Consciousness Live! with Luke Roelofs (S4 E2)

0:00 press the wrong button and ended the whole stream so let's not do that [Laughter] all right we are live uh joining me today is an extra special guest uh luke roloffs um luke thanks for joining me today and i wonder if you would just say a little bit about who you are and what you do for those who might not know you uh thanks yeah hi hi richard um thanks for having me on i'm a postdoc at the center for mind brain and consciousness at new york university um and i i work on i always have trouble

0:33 summarizing the the somewhat disparate things i work on but i broadly say the metaphysics and to some extent ethics of consciousness very good okay short sword and pithy i like that um yeah and uh you you have a book which just recently came out uh called combining minds which i guess is mostly on the metaphysics uh yes consciousness but you're also i guess working on a second book already which is on empathy and that maybe is where the ethics comes in yeah that's that's right um so that's trying to kind of

1:05 draw out the implications of us being the sort of creature that you can only fully understand from the inside with conscious creatures um and i think that that is important for how we think and feel about each other um that we you know that there's something missing unless i can put myself in your perspective but most of my published work to date as you say is on the metaphysics side very much very cool okay well i want to get to ask you about some of the empathy stuff maybe a little bit later on but

1:38 i guess i wanted to start by um asking you about your views about the metaphysics of consciousness and i i'm a big fan of this book by the way i hope more beyonce read it um it's uh some of the best of philosophy it represents in my opinion it's careful it's clear it's well thought out and it argues for a completely a thesis which is just dismissed out of hand um and by the end of the book you you find yourself thinking wait maybe it shouldn't be dismissed at a hand so i think to me that's that's the beauty of philosophy is when you can take an idea like that and carefully

2:10 argue for its life that's the goal yeah yeah and it's not done big ideas like that aren't done enough so i think that's very cool um and you you consider yourself a defender of pan psychism although that's not the main focus of the view of the book uh because you do have the last two thirds of it where you focus on other things but but a large part of it is aimed at defending pence or a thesis of pan second is that right that's right yeah um so i i kind of think of it as one step downstream from pan psychism um in that it's addressing what i think is the the biggest challenge for pan psychism the

2:43 combination problem yeah um but it's addressing it in part by trying to show that it's actually a much wider problem it's something that matters for for physicalists um really for i think almost any view except the kind of cartesian dualism that makes the mind an absolutely simple thing right simple without parts so if anything with parts basically you're gonna think you're gonna end up focusing some version of the combination problem that that's the idea yeah yeah and so at the beginning of the book you kind of try to motivate pan psychism even though

3:16 that's not the main focus you do sort of defend it and so i wonder if you could if we could just start maybe with the four kinds of arguments that you give uh at the beginning of the book about why once you take pan second seriously yeah yeah so so i mean i i kind of came to pan psychism because i felt torn um on the one hand i was very attracted to the sort of naturalistic worldview that is usually associated with physicalism um the idea that you know for understanding the structure of the world

3:49 science should be our authority and what it seems to tell us is that there's basically just one type of stuff and we're all made of it and there's nothing special or magical about human brains we're just a a very complicated arrangement of the same things that are in everything else um but at the same time i also felt the pull of these the standard anti-physicalist arguments that are discussed a lot in the literature the knowledge argument the conceivability argument all of which seem to show that a purely physical account of the brain just

4:26 leaves something out it doesn't quite explain or capture why there's anything it's like for us from the inside um and so that's kind of the basic driving thought is this this explanatory problem for purely physical ontology that seems to motivate uh accepting consciousness as some some kind of irreducible ingredient so then if if you make that step though if you think consciousness is going to be part of our fundamental ontology

4:58 um and you ask well you know where is it going to go what how did it fit into the world right um i think the other three arguments i give there are sort of trying to motivate it as against more dualistic sorts of views um so one of those uh is the the causal argument if people talked a lot about mental causation um it looks like we can give a fully physical explanation of every uh you know every event including every emotion of my body um so if there was consciousness that

5:30 was something apart from the physical it's not clear how it would do anything it's not clear how it would kind of find work to do in this chordal story um another is the continuity argument which says uh you know between me and i don't know this pillow uh you know there's there's a potentially you know we could draw an in an arbitrarily uh fine-grained continuum of intermediate states and intermediate arrangements of

