Consciousness Live! with François Kammerer (S3 E28)

0:00 button and then we'll be live so here we go all right we are live uh joining me today an extra special guest uh franois CER um I'm sorry for that American pronunciation of your name but franois for your for people who don't know you can you say a little bit about who you are and what you do yes so let's uh let's start with the hard questions so I'm so my name is fris CER and I'm fine with tons of different pronunciations and so I am a French originally French

0:34 philosopher of mine and now active in Germany I'm a postdoc at the University in bom in the team of Tobias schlish and I got my PhD a few years ago from uh the university Paris orbon so in Paris and so I've been working mainly on Consciousness uh and so I think of course we're going to talk a lot about that so one of the things that I've been doing uh in the recent years at the end of my PhD and now is um develop and defend and explore an Illusionist

1:08 conception of phenomenal Consciousness so to take the label offered by KISS Frankish but I think we're going to we are do to talk about that more in details so I don't know if there are more things to say about me in the first place um except that one thing that might be relevant to some of the U some of the work is that so I've been training for philosophy but I've not been interested in analytic philosophy until rather late compared to most people that I meet in my most professional settings which is that I never did not really get into analytical

1:41 philosophy before the seconding year of Masters so I was trained in France rather traditionally doing history of philosophy and loads of French philosophy and I actually like that so I'm not I'm not the kind of person who would say analytic philosophy rules and conent of philosophy is just awful actually I kind of like that so I changed my mind about lots of things and I also changed a lot of my philosophical interests but um so yeah I I went rather late to analytical philosophy and I went tweet mainly because I thought okay that's where you can really tackle the problem of Consciousness because I was

2:12 really interested in the problem of Consciousness and S that I've been staying quite a lot of years uh working on this problem of phenomenal Consciousness oh that's interesting so I didn't realize that you had the background in Continental philosophy uh that's I mean I also had an interest in as an undergraduate early graduate I was very interested in SRA and uh not so much D I liked arguing against Dairy dah but you know I was interested in that sort of stuff with Coen so so that's that's where you find a lot of really interesting questions being discussed I I've never really got this this Continental analytic divide to be honest with you it's like everyone's interested

2:46 in these questions and they just have different approaches and I don't see what they all the fuss my my own opinion but we can discuss that later because maybe less Central to Consciousness life is that so first of Continental is some sort of it's not a real category because it mixed together lots of different things some of it really good some of it really bad some of it Etc and uh and yeah I don't know what to make of the distinction myself and how to position myself clearly what I'm doing now is analytic philosophy but I I think it would be wrong to have too narrow a conception of what it should be and also to consider

3:19 whatever is not labeled analytic philosophies do not interesting but anyway we could discuss that maybe yeah exactly no I I agree with you 100% I'm not in the boundary policing in terms of like what is and isn't good philosophy I think it's a we should have open borders here but so that's interesting I know your early work too you were sort of uh it before I mean not early early but I mean your early publish work I guess was sort of focus on questions about group Consciousness because I read a paper of yours actually defending an anti- nesting principle yeah yeah I did actually yeah so if you want the story I I did not really work on that it's just

3:51 that I was an Avid Reader of Eric fidz gi's blog I don't know if you read the Sprint I think it's a really good blog and I think every really great job at doing blogging and philosophy in some sort of uh productive and fruitful Manner and I just read this article that um Eric had written about uh if you're a materialist then you should probably accept that the US as a whole is conscious and I thought no that's wrong there are lots of answers and I Blog the answer and then I told me you should publish that say okay I'm going to publish that and it was rather

4:23 peripheral I was not really working on that it's just Eric telling me that's publishable publish okay I'm going to publish that then okay that's good feedback it's it's I I I really enjoy Eric's blog by the way and he inspired me to amongst other people to start blogging back in the day I I sort of feel like it's too bad that philosophy blogging isn't what it used to be it used to be like a big Community actually now there's only a few of the bigger names which is too bad because like you say uh blogging is a really good way to get your ideas out to get people reading them and some sometimes it's a pipeline to get things published so I think it's a it's an alternative nice way of thinking but yeah to go back to these

4:56 papers that I published I think it was a time where I was not an eliminativist Illusionist about Consciousness so I still wanted more or less to be realist and so I was still interested in knowing but is a United States really conscious really phenomenally conscious or not and of course I wanted to say no because it's really weird and uh and and then shortly after that I mean around the time the paper was published I was starting to say no but actually I'm going to go Illusionist that's that the thing that the way I make sense of things and so in some sense now this problem of nested Consciousness I mean I still interesting

5:30 as a puzzle like intellectual puzzle but I don't find them as pressing as maybe I used to five years ago interesting yeah so I mean I was that that's interesting that you phrase it that way so I am curious like what sort of it the way you sound describe it is sort of like a conversion uh from you know realism about Consciousness to illusionism so before I ask you like what your ver because and I also want you to distinguish between illusionism and Li limit ISM what you do in some of your work which I think is a nice distinction that's needed but anyway so I'm just curious like sort of LED you towards uh The Illusionist side of things oh so so

6:04 I would describe things that way first I was uh when I started doing some philosophy at the end of high school as an undergrad uh and as an undergrad then I think I was I wanted to be a materialist right because materialism sounded more serious more scientific and also I was kind of reading lots of leftwing authors like Marx and Fuko and I thought okay also if you want to be really leftwing you also have to be materialist right ex so I really wanted to be materialist but it never occurred to me that phenomenal Consciousness specifically like this subjective experiential aspect of mental life could create a specific problem for

6:37 materialism so I was more focused on yes the ones who are not materialists are the religious ones who think that there is a soul that survived and this is wrong there is no such thing right and then I remember as an undergrad thinking a little bit to myself that that's weird this materialism because what do you do of this like subjective aspect of everything right there is a body but it feels like something from the inside and okay you guess I guess that you have to ad that matter as some sort of internal side right and I was happy with that I didn't see it as a as a problem for materialism and then later when I got into analytical philosophy I started

7:09 reading for example like chmur and Levine like no no no no wait this is a problem for materialism because what you sort was materialist is in fact more some sort of property dualism so what I was I was calling myself a materialist but in fact really I was more of a property dualist thinking well there is objective matter and then from the inside it feels like something but this feeling of course cannot be ex exactly the same kind of aspect as as the objective external aspects right and then I was torn and then I read livine I read the conscious mind by by by by Dave chelmer and uh at some point I flirted a

7:44 little bit with property dualism like um properly naturalistic dualism yeah naturalistic dualism or some sort of monism and I must say what convinced me that it had to be wrong was the very cool and uh chapter on phenomen judgment by chur right think it's must be chapter five of the conscious mind par of phenomenal judgment yeah like the idea that if you have this like naturalistic dualism that has to be either epiphenomenalist or something close to epiphenomenalism in some sense then you don't understand what role does this

8:18 conscious experience play in our phenomenal judgment because we say that we're phenomenally conscious uh we think about it and if phenomenal Consciousness is this epiphenomenal saying then what role does it play and if you if if you're Russian Mon and you say no no actually it plays a role because it grounds uh it's a categorical basis of whatever calls the Judgment still you it feels like it could be another phenomenal experience if it could change nothing as long as the same dispositions are grounded and then it felt just weird okay it can't be true it materialism in some sense like the stricter materialism

8:53 has to be true because otherwise it's so weird because we have this sort of material I mean we have all this sort of material phenomenon such as our judgments about Consciousness that seem to be related so closely to phenomenal Consciousness and I could not make sense of that in a satisfying manner in whatever non-materialist framework was offered and then I thought okay I have to be a materialist and then roughly I thought okay the best strategy to be material is one that is super popular everyone is after is the type B physicalism that you compl with some sort of phenomenal concept theory that to explain okay materialism is true but

9:27 still it kind of seems false and we have to explain that and so I did my I did my my my PhD many on that I reviewed various series focusing on Brian law and David papino and and a few others and I got out of this thinking no it doesn't work uh what does not work is that none of these theories seemed able to me to capture uh what I think um Joe living called the substantive and determinate grasp of Consciousness that we have through introspection right uh all these views seem to fail for some reason

10:00 and and they also did not seem able for me to account for our persistent and strong anti-physicalist intuitions because if really I grasp my phenomenal State V some sort of empty demonstrative then why should I be so reluctant to accept that this is in fact a brain state right if I have no grasp of what this is right it's just some sort of empty label and then I should be able to identify with to identify it with anything and still I'm resistant to do that and then I thought okay so to account for our anti-physicalist intuitions we have to admit that our

10:32 grasp of Consciousness is substantive that we grasp something of what Consciousness is and but once you go that way then you're very soon led to admit wait wait but if we have a certain grasp of what Consciousness is if this grasp makes physicalism problematic If it creates anti-physicalist intuitions and yet I'm a physicalist then the only natural answer is that well there is nothing that satisfy this grasp this grasp has to be illary right Nothing fits the representation and and that's how slly I

11:07 started to accept yes so this thing cannot exist in some sense at least there is a a way of I mean because we can discuss about that later when we debate I suppose about we elionism and that kind of stuff there is a sense in which these things that I grasp through introspection is not real and then I turned Illusionist and then so end of the story because I did not have the label and then I was I was like writing about that and I sent some of things I was writing to to Dave chmer say okay I have this View and he said yeah that sounds cool you should read this draft by a guy called kiss Frankish he call

11:41 that illusionism and I think he would like that and I read say no that's great that exactly what we should do just better better written of course and much more structured and much better but that's that's what I see and so since that they have endorsed kiss great label illusionism that's interesting story of version yeah I like it that's a very nice that's a very nice story one of the things that kind of jumps out I mean one of the things that I think that I like about your work and your approach in particular is that you started off as a phenomenal realist uh like you just described and so you part of your view is struggling with this idea that we

12:17 introspectively have a grasp on something but then for theoretical reasons we become convinced uh or some people can become convinced that this thing that we thought we had a grasp on isn't really there and that's why I think you really put your finger on the big problem for illusionism which is the what you call the illusion meta problem um so but before we get to I want to talk about that but before we get to that um I I am curious why why you don't so I guess it's hard to phrase the question but I guess what I'm wondering

12:48 is why you didn't end up a dualist given what you just told us uh because if you're if you really feel like you're confronted with something in your experience that you can't make a sense of physically uh or in physicalistic terms then I wonder you said you sort of briefly flirted with with property dualism but I wonder what was dissatisfying and I'm not a dualist I mean I'm I'm friendly to physicalist if so I'm not trying to press you in that direction but I am just curious like when you're at that crossroads and you're like thinking to yourself okay so it's either this thing is real and it has these properties that are uh in my opinion in opposition to

13:22 physicalism or I'm mistaken about the properties that has what kind of Led You In One Direction versus the other yeah that that's a that's a very good question so I would say uh that's one thing that I was quite convinced in the first place I'm still quite convinced by it and it's not that physicalism is true but it's something like yeah I guess that probably we should be able to explain everything about our behavior in physicalist term so or physicalist term by that of course I mean with a usual uh caveat so something like physical

13:57 functional and I'm not saying anything about the interesting nature of the physical and it might be that we ignore lots of things but I know that at least it's not fundamentally mental right so I accept the V negativa approach of M right anyway so now I just use physical to mean all of that so I'm quite I was quite convinc I'm still quite convinced that yeah we should be able to explain at least all of our behaviors uh without Appling to anything that is not physical so I was not convinced that physicalism is true but I was convinced that to explain behavior like things that we stay things that we do with our bodies

14:30 we should not have to appeal to anything else than physical stuff that's something I was convinced by but then of course at someone I was I was really toing okay but maybe there are other things in the universe right why would it be of course you can explain all Behavior just physical J but there might be other things on top of that but then at some point I had this problem which is that how do I know that I'm phenomenally conscious how do I think I know I'm phenomenally conscious why I think about it and this thinking leads immediately to behavior right uh such as spe speaking writing certain things and of course on a certain level like my my

15:03 brain does things when I introspect right and that's where the par like chmer Paradox of phenomenal judgment kicks in which is that wait if I'm a dualist that means uh that there is stuff that is non-physical right that constitute my phenomenal Consciousness at the same time I really want to admit that my phenomenal Consciousness is relevant importantly relevant for my phenomenal judgment MH and yet also think that there is a level at which my phenomenal judgment can be explained without appealing to anything non-physical and that's a real problem and of course CH

15:36 struggles with this problem and he gives an answer that I must say is one part of the book where I thought no I really because he's great at arguing right agre great no no that I cannot believe this is this is varable this is I at least for me I I thought it was a varable answer not satisfied and so it had to be a dualist I would say okay maybe some sort of interaction dualist maybe that would seem coherent because then if your interaction is dual and you can explain how this non-physical stuff is really relevant for your behavior of talking about your phenomenal Consciousness but then add this prior commitment that no

16:10 you you should be able to explain all about Behavior just in in physical functional terms so interaction is dualist was for me not 100% ruled out but at least very seriously um like I would just give very marginal Credence to it because I have the impression maybe I'm wrong but I have the impression that interaction is dualist is just not really an option given what we know about uh like what contemporary Neuroscience tells us there does not seem to be this like causal gaps that needs to be filled by something non-physical so anyway so that was the landscape I could not accept non uh

