like because it's like you're just pushing something else to the reduction base you're not really explaining anything but i would still defend that if i were from in your shoes right now by saying maybe since we don't understand the association fully the association itself is a manifestation of this new law of nature that we don't yet understand because we don't yet we cannot reduce dissociation yet so if we can't explicitly reduce it although it's empirical it may itself be a manifestation of a new irregularity of nature that we haven't

1:22:54 recognized yet yeah so i agree these aren't clashing and i'm not opposed to um you know i think these are trying to do different things and and they are compatible um i mean just two things quickly one i'm i'm not i'm still clear i'm sensing which it's an illusion i mean to my mind if there are if there's x and there's y and what it's like to be x is different to what it's like to be y then that's that's that's two subjects um but just i mean just suppose for example something like the integrated information theory just to

1:23:28 i don't know whether this you know might perfectly adequately explain why in cases of dissociation you go from having one subject having two subjects say it turned out that um you know there is in such cases we go from one locus of maximal integrated information to two locus or multiple loci it's not the plural of integrated maximum integrated information uh and so we have an explanation of that um just suppose i mean look i'm not i'm you'd have to reject the exclusion

1:24:00 postulate to do that yeah i know it's pretty fun see i'm i'm not just you know something like that you know there was some theory of consciousness that predicted that in cases of dissociation you go from you know in case of dissociation we go from condition sufficient for one conscious mind to sufficient conditions for multiple conscious minds um okay and that and then it it wouldn't seem to me to obviously imply anything about where my conscious mind came from it's just

1:24:31 you know this theory predicts that in these situations we go from having one conscious mind to multiple conscious minds because the you know the conditions necessary for consciousness go from being this this condition they say for one conscious one conscious mind to multiple conscious minds why why would that push us in the direction of i mean look i ultimately share something like bernardo's view uh that but i i'm not clear why this pushes us in that direction uh you know this is like the split brain cases as well let's split

1:25:04 you know what i don't think the split brain cases push us to bernardo's view why is that why does dissociation dissociation well if i if if i may um i have a lot to say about iit as well but just to answer a question very quickly um there is nothing empirically showing us that subjects combine there is nothing empirically showing us definitely that matter as defined in physics creates the qualities of experience but here we have something staring us in the face in the empirical world that shows that some kind of

1:25:38 decomposition of somebody who was born as one mind and then seemingly becomes many actually happens now in your terminology the seeming is already a different mind i'm fine with that if you say the seeming is alone to characterize the existence of multiple minds i go along with you there i don't have any problem with that but it shows decomposition and you might say well it also shows combination in the sense that it goes back to its original state i would say no it just shows the reverse of decomposition uh i suppose i suppose i'm not sure

1:26:12 i might be wrong i might be wrong about that i mean you know more about them i suppose i'm not quite saying does it really show decomposition or does or does it just show that we go from having one mind to having multiple minds that surely that is what we know empirically not that there's one mind that becomes multiple minds or the decomposition but just to fill up his his point was that uh that we have some reason to take that seriously i i think because after they've been integrated back into a unitary mind they share the memories

1:26:43 so i thought that was the kind of point of the that evidence that he was given the person realizes oh it was me all along it's the same thing that happens when you wake up from a dream you are dissociated in your dream an ordinary dream from the parts of your mind that are conjuring up the rest of the dream around your dream avatar but you you don't you don't identify with that you think that's you know the cars the streets the trees around you in an ordinary dream you think during the dream that they they are not you they are out there you are dissociated from that part of you that's conjuring up all that stuff

1:27:16 but when you wake up you realize hey it was me or longer i was imagining all that stuff it's a little bit different in the diacronic case across time cases i think i mean you just have one subject that sort of partially loses its memory for a bit i think it's um i think that's different to making sense of at one time multiple minds that are some sense in some sense the same i think that's more paradoxical but just um but one time i was going during the dream you have multiple two minds