6:03 matter that would differ just in very small degrees um and we kind of do see this you know on the phylogenetic scale from humans through simpler animals uh down to single-celled organisms and it it doesn't look like that any magic point where you could kind of think well consciousness appears right here before this no consciousness at all after this there's some consciousness so both of those arguments push us towards wanting consciousness to be part of the physical world not something kind of added at a certain

6:37 point right and so the the fourth argument i'm hoping i remember the what the full art yeah uh the the intrinsic nature's argument right um is trying to say actually if you really analyze what the the physical sciences tell us you realize that there is a way for consciousness to fit in because what physics tells us is essentially a very rich story about how things interact how things behave how things are

7:08 structured but without ever directly addressing what these things are you know you look at the physical characterization of an electron um and essentially you're told dispositional facts about you know how it is disposed to move under various circumstances you're told you know how does it relate to us and other properties or certain other particles but it all kind of leaves this kind of unanswered question what are these various things that interact in this way um and so contemporary pan psychists think well

7:42 if the intrinsic nature of the physical world is actually not spoken to by the physical sciences um and if we do seem to have a kind of insight uh in the case of you know the matter of our own brains what this is kind of from the inside um then maybe the the simplest uh view is that it's all some version of that the intrinsic nature of mata in general is some something like the consciousness that we experience though presumably much

8:15 simpler in ways that are kind of the really stretched up powers of imagination um yeah did i get all four of them there good yeah a plus for remembering uh i mean so one question that i have is is why you find these the these arguments so motivating um i mean i'm all for exploring cool ideas and i think you'd do an excellent job of that but but but with like with respect to the conceivability arguments for example there are well-known responses to that

8:47 um for myself personally i think that it's conceivable conceivably true that you know consciousness is a physical property um that there are duplicates of us that are conscious uh things that you know keith franken is called anti-zombies not called zombies or whatever um and so i i'm just curious generally why why so much why would you put so much credence in a priori reasoning in this area um especially emphasizing explanatory value which which was what you sort of emphasized in your version of it but there's this you know we can't understand how to explain consciousness

9:20 to physical terms so that suggests that it's not itself physical and i know about the you know two-dimensional versions of conceivable blah blah but i but i just wonder why we should i shouldn't blah blah blah all that important stuff i can tell it's uh maybe what you're going to say but i just wonder what makes you what motivates you to take that stuff as seriously as as someone like you does um yeah so it's a good question i mean the this is kind of a tangle of of competing methodologies um i mean so i guess in part um

9:58 it's that i you know just at the object level i find the responses to the responses more compelling than the responses um so like i i don't think that anti-zombies uh i don't think that's something that you're conceiving of in the same way as as zombies because they have this built-in modal element so you're actually conceiving of facts about other possible worlds when you conceive of that one um it's also though that like the the formal arguments are kind of drawing out

10:30 what i think is a very simple like everyday intuition um i mean most people don't think about zombies spontaneously but most people do think about spectrum inversion right at some point in their lives they have this this realization that huh if someone else you know was having different experiences when they looked at things that i was but had had always have been that way and was seeing things in there i thought it was with learning to associate the same words how would i you know how would i ever find out and the realization that no amount of

11:03 information that you acquire from the third person no amount of you know details about how their brain works would ever remove that doubt entirely um you know i don't think you have to be a philosopher to to kind of to notice that and to think that that's telling us something fairly deep about the nature of the phenomena here i mean i guess i also to some extent want to maybe just turn things around on the opponents and say you know if if you don't want to do 850 reasoning you know why do you believe in non-conscious matter

11:37 um because you know there's a way of framing pancakism where you start with okay well i know that there's a bit of conscious stuff here and i'm surrounded by things that i see from the outside so i don't know whether they're conscious um and to a certain extent whether they're conscious is not going to be a directly empirically resolved matter so uh you know just as you can ask well why should we listen to arguments telling us that we should attribute consciousness to them i i can say why should we listen to you know the

12:09 the arguments if physicalists have them uh for not doing so but thinking that there's anything that is without consciousness right yeah that's a good point i i i would just say on the first thing about i don't want to spend too much time on this because there's too many other interesting this is really just the opening salvo and all the stuff that comes out which is really more interesting i'd say uh with respect to what you're doing but about about the anti-zombies or shambies or whatever i guess i would say i don't think you are conceiving anything morally there anything more than you are you're simply saying there's a world