16:45 interaction is dualism because it just seemed to have weird consequence of phenomenal judgment and at the same time interaction is dualism seem to me to be ruled out so that would be why dualism or other kind of anti physicalism that make Consciousness fundamental were for me sort of ruled out okay interesting so if you want to to know what from are still the contenders of course are still contenders I I still think that maybe some sort of idealism makes sense on some level there is still some sort of problem of phenomenal judgment that uh still exist uh but I don't I'm not

17:20 saying these theories are not coherent right I'm just saying are lots of important problems that arises for them right But but so you don't so I think that's interesting that you put that way so you think that idealism is a contender but not not realism phys physical realism uh because I honestly like I don't really share the intuition that this thing called Consciousness is couldn't be physical um so I always find it to to me I find it very uh I don't know it's hard for me to put myself in the position of someone

17:53 who takes that kind of view so seriously that they're willing to go and explore these other sorts of ideas because I just think well well the most plausible thing is that it's something in the brain um and yeah conceptually it it's a bit hard I guess for some people to make sense of that but why do we expect things to conceptually make sense to us um is is a puzzle to me I I guess I just yeah so anyway I'm not saying that's an argument or anything against your view just I'm always curious about why people take the other the other so I think one way to make sense of maybe our different ways of approaching it would be to say well

18:24 maybe we're using the word Consciousness differently right and that would be some sort of verbal issue and I think that maybe in some cases opposition between let's say weak illusionism and strong illusionism really comes down to a verbal issue for example maybe what you're saying is that well the way you use Consciousness Consciousness refers to whatever the real thing that tends to cause your judgment that you are phenomenally conscious or tends to cause your introspective representation of phenomenal Consciousness and that's a fine way to use the word Consciousness and I agree that if you use a word like

18:58 we talk about phenomenal Consciousness right if you that the way you Define phenomenal Consciousness then I agree that yeah probably phenomenal Consciousness is something I don't know it might be a very disjunctive property like it might correspond to a very disjunctive property of the brain maybe not very interesting scientifically but it certainly is something there there's probably something that tends to reliably cause my representation of my phenomenal States but those are Quasi phenomenal properties what you're talking about in the technical language like that Frankish introduces right so excuse me

19:29 I said those would be quasi phenomenal properties in the language from my perspective what I would say listen what I suggest is to use a word phenomenal Consciousness not to refer to whatever causes or representation of phenomenal States but I rather consider that in phenomenal introspection I have some sort of grasp of something right I have a grasp of something that I think is a state I'm in like this um experience of a red notebook of course I took a red object one next to me like this the ress of my experience I feel like I philosophers

20:02 and their props exactly you don't have object on how do you do I feel like I have a grasp of what it is right this what it's like to see red and when I talk about phenomenal Consciousness I talk about that not whatever causes me having this representation or me being tempted to say that I have this state but this state that I grasp through introspection and that what I want to know uh exists or not and what it and of this if you tell me that this can unpro be identified with a brain State then I'm

20:38 I'm very puzzled and to me someone tells me that I feel so um I feel exactly as if so I'm I'm I've been I've had a Catholic un bringing right for me it's exactly as if someone tells me you know God is both one and three or this piece of bread is also really literally the body of Christ and I'm like I suppose that I can say these words I can you know retry myself to accept this words but in the end I don't understand what it means it's a mystery and the Catholic church say yes these are literally Mysteries and to me when someone ask me to accept that this things that I grasp

21:12 through introspection not whatever causes it right but this thing is just brain state or whatever other physical functional State just exactly the same thing I just don't understand I cannot I cannot really contemplate it really that's interesting yeah cuz I have the opposite view to me so so I have the same reaction to The Illusionist so we'll get to that but it's like you know that's the meta problem that we're going to talk about but it's to me it's like you're asking me to think this thing which I know is right in front of me is like an illusion and I don't really get that but at the same time so one way to

21:45 work your way into sort of my view because my view is just what you said I think phenomenal Consciousness is what it's like to um has subjectivity and all these things you can build as much into you want I still don't think it's a problem that it's physical I mean you could take like the way David chers thinks about it and I say that could be physical and one piece of evidence that I think about this is conceivability so it's certainly conceivable that that is uh simply a physical um thing in my brain and so there's no a prior contradiction in it there's nothing that you that can't no one if there were someone would have published it and become very famous by now so lots of people have thought about this for a

22:18 long time there's there's there's certainly if there is a contradiction there you have to dig very deep for it so it just seems to me like this sense of puzzlement that people have uh which you're espousing isn't really based in what we normally take puzzle because because the Trinity thing is different that's a contradiction one is not three so there's the contradiction um uh but there's but there's but there's nothing like that with respect to saying this experience of red is a physical brain state so I don't know what the source of puzzlement really would be okay that that great question so I want to say two

22:51 things first I will not answer your question and then I will try to answer so first I want to do not answering your question I would just want to raise some sort of worry uh link to what you just said earlier you said earlier okay you think that uh phys physicalist realist I say physicalist realist is really like a mystery of the Catholic church and you feel the same way about illusionism like I cannot accept that this does not exist and then I just want to raise a little worry which are for all weak illusionists out there which is the following I think that there is some

23:25 sort of tension between having this strong confidence that this has to be real this is one thing that I cannot deny in my theories in the first place and then in the second place ending up developing a theory of what this is that makes it a perfectly mundane thing that in the end could very well have been misrepresented and could in fact very well not exist you see what I mean what I mean is that I'm always a bit puzzled when I see weak illusionists saying I cannot I cannot accept strong illusionism because of course I know this is real this is undeniable because

23:58 to me to really back up their high confidence they it seems to me that they have to appeal in some sense to the kind of epistemology that only the realist can appe Like Only the Strong realist we think that yeah we have some sort of special epistemic relation to Consciousness uh and not just a physical mechanism of detection right so that's just a worry General worries that are for weak Illusionist I think that there is a tension between two things so one thing that they don't want to abandon phenomenal Consciousness at all cost and second what they say about phenomenal consciousness it so that it is considered a thing that they should very

24:31 well be able maybe not to abandon but at least to consider maybe does not exist yeah I guess yeah so I I'm less puzzled by that because I don't really see how it's a serious possibility that it couldn't exist um so it doesn't seem to me to be the sort of thing I mean I'm not really into certainty and I don't really care about epistemology all that much to be honest but it seems to like if if there were something I was certain of it's this that I'm ious uh in the sense I could be wrong about some of the details

25:03 but there's this thing that's right it's like I have it it's right in front of me and you it can't possibly not be there that that's that's literally seems to me like necessarily false which I guess is you're just going to come back and say that's the meta problem and you just think it's absurd and you we have this built-in you know kind of introspective apparatus that delivers this confidence um but that seems anyway so that's yeah I I really don't to me it's hard to take Serious the idea that it could but I think it's very important because if you I I follow you I understand this intuition that no no it cannot be uh

25:37 that it does not exist that it's something maybe not exactly logical but almost a priori a prior there yeah but then again I want to say this should raise suspicions because if this that you think is so certain was really just whatever physically series say Consciousness is like in certain kind of integration of information or uh like retroactive uh Loops in some part of the brain or like you know certain kind of representation all these things we can very well imagine that we are wrong about them right any of the candidate that we illusionists want to

26:12 accept there are things about which we should not have this kind of confidence and then so I'm not saying that the wek cannot work out some things with like different anyway I'm sure they can Pi up something but I think it should raise suspicion you there but I guess so just really quickly I think there's a difference between Theory and sort of what you're theorizing about so you know I think the kind of combustion example is is a kind of instructive example here so you know fire is real I mean let's just assume for the moment we're not in a matrix or anything or in a dream fire is a real thing uh is it oxidization or

26:45 is it fistin um well that's a theoretical issue and so when you when we eliminated fistin from our scientific vocabulary we didn't eliminate fire Fire's still there it's the same as it always was it's just we had a bad theory of it uh so but that's not the kind of view that you can take as an eliminativist about Consciousness you can't say the same thing is there that we thought was there before it's just we have a different theory of it now of course but but the thing is with fire is that I think it seems to be a very plausible point that the way we uh let's say fix the reference of fire is whatever causes such and such and such events right and

27:20 whatever does this this this this this is fire and then then it's open what fire really is but I thought that you didn't want to Define phenomenal Consciousness as whatever causes my representation of phenomenal Consciousness we I thought you wanted to to to say that we have this more substantive grasp within introspection and if we do that then we have to admit that no no we we know what phenomenal Consciousness is at some level yeah and it's not just whatever plays a certain role right right yeah I agree right then but we don't know metaphysically what it

27:55 is we simply know that it's that we have it and it's there so so this is why you know epistemically I do think we have a kind of special access not not super special I don't think it's infallible so I think by the way just as a side know everybody is a weak Illusionist I don't know anyone who isn't a weak Illusionist even David chers is a weak Illusionist because he so so that that's a universal thing I don't think uh even the most devout hardcore phenomenal realists are weak illusionists because uh yeah sorry go ahead though no no no please please I I agree with this point I think I tend to use weak illusionists

28:28 in the sense in which to be a wik Illusionist you have you have to deny that it's not enough to say Consciousness exists even though it does not have some of the properties it seems to have but you have to deny also some of properties that it essentially seems to have right because I agree that uh almost everyone agrees almost everyone agrees that sometimes uh there are properties that phenomenal State seems to have and they don't really have maybe about when it comes to their distribution or whatever so I think I tend to use weak Illusionist only for these people who think that uh General Consciousness seems to have essentially

29:00 certain properties and it does not really have them and also in the sense of seems that is relatively robust right it's not just right to some people sometime but in a rather robust way that's yeah well in that sense I don't think I would be a weak Illusionist okay so you think all of the essential properties that phenomenal Consciousness consistently seems to have at least to enough people it really has them I think that it's uh I think that it's possible I think possibly that it does and it's also physical and I don't see what the why I

29:34 should be why I should back away from that claim and if you say things like zombies and Mary well you know I say things like shambes which are my physical duplicates that have Consciousness I think they're conceivable um I think Mary if she had the concept of red would be able to deduce uh from the physical facts what read well I think she needs the concept first and they you don't get the concept without having the experience so that's why she can't do it in a room so I think there's all these ways out I just don't really see why what what where the what's what forces me to accept um that

30:08 there's a problem here and by the way we don't have to get totally hung up with this because you have so many other interesting things so if we just want to say we can disagree on this I think that's fine people do disagree but I am just curious why why people take this so uh seriously it's like okay well it can't be physical so what is it is it idealism is it dualism is it illusionism I still say well why can't it be physicalism I I just don't see what has pushed us away from that um in such a in such a in the way that you feel because I think you put it really nicely that you just really find it hard to believe and that you can't really make sense of

30:40 it it's as mysterious as transubstantiation um and you know that's pretty hardcore so I was think really it's this this mysterious is the Trinity I just don't understand that to be honest and I'm not trying to play a game or be coy I'm just honestly trying to see uh so yeah so of course at some point it's sometimes like you have the debate in in a way where it's hard to move forward so I want to maybe do one step backward and come back to one thing that you said that I didn't answer to but I think is important you said one of the reasons why I want to consider uh physicalist realism and and

31:15 like a an open possibility is that it is conceivable right yeah um I can conceive I suppose what you mean is that the like anti- zombie argument or something like that like I can conceive of a world where there is a creature that is my bare physical duplicate and yet is conscious yeah well I just just before you continue I don't know if you know the history of this but you know Keith came up with the anti-zombie argument and then um a year later I came up with what I called the shamb argument we did it independently and because then I found out afterwards

31:47 like oh we both came up with what I thought was the same but now I really think that it's not the same because I think that when what Keith is saying is that an illusionism world is conceivable whereas when I'm saying is a phenomenal realism world is conceivable and in that world it's physical so I do think that there there's some technical differences between the way he thinks about and the way I think about just curiosity question like does Keith agree does he agree with your way of putting in things because I always read I mean it's been a long time I've read this paper about anti zombies I think he wrote it a long time ago and to me it was not obviously

32:21 an Illusionist paper at for me at this point it was not an Illusionist that's the way I was reading it yeah that he he said about how in how like he doesn't find that there is no you know notion of qualia or phenomenal Consciousness which could be physical it's pretty clear that he doesn't find it conceivable the things that we're talking about let alone possible um so I so maybe he didn't put it that way in his paper but I think in the background of his thinking is this idea that yeah this isn't really but for me I I don't I I

32:54 want to take I want to take you know I want to take the hard like someone who I think is just like Ned block David chers these guys phenomenal realists of the ultimate stripe and say whatever they're talking about that thing could be physical and there's nothing there's nothing inconceivable or contradictory about that being physical okay so just to okay so let let's let's consider this view so I think my my take would be so twofold so first my intuition is that really I I I cannot get myself around it and believe me I've tried I'm really sincere I really tried because is that the

33:26 position that I would be on paper most attracted to like it seems to have lots of quality if only I could understand that and and I cannot and now you say but wait isn't it conceivable though where is a contradiction right and there I think there there be something I don't know how to spell it out exactly if I have to do it properly in like philosophy of language terms or what but I think there is a difference between implicit characterization and explicit characterizations what I mean by that is that I do think that our introspective representations of phenomenal St stes characterize these states as being