1:27:48 during the dream at the same time one mind generating the environment of the dream the other mind being the character in the dream and you don't have a sense of ownership of the cognitive processes generating that imagery actually there are even certain brain damage circumstances in which people lose the ownership of their own memories they still have their memories but they don't think they are theirs they think it's somebody else's memory so the association expresses itself in all kinds of forms and and even conscious dissociation there is clinical evidence for that

1:28:22 there is clinical evidence for alters fighting for executive control which shows that they are both there concurrently you know oh yeah yeah i'm not denying that there are conscious minds i'm just um i mean so just coming back to the to the the point about them having the same memories i mean you know we have from parfit derek parfait all these you know thought experiments where you might have uh you know two minds fusing into one and the memories going into the next individual and um without needing to say that in some

1:28:56 in some sense i mean he wants to say you know we've got two minds and then there's a brand new mind but then it inherits the memories and um you know he's got all sorts of thought experiments in that regard so it's not it's not i mean i'm not opposed to this but it's not completely obvious to me just because uh when the dissociation ends the mind that is there then has the memories of the previous minds it doesn't seem to be obvious that they have any substantial identity with it um when they say that they they come to a realization that

1:29:29 they were the ones that they're their memories it's not just that they have them it's like that was me i think that's kind of the crux and the thought is we should trust their testimony on that does that do but what else do you have yeah yeah yeah i'm not i'm not i'm not saying i'm opposed to that but i mean i i i have private personal experience with mild forms of dissociation not the idea but i i have come to insights later in life that for instance there was a moment i suddenly realized that there was something i was

1:30:00 thinking and feeling for years but i was not explicitly aware of it there was a part of me that thought and felt in a certain way constantly all the time in parallel to what i knew i thought and felt and then when you reintegrate them you realized darn i was too that was me and that was me as well right i just didn't have any cognitive bridges between the two and i can tell you it's a very compelling experience the realization that

1:30:31 both were you all alone it's and then i would say well is that in a definitional sense really the foundational mind behind the two or did we have actually two separate minds that now have become only one mind that inherited the memories of the two i mean you talk a lot about it in your latest paper um what's the distinction there yeah i understand the conceptual validity of the discussion but when it comes down to you know my sense of reality my sense of what happened

1:31:03 there's a little doubt it both were me the same guy i am now yeah that's really interesting that's but yeah so as i say i mean i'm not i'm not opposed to this possibility i suppose it's just i mean if this closed the exponential gap i'd say wow this is the right theory because that would be amazing but it seems to be kind of one empirical consideration and if it turned out that um you know a theory global workspace theory whatever you know predicted um that well i'm kind of repeating myself now that we go from one mind to

1:31:37 two then it's not i suppose the other thing finally i suppose and i won't push this anymore um is just i i suppose i have conceptual difficulty this is where we ended our twitter discussion about it conceptual difficulty this uh in what sense it's used you want to say that they're still um they're still in some sense not distinct from the the mind they came from but they are just i mean i i i suppose either i want to say either what it's like to be the new thing is is different to what it's like to be the old thing and then they're just different subjects

1:32:08 or that's not the case and they're the same as i have conceptual difficulty making sense inside this middle way between identity and distinctness of subjects that might be another part of the if i can quickly comment on that and just go back to one thing i wanted to say before regarding iit you reminded me now uh what would be the conceptual reason to imagine the altars as how along being the same mind i would refer you to itae our friend shani's paper from 2015 his paper on cosmos psychism where he talks about course objectivity and sentience

1:32:41 being inherited by every relative subject his terminology for alters or individual subjects it's complex to go into that discussion right now but i would just refer you to that i have difficulty making sense of that as well it's more subjective and but yeah core subjectivity makes all kinds of sense to me personally on an introspective basis it's like it's a flashing glaring light like it pinned it he really pinned it but yeah it's difficult to convey that