12:42 at which uh there's nothing but physical stuff and there's cost of consciousness um so it's not like conceiving you know necessarily if peeve and q um or you're so i don't really buy that sort of response uh so i don't anyway so that's just a side remark i guess i'd say i mean i i think the thing is that there's a lot built into that nothing but um so when you say i'm conceiving of nothing but the physical stuff um you know clearly you don't mean the nothing but to exclude you then saying

13:16 i'm also conceiving of consciousness um and i i guess i i assume that what's going on there is you're thinking well i'm conceiving of the consciousness as just coming from or nothing over and above the physical stuff right um which means that you you are trying to specifically conceive of it as necessitated by or somehow kind of related to the physical stuff i don't think it needs to be necessitated just physical and so then then if you wanted to spell what

13:48 that meant i mean i think you have to do the same with the zombies right so if you want to say that's just physical stuff you have to have that's all claws as well and that may involve some modal stuff as depending on how you flesh that out but uh i mean i think yeah the easiest thing to do is just say consciousness is physical and then there's an open question about whether identities are morally necessary i think that's something that uh so all you really need is like an axiom of identity that says you know if x equals y then if f f of x then g of you know g of x f y or whatever yeah i mean i i don't know if that

14:24 really addresses the the seeming the epistemic distinctiveness of this particular identity um you know standard scientific identities like you know lightning is atmospheric electrical discharge you know they don't generate the same epistemic sense of a gap because given the full physical story you can deduce that this identity hold you can see that the thing we call lightning thing we encounter into these under these circumstances will be this this

14:56 physically characterized phenomenon um but as you say i you know there's a lot of trends to author over this topic um and to some extent i have sort of tried to to kind of step past it and think well you know suppose that the anti-physicalist argument hold water you know what would we do next where would we go from there right yeah exactly so i and i think that's where all the action really is in the book at least um but i was just curious because i am always sort of mystified

15:28 um that people take our own reasoning ability so seriously that you know they're willing to to sort of go to take the anyway so i don't but uh that's that's neither here another um so let's go ahead and then i guess the the other thing i was going to ask is well if you don't don't like physicalism and you don't so you don't like dualism either but i guess the argument against dualism the causal argument i guess i'm a little bit suspicious of because i once you read hume you're like who the hell knows

16:00 anything can cause anything really so not really sure that that's that really gets at it um so but also um i think really this is where the continuity thesis really comes in right so this is what's really doing the work or do so let me ask you how do you feel about like post-human views of causation do you think that has any effect on the argument so that definitely yeah undermines a certain way of of framing the causal issue you know it undermines descartes problem

16:32 about you know things being in contact with other things right um and yeah there's no a priory difficulty with having kind of an extra causal factor um but i think there are a few reasons to be very skeptical that there actually is such such a thing i mean one is you might just think well why haven't we found it yet you know why why have we not observed anything happening in the brain that violates the known laws of physics but you might also think

17:07 like even if we did if we're going to postulate a law uh you know cause a law of nature that governs something that exists only in a very rare sort of physical structure only in brains then it's going to be uh it's going to have to be a far more complex law than any of the standard physical ones you know it's this kind of appeal that uh to how simple the physical laws are that you can supposedly you know write them all on on a t-shirt

17:39 um but you know but if the laws is somehow going to explain why only in brains do you get this extra thing appearing um then the statement of the law would have to include a physical specification of the structure of you know of a minimally necessary brain and that would be you know much more than a t-shirt that might be you know more than all the t-shirts in the world um at least a hoodie at least a hoodie yeah so do you think that same kind of argument is gonna you can marshal it

18:11 against emergentist versions of uh pansagism i i do yeah um i think i i've never been very attracted to the emergenciest versions of pan psychism precisely for this reason um it seems like they're going to have all of the the same sorts of problems um they they might be able to mitigate some of the problems to some extent um yeah i i don't know if i'm the fairest kind of exponent of

18:44 of how they see the mitigation happening right but they will sometimes say things like this you know it's less problematic for one sort of consciousness to emerge from another then for one for any sort of consciousness to emerge from something completely non-conscious maybe uh that's i can see the force of that intuition right um but i guess i'm i'm sort of more motivated by these like considerations of simplicity and continuity yeah yeah okay so suppose that one

19:19 is convinced by these uh anti-physicalist arguments and also suspicious of dualism as as you are um so then we we start looking at uh pan psychism um obvi the biggest problem for pennsylvania has always been the combination problem i think that's you know since the you know at least since james i think right william james um this is definitely yeah pointed out maybe um so can you first tell us how you interpret the combination problem and then we'll start talking about how the combining mind stuff uh experience inheritance and all that thing yeah um so i have this slogan i like to