34:00 essentially a certain way and I do think that this characterization makes it at odds with there being physical or even possibly physical at the same time I agree that this characterization is not some sort of linguistic characterization and it's not an explicit characterization so I agree that if you consider the sentence this experience of pain is fully physical no one can derive a contradiction of that because anyway the concept experience of pain is obviously not composed in an explicit manner so it's it's in a different vocabulary so I it's not clear what how you could derive

34:34 contradiction from that you could process it as much as you want in your little computer you will never have a contradiction that comes out but what I also think is that when we say that the concept that we express the concept of like experience of pain has an implicit characterization that is born with it and this implicit characterization makes it so that when I try to um have a positive conception of what it would be for this to be physical I cannot find one there is always a problem but I agree that I would never derive an explicit contradiction so yeah

35:07 so this is the difference between what chers calls negative and positive conceivability so the so the explicit stuff is like you have to have a a positive account of how it could be physical but all you need for like conceivability arguments is the negative stuff you just have to say there's no contradiction man yeah yeah yeah no no I I know that I agree but so again I've not really worked that out in DET so I don't know I would present it exactly but what I want to suggest is that I agree with you that I cannot derive a contradiction from like Consciousness is physical but I still think that there is something deeply problematic and that from me comes from the fact that have

35:41 this sort of implicit characterization of what Consciousness is that makes it so that whenever I try to apply the get physical to it it's not a contradiction but I think that something is off let me give you an example with something else uh let's take for example what uh what Dave calls add any colors right this colors that maybe uh perception uh like maybe that we instinctively represent perceptually as being in the world and then you know decart and Galileo come and say no no no so adding colors I think arguably we could say that they

36:13 are characterized as primitive like primitive properties of surfaces but of course this characterization is not explicit because our perceptions are not linguist like they are not linguistic they don't have a linguistic format so if I think this where this refers to primitive redness if I think this is composed of uh microphysical properties of surfaces there is no way I can derive a contradiction of that right and yet it seems rather intuitive to many people that no but there is something weird when I try to think that this where this is really the edic property redness is a

36:48 microphysical properties of surface because there is an explicit implicit characterization of this as maybe for example primitive primitive property of and I for me that kind of that is going on in the kind of Consciousness with so I I I grant you this that yes there is no explicit contradiction that can be derived so there is some sort of negative conceivability but for this other reason I still think that there is something problematic and a prior problematic in physical this realism so I don't know does that make sense yeah it does it's interesting you know that it brings up a kind of question that I

37:20 was I was uh that was percolating while I was reading through a couple of your papers which is one so a lot of this seems reliant on introspection so a lot of what you're talking about is like the grasp that we have of Consciousness via introspection so as a way of warming up to what I really want to ask you let me ask you first suppose that we were as a species incapable of introspection um that for whatever reason we just never developed the ability uh but yet we still had everything else you know physically the same with us and so forth do you think there would be a hard problem of Consciousness or anything in this area or do you think this only

37:53 comes about because of introspection uh so we can so we cannot we don't have introspection do we have um what kind of metacognitive capacities we have nothing we have no metacognitive capacities whatsoever yeah let's just assume that we don't have any E Yeah Yeah well then I indeed I don't see how that could be a hard problem of Consciousness because also but I think many people would agree with that now because if we don't have any of the concept or representation that allow us to grasp Consciousness as such or

38:25 anything in the vicinity I think even realist would admit that a creative is like that cannot formulate a heart problem of Consciousness right they don't have the representation they might not call it the hard problem of Consciousness but wouldn't there still be the hard problem of uh edenic properties sort of the kind that you were just mentioning wouldn't we still have a a puzzle about you know if we thought the redness was out there and we never even you know noticed that it was a property of us or never even thought about Consciousness at all wouldn't there still be a question about how could red that red out there be a physical property of the similar kind of puzzle or or not yeah so I think it's

39:00 hard to say because in the end I think the my take on this is that the hard problem of Consciousness is both extremely significant and extremely unsignificant what I mean by that is that I think extremely significant because it uh it conent something that seems to be um everywhere that seems to be extremely important for who we are and for what does reality consist in but I think it's also extremely significant in the sense that in the end I think it's it is caused by some pretty cheap tricks of introspection right right so I think it's a very hard problem impossible to solve and uh all the

39:34 options seem crazy for all the solutions seem crazy but I don't think the cause of this problem is something really deep or really important right so what I mean by that is that if you ask me to imagine another creature very different would it have something like the hard problem say maybe maybe not I would need to see more about this exact creature I could very easily imagine that yes very easily imag than that no it really depend on the kind of representation par that this creature has because yeah I don't think the hard problem of Consciousness arises because of some deep cognitive features that maybe All Creatures must have at

40:09 some level I don't think so I think I think it is significant for us but I think there is nothing significant in its in its cause yeah okay interesting I mean yeah that's sort of what I thought because the reason why I'm thinking about this is because I was one of the puzzles that I have a lot about introspection excuse me about illusionism is whether it's a theory of Consciousness or a theory of introspection so a lot of the ways that people put it is like okay it's a theory of introspection it's an account of that we get things wrong when we introspect that we we have this thing and then we introspect it and we misrepresent it in

40:42 introspection um and then there's this leak this leap that says oh and because of that this is a theory of of of conscious experience but but ordinary conscious experience that's not in respective um seems already like enough to generate the problems that we are interested in that's kind of why I was asking whether you agreed with me so you said no so I could see maybe how answer this but uh um but just to clear things out first could it be that we have here a slightly different way of understanding introspection Poss I feel like some it's

41:16 not really clear Sometimes some people want to say introspection is really only uh when you deliberately pay attention to your experience and maybe even like grasp it in some sort of quasa linguistic terms yeah I think mean yeah I think I'm think I'm using introspection in some sense that could also include uh some lower level process by which you kind of represent your own mental States right see that's standardly the way in which I want to use introspection and I'm I'm

41:48 sorry if this is misleading uh maybe it is misleading in some of my no I don't think so I think people use it that way but yeah I was assuming so what so what you're saying is that like suppose I have a toothache and then the next day I think man that toothache really sucked that I had yesterday that's introspection on your view even though I'm not like having the conscious experience at that moment I'm really thinking about a conscious experience that I had like an hour ago something does that count as introspection like in the past no I don't think it would count as introspection that count Asing I don't want to make it count as introspection but at least in standard cases like in human cases what you're

42:20 probably doing is you're probably recruiting the memory of having introspected I that's what I would assume right so I think so tell me what it is you what you can can you say again what it is that you mean by introspection CU now I'm a little bit uh so you got to be having the experience first of all and then you think about it and that's it my introspection I I want to mean um processes by which we represent with or without particularly paying attention or with or without deliberately choosing to do so by which we represent our current mental States in a way that is Rel like interestingly

42:56 distinct from the way in which you present my mental States right and I don't want to say that it's essentially distinct but at least there seems to be some interesting difference That's What I Call introspection and so in that view if you have some sort of self-monitoring theory that say that we permanently monitor our own internal States right I think I'm I'm I'm inclined to say yeah you can call that introspection too okay yeah so more like the David Armstrong sort of uh view that would count as introspection for me right okay which I use the term

43:27 and so the so the idea is that we don't have to be it's not deliberate we don't have to be bracketing the world in the famous whoel whatever way um but rather it's just any way in which we come to know about our own conscious experiences uh but but there see this this puzzles me because again take the dentist I mean the pain of the tooth example um I just recently had a root canal so these things have been on my mind lately but uh it it seems like a lot of what so if they if I go to the doctor they say where does it hurt I say

44:01 it hurts you know my left tooth or whatever does that require it doesn't seem like that requires introspection to me because I'm thinking about my tooth and the pain in the tooth apparently as it seems to me so is that int that doesn't really seem introspective to me it seems like I'm thinking about things out there like you know yeah it hurts on my toe so I I think it's it's quite uh it's it's true that the case of pain is always very problematic for everyone wants to distinguish introspection from perception because it seems that when we focus on pain it's not like there seems

44:36 and I agree to be always some sort of fine line between am I focusing on my jaw right my my tooth or am I focusing on the way I experience it right and then what I would say is that um so i' I'm not a view particularly about that right I think I'm inclined to think that perception and in like perceptive task and introspective task are obviously very much related and it might be in my view that what makes um introspection and perception differ is that in the case of introspection there is some sort

45:10 of recruitment of representation provided by our theory of Mind module that comes and is sort of annexed like added to um maybe some perceptual qu quasi perceptual representation so I'm also okay with the view in which well maybe in many cases it's not really clear if we are introspecting or or perceiving and maybe we're just saying things in some sort of mental vocabulary but maybe what we are really doing mentally is sorry yeah is is is perceiving so I would be okay with that because because I do think that there is

45:42 a a close relation between um P yeah what we do when we perceive and what we do when we introspect because I think introspection sort of piggybacks on the doings of perception yeah so so once you have that view of introspection in mind then it seems hard to motivate at least I'm getting a little bit lost on how one I'm sure I'm just confused but how one motivates the argument for illusionism based on introspection because I I took it that you needed something like you know direct phenomenal Concepts or you know these kinds of more heavy duty Notions

46:16 where you have a a seemingly because because the way you put it earlier was like there's an acquaintance relationship or some kind of crap that seemingly is going on there and that's the mysterious bit is this non non-causal way of knowing about like a direct grasp of the conscious experience or however this you know those sorts of things don't really seem to play a role in the kind of thing that you're calling introspection so I'm not sure I got your question because in my view of course when you talk about Consciousness and also when you talk about introspection I think you should always distinguish two

46:48 things carefully one is what really exists right and then what really exists for me is a kind of process of introspect ction of which I gave a few elements I'm not sure I want to be committed to details for everything there are some aspects where I'm happy to just not not have an opinion but like I have a certain view about what introspection really is and I have also a view about what Consciousness really is so in my case it does not really exist except in some quasi phenomenal sense and then there is the view of what appears to exist and then this problematic phenomenality yes and then

47:21 maybe also there is some sort of acquaintance relation that appears to be to hold right in the that it seems to us that we have this acquaintance relations but that's not in the domain of what really exists right that's just in the domain of what appears to exist right and now I'm not sure I understand and then I'm coming back well here here let me let me try to put it slightly a slightly different way because I I take your point I think you're I think it's it's good to make that distinction especially when you're talking to someone who holds a views like yours um but uh here here's I mean maybe I'm just I'm open to the idea that I'm just

47:55 misunderstanding what's going on here so hopefully this will help clear my imit understand so I thought what you were saying was that in introspection um we come to believe that there are these essential properties that phenomenal Consciousness has um and those are the properties if you're an Illusionist then you have to deny but either strong or weak VAR you have to deny that there really are things which instantiate those properties but then in your just now just talking about introspection it doesn't seem like that sort of thing has anything to do with these Essen I

48:29 mean where is the essential where's the attribution of essential properties in this kindal introspection thing okay okay now I understand okay so in my view what happens is that you have the going on of perception let's say and then you have some sort of um introspective process which I sometimes I po I prize as being based on some sort of some sort of theory of Mind module which makes up PR presal representations and adds some sort of operator right probably it's more

49:02 complicated than that I'm just doing a very simple St and so you have the act of perception which is judging this is red and probably red being originally characterized as some sort of primitive property of surface and then you have the working of the theory of Mind module that just takes up these judgments and at least in certain situations um I don't know if it's permanent or just when attention is is given uh add something and say have an experience of red right and I think the problematic essential properties happen in the characterization of experience I think

49:35 experience is like this like this op representational operator used by our theory of Mind module I think experience has all sort of implicit commitments and this implicit commitment makes it so that uh phenomenal Consciousness cannot be located in the physical world right that what makes it problematic right and so you think that it seems that way so I guess what I'm trying to get at is in introspection does it appear that way to us because oftentimes in the kinds of things you're talking about in introspection it doesn't seem

50:08 to appear that way to me at all so if you take the Armstrong view so or any kind of higher order view about Consciousness um like David rosenthals or whoever I've defended a version of these in places well but I'm not super committed to it anyway um then ordinary conscious experience always involves something like an introspective element but it doesn't seem like all the problematic stuff is there just says you know I'm in a certain state of a certain kind of course yes I agree with that that's why so here I will give the same answer as

50:40 previously I think it's all about the implicit characterization because I don't think this characterization that leads to the problems I don't think it's explicit right so I don't think so to speak if you like the language of thought approach or metaphor I don't think we have little words in our language of thought that says I'm in state that is and then explicitly non-physical and problematic and this and that right right so I mean it's hard for me not to hear what you're saying as saying um that there are certain theoretical considerations that you want to smuggle

51:13 in here and attribute to introspection which I don't really see the reason I don't really see them showing so what you call implicit I don't really it doesn't seem like that's a part of the kind of introspection that I do okay okay so here's my description of how we disagree and then I would try to give arguments so what I'm saying is that well when we introspect phenomenal States uh we have this explicitly simple and uncomposed representation but really with lots of implicit commitments and they are responsible for uh the heart problem of