1:33:13 conceptually but regarding iit iit of course is not an ontology it's not making any metaphysical claims it's just finding a correlation between reported experience and certain loop-like patterns of brain activity that integrate information um i would just uh alert you to to to the implication of the methodology involved in deriving iit what they are finding correlates off is not phenomenal consciousness it is meta consciousness because the entire methodology is based on

1:33:46 reportability the subject has to report so the subject has not only to have the experience he has to be explicitly aware introspectively of having the experience and there is a whole stream of neuroscience now that the no report paradigm as they call it now in which people have become aware that of this distinction that there may be non-reportable phenomenal experience and then the neuro correlates of that can be completely different so i i would bring your attention to that in your write up the latest you go from explicitly explaining that you're talking about

1:34:20 phenomenal consciousness and then you go seamlessly into iit which implicitly conveys a message that iit is figuring out what the correlates of phenomenal consciousness are but that's not the case uh it's a subset of that it's the correlates of metacognitive awareness yeah so i mean just on that the the use of iit in my paper and the use of iot in this discussion today was purely illustrative you know i i'm not a proponent of iit i'm you know i'm i mean it just it gives you a nice sort of

1:34:53 simple theory of the correlates uh that you can talk about for example but i'm not and i appreciate there are those issues i mean richard's written nice papers i've been reading your paper with haqqan on yeah these issues of oh you know are we tracking you know um well just i mean just the issue you said about non-reportable consciousness or the disagreements of ned block and richard on on this score and i've i have no idea where i sell i find that issue very difficult but i i agree that

1:35:26 the proponents of iat haven't uh defended their side of that position enough but yeah but i mean don't tell julio that his view doesn't make any ontological commitments that it's a a view about metacognition because i'm sure he denies that well they say there's an identity don't they they say there's an identity yeah exactly does he deny i mean does he deny that his views don't make an ontological commitment he he wants to identify phenomenal consciousness with these um um integrated information which makes it just like physicalism i

1:35:59 mean i i've just christopher [ __ ] christophe [ __ ] and me reviewed each other's recent books and yeah this is the claim i was making it you know it's it's a sort of reductive physicalism strictly because christopher himself kristoff himself does not make the claim christoph is a dual aspect uh monist well a psychist even he he might maybe he contradicts himself but he does assert that identity um but it's an identity between the conceptual the mix as they call it or they used to call it uh but that's not something physical that's

1:36:32 that's something else i mean maybe implemented in physical systems but yeah that's what christoph says in his book yeah that's that's that's julio's view too i mean they're that and they're open to the pan psychics because yeah they think logic gates and you know anything with the integrated information is going to have consciousness um so it's not exactly yeah exactly and well it's yeah internet um anything with a measurable five i mean my problem is that you can't compute phi it's mathematically intractable um anyway so okay uh i wanna raise another one theory which hasn't been that's a higher order theory they can

1:37:05 make sense of a lot of these data points as well with respect to dissociation et cetera um but so philip i want to let you have your say but i want you to convince us that there's some other alternative to disassociation for explaining the relationship between our consciousness and the universal consciousness uh i just i do want to raise one other issue with bernard's worth i'm really keen to talk about uh before we finish but no look i mean i don't i'm not i i i depends what you what you're trying to do i'm i'm not i i so i see it as you know two tasks here

1:37:38 one is we have to work out what's the best theory of which things are conscious and which things aren't conscious um uh you know mapping correlations uh and i yeah and and the the empirical data about the association might be an important factor there i suppose yeah i suppose that's a way of putting it i'm not seeing why it's not it's more than just a correlation i think you know what what we what we can get at empirically are correlations and so i would want to say you know okay what we know empirically is

1:38:12 you've got one conscious mind you've got multiple you've got right and i think that might be more paired down than the the the than the metaphysical claims bernardo wants to attribute to but but it's interesting what you're saying about maybe trusting people's testimony might that's a really interesting thought actually because i suppose i'm thinking all we have to go on is observing people's brains and asking them how they're feeling but maybe if we can trust the testimony that they've sort of become a reunified person maybe that's another form of testimony that can help us there and so that and that's really interesting i