19:53 say that the the combination of the problem is a combination of problems yeah um uh you know you can read different people talking about it and the actual argument that they give it's completely different because it's kind of an umbrella term for a few different difficulties um but the the basic difficulty is that you know if if pan psychism is going to make any progress over physicalism in terms of uh rendering human consciousness explainable um it's going to have to do so in a way that you know relates complex

20:30 composite consciousness in us to some sort of more basic consciousness and the obvious way to do that is to think well look the human brain is a complex physical structure that is nothing over and above a bunch of simpler physical structures standing in certain physical relations so the the natural thought is that the human mind will likewise be nothing over and above a bunch of simpler minds standing in certain mental relationships but when you try to think through what

21:02 that means it rapidly becomes so difficult and people have uh you know for a long time actually you know in some ways before any discussion of panseikism specifically um have argued that there's something specifically impossible about that you can find the arguments going back to descartes platinus um people saying look minds are indivisible minds are unified in this special way that differentiates them from any divisible composite system and they've usually used this as an argument for

21:35 dualism often actually as an argument for immortality right and say add the premise that the destruction can only mean like the separation of parts um but these intuitions i think run fairly deep um i call that the anti-combination intuition um and it comes out in a few particular ways that i can talk about but that i think is the kind of core idea yeah no go ahead and if you want to talk about those particular ways that'd be great yeah um also so

22:09 one way that it comes out i think is when we think about uh mental relations so you know one of the things that immediately strikes me if i wake up in the morning and i decide to check on my consciousness is that i'm having you know having a lot of experiences at once you know tactile visual emotional cognitive and so on um but they're all unified right and there's been a lot of work on you what exactly does that mean when you say they're unified but um but there's some really interesting sort of phenomenal relation

22:44 among my experiences they're they're experienced together um and if they are you know somehow coming to me from distinct parts of me then it looks like we we're gonna want to think of these relations as relations that can uh they can obtain between different subjects right and that's a very unfamiliar idea we're used to kind of thinking well there's there's the external relation between my experiences in yours and then there's the internal relations

23:16 between my experiences and my other experiences um but you know if if mine's combined then those two things have to somehow be like you know maybe it opposite end of a spectrum but there has to be continuity between them um uh so a different angle is to focus on subjects on the you know the eye the self whatever you call it um because you know if if i'm composed of these uh many simpler minds then it looks like those minds each of them individually isn't me

23:51 uh it is in some sense someone else um and yet i'm not someone else i'm me uh and so people have kind of been very puzzled but and there's a certain kind of vertigo that you get when you really think about okay i am just a bunch of these you know other people or other subjects um yeah so those are i think two of the the the kind of key aspect of it there are others i could i mean yeah i catalogue far too many i think i mean yeah so you bring up i mean i was going to ask

24:25 something else but you brought up just now sort of i guess it was a slip a little bit you said people instead of subjects um but personhood obviously i mean i guess why you did that was because person is a much more complicated issue but you don't think of these micro subjects as as persons because that would inquire rationality and you know probably or do you i guess uh um so yes standardly i would i would say no i'd say uh certainly at the fundamental level um you know the the electron mines or whatever there is at fundamental level

24:58 um you know we our only guide to the structure of their consciousness is the structure of their behavior and that's so simple that it seems completely unwarranted to attribute you know capacity for reflection decision making memory planning any of that stuff that we associate with personhood um it it may be that there are intermediate scales on which you do have multiple persons in the brain um so i talk a bit about the the split brain

25:31 uh phenomenon and the this you know the slightly troubling observation that uh you know i can continue to to be somewhat recognizable as the self-conscious person i am with one or the other of my cerebral hemispheres missing right um you know i'm paralyzed at first on part of my body i have various difficulties but uh it looks like my core kind of conscious capacities are somewhat redundantly instantiated in the brain um and so it may well be that there are

26:05 you know somewhere on the scale from between electrons and me there may be parts of me that that exhibits uh yeah these capacities to some extent yeah that's interesting i want to get to the split brain stuff a little bit later um so let's talk about the electron i mean so one thing you say in the in the beginning of the book is that you're sort of agnostic about whether you know particles are are the ultimate stopping point for physics and that if uh it turned out that there weren't you know it would be okay with you that that what