51:46 Consciousness arising and all these kind of things you saying no I don't think so for example what you might be saying is that all of these problematic commitment they only arise because people adopt theories because people are just too convinced by theart or whoever else right exactly yeah exactly okay so my reasons to think that uh I'm correct is so and and and and now like I've to appeal to different things but one we thing I would say that well if I'm correct that would nicely account for the fact that whatever whatever our

52:21 exact philosophical beliefs like even if I really want to believe in materialism I can still still fine intuitively that there is something really problematic with Consciousness because if it was really all about adopting a theory or having read the cart then we should see some sort of pattern there like really if you believe in dualism then you should have the intuition and if you don't you should not right and honestly I don't find it plausible at all again I tried hard to be yeah but but so but I I like what you're saying and I I understand what you're saying but let me try this on you because what it sounds like you're saying is you should

52:53 explicitly hold the theory but what I'm saying it sounds like you licitly hold it or in other words that uh you know maybe you're not even aware that you had these these theoretical commitments or certain theoretical way of thinking about things which gets smuggled in okay um and then you want to say look the thing is not real because it's it's connected to these implicit things but the implicit things seem optional actually and many people who are physicalists I mean I don't know anyway so it just seems like yeah I'm repeating myself but it seems like you're sneaking something in here I I think I think I understand your point so just to to be

53:27 but I just want to be clear about what your view would entail and why it also has a cost right okay because if you say well it's because you have implicit theoretical commitments uh let's agree that let's still agree that they are implicit then if it's still a theory some that I have adopted at some point it should not be Beyond um like reasonably simple means to just abandon this the I should just be able to work hard enough for six months and then boom I'm I'm I'm Healed and really that's not the case yeah if that's the case then it's a pretty special case of implicit

54:00 theoretical commitment that that's possible but I think like the cost goes up that's what I mean the second thing that I want to say is just that um so I forgot what I wanted to say yeah no no yeah I remember what I wanted to say so I think the what what I'm saying of course is not that so I'm saying there is this implicit commitments just in our representation of um phenomenal state in our introspective representation of State and I'm assuming here that it's kind of innate or at least very robustly present in human beings right okay and but the

54:35 consequence of course is not that we should all be dualist it's not enough that we should uh be reluctant to accept all explicit sentences that Express a physicalist view it just means that when probed in the appropriate manner we should have intuitions that goes against that but of course we might still have lots of consider ation that makes us want to still accept the explicit formulation of a physicalist view and so for example in my view you also have the probably you also have the same kind of phenomenal introspection mechanism as I

55:07 do it's just that you think that there are lots of good reasons to be a physicalist and so you choose to ignore this pool to be no no this is physical but you still have the pool and my view is that you have the pool not because uh you have read too much decart I think you have the P because that's that's probably how your brain is made to function in the first place that's that's my that's my yeah no I I appreciate the view that's I mean it's interesting but and to be honest when I was younger I was a duelist uh um possibly I mean partially because diart well even before I read dick cart when I

55:40 read dick card I was like aha now I know why I'm a du but it was more like because of my kind of experiences that I had I felt like um you know when I was younger you know I did hallucinogens for example and I was like you know Sil cybin convinced me that there's more you know Cosmic Consciousness is real I had to kind of like experience that I thought presented that to me and then I became convinced that that was a mistake but uh so so maybe you're right that I was smuggling some kind of some theoretical I mean I think that the problem here is that we we we think that terms like Consciousness phenomenal Consciousness are theoretically neutral

56:13 but I think really they aren't I think they carry baggage with them and if you think especially like that it's just a simple thing that we're directly acquainted with then of course it's going to be mysterious I could be uh made part of the physical world because we need to we need to have a theory to embed it to make sense of it and embed it into the world so that there's that I find people like Dave and Illusionist too I think because they agree with Dave about how to characterize Consciousness um uh I think that that that whole approach builds in the problematic aspect from the beginning by saying look this is so different so special it can't

56:46 be physical and then they go look it's not physical but that's because of the way they're thinking the way they conceptualize the phenomenon to begin with yeah yeah so I I agree with that with a different with with with the differ that I don't think that this way of conceptualizing comes from some sort of Nefarious cultural influence uh of any kind so I think at this point actually you probably agree more with kiss right because I think kiss is more inclined to think that whatever theories philosophers have developed might be to blame uh for or false Impressions about Consciousness I'm not inclined to think

57:21 so okay interesting one one reason why I'm so it might be for different reason why just my own case like I feel like no really it just seems to be this way to me whatever I think whatever I believe whatever philosophical beliefs I Endor one other is I must say even though I know this is very debated is I think when I read lots of like history of philosophy I at least since the cart and people following that I feel like we are really talking about very similar things so I know some people say no actually the debate has changed very much um and I've not studied the question

57:55 extensively but but my intuition is that no we are really talking about the same thing that would be so surprising that we are talking about the same things if really that was so dependent on some theoretical framework also I'm always surprised at how simple it is to get into the problem when you are a teenager you often have like glimpses of this kind of problem I think way before you uh you really go into philosophy and read the C whoever is a modern cian right so I think my that's my inion my inion that sometimes people are saying this is all because of of theat more

58:27 recent this is all because of Charmers I think they are giving in some sense too much credit to too much credit yeah fral thinkers for sure but I I don't think there as a cause of us wondering about that right that's my yeah that makes and that's in some sense of I I agree with you about that yeah I tend yeah I can see what you're saying because I do I was sort of agreeing with the Keith line with the Frankish is line about uh it's the way I mean I don't know so I go back and forth on this actually because uh it does seem to me that not clear how widespread these intuitions are um and there may be some bias because the

59:01 people who are really puzzled with them end up going I mean it's the same thing about philosophy of religion like a lot of the people who work in philosophy religion are are religious why because they're really puzzled about it um and so they kind of go go that way and so maybe the philosophers of Mind who are interested in Consciousness are those who are who have this you know thing but it's not 100% clear I think there's some experimental philosophy on this too it's not really clear that the average typical naive subject has these problems that we think are there which led in some Credence to the um maybe it's not the Philosopher's fault but maybe

59:35 instead it's the philosophers who think this way who then are drawn into philosophy therefore it's still being the philosopher well in some roundabout sense yeah so I've I've read some of the experimental philosophy things about that and I'm I'm not sure I really I'm I'm not sure it can settle much as it's done currently I'm not saying in the future as it's done currently and my problem with that is that I'm not sure we can really get at the issue for example me as someone who believes that in the end the solution to the meta

1:00:08 problem has to lie in introspection like the reason why it seems there seems to be a hard problem is because some something that has to do with introspection the problem that I have with at least all the experimental philosophy studies on dualist intuitions so far that I think they are too far remote from introspective tasks so they don't anchor the questions in introspective tasks they usually ask question about an imaginary creature and ask like is this robot conscious does it feel that way and I feel like because it's so far remote and ordinary concept are so potentially polyic uh when like

1:00:42 experience or Consciousness I think that I don't think they could detect what we would like to detect and I think in in the future I hope what would be done because I think it's a very important question to what would be done to explore J intuitions uh and all or robust they are or widespread they are I think it would be really great to try to do that by anchoring the the the questionnaire in introspective tasks or tasks that Force to distinguish between introspection and perception for example right yeah that's a good point I mean because I I think that this is a real problem I I like

1:01:15 that you brought this up because you know it sort of reminds me of like the work from Paul Bloom the psychologist who says you know we're all sort of maybe this is sort of what's in the back of your thinking too is like that humans are kind of natural dualists um it's kind of born into us but it's not really clear what Bloom's evoking from a subjects because we tend to use contrasts whenever but I mean Ordinary People I'm I'm kind of saying we like I'm an ordinary person although obviously I'm very corrupted at this point um but uh ordinary persons tend to use these kind of contrasts when they don't really think there's a contrast there so we say human versus animal well we all know humans are animals but

1:01:49 there's a relevant contrast there we're a special kind of animal and we say physical versus mental and that doesn't really seem to me suggest that we think the mental isn't physical it just maybe it's a special case of the physical for sure for sure and and and one last thing so it's more anecdotal but I think it's important one last thing one reason why I'm a bit I'm not fully convinced about some of the studies that I've seen where for example people are asked about whether or not they would accept that uh uh Consciousness can be entirely explained by the brain is that I think that really most F people don't

1:02:22 understand the problem I remember because I did not understand the problem either like I would for example call myself a materialist for many years but I I had a certain idea of what it meant to be a materialist which in fact turned out to be perfectly compatible and even leaning towards what most philosophers of mind would call property dualism right right and I or non-reductive physicalism I mean you just didn't read I said or non-reductive physicalism you just weren't exposed to a good non-reductive physicalist yeah maybe two maybe two yeah and also for example I don't know if you have the same

1:02:54 experience but I have this experience when I when I was I I don't do it this year but I did a few years like teaching philosophy of mind to undergraduates I always do little surveys like what's your view on this debate when I teach a hard problem of Consciousness and really I'm very surprised by a number of student every year who start by saying of course I'm a materialist of course Consciousness is all in the brain and then at the end of the class they say I actually I'm not a materialist at all that's super weird how can you really think that and really it happens every year so it's anecdotal but that that that fits my sense that if we want to really probe what we want to

1:03:29 probe anti physicalist intuitions we probably have to have some sort of like finer grain than what I've seen used for I think it's it's good that there are studies in that direction but I'm not sure they can prove what we would like them to prove at this stage it's a fair point and I think it's it's a good note for the experimental philosophers um just anecdotally I have the opposite experience experience in the class I end up with a lot of students saying what's the big deal I think it's possibly because of we're presenting the material you you're presenting as like oh it's very puzzling and I'm presenting like

1:04:00 what's the big deal and so I think that does influence maybe the way students respond so that that's one that's one thing I guess I would say um but yeah I take you you're raising a lot of interesting points in making me um and making me to think about this stuff in a new way so I like that uh but I noticed so let's let's put a pin in the physicalism discussion for a second if you don't mind because I do I want to make sure that we have time to talk about first of all the meta problem which I don't know if you the illusion meta problem um which is different than the sort of Charmers meta problem right so can you tell us a little bit about I mean we've been sort of dancing around

1:04:32 this whole time but let's just get it out you're right so just one word first about so what Charmers calls a meta problem is the problem of explaining why we tend to seek and believe that there is a hard problem of Consciousness that's what he calls The Meta problem so what I called the illusion me a problem so actually I wrote Of course that before knowing that chamus was writing this paper and it was accept then press and then I learn oh uh too bad like the same name or almost the same has been taken by one of the most influential philosophers of mine currently alive so

1:05:04 of course everyone is going to forget my thing right and so what I your thing is actually the more important thing actually I would say what what do you mean sorry I say your thing is the more important the more interesting thing so the illusion meet a problem I saw it as a problem for illusionism but you don't necessarily have to so it was um it was drawing on Frankish illusion problem said if you're an Illusionist you replaces uh you replace sorry the heart problem of Consciousness with the illusion problem the illusion problem being how come we have the illusion of Consciousness even though it's not there

1:05:38 how come we how come it appears to us that we are phenomenally conscious and what I said is something like that um in the end if we just look at this question maybe it's not that hard to explain why it seems to us that we are phenomenally conscious after all lots of lots of things seems to us to be the case and are not the case in perceptual Illusions for example so if really that was only the question why why does it seem to be the case that we are conscious even though we are not we could recruit tons of possible models of explanation uh like drawing on like perceptual illusion

1:06:12 models for example although not only and that's what some people have done right some people thought about the illusion of Consciousness as some sort of Quasi perceptual illusion sometimes comparing it to the m lier illusion right um so but what I'm saying is what I'm saying uh is that well there is an important contrast between most if not all Illusions and the hypothetical illusion of Consciousness and the contrast is this let's take any non-phenomenal concrete stuff like this red notebook a glass two hands I I perceive this

1:06:51 stuff I could it seems to me that I can very easily contemplate the possibility that these things do not exist even though they appear to exist right I can very EAS I can make lots of scenarios like dream scenarios brain inovat scenarios massive hallucination scenarios doesn't mean that I believe in any of these scenarios and actually it would be pretty hard to make me believe in any of them but I can quite easily contemplate these scenarios as a possibility what makes the illusion of Consciousness so special so to speak so

1:07:24 Weir is is that people including myself have the hardest time contemplating uh the possibility that this where this tries to capture their current phenomenal experience does not exist even though it appears to exist and at this point I say yeah I think most people think it's crazy and I understand also on the face of it find it a little bit crazy how could it be that this does not exist even though it seems to exist right and I said this is a illusion meta problem and what also said argu so I think it was in the paper

1:07:58 in 2018 I also tried to argue that one one wrong way to try to solve this problem is to say in the end it's just a matter of the strength of our belief or the strength of our disposition to believe because some people I think would like to go that way it's just yeah it's just that we are much more convinced in the first place than we that we are conscious than of the existence of anything else right and in my way that thinking things wrongly why because I can think of some things that I'm extremely convinced of for example I have two hands right now God I'm