1:38:45 think more about that so that's one thing and i i guess i just don't really have um a novel contribution there uh you know i'm really interested in the task and i read your papers richard and other you know and try and try and get a grip on it but i suppose the task i'm interested in which is just a different task is closing the explanatory gap and um and in an empirically adequate way um and and so it's just a sort of different task that but but it you know what explanatory gap do you see

1:39:17 that it's not being closed by the way bernardo's addressing this issue oh yeah oh i don't think i closed the expansion gap because just because um i think if you've got one mind and certain of its phenomenal properties become inferentially isolated from the others i don't think that gives that entails that there are now two subjects even in the minimal sense that there are you know there's x and there's y and what it's like to be x is different to what it's like to be y i i don't think it entails that but though so it doesn't close the

1:39:49 exponential gap you're replacing one explanation for the empirical fact you're saying inferential isolation is one way of explaining the empirical fact of dissociation but what richard is saying is forget that pretend that we don't have an explanation a conceptual explanation for the association but we know that it happens isn't that point in the way amongst the three alternatives either emergence uh combination or decomposition isn't it pointing an empirical preference towards one of the three possibly yeah possibly

1:40:21 it's a it's it's something in the mix um or but i but it but i thought richard was asking me what what is the explanatory gap left over and i think maybe bernard is agreeing i'm not sure when you say there's no conceptual explanation of it i suppose that that is to say the expansion gap isn't closed so that's so so it's it's it's yeah that's all i'm saying i'm not yeah i would agree with you we do not have a final conceptual explanation for dissociation strong dissociation we just don't have it i think

1:40:55 inferential isolation is one i think obfuscation through attention is another i think you can add all of this together and it's still not fully conceptually satisfactory so i would grant that there is an explanatory gap in the sense of making conceptual sense of dissociation but but that's a minor point compared to the big explanatory gap that plagues an ontological choice uh which sort of assumes that there aren't empirical instances of any

1:41:29 of the things postulated combination emergence or decomposition but if you say empirically there is decomposition we may not be able to explain exactly how it happens but we know that it happens then you are in a completely different reality than the original reality of the explanatory problem in which you are purely still in the world of plausibility coherence here you are beyond coherence you are beyond plausibility you know that it exists it's a matter of whether we human beings can make conceptual sense of it don't wouldn't you grant that this is a whole other discussion

1:42:01 in the abstract discussion that preceded it well i just think the two different things i i you seem to be saying it partially closes the expansion gap if that's i don't think it closes the expansion gap at all any any more than i hope we don't have an argument any more than physicalism and or or certain forms of pan psychism or if there's an expansion gap there's an explanatory gap i don't think it's sort of um you know it's a big it's like being you're either pregnant or you're not you know i think there's either expansion up closed or or there isn't and i don't think i don't think it poses

1:42:34 this match up which is not to say that that it might i i'm open to the other point that it it gives us empirical reason to maybe you know have some kind of world view where there's big minds turning into little minds maybe um but it is your view right now yeah which is my view exactly right but because but i have that view because i think there's this way of closing this pantry gap in an in an empirically adequate way but yeah you prefer postulating new uh laws of nature then to empirically

1:43:08 appeal to something we know exists i guess i'm now inclined to think for various reasons that conscious hu every form of consciousness including human consciousness is in some sense irreducible and so you're gonna have to postulate basic laws and then the you think that adding something to the to the reduction base is better at closing the explanatory gap than appealing to empirical observations that are nearly irrefutable but i don't think they do close the

1:43:39 expunger gap i don't think they do close the expansion i i agree they might give us reason to think big how do you close how do you close the explanation the way the way the duelist does by postulating basic laws of nature and you know if if if it is the case that all forms of consciousness are irreducible i think it looks like that that's how you've got to do it and you might you know you might say but is that really more satisfying to you as an explanation to shove something into the reduction base in other words basically not explaining it at all just saying