26:38 you're talking about is properties of whatever the fundamental level of physical reality is and so i guess i was a little bit um a little bit puzzled by what i thought was maybe a kind of a quick move on your part there because certainly if you take like a field ontology which you know like quantum field theory or something like that then it doesn't seem like you're gonna get i mean it doesn't seem like you're gonna be able to attribute minds to the little bits or to that there's intrinsic natures or something um and this you know large part is part

27:10 of an argument i guess for like anti-structural realism which you know maybe i think that you don't accept but so i do wonder whether you think there's any way that physics could turn out which would impact your your credence in this sort of thing yeah yeah so so i i do occasionally find myself sparring with other panzerkist colleagues um who think that it's it's really a significant fact that the uh the ultimate physical ontology may turn out to be you know something very very big rather

27:42 than lots of very very small things right um you know either a small number of very extensive fields or uh the universe as a whole or you know you can take this back to you know spinoza or schopenhauer who in spacetime is the one substance something like that right um and you know i'm not i don't want to rule out that these these would have really interesting results that would be worth exploring um but i guess i do think that well i mentioned a kind of a scale you

28:15 know of from the brain you know subsystems within the brain to neurons to molecules to atoms to subatomic particles um and the thing is i think that a lot of that that hierarchy is still gonna like that's a well evidenced clearly present structure in the world um and that's gonna um that's gonna still be there even if subatomic particles are somehow like abstractions from a

28:47 a giant field that pervades the universe or that is the universe right um and in particular these what we think of as smaller parts still exhibit uh a certain kind of uh ontological priority over the larger parts in that they can survive dispersion so you know my brain is made of a bunch of molecules and the molecules continue to be molecules you know independently of my brain if you if you've removed them they wouldn't sort of cease to be the

29:19 molecules that they are i mean they might get denatured over time by the temperature or whatever right um but my brain would be gone so it looks like my brain you know as a a complex whole is dependent on these simpler parts coming together and they in turn seem to be dependent on simple parts coming together and i guess i'm inclined to think that we'll make more headway at least understanding like the the us end of this uh this spectrum uh you know how the human mind relates

29:52 to its parts if we stick if we kind of focus on that even if you know when you get really far down to the ultimate level things get very weird so what where would be what would you be attributing the fundamental phenomenal properties too uh on on a on a view like that so i mean are you saying maybe i'm misunderstanding you but it sounds like what you're saying is well it could just be molecules instead of particles or um so i guess what i'm thinking is you know it may be for instance that

30:24 ultimately there's there's only one subject in in some suitably fundamental sense of subject just the field maybe the electromagnetic field or maybe the universe of the whole or something and it instantiates a lot of phenomenal properties um structured by a lot of a fine-grained instances of some small palette of uh phenomenal relations you know enough to to generate the the complexity that we observe and

30:58 some and within that kind of sea or ocean of consciousness um there will be kind of say like little i don't know vortex there's little structures that hold together and kind of undergo changes in their relations to each other um and we are one of those vortexes but it looks like we're made of smaller vortexes right i don't know if vortex is a useful analogy but uh descartes love vortexes so sure you did

31:30 um so it sounds like what you're saying is the distinction between what's sometimes called cosmopsychism and micropsychism is not really all that important for for what you're interested in that's that's the opinion that i've come to yeah i think a lot of the a lot of the same problems will kind of reappear in different guises whichever one you you pick um and i should say you know it's not just about scale so um susan schneider has pointed out that on a lot of models of the fundamental physics time itself is kind of an emergent

32:04 property so what is really most fundamental is non-temporal um and it's it's not at all clear whether consciousness it can can be non-temporal right so that would yeah that would be you know if if that works and that would potentially be a good argument against the letter of pan psychism um but i guess i kind of think look if if consciousness appears right when time appears um at you know at the level of whatever the smallest temporally extended entities are and

32:37 then compounds from that level up to us that's still kind of keeping most of what seems significant to me about and psychism as opposed to physicalism as opposed to dualism and so on so why do you i mean i know that that uh thing that you're referring to by susan um i do wonder why you think that uh time is required for for uh micro experiences especially the ultimately simple ones um i could get why you would it'd be required for us or more complex ones but why do you think it's a requirement of

33:10 consciousness period um oh i i mean i i don't have a particularly firm view on that perhaps it's not you know perhaps the perhaps of the really fundamental things have a sort of a temporal qualitative awareness um i mean you know historically i guess people have attributed something sort of like that to god yeah in a lot of systems and god is very different from us but usually it would be weird to think god is not