1:08:32 convinced of that it would take you I don't know what it would take you to convince me that I'm not maybe you could I don't think you alone could maybe I could have a bunch of evidence to convince me that I don't have two hands right now but given my situation you I don't say you could convince me that I don't have two hands right now and yet I have no problem contemplating the possible situation in which in fact it is an illusion right right and similar for but as opposed to Consciousness when it comes to fomal Consciousness it's not just that I resist the uh the negation of my belief that I'm phenomenally conscious it is

1:09:05 that I have some sort of uh like conception problem representation problem to contemplate this hypothesis that I'm not really phenomenally conscious it just seems to me that I am and I said a good Illusionist Theory but not would even add a good theory even not an Illusionist one should give an account of why is it why is it that we have this trouble conceiving of such a situation right and yeah and that's really so I mean I know you have an answer in terms of introspection which we're going to get

1:09:37 to it's the tce is that the right acronym I forget the uh is it tce or okay so we're gonna get to that in a second but but so if you have these two so the thing that I was thinking when I was reading through all this stuff um in your papers on this was given there is so I agree with you like you know a lot of people find it absurd you know like gayen strawson says the silly ass IDE in the history of the universe and you have a lot of that kind of dramatic rhetoric like people who are like I don't really myself go in for that dramatic kind of rhetoric but I certainly get the feeling

1:10:10 like I understand that yeah this is absurd like it's right there that you're telling me that it's not and that's just even if it's a l are experiences you can do all the sort of things that people do um so if you have that illusion meta problem and you put it up against the kind of feeling that you have about about realism physicalism realist physicalism and you say well no that's absurd too so you have these two things which on the face of it according to you are sort of absurd um isn't one more absurd than the I mean so so so is it that what I'm trying to figure out is your own reasoning here so

1:10:44 is it that what you're thinking is aha I have a strategy to explain why I think it's so obsurd in the case of illusionism but I can't Envision any strategy like that working for for realism so that's what makes illusionism more plausible is that the kind of argument overarching meta argument okay I see so it's a good question because I think when you answer questions about motivation there is always for example a tension between your actual motivations when you endorsed The View what led you to something and the way you would like

1:11:16 to present it in an argument and often they are not the same right right yeah totally I don't know if I would draw an argument like that I would have to think more about whether want to draw the argument like that but I think what I would like to say that definitely I try to one one things that I did for example in my first years of PhD is really try to look at the different explanations of why we would be so reluctant to accept that this is physical even though it is and I found them I found all of them extremely implausible so you could say in some yeah maybe I found them too implausible like for example typically the view of David papino which I think

1:11:51 otherwise as a extremely impressive Theory Of Consciousness but this view that we commit antipathetic fallacy for example quite a lot on that you have a whole paper on that it's a great paper by the way yeah and and thank you and I think that yeah the view that we commit a fallacy I don't know I think that lots of reason to think that it's not what is going on it's not that we systematically commit a fallacy for one thing there is not the same kind of psychological pattern than inted fallacy so if it's a fallacy that would be a very weird kind of fallacy second it's not clear that it predicts all the occurrence of the intuition etc etc so some sense yeah you

1:12:25 could say I proceeded like that but another way to look at it is to look at it this way and I think I think I discussed that with Ki and I suspect you would agree with me the thing with illusionism is that the really hard part is the first step but once you look at illusion from the inside once you like bracket the rest and look at it from the inside I find it it really makes sense it allows really to make sense of lots of things it solves lots of problem and I think it also gives a sense that we can make lots of progress too because then there are

1:12:57 lots of things that we can study a lots of questions that were impossible to solve it makes sense now whether they are impossible to solve there are just verbal issues or like issues about things that do not exist so I think illusionism is extremely uncomfortable on the first step while for physic this real I feel like no it's uncomfortable all the way down because I have to accept that um there is always something that I don't understand the second thing the second difference that might be relevant is that in some sense for me illusionism requires me to accept that what goes wrong is my introspection right like I introspect something

1:13:31 and uh and this goes wrong and then I just reason too much on that so I cannot go out of the illusion and the illusion met problem it's my solution to the illusion met that we will discuss later but the problem for me with physicalist realist is that it forces me to think that in some sense it's more my reasoning that goes wrong right and uh I don't know that's sensitive yeah you want you don't want to yeah that's cor yeah for me it's easier to think well I live in the cavern right because that's that's what illusionism says in

1:14:03 the sense like I live in the cavern there are lots of Shadows and I'm I'm I'm just seduced by these shadows and I don't see what the reality of the world is but to say no no it's not just like you live in a c you have illusion it's also your very faculty of reasoning just goes wrong I don't know I find that deeply uncomfortable to accept yeah so that would be one way to to put it maybe that's interesting too in the background are all sorts of things about yeah because I I find that less uncomfortable since I tend to think that uh this happens quite often um but I I I like this I like this answer that you given so what so what is your proposed

1:14:36 solution it's uh that there's a kind of hardwired introspective capacity that we have that just gets it wrong because that's the way it was built up okay so yeah so let's say that there is two level to the Ser the first level is the one that allows to solve the illusion problem and then we'll focus on the part that allows to solve what I see as a subp part of the illusion problem which is the illusion meta problem so the illusion problem is that yes we have some sort of hard wide mechanism introspective mechanism which I think

1:15:08 recruits our theory of Mind modules and it just probably reliably tracks some property from the brain but it deeply mischaracterizes this properties as phenomenal properties right and also when you look at it that way I don't think there is anything surprising or weird about the idea that we'd have some innate domain specific representational mechanism that would deeply mischaracterize whatever it tracks because it happens all the way in other domains right if you think about for example uh probably visual perception misc cariz colors as primitive

1:15:43 properties that they are not really uh you can also see that n physics for example probably tracks some patterns but mischaracterizes the things that are out there like things that there are like forces such as impetus are sucking and there are no such thing in reality right so what I want to say is that when you look at it that way there is nothing very surprising in the idea of a high wide representational domain specific mechanism that is efficient in certain very limited contexts but that happens to deeply misc characterize the essence of the real thing out there that it more or less tracks or at least tracks well

1:16:16 enough to be evolutionary useful right so that that the first part of the story but of course if you just go there then you're like okay then why do I have more problem accepting illusionism about phal Consciousness than I have problem accepting illusionism about any other things that seems intuitive and is computed by my innate representational mechanism for example there are lots of things that are very intuitive let's think about like not like the existence of uh colors as properties of surfaces but also let's say a reality of absolute

1:16:50 simultaneity right I think it's super intuitive that two events either happen at the same time or don't and that it really means something absolutely and yet our best science tells us no there is no such thing without the point of reference right and anyway but I what I say is that we have lots of domain specific representational mechanisms that mischaracterize s in the world but for Consciousness we have a specific peculiar difficulty in accepting that there is this deep

1:17:23 mischaracterization that the the things that we represent is not really out there and that's so that's the illusion met problems so where what is my solution so first at at a high level of generality my solution is this I think that the mechanism by which we represent our phenomenal experiences so phenomenal introspection say is deeply intertwined with the mechanism by which we represent our epistemic situations or evidential situations so this is at a high level of generality right but the idea is that

1:17:55 what the problem what the deal with Consciousness the deal with phenomenal Consciousness is that we think of it as something that cannot really at least not systematically or not massively appear otherwise than it is right it cannot appear massively non veridically and and we have strong in I think we have strong intution regarding that right and so where does the explanation lie and I think In The End by the way you could accept this explanation even if you're not an Illusionist explanation is that why maybe it is that the the kind of intuitive ways in which we conceive of

1:18:29 evidential situations what appears to us maybe this set of representation is in some sense linked or interwined with our phenomenal uh introspective phenomenal representations and this inter twinning maybe is what makes things go wrong in the sense that for anything in the world we can always think well this thing appears to be the case but does not is not really the case but for Consciousness this breaks down right right so that that's my my view and that I really think it's true I I really think that I would I would I think I would bet I would bet something on it

1:19:02 and then what I also try to do in my PhD and then in some papers that I published in English is try to do some speculation about how possibly mechanism that could explain that right that could explain uh this intertwining between uh our representation of uh of of evidential situations and of um phenomenal introspection so what I try to speculate and this is more speculative like this second part of the story I try to put it just out there to see look there are things that could work but I'm not I don't feel merried to

1:19:35 this view right like this speculative hypothesis is something like this uh maybe phenomenal introspection uh as well as the way we conceive of evidential situations maybe this this realized in some sort of resemblance rule right maybe uh we conceive appearances like what appears to a subject as something that is grounded in resemblance in the S like we think that things appear to subjects when they are in states that resembles these things in certain ways right that's one thing and

1:20:09 maybe at the same time we uh cons we represent experiences as resembling certain external states of Affairs so maybe that's what phenomenal introspection tells us about our experience of red is that it resembles add redness it's some sort of mental version of Ed redness right and then I try to say well if we think of experiences as um making whatever they resemble to appear then they would make appear like the external state of aair that they resemble to like red nness but

1:20:43 also there will be some sort of annoying byproduct which is that because uh experiences um trivially resemble themselves because everything resembl themselves then they will also be consider as making themselves appear and on the other hand because because in order for us to have an experience that appear to us we need to be in a state that resembl that experience and so we'll think that in order for us to have an experience that appear to us we'll be in a state that needs to resemble as much as possible in experience so be it have an experience so we'll also think of of experience as

1:21:15 something that cannot appear massively non very Decay right yeah so this is highly speculative it's not sort of like toy model of how possibly could phenomenal introspection on the one hand and our inate mechanism for representing evidential situation on the other end be intertwined so that the output is that we think of Consciousness as something that well when we have it it must in some sense be given to us it must in some sense be available for us to inspect it must appear to us and on the

1:21:48 other when it appears to us it must in some sense really be there right I think these are yeah yeah I have a bunch of questions so so one going back to what you were saying at the beginning I I do wonder what you think evolutionarily is the advantage of having a system like this because certainly I can I can imagine a case where we have an introspective system that doesn't misr misrepresent the quasif phenomenal States or you know that just that just you know says you know they're in these states and it could even be a simple un user interface

1:22:21 like you like the people you know like like dennit uh famously coin but why does it what what's beneficial or what reason will we expect Evolution to select or favor this kind of mechanism over one that was more accurate uh and didn't didn't attribute these implicit weird properties to the things is tracking of course so I think what I would say at this point is that of course I don't think there is a sense in which you can give like let's say a fully adaptationist story for why we have this defective mechanism but what you can say to counter the worry that uh

1:22:56 this quest for an adaptation story could raise what you can say is this first clearly this mechanism will some will misrepresent the essence of the state thought about but this misrepresentation will not be problematic in any context that our ancestors had to deal with because what I think is that basically the only context in which this will start creating serious problems is when you start doing some metaphysics of the mind but what is really this weird thing that Consciousness is right but before you start asking these

1:23:29 questions this aspect of phenomenal introspection mechanism will not be a problem for you right right so you don't need like it does not need to be um like there is noes that it will be selected against right so now of course you can say why why do we have this rather than another one I think the answer probably lies in a mix of um uh of adaptation and ex so my my view would be well the thing is we had lots of the components of such phenomenal introspection mechanism

1:24:02 already there in the first place right we had probably representation of external states of Affairs as as as being made of qualities and then we probably add a concept of resemblance like some sort of naive rough ways of competing resemblance between two things and after all when things are there you just Evolution just recruits them and Tinkers with them to do something and maybe that that's the way we ended up with that right but what I want to say is that of course I'm I'm not very convinced of this story right that's not something that I want to necessarily

1:24:34 defend in the first place but what is important for me to say first there is nothing surprising in the idea that we have an innate mechanism that deeply misrepresents what it represents because that's always the case uh second whatever um errors the systems makes are not errors that would normally lead to loss of Fitness for our ancestors I don't think it even leads to loss of Fitness now so I don't think it definitely led to loss of Fitness for our ancestors right I don't think that Illusionist have more have more

1:25:07 offsprings than non Illusionist I don't think so it's not selected against so I think in the end yeah Pro like if I'm right of course there is a causal story in evolution explain why we have that but I I don't think I have to provide a strong adaptation his story because what I'm describing doesn't have to to be selected against and in lots of cases we end up with slightly suboptimal systems as long as yeah but that but that exact argument seems to sort of present a problem to me anyway because it seems to suggest I mean Evolution usually works by variation there's a bunch of different stuff and then um

1:25:39 that's why you know there's so many different species and so forth and so on so it tries all sorts of things and then the things that don't work out uh die off so it seems like the prediction here would be that there should be other sorts of systems because they wouldn't be selected against either and if there's variation then seems like you know maybe you would expect in in the course of history something that was more accurate than ours maybe even within the population you know maybe in Australians is more accurate and you know and in the French less accurate or you know whatever uh Americans terribly inaccurate um obviously but it it just seems like it would be kind of a miracle

1:26:14 if if it all worked out just this way okay given that there's no pressure for or against it and it's totally an acceptation it just seems like the prediction would be oh yeah yeah okay but okay so I'm not I'm not a I'm not a good philosopher of evolutionary biology right so I don't know how I should exactly draw the argument but one thing that you could say first is look at what other kind of inage representational mechanisms we have and do they variate as much and I think there are lots of arguments to say that for example core theory of Mind regarding beliefs and