1:44:12 it's a brute fact is that explanatory more satisfying to you than pointing to an empirical process we know to exist it would be i mean it would be better i guess if you didn't have to appeal to um extra laws of nature but i don't think what you're offering gives us that alternative it i just don't think it makes any any advancement on on that specific issue of closing the expansion gap as opposed to you know the issue of which things are conscious which things

1:44:46 are not which but so so i don't think there's an alternative and i don't think you know i don't i don't see why i well yeah i think there's good principal reasons to think we're gonna have to bridge this gap with basic laws uh but this is an explanation to postulate brute facts of nature is that an explanation or is it precisely the avoidance of the need for an explanation because you're not reducing anything you're just saying well it happens it's a brute fact done yeah you know you're with the physicalist in a way that i don't think bernardo's view is uh because the

1:45:20 physician's going to have to sort of a type b material it's going to appeal to some brute identity between brain states and conscious experiences now you're appealing to some brute fact some law that connects brain states to conscious experiences it's exactly the same parallel uh move so if one is dissatisfactory so is the other um well i mean i think there are strong arguments against type b the type of identity the type b physicalist wants to make i mean we could get into that i actually i think if ty i don't agree with that i think if type b physicalism did work out

1:45:52 it would be very satisfying because in a way it's not brewed it's just too it's just like water and h2o as they think about it but i mean i don't think that view does work out but i think it would be satisfying if it did um look what's so impossible i mean you know there's plenty of precedent as david chalmers has pointed out there's plenty of precedent in science for non-reductive explanations you know when maxwell explains electromagnetism he doesn't explain it in terms of what goes on before he postulates new electromagnet you know electromagnetic properties and laws and

1:46:25 explains on that basis i mean every every scientific theory postulates fundamentals their explanation has to end somewhere postulates laws okay usually the laws are causal laws sort of diacronic from past to future uh whereas in this case they're sort of syn chronic from uh the lower level to the high level but i don't i don't see why that means they're completely inadequate and and as i say if if human consciousness is fundamental i think that's that that's what that's

1:46:58 what we're going to have to do but i don't think the claim is that it's completely inadequate because yes we have to come down to some fundamentals at the end of the day you can't keep on explaining one thing in terms of another forever but the point is a relative comparison between the two concrete options in front of us one is you say well the formation of individual subjects is a brute fact in other words you're not really explaining anything you're you're adding a brute fact it's a reduction but yeah but then you come and then you say

1:47:29 that is more explanatory satisfactory although you're not really explaining in the sense that you're not really reducing it you say it's more explanatory satisfactory than to point to a known empirical fact while acknowledging that we may not have a complete conceptual understanding of the processes underlying that empirical fact but you prefer to add a brute fact it gives you more explanatory satisfaction to add a brute fact than to follow nature that i find very striking if you if you had a way of closing the expansion gap without recourse to fundamental laws that would be better

1:48:02 and i would embrace it wholeheartedly um i don't think that as you're agreeing i don't think that is what you're offering and i don't agree that what we have empirical reason to think that there is a way of closing the expansion gap in this vicinity as you say even if i so i'm accepting that there might be empirical reason to think you know big minds turn into little minds but of course my theory has an explanation of that as well so so even if so i do agree possibly i'm open very much under that there's an empirical reason to think that big minds become little minds and

1:48:34 that's sort of how it fundamentally works but i don't think there's any empirical reason to think there's a way of closing the explanatory gap in this vicinity so i'd embrace it if that was what you were offering or if that if there was some hint that there there was one here but that i don't agree hey that's what i'm offering it's it's right there on your paper you claim that you are closing the explanatory gap by populating brute facts so if the fundamental closure of the explanatory gap i would say dissociation is a much better way to close it i mean if but if postulating root fact is closing the explanatory gap

1:49:07 what else is not i mean when a scientist you know explains something by postulating the schrodinger equation explains you know the evolution you don't say oh you've just postulated you haven't explained why the schrodinger equation but you know everyone has to stop so look i agree it would be better if we it would be more parsimonious if we if we could do it without these extra laws of course that would be more parsimonious but i i can't see that you've offered us that this is giving us a reason to think there is a way of doing that in this

1:49:39 vicinity this is an important point because i'm getting lost on the dialectic here so we keep using the explanatory gap with the definite article there um and so it seems to me like you i saw philip are you suggesting that bernardo's view is left with the original the the normal one that we all talk about you know um how do you get from these physical facts to a conscious experience uh is that so you must be a physical you must mean a explanatory gap and explanatory gap

1:50:12 because it's not the explanatory gap what we mean by an explanatory gap is you've got a story about x emerging from y and you don't have an explanation of how that happens oh i mean i would ultimately put it in terms of a priori entailment that you can't move a priori from the more fundamental thing to the less fundamental thing i think the physicalist faces an expansion gap i think the the panzerkist can face an expansion gap it's not the same expansion gap because you're not going from the physical you're going from conscious particles to systems level consciousness but there's still seems exponential gap there

1:50:44 in that you know there's no intelligent explanation and i think bernardo faces exactly the same expansion gap that there's no explanation of how one conscious mind can the exactly the same kind of explanatory gap the same kind of planetary gap because what richard is hinting at it's not the physicalist explanation right it's another one but you're saying it's equivalent in something yeah it's not obviously you're not going from physical facts to consciousness facts but it's it's it i think it's just as troubling in so far as we're going from base to

1:51:17 product don't you get the same thing philip because you can't a prayer a deduce cosmo psychist without adding these fundamental laws the ideal reasoner would have to postulate the existence of these things so there's no entailment from the cosmopsychic facts to the your consciousness facts without the addition of these group facts so it's the same you get the same gap you're just trying to plug it with a kind of ad hoc maneuver yeah postulated once you plug in the laws you do have an explanation right and you might say arbitrary

1:51:50 satisfy well i don't see why that's any more arbitrary than explaining you know the a causal process in terms of the schrodinger equations if we look at science you have to look at the entire history of science not only particular moments we have reduced everything to four fundamental laws and we are very close to reducing those four laws which in fact are four feuds to one fuse i mean the history of science is the history of reduction and we have been extraordinarily successful at that because of quantum field theory we can

1:52:24 explain maxwell's equations we can reduce them not in a way that maxwell was aware of at the time but today we have reduced it so it's not the history of science that you postulate ad-hoc brute facts to make sense of everything it's a loaded way of putting ad-hoc brew facts of course we try to get them as simple as possible you want them who was it who said to be written on a t-shirt but i mean i mean one problem with appealing to history sciences i think you know the history science since galileo hasn't been really dealing with conscious or you know the physics at least um and so it's it's not obvious what lessons we we can draw from

1:52:58 there but look i mean i i i i don't i wouldn't i would reject that it's that that it's it's it's ad hoc i don't it's um it would be more it would be more like what you can say is it would be more parsimonious if you had fewer laws right that you can say that but i'd but i don't see why it's and you have to cherry pick the last two and i just just i think we have good reason to think human consciousness is fundamental so we're going to have to i think that's a good reason to think we're going to

1:53:31 have to bridge the gap with laws sorry richard what do you mean cherry pick the laws well there's an infinite number of laws that connect these states to conscious experiences so you have to select the right ones out of all of these yeah that's why it's an infinite number yeah yeah exactly so that's what it's an important no hold on it's an empirical question we we look what we try and work out is the best that's why it's not a priority exactly yeah so that's the same gap yeah exactly you know what what i take it what you have to do is you