1:26:49 desire does not vary very much from subject to subject maybe in some pathological case that discussed but in soal normal subject I think there is the idea there is not much variation and I don't think there is any sort of like inter uh ethnic or national variation and you you think that's inate sorry you think those are innate capacities yeah yeah yeah I mean lots of people say that I'm not saying it's proven or what I'm just saying it seems to be at least out there as a as a theory accepted by quite a lot of people that maybe there is a

1:27:20 core theory of Mind module regarding like ascriptions of beliefs and desires and this is innate and this does not have much variation uh across subjects right the same could be said arguably about na physics so what I mean by taking these examples is that it's not that clear that there should be lots of variation and second I I take your point that well after all why even there other Alternatives that appear if this if this version is not that much better than the other uh why shouldn't be other Alternatives uh then I think there is

1:27:52 something about uh I think one could appeal I suppose to the concept of The evolutionary landscape which is that once you have a mechanism that has appeared it changes The evolutionary landscape which is that maybe this mechanism is not the best to do task a but when it's there it's more cost to evolve a new mechanism and just stick to mechanism uh X right there would have been better mechanisms but one this mechanism is out there it would just spread and it would probably be the only game in town because it changes evolutionary landscape and it's very hard to to go up when you're in a in a little hole right so yeah like to really

1:28:27 spell it out if we need more work but you see the ID and I think it's totally yeah so and but it also seems to like lead to the prediction that you would have these kinds of cases where you misattribute experiences to other persons if they are sharing this common pathway about theory of mind um like uh you know I should be able to have so so what makes it special about my case that you know I have access to my me why don't I have the feeling like I could have access to your mental States um if really all that's going on is just kind of introspective why can't

1:29:00 I have a kind of extrospection of your mental states which is as convincing to me but we don't ever see that and most people find that um if it really is just this kind of well I attribute to myself these states of these certain properties um why do I attribute them to myself as opposed to you there doesn't seem to be any okay so I'm not sure I really understand the question question maybe I'm missing something because it seems to me that we do attribute experiences to others right but not in this way in the same way oh so your question is why don't we introspect experiences of

1:29:33 others yes it seems like a prediction of your view that it should be possible uh so but it's obviously not so it I'm going to give I'm going to give a very annoying ANW that sometimes but I'm I'm not sure I see why it's more a problem for my view than for the other views I think it's a very annoying answers because after all if it's a problem for the other but not really in that case I'm not sure I see why it would be more a problem for me than for any view of introspection that think that introspection relies on some sort of any

1:30:06 kind of mechanisms because after all yeah why don't you just introspect yours and why sometimes the mechanism does not dysfunction and then start ascribing experiences with someone else well because in in other views we have a access to something that's there and we're sort of some aspects of it right um whereas here we're misrepresenting what's going on there and it seems like I could just as easily misrepresent what's going on with you okay I see no no okay I understand but so I would not really answer a problem I would just say why I don't think it's

1:30:39 really more problem for my view I would say well of course this introspection mechanism uh that we all have I think does not operate uh in sin air like it has in some sense access to something it's just that it deeply misrepresent that SC but it's still deeply uh deeply connected to lots of the other going on in the brain that's why I do believe that uh phenomenal introspection will reliably track something about the brain like I think that when people say sincerely I feel pain right now I believe that there is very probably some

1:31:14 sort of thing that is like reli reliably tracked by that so in that sense there is some similarity between whatever mechanism I posit for phenomenal introspection and what's standard uh like inocent series or other thing like the difference for me is just in the content of the representation I think the content of the phenomenal like of the introspective representation of phenomenal States is deeply implicitly committed to lots of things and that's what uh creates the problem right but but so it's just still

1:31:47 seems like on this kind of view there is an in principle possibility that I could misrepresent your states that way which seems sort of absurd like that I could feel like I have access to your conscious experiences because I simply attribute to a I have access to something your behavior you know you're moving around you're saying ouch and I say oh he's in pain and I could misrepresent that in the same way I misrepresent my own pains um and so if that doesn't actually happen all right but it seems like it could it's your your view doesn't rule it out but that

1:32:19 seems deeply weird that we would have this kind of Illusion about the other person's experience I don't know so seems like there's something special about our own case here yeah if I try to think about what would happen if I felt like I could introspect your your oh sorry you just cut out for a second I missed what you said at the beginning can you hear me yeah yeah yeah so if I try to think for one second about what um let's say I'm in a situation where it seems to me for one moment that I'm introspecting your pain what I think you will you will accept is that what would happen

1:32:52 probably in that case is is that it would feel like so first of all is it sure that we never do that some people say that in empathy maybe we can do that like we can feel the other person's pain I I'm not a good expert on what empathy is I know there are lots of Distinction in things uh to say about empathy but anyway but even if we agree that it does not work so it doesn't happen so what happen that I feel like I inct your pain and the likely outcome is that I will think oh but in in fact that means that I was just feeling pain myself or maybe you being in pain led me to feel some

1:33:26 sort of thing that uh resembles pain or is a bit lack pain right and so your question is that how is it in your view that whenever I introspect someone else's pain then I'll always end up uh self ascribing uh that uh that pain right and and so I do think actually it might be a problem for other views too but I'm still trying to take it up so how can I explain it in my view but one thing that I could say maybe is that um if I introspect your

1:33:59 pain uh and so for example if I if I'm in a situation where it appears to me that you're in pain uh I should be maybe there is an argument to be drawn for the ID that then I should be in a state that then as to resemble pains itself so really in order for for it to be the case that it appears to me in in sort of low level introspective way that you are in pain then maybe according to my tce view about the like resemblance the

1:34:31 resemblance rule theory that maybe it would need for me to think that I'm in a state that in some sense resembles pain to make the pain in question appear and then I would need myself to be in pain so actually maybe I can make it a prediction of my view and then there would be of course other senses in which it can seem to me that you're in pain but not in the same sort of immediate introspective sense right it seems to me that you're in pain because it seems to me that you're holding your jaw while crying and have lots of beliefs about implicit beliefs about that that meaning that you're in pain um but but but do you agree that uh in in in principle it

1:35:06 could so you could imagine here's a possible World a possible world is where people have these introspective capacities for other people's States so maybe they don't even have them about themselves so when I when I seems to me that you're in pain it seems to me that I have special access to a state of yours which has you know subjective properties phenomenal feel all the stuff that you think is is problematic um and so it just seems like I have direct asset not and it's in your mind over there I don't say it's in my mind I I'm in something similar that resemble it I just sort of

1:35:39 mischaracterize uh your behavior as giving me special access to to one of your mental states that that's at least conceivable right on your view that this could turn out that way I mean oh but actually so it's not something that I sort to love about it but actually given the answers that I gave you earlier it seems to me that no it should not be conceivable because if I think that if I'm in a situation where I introspect that you are in pain and it appears to me like it appears to me that you are in pain then given the way in which my concept of appearance are intertwined

1:36:12 with uh my concept of phenomenal State then it should implicitly mean that I judge that if it appears to me that you are in pain that I judge implicitly that I'm in a state that resembles your pain and so it it needs to be the case that I'm in pain in in some sort of say that resembles pain right okay but so yeah because of so so it seems to me that one consequence of my view is that I cannot introspect someone else's pain or someone else mental like phenomenal mental states without at the same time

1:36:47 being myself uh in some sort of state that resembles it and as for thing but okay but then you should be able to know infallibly or you should have the intuition that you should be able to know infallibly my own pain or the pain of someone else right I don't I don't I don't see it because in my view the intuition that we have some sort of infallible appearance of our own phenomenal mental States derives like some sort of byproduct of this resemblance rule right so the reason why uh my own pain appears to me when I have

1:37:22 it is because when I'm in this phenomenal State this phenomenal State resembles itself and in virtue of resembles itself it makes itself appear to me right uh but then if you are in pain there is no reason to think that necessarily it should appear to me because it's the subject with is in the state resembling something that has the appearance of this something right so I think we're getting yeah I see what you're saying okay so I mean I I have more things I I could ask about this but let's move on because I see I can't keep you forever and uh it's already getting

1:37:56 late here so um I want to go back to this question about introspection because it came up in the chat I don't know if you've been keeping an eye on the chat or not but it came up in the chat and it's something that I've always wondered about too so the extent okay I that you don't have to worry about it uh but um so this is a question that was asked by T jump who's in the chat but also one that I've asked a lot in the past which is how how can we move past the idea that this is merely a verbal debut a dispute so you you say um phenomenal Consciousness doesn't exist and then you give this

1:38:30 story about introspection and then the answer would be well that's what Consciousness is right uh um so so anyway yeah H how how what is it that why H why I know well I already know what you're going to say but why aren't you giving a theory of Consciousness that's realist but just minus some of the baggage as a opposed to saying the thing isn't really there that I think that's the core of the question so I think so I think we are to certain extent back to the to the distinction

1:39:04 between strong illusionism and weak illusionism and really in the end uh my ways of approaching it is really uh this I think first we have to start with whether we make it a verbal dispute or not so e it to problem about what we decide to call Consciousness or phenomenal Consciousness or is it more than that right so let's say for one second that it is more than that my way of making sense of what it could be to be more than that is to say well uh we have a grasp introspectively of what we mean by phenomenal Consciousness and we

1:39:36 agree on that and then we debate on whether this is physical or whether No No in fact uh this is not physical but exists or maybe as we as I say and key say this does not exist and if we say that that uh then what I what my worry with weak illusionists that uh is that what what they think that this exist this is physical even though indeed we agree I mean I think most of them agree that we have a lot of trouble seeing how it

1:40:09 could be physical exactly at least it's not obvious and we have a hard PR explanatory Gap and and then I think My worry is that in that point I agree with Dave chmer which is that in that case weak illusionism does not really advance advance B us with the hard problem we are still wondering how can this be physical like we admit that it is physical because we have decided that it is but then how can it be and then we Face something that for me is like a mystery then the other view is or key also would say the problem is that we have no conception of this that would be

1:40:42 more substantive than let's say just a physical stuff um because of course the we Illusionist in that case want to say that it is a substantive claim to say that this is physical and this is such and such brain state so it has to be more substantive than any physical description and at the same time not too substantive that it does not have the baggage and I'm not sure I see what this diet qualia thing is right right we putting so that was one branch of the tree seeing it as a substantive issue weak illusionism versus strong illusionism and if we see it that way

1:41:15 for me weak illusionism is either committed to some sort of mysteries that I cannot accept or um or and also does not help us with a heart problem now if we say no it's just a verbal issue and I think sometimes I discussion with David papino for example I remember David papino he was in my um dissertation committee and we had a little debate about that and at some point so of course I don't want him to be committed to whatever I'm going to say but I think he said something like yeah you know what FR we agree about what exists in the end I agree with strong Illusionist

1:41:49 that that's really what exists and there is nothing over above that and I also agree that that through introspection maybe it seems to us that there is more at least or maybe through introspection uh aided in a certain way at least he agrees that quite robustly something else seems to be there that is not there and then the question becomes what do we decide to call Consciousness should we call Consciousness this thing that introspectively kind of appears to be here and is not really here or whatever is really here and let's say leads like tends to make us judge that it's that

1:42:22 there something more whatever and then the issue becomes varable and then the way you should settle it is by thinking about what kind of rhetorical Advantage you get from here and and at this point let let's describe the situation as follows some people and I think there are many of them I think I think David papino is one of them I think Michael Grano is also one of them they just don't want to say that they are Illusionist because they know that as soon as they say well Consciousness at least in some important sense does not exist you're going to have half the living and think that this is crazy

1:42:56 right uh and so they don't want to say so they choose to call Consciousness something else my view is that when we do that we have many things that we lose first I think we lose Clarity because the way at least maybe not Consciousness in general but at least phenomenal Consciousness the way this term has been introduced as a technical term for I think know a few decades now what philosopher have been discussed about it is something that we grasp through introspection right it's not not whatever causes it it's this so I think it is clearer and it is more respectful

1:43:28 of previous use to just keep on using phenomenal Consciousness for this the second thing that we lose is that I think if we Illusionist we back down to this uh like uh like this realist rage like the thing you're just Sil or you're just stupid or you're just crazy or you just a monster whatever and the that we'll back down for bad reasons because my impression is that the very thing that makes us believe that consciousness of all thing has to exist and cannot be

1:44:02 in illusion is precisely this aspect of Consciousness that we cannot accept so even if you're a weak weak Illusionist that's like the the certainty or the impossible to deny that's precisely something that you want to get rid of right if you're a weak Illusionist you don't think that Consciousness is any kind of thing that you have some sort of special access to you think it's just one more phenomenon in the brain and we can very well be wrong about it and Etc right so I think it's wrong to back down to the realist rage because we back down

1:44:35 for bad reason because we implicitly give up something that we should crucially deny right yeah I see what you're saying that's my view of the debate and of course we can still be at a stage where like with David papino and others in fact we agree about maybe most of the facts but then the question is how are we going to be understood and how is it going to Fed into the further debate and for me strong religionism is clearer it's more respectful of previous use and it does not lead to this implicit suggestion that we in fact accept a phenomenal epistemology that we