1:54:03 you look to neuroscience the correlations that neuroscience gives and and the association might might be something that comes in there and and um and then we try to get the best systematization of that but if you're comparing these two ideas i'm trying to make a comparison between the two we are both facing the same problem which is how do we come from a universal consciousness to individual private consciousnesses how do we make that step i say well we can get a clue from nature from an empirical process we know to exist it's called

1:54:33 dissociation and although we don't have a full conceptual understanding of it we have some and regardless of that we know it happens so let's look for look for an explanation along those lines and you're taking the exact same problem and you're saying well it's a brute fact that individual subjects form point you don't go any further than that and you say that this is explanatory more satisfactory than what i'm doing that is what i find extraordinary it uh sometimes you seem to be saying that

1:55:06 this partially closes the expansion gap and and when you say we don't have a full conceptual explanation i mean i'm not sure what exactly it means i prefer to talk about you know a priori entailment and i don't think this offers any um any sort of closing of the expansion gap any more than than the physicalist or the or the simpler forms of psychism and nor do i think there's empirical grounds to think there is a a a way of closing this bunch of gap in this vicinity so so yeah if you had if you if you could do it without appealing to extra

1:55:39 laws i'd say that's more parsimony it's great but i i don't i don't accept that they're but you're putting conceptual understanding above empirical fact you're saying it doesn't matter that there is an empirical fact that this happens if i can't have a complete conceptual understanding of it i will ignore it and that that's armchair philosophizing is telling you the solution why wouldn't you look at it what the empirical facts are telling us if if if you're right is that there's empirical grounds to think little minds come from big minds and

1:56:11 that's what fundamentally goes on i'm happy with that i'm not rejecting what the empirical facts point to i'm just not seeing a solution to the expansion gap and so much as i'd love to increase but the explanatory gap loses a lot in significance look even if i couldn't explain exactly how it happens i know that it happens and now it becomes a question of elaborating conceptually on our understanding of it but everything can go on based on the observation that it does happen it's not a question of plausibility anymore

1:56:44 it happens all right it's there can i try to can i try to step in here because i i do think that we're going chasing our television here's a way maybe to put the points um so everybody for the sake of argument at least i'm a bit of a skeptic but still everyone for the sake of argument is accepting the idea as a psychologically real phenomenon um philip seems to be arguing that even when you have that in place you still have the explanatory gap

1:57:16 whereas what i hear bernardo arguing is that by extension of psychological psychiatric theories that we already know that we can sort of see a road between where we are now in a complete understanding of disassociated there's a path in principle yeah right and so that's where the explanatory right so do you not see the extension i'm not seeing a pathway to closing the explanatory gap i mean i i you know i i just don't really don't see the difference i hope i hope this

1:57:48 isn't offensive i really don't see the difference between a physicalist saying we know that it happens one day we'll we will we'll find we'll find the way to bridge expansion gap i i mean i i think perhaps perhaps i can be persuaded perhaps i can be persuaded that yes you're right we know that it happens we don't know that it happens on the physicalism we don't know that yeah okay okay okay but but let's say but but let's say you know even if an even if a physicist could say look look we know when you get these kind of brain states

1:58:21 you get consciousness uh you know even if you have a correlation not causation it's more equivalent to like yeah it's more equivalent to newton's saying look we know that gravity happens we don't know how it happens and then we get einstein's curvature of space and we can see a kind of connection how you get from one to the other of course newton couldn't see it but we see how you get there so why isn't it sort of similar with in this respect here i mean even with i you know when we get to einstein we still you know you always end up with with certain facts that are brute that

1:58:54 you know that mata follows geodesics through space-time and space-time curvature impacts on that you know so so in a way you know we always have to get to these brute explanations um why is it different because um yeah i just i just don't see the reason to think that this is pointing us to a way of closing expansion gap i don't even if you're right that it happens that we have one mind becoming two that could be you know it could be because of because

1:59:29 of brute laws of nature i don't see that way i don't i i don't see a pathway to giving an intelligible explanation of that and in fact i think there are good arguments that um you know human consciousness is fundamental so you can't really give that kind of reductive explanation i don't think we're going to converge and we are very close to the time you have to leave but i mean it might be if just make a concessionary point here i mean kind of concessionary it might be to do with you you liking the taishani stuff and i suppose it you know it might be something to do with that this

2:00:01 making sense of this middle way between separate and distinct minds and maybe if i was into that that that would help to see how the expansion gap could potentially be closed so it might i don't know if you face the same problems but i also want to make a concessionary point i concede to you that the dissociation may be an expression of fundamental laws do i think we have reason to believe that right now i don't think we do i think we have lots of very promising uh understandable coherent ways to make sense of it based on standard psychological and psychiatric doctrine we have lots of hints related to inferential isolation related to attention to focus

2:00:34 so but i i i concede that ultimately it might be the case that there is a fundamental law in operation and i know you're not going to agree today but there is only one point that i really want to highlight because you suggested it and i'm totally in opposition to that which is it is an empirical fact that one mind thinks of itself as being many but it is not an empirical fact that matter creates experiential states the empirical fact is that there is a correlation between the two there is no empirical fact of experience

2:01:07 creation or are rising out of a material organization it's not an empirical fact it's a theoretical inference based on the empirical fact of correlation but one mind becoming many whether it is an illusion or not is irrelevant for the point in contention because all that is required is the illusion if you show that the illusion happens you are done it is an empirical fact it does not depend on interpretation and we have to go in a few minutes i mean i'm not sure about this illusion stuff or one mind thinking it's many or i mean yeah

2:01:41 it could be that this empirical evidence that one bind becomes many but i don't think we're getting anything here that in any way closes the expansion gap but the other thing i wanted to talk about that uh but we're not going to have time but is yeah why i think the um the manifestat the altar manifests as the body rather than the brain i still but we'll have to uh i know you have to go but can you give us a 30-second argument that there's an explanatory gap

2:02:14 here that there's an expansion gap um yeah that even if you knew all the facts about disassociation there would still be this further look at the relationship um i i don't i don't see it it's the same gap you have it in any case in every case there's not you know just because you've got certain quantitative physical properties it doesn't entail qualitative consciousness properties just because you've got conscious particles doesn't entail that the system is conscious just because you've got one mind with certain

2:02:46 subset of its experiences cognitively isolated uh doesn't inferentially isolate it doesn't entail that you've got two conscious things in any sense even in the minimal sense that there's now two conscious thing you know that what it's like to be wanted differently so it's it's just as much an expansion gap and then you say okay well how do i know how do i know that you know if we keep doing this we'll close expansion gap i mean you know look i'm i'm open to people working on that that would be great but i'm also in some way open to physicalists as you say it's a type c physical position maybe we'll close the expansion gap if we

2:03:18 but i i in either case and i'm you know i'm not i'm not saying to be provocative comparing to physicalism honestly in either case i don't see any reason to think there's a way of close expansion gap i mean i give some credence to all these possibilities but but you claim to have closed it in your latest paper by postulating a brute fact yeah i mean anyone can anyone can close it in that way yeah that's the point the challenge challenge yeah well i'm not sure if that would be consistent with the definition of physicalism

2:03:49 but it is the challenge the challenge is closing it that way in a way that's empirically adequate that's you know that's that that's that's how i see the challenge but um yeah all right yeah you've got a i know you got real life i just heard my children waking up from their naps so that means my time is uh to put as well um i want to thank both of you guys for joining me this was a really great discussion i feel like we have a lot more to talk um to talk about uh we covered a lot there's still a lot left to cover so

2:04:22 um thanks guys uh let me go ahead and end this and i'll say buy off the air just really quickly oh that's right thanks a lot it was a fun lot of fun thanks bye bye all right we're clear guys we're clear