1:45:07 don't want to accept and we should not accept that's related to my story about the weak Illusionist right exactly right about the tension between uh the reasons like the motivation for really staying just a weak Illusionist and accepting the existence of Consciousness and the fact that if a really weak Illusionist who also wants to be a coherent physicalist you probably have to accept a phenomenal epistemology that is pretty weak and uh and yeah open to lot of errors and mistakes and Illusions Etc yeah yeah that's interesting I mean yeah okay so let let me let me segue into

1:45:42 talking about the Normand problem because that's something I think which maybe some of the things that you're just saying right now are intention with uh and and I really I highly recommend this paper I think this paper it's coming on Ergo right I think uh on the norer problem it's just one of the best things that's been written on illism uh probably ever so I highly recommend that people read it because it's honest it's probing it's thorough um it's it's clear it's accessible I I love everything about it so and not that I'm not not the other papers weren't as well but this one I think especially for me really crystallized some things that I was

1:46:14 thinking about um so and this came up in the chat as well because people were asking about uh um Jeff Lee's alien subjectivity and so that's you know I think um if you are you familiar with Jeff's work uh um um so I read a few papers of him of his uh precisely I think for writing the the paper on the normative challenge for Illusionist views of Consciousness and um so but maybe you can remind me of the of the relevant part of Jeff's work so that they can maybe well I think what he wants to do

1:46:47 is CH challenge what you call phenomenal value um and maybe even exclusive phenomenal value or I think just gen maybe even generally like phenomenal value I mean I don't want to put words in his mouth but I I I had him on the show and talked to him and I read his book on this and everything anyway so the basic idea is that you know we have this strong intuition as you point out that that connects you know mo U morally relevant properties with phenomenal Consciousness and so The Illusionist is at least under it looks like they have to give up something that we don't want

1:47:20 to give up um and on your own preferred view I take it you have to accept that things like pains just aren't as bad as we thought that they were um that because they would be worse if they had this phenomenal aspect but you deny that it's there so that what we think is the really bad part of pain isn't as bad as we think that it is which is I mean it's obviously compatible with the view and everything you're saying but it's really hard to stomach it's a cost of the view I would say to put in my I I agree so yeah so the way I see sing

1:47:53 uh is we have yeah this strong intuition that there is some sort of connection between phenomenality and value and I tried in the paper to spell it out in the form of two different thesis one view would be well there are lots of the standard phenomenal properties that are such that when they are instantiated they ground some sort of intrinsic value and typically it would be like Pleasure and Pain and also maybe lots of others but at least those and then some people would go further and they would say no it's not just that when these properties are instantiated they value but also only properties that are phenomenal can

1:48:26 do that right and so that if there is no consciousness nothing has value right um and so what I try to say that these two Theses I think are attractive to a point the first one I find it very intuitively attractive and the second one I'm not sure my own intuition it's not clear if I yeah I'm not sure but anyway oh I think it also has some attraction and then what I say that well if you're an Illusionist that that like accept one or two of these CES might prove uncomfortable because basically if you accept the second one that means that

1:48:58 you're nist right illusionism leads to nalism and many people find it uncomfortable some people can live with it many people find it uncomfortable even if you accept just the first one which basically would mean well there is some values that is grounded entirely by non-phenomenal stuff maybe for example there is some value grounded by purely non-phenomenal objective beauty or uh objective knowledge or correct representations or complexity whatever there is some value grounded by some non-phenomenal

1:49:29 stuff uh but at the same time when for example someone is in phenomenal pain this in itself grounds some negative value in that case and what I'm saying is that well so you have this intuitive views and The Illusionist must choose uh whether to accept or to deny it and even for example if the if The Illusionist just accept the weaker one just the phenomenal value like yes for example Pleasure and Pain they gr some value if you accept that and you're an Illusionist it has some normative revisionary consequences because as you said it means that well maybe after all

1:50:03 pain in the real world is not phenomenal so it does not have this it does not have this extra awful uh phly aspects that I thought it had and maybe it's not as bad it involves that it's not as bad right if this extra fly awful stuff was gring some value or would have been grounding some value and it's not there then it's not as bad it can still be bad for lots of other reasons right because there might be other things in quasi phenomenal pain that ground some negative values maybe for example quasi phenomenal pain is a frustration of one

1:50:38 of my desires and it's bad to frustrate some of my desire um some of my desires maybe um quasa phenomenal pain is something that I dislike and it's bad to be something that I dislike so you have ways around it but in the end you have to accept that yes if if this ingredient is not there in the world and if you believe that this ingredient would ground some value so contrary to what you said earlier the the distribution of value has to be a bit different right uh so what I do in the paper is really I try to map the options because I don't have a very clear um idea of where I want to stand but I also think that it's

1:51:12 a real issue for illusionists and I think they should not try to avoid it right so so what you're just talking about is what you call the moderate position right exactly exactly the moderate position would be to say um in intuitively I can accept that there is some value grounded outside of phenomenality that does not require phenomenality maybe for example some like purely objective non-phenomenal knowledge or correct representations or um things of that kind but it would still be the case that if someone had this phenomenal glowy pleasure or pain

1:51:46 this would be like this would ground some negative or positive value and it does not happen in the real world contrary to what most people used to think so we have some revisions to make um I I think a good way to approach it intuitively what I think my my preferred position is is to think about other examples outside of phenomenality for example this example came to me uh a few days ago think about what people were believing in the late middle age uh when it comes to political legitimacy in Europe there had this the of the Divine

1:52:19 rights of Kings they thought that the Kings not only the king of friends but I don't think he was the only one they thought that the kings were in some sense ruling the country because they had been chosen by God so they had some divine right to lead there were a luant of God and let's say you are in this society and you believe that and you think that the king is super legitimate right maxim of legitimacy like God right and then let's say you come to stop believing in that either because you abandon the theories of the divine right of king or you think that God does not exist or that God does not choose King

1:52:53 and so in some sense does that mean that there is no legitimate government anymore no maybe you can have another theory of legitimacy like a democratic theory or whatever but does that still mean that uh whatever person govern the country is still not as legitimate as you saw the King was when you saw the king at the Divine Right yes because it's very hard to beat God it's true that the king had this divine right it would be really super legitimate like you yeah exact my view of Consciousness is a bit

1:53:28 the same I think we have uh this strong aiori connection between some phenomenal states and their phenomenal properties and intrinsic value and once we admit that there are no phenomenal States maybe we have to admit also that yes there is some sort of glowy awfulness or all we of all or maybe glowy greatness that is not really there in the world and so maybe we can still admit that some things are good or bad but maybe it can not be distributed exactly in the same way and for example maybe one thing that I think we would

1:54:00 have to do is to weaken the contrast that we make between sentient creatures and non-sentient creatures I think this is a very intuitive contrast for most people including for myself I find it super inuitive that really if you're sent you have rights and you have dignity and you have something and if I'm not sentent then no and there is a strong border but if I'm an Illusionist I think it's very hard to make sense of that in an Illusionist framework I don't think it's impossible I just think it's very hard and it ends up looking artificial and a bit arbitrary and so I think it does not mean that you can make people suffer no it does not mean that

1:54:33 but it probably mean that you cannot keep this star contrast and you have to revise that because whatever you think will play the role of grounding value it would be very arbitrary and artificial if it worked exactly like phenomenal Consciousness used to so it would have to work differently it borders would be different and you would end up with a different distribution of value yeah I mean it's interesting and I think this is relates to the question let's see who was it that asked this in the chat I think it's Daniel Capel um uh he uh so so because the reason I think he brought up Jeff's view because Jeff

1:55:06 takes the kind of very strong line that there are there are states which are not conscious but that matter as much um so that's the alien subjectivity so if they were non-conscious aliens they would have states that played certain roles and those States would matter for them as much as like Consciousness matters for us so I think that he thinks we are phenomenally conscious Jeff is that that is um but that there that the aliens who lacked Consciousness would have states that mattered as much as our real phenomenal Consciousness state so I I

1:55:39 don't think he's an Illusionist but it sounds like I hear I hear you denying that I think that you think that that that if there were really phenomenally conscious States they would matter a little bit more than states which lacked it is that is that correct or so yeah I think I think at at this stage now because really it's again the paper I wor is really more about mapping option that we defending one so I'm inclined to think that but I'm I'm ready to change my mind at this stage I would say it's a little bit like again like I think the European Kings Divine Right is a good example like yeah I think if

1:56:13 there was some Divine rights of Kings then there would be super legitimate no question about so you don't think a different another way of being legitimate would be just as good as being being chosen by God if there were a God and all that stuff well because the problem is that because I'm an Illusionist I think that whatever quasi phenomenal Consciousness is it's something that realist agree that we have right right whatever I think in quasa phenomenal Consciousness grounds value I think it's probably the case that if I was so there are probably some ways around if you have a conditional

1:56:46 Theory but in the first place it's probably the case that if I was a Consciousness realist I would agree that I still have this quasi phenomenal stuff right right yeah and so the idea is that that's the difference between I think jof Lee conception because he's not an Illusionist right so he thinks that these aliens and us we really have different things it's not that they have something more or have something more and also what they are it's that we have different set of things but if I'm if we are an Illusionist we think that we have something less compared to what the

1:57:20 phenomenal realist says we have at least most phenomenal Realties because again it's in reality yeah so so I mean Jeff thinks that you know zombies their pains matter pain stars or whatever you want to call them you know that they're they're in certain states that play a certain role and that they're they they can be in so the Zombie World I know you bring this up in your paper like the zombie suffering kind of cases and and things like that Jeff seems to think that the zombie pains matter as much as our pains there's no difference between them except that ours are really conscious and theirs are not so in that sense they do have something that's less

1:57:53 than ours yeah but he thinks they matter exactly the same so that's like what I hear you denying yeah yeah no I understand so they have something less it's just a possible thing but they it's not normatively significant they matter as much as we do I think the problem with such view I think it's coherent the problem with such view which I think would be what most Illusionist at least and not that many Illusionist but I think for example ke I think he would like to go that way the problem for me with such is that we still have to deal with is a strong intuition that the zombie when they suffer it might be bad

1:58:26 but it's not as bad and so once I think almost everyone has this intuition and so if you have this intuition then you have either to accept the intuition saying yeah it says something true about the connection between phenomenality and value just phenomenality is not real in our world so we have to deal with it or you say no I reject the intuition but and then what I try to do in the paper is see what would be the ways of rejecting the intuition and it's not clear that they are that easy to reject right because even if you believe that zombies are not possible or even if you believe that they are possible and

1:58:59 actual and that its conscious creatures were not possible um the idea is that our intuitions about value anyway there are probably things that we can have about uh like merely conceivable world right I can just conceive something and then elicit some sort of Intuition or value about that and if we start saying that we cannot do that um let's say it is not that easy as it seems right it's something that we do all the time to evaluate how valuable a situation would be even though we have no guarantee that it is more than just conceivable we have

1:59:33 no guarantees that it's possible we do that all the time right um and so what I anyway maybe I'm being a bit too fast here but so what I mean is that my my worry with uh answers that I agree would be quite natural and quite attractive which would be to say well zombies pain is just as bad as ours is that we still have to deal with this pretty strong intuition that there is a difference between a normative significance of a zombie pain and the pain of a conscious creature right and how to deal with that right yeah I think I mean I so I do

2:00:10 share the intuition that you know there it would be bad to kill zombies um but not as bad so I agree with you I think more than I would with Jeff but it's not as bad as you know killing you or I or or a being that was really phenomenally conscious and you can kind of Imagine like trolley cases so if you had you know one person on one side of the track that was The Illusionist Theory Of Consciousness was true and the other side that the phenomenal realist theory was true I think it would be worse to kill that person in the other one although both bad obviously it's like the one versus five both are bad

2:00:41 options um so so that's the way I tend to think I do think that having phenomenal Consciousness adds some value but I think the way that these uh you know way people like Jeff think is that well that's just kind of a byproduct of the fact that we can't really imaginatively put ourselves into their position we're sort of um that we're locked we're locked into a certain way of uh being such that we can't make sense of them from our point of view so that there's maybe a bit of a bias or something here which you know you could you could work your way around um but yeah I don't know so uh so do you do

2:01:16 agree about the trolley case though that if you had to pick it would be like better to kill The Illusionist I mean not The Illusionist theorist but the one of which the illusion theory was true versus the phenomenal realist yeah so so I have to imagine a possible World in which there is phenomenal Consciousness yeah right and then there is one zombie like there is one zombie and one non zombie right yeah exactly um I Think It's tricky because of course from my point of view because we are all zombies what you're asking me to imagine something like one is a normal human being and the other is some sort of

2:01:50 human being with some sort of extra glowy angel stuff that that I used to think I had but I don't and and that's of course I like the human right I want I don't want to say kill the human but what I what I can say that I definitely feel the pool of saying yes there is maybe something extra in this like glowy angel stuff uh yeah so yeah so maybe I think we should choose that creature the same way if you tell me is it possible world where there is really a real Divine King like a divinely chosen King should you serve the king or or serve

2:02:24 the will of the democratically uh elected like the will of the people and then I want to say well in our world the best thing is democracy so normally I would say the democratically elected guy right but if it's really a world with a really elected like um really divinely chosen King I suppose I have to go with him that's interesting because I don't share that I would say still it's better to go with the people I don't see even if the god like it's really God like in the definition like omnicient omnipotent Ultra benevolent if it's really God as

2:02:57 in the definition that's the difficulty because we I I don't think there is such a thing but right me neither as in the definition I think you have to go with it now huh yeah I don't know I guess I would disagree with that but I see what you're saying I I take the point I take the point that uh that that gives something extra but so to what extent do you think illusionists can ground morality so do you think like could you be a utilitarian and still I mean not like a prefer utilitarian but like an old school like Hedonism utilitarian you know it's like pain and pleasure like Bentham and those kinds of B could you does that kind of view make sense on

2:03:30 illusionism so my my impression is that you I think it's always possible to develop it if you really want to because what you can always say that well look we thought that um we had to maximize wellbeing and that well-being was was a matter of having certain phenomenal States and no we have to say that it's a matter having certain quasi phenomenal States and that now there are two problem with such a story the first problem is that there is something attractive and intuitive about let's say Hedonism utilitarian Hedonism like the standard

2:04:04 one that you were describing which is that we seems to be pretty sure that pain is bad and pleasure is good and one of the reasons why we seem to be pretty sure of that is that so to speak uh they wear their quality on their sleeves I think it's some C say something there at some point like we see immediately that it's good or bad like we just have to imagine what it is and say yeah that's good that's bad no doubt about that I can doubt about lots of things from a more point of view but not the the value of pain and pleasure but if you are an Illusionist and you think there is no

2:04:36 such thing as this like glowy revealed pain and Pleasures with just some functional quasi phenomenal stuff then it's not as clear that you can justify it as well right right because your standard justification will uh you will have a hard time making it work I'm not saying that is not somewhere around maybe you can still say well introspection is reliable for some things not for others maybe it's reliable for Value but uh not for like metaphysical nature of the state so about and but then there is I describ this debate in my paper I think one problem is that it's not clear that we

2:05:08 know about the Badness and the of pain and the goodness of pleasure or similar things by introspection strictly speaking I think we know about it much more in some sort of apriori process what we know by introspection is that we feel this but that this is bad or this is good it's not clear that we know it through introspection so it's not clear that you can easily salvage some sort of good moral epistemology of pain and pleasure in an um Illusionist framework so that's one problem the second problem is that whatever Theory you give of what makes quasi phenomenal pain and pleasure

2:05:42 good or bad you would have to explain what make like what aspects of it makes it good and bad and then it's very likely that in order like whatever Theory you develop it's very likely that it will either be elegant and then it will probably be extended Beyond uh the realm of creatures we usually think are sentent or it would be very inelegant and super botched like I don't have a proof of that but I think that if you have to give like some sort of functional theature of Quasi phenomenal pain and pleasure that

2:06:15 grounds its Badness and its goodness and then think about what has it in the world um I think it it's very unlikely that we'll have a theory that is both elegant and coherent and also does not sometimes weaken the contrast between sentient and non-sentient creatures right because you would say something like well maybe it's because we dislike in some sort of purely functional sense of course we dislike the pain but then probably in some sort of functional sense we also dislike the unconscious like the purely unconscious pain or non sentent creatures also probably in some sort of functional

2:06:46 sense dislike their um their purely functional pain so what I mean is that you can probably be um like standard hedonist utilit if you're an Illusionist but then you have one problem which is justifying your view and one other problem which is accounting for the Badness or the goodness of the state you think about without changing too much the distribution of this goodness and and you might probably end up doing it if you're coherent and if you want a theory that is uh elegant enough so so yeah that one of the I think is okay sorry go ahead no for my I just

2:07:22 wanted to say as for my own preference because again that's more paper where I try to map the option because I think that's not something that has been discussed so far I hope some more people will also like take that and build build on on this that would be my hope but my own preferred option I'm must say I think I'm inclined I'm inclined towards um a view where um some sort of non utilitarian view I think I like a deontological view or something uh no not not theological I think I'm consequentialism I think I like consequentialism some sort of nonu

2:07:57 I mean depends how you define utilitarianism no understand something that deeply will appeals to well-being I think deep down but that's weird I think I'm I'm really I think I really like the good old plon conception of Ethics so I think in the end what is good is contemplate and love the good and you have to make sense of that at some point uh with what we have right I don't know if that makes sense I'm just telling it does yeah what inclined to follow and uh that makes a very platonian framework because we live in the C we live in the cave right uh it's all an illusion and

2:08:30 we have to love and contemplate the good and so maybe qu phenomenal of Pleasure and Pain have something to do with it but it's not Central to what it is I see so I have two questions that I want to ask really quickly so one is is do you think in your own personal view is illusionism true of animals non-human Animals by which I mean dogs sheep cows or or what what you mean by that is that is that also the case that they are not phenomenally conscious or is that the case that they have an illusion of Consciousness yeah that they have the illusion of Consciousness so I'm inclined I don't

2:09:04 have a strong view on that I think I'm inclined to say no because I'm inclin to think that they don't have the sort of meta um cognitive introspective capacity that would allow for them to judge like to to be such that it appears to them that they are phenomenally conscious okay um so that does like a big that would be a big revision if you're a hedonistic utilitarian right you can't say like what benam said about you know it's whether they feel not whether they think or something yeah but it depends because of course you can still say well

2:09:35 they don't have the illusion of Consciousness but they can still have quasi phenomenal Consciousness if you Define quasi phenomenal Consciousness as for example whatever natural kind uh tends in US reliably to cause the illusion of Consciousness so dogs could be qu conscious in a way just like us but without the introspection yeah but they don't have the illusion right they still qu like conscious so in that respect um I my impression is that if illusionism has to have some sort of reev revisionary normative consequence

2:10:08 with the way we treat animals it's not so much that it will make the animals that don't have the illusion of Consciousness irrelevant or less valuable I don't see it but I do think that there is some things about the sensient non-sentient distinction that probably has to go I I I don't see how it it could keep being the case it has to go and in the end the more I think about it the more I'm like yeah probably it has to go and I'm pretty convinced that it will go by the way I think this distinction I mean I like the distinction if it forces us to pay attention to other creatures and human right right in that sense it's a useful

2:10:41 distinction but while while you focus on the border is it really sent are really not sensient I think yeah I think illusionism gives us reason to think that we should not pay attention too much to that it's not very there is no really because when it comes to quasi phenomenal Consciousness that would not be any important distinction right you need to to think that's really different to be sensient or not sensient so like questions about like our trees conscious sentient are going to be like for you sort of cases of like we can't really answer those kinds of questions in a

2:11:13 what about lobsters what about oysters yeah I think I want to say well no one is phenomenally conscious anyway and when it comes to Consciousness well it's some sort of functional stuff and it will be more or less similar and in the end we have to decide what is valuable without because yeah so just digression I'm digressing sometimes I feel like in the debate about uh what is valuable when it comes to other creatives animals Consciousness is just used as some sort of Black Box we say well we don't know but if they are conscious then that's important and if they are not well that's okay but in the end I think we

2:11:47 have to admit that there is no there is no such um magical properties that could uh in fact settle the matter and we have to decide anyway are they valuable or not for what they are right and not for some internal extra properties that they would maybe or maybe not possess possess yeah no that's interesting um and then one one other thing was how do you respond to chalmers's master argument against illusionism where he says you know if illusionism if illusionism is true no one's ever had a phenomenal pain but people have had phenomenal pains

2:12:19 therefore no illusionism you that BS the question or what what do you think about that so I wrote I wrote a paper about that actually it's a draft it's somewhere under review um I also sent today right so it's it's um I hope it would be out at some point but what I want to say is that uh first I want to say uh yes I accept that uh illusionism involves that in some in at least one important sense of pain uh then it implies that we are not in pain so I accept the entailment I don't think it's

2:12:51 good idea to just wiggle around and try to deny it I think I think it's just clearer to accept it from okay so in some sense of pain yeah illusionism means that no one has ever has ever felt pain and I would just deny that uh people sometimes feel pain and so chos would say but it's obviously true and then I would say so that's that's the gist of the paper that is under review right and then I would say lots of obviously true claims have been found have been at least um are not considered false right we have found arguments like

2:13:25 um that made us consider that these claims that seem obviously true are in fact false and I think that illusion them can do the like good Illusionist argument can provide the same thing except if you say that there is something super duper special about the OB obviousness of Consciousness rather than the other kind of obviousness right and then that's what you have to say you have to say there is something super duper obvious and then what my strategy is to try to say well what is your evidence for that that the existence of phenomenal Consciousness is super duper obvious

2:13:58 right and and then I think back to the beginning all through the whole thing over again because I think at this point I think the best answer of someone like CH to say well this itself is obvious and then you can draw the same thing oh yeah but you can have argument against that so you need to say the super duper obviousness is also super duper obvious and basically what I say that at some point you have to break down because at some point it cannot be super duper obvious it cannot be obvious at all because at some point it just become highly theoretical yeah right okay and I I would like to read this paper if maybe

2:14:31 I'll send you an email I'm sending the draft right under review I never know what is a policy regarding uh preprint online that are under review should I do it should I not do it in the past I was doing it uh I'm I'm not doing it right now but actually I'm a bit annoyed because this paper has been under review for a long time and that's super I know I I go I I think you should put it up although lazy reviewers will Google the title and try to find out who wrote it obviously that's a problem but uh yeah I know I have the same ISS I go back and forth in the same exact way over this exact I think I think I might a paper that's been in review for a year and a half right now it's under it's been

2:15:04 revised it's still under review but it's like i' would like to share it you know it's like but yeah so I know exactly how you feel um I I I hearing screaming from downstairs which means the kids are driving my wife crazy so I do have to to wrap this up but we didn't even get to talk about phenomenological overflow which is I was really uh that paper I'm so excited about so maybe if you have the time and patience I'll have you back on and we could talk about that because that's something that's dear to my heart there that whole issue and you had some really interesting you contributed to some really interesting and I think important results about about this debate yes um but besides overflow was

2:15:37 there anything that you were hoping would come up that hasn't come up um let me think no I think we covered the the ground yeah we could have talked about overflow but obviously we have talked more than 2 hours 20s yeah exactly we'll talk about that another day I would be glad to to do it and also self-building Technologies I read your paper on that so I mean there's a lot there's a lot of interesting ideas that you have that I would like to talk to you more about pereral stuff uh yeah this thing on overflow I I like it because I think it's an intervention in the debate that I and with two other authors we did and

2:16:11 none of us are really expert of these precise debates because the debate on overflow is a huge debate right some people like you have contributed lots of people have contributed and becomes almost some sort of sub field and and and so so we had this this paper with an experimental part that we did so floron kova and Maxon Gaya and what I liked is that none of us were really expert but I think what we did is pretty interesting coming a little bit as Outsiders and I think doing something that should have been done for at least 10 years in my my you know just anecdotally I was trying

2:16:43 to get people to do that behind the scenes for so I was every experimental philosopher I know I was like do this do this and you know anyway so no one did so I when I your paper came out I was like finally someone has this is like needed to be done like you know don't just anecdotally say people say this like let's find out so let's actually look at what they say and get some qualitative maybe just some of the the gist of the of the study for the the viewers so there this overflow argument and the over argument notably relies on

2:17:17 theid that well you have lots of ways to account for like spelling experiment and landm experiment and all these experiments but in the end we should choose the Overflow interpretation because it fits better with what the subject them themselves say about the experiment because the subjects in all these experiments they say that yes they have perceived everything they have perceived much more than they could report that's what they say and now we decided is it really what they say and then when we look about the the the where the what the references are for this claim they are really spess it's just a few anecdotal claims or some super old studies yeah it's one one

2:17:50 offhand comment by Spurling actually that's it and and then what we did is that we replicated like the spelling experiment with the letters and Lear man experiment with the rectangles and then we ask the subjects what what did you feel like you just saw and turns out it's not clear at all that they support overflow like it's exactly you can maybe save it but really the if you if you have to say something is support as the Sur Rex report it's much more some sort of mix of SP like SP space fragmentary phenomenology and generic phenomenology and maybe probably both of them so I'm

2:18:24 not it's not claim that that's what is right because anyway IND I don't think there is phenomenology but if you are interested in subjective data yeah does not support what people claimed it support and I think it's important because we have to do more of this like careful study of like introspective reports subjective data this kind of things absolutely couldn't agree more actually um so let me take this opportunity thank you for coming on France while you're and also recommend your work I mean your philosophy is like the best in a philosophy as I think of it it's challenging but clear um it's honest it doesn't back down from hard

2:18:57 problems um comes up with creative and interesting solutions that that really challenge you in the best possible way which is what good philosophy is supposed to do it's supposed to take something that you thought there's no way you could challenge this and then you say well here's an argument and you go oh ah makes you makes you anyway so I I highly recommend your work I thank you for it and for your time um and uh yeah thanks thanks again for coming stay on for just a second I'll say bye the air by the way but okay well thank you for thank you for your nice words thank you for having me here it was really a pleasure having this um two hours 20 conversations and I really enjoyed it

2:19:30 and maybe another time also okay yeah they're all saying thank you and bye to all right so I'm going to click the button and we will be off the air all right we're off the air now so uh we St