33:41 conscious um but at the same time other people have it's been kind of traditional to think of time as a key feature of consciousness um sometimes with the kind of contrast within space is a defining feature of physical objects time is a defining feature of consciousness right um so yeah i i don't i don't know which of those would be correct my point was that even if you thought that uh that time was required for consciousness right so even if it were sort of like you said defeated the letter of it wouldn't defeat the spirit of it so that's that's that's my feeling yeah

34:14 right okay interesting um yeah because i always have a i mean i'm a kind of flat-footed consciousness guy and i i you know i'm seeing people saying they hate type b physicists in the chat right now by the way i'm like guilty of being hated by them but uh um i i've also i find the very idea of consciousness just at the fundamental level hard to really understand because there's no kind of there's no sophistication to it there's no and it's just permanent it's always that it never changes it's just like you know

34:48 this electron has a conscious experience which exists as long as the electron exists um there might be change matching like changes in energy levels i yeah that would be kind of one of the questions that i feel like i'm not well positioned to directly address but in to the extent that the properties of electrons change that would presumably correspond with some sort of change in their very simple consciousness right so being attracted and repelled are two

35:21 different states i guess uh header has some things sort of along those lines right uh yeah um i'm gonna talk to her about that later actually um okay so i mean yeah okay so i guess that's not as bad as i thought it was then because i thought it was that your view was just that there was like this permanent static sort of states which never but uh as long as you allow some change i guess i can sort of understand it um so so how let's let's talk about experiential inheritance um and how that's going to help us with these uh combination problems because actually that was one part of the book where i

35:54 found myself probably the most skeptical was when you applied it not not just the idea of experiment to inheritance or ei as you call it i i've sort of got my mind around that i think but to though to the way in which this was supposed to help us with the combination problem okay um so so first can you tell us about how you uh think about inheritance in this way and and then we'll talk about how it applies yeah so so as i said you know part of the the combination problem with this worry about

36:25 subjects about how how does something that's me uh relate to these other things that aren't me um and it kind of looked to me like the the answer has to be something along the lines of well they're not me individually but they they are me collectively that the this distinction between the one and the many um is is not that metaphysically deep um and this is a

36:56 view that you know has already been defended uh in you know non-mind-related metaphysics right um it's often called composition as identity uh or composition as something like identity or something analogous to identity um the thought being that you know that what we call one whole is is in some sense just the the very same bit of reality as the set of what we call its part it's just that we either count it as one thing or we divide it into into many things it's the same reality

37:27 whichever way you slice it right and that seems to work for the most of the fundamental physical properties you know the mass of the object is the same whether you count it as one object or whether you count it as two halves or three thirds or whatever right um and so i thought well i'm kind of being pushed towards uh wanting consciousness to to be susceptible of that same kind of of approach that it's the same mass of consciousness you know going on here um and we can either attribute the bits

38:02 of it to the part we can kind of carve it up like that or we can count it as one and then you i'm something like that one thing that has all those experiences together um and yeah so a theorem that kind of falls out of that that approach is experience inheritance that you know whenever some part of an object has an experiential property that thing also has that experiential property um and there has to be certain caveats to that um just like they have to be caveats to

38:34 talking about you know electrical charge inheritance um or any any analogous principle but that basic idea that it's the same reality whichever way you slice it um is the idea that i was trying to get across there yeah i mean that's very interesting so i mean some of this is going to hinge on what you think of as a part and what you think of as a whole and so you want to include like obviously your brain as a as a whole but you you would generally as a whole but like for instance you and

39:07 i are not a whole um or or or would you count that us you and i together as a whole or a an airstats hole or something like that or do you make this kind of distinction so so this is one of the the reasons why i think the book is admittedly a kind of a dense uh book is that i think the nature of holes is one of these topics where there are conflicting intuitions to address and you kind of have to do

39:42 different say different things in different chapters to to make sense of them so so one really obvious and basic observation is that you know sometimes the whole is more than the sum of its parts and sometimes it's not so you know the stuff together here is integrated in a way that allows it to work together um in a way that you know you and i are largely not um and so that's going to make a big difference to how the the minds combine over here and how the mind is combined between the two

40:14 of us um and i try to kind of bring that out by talking about structure specific holes i i am a structured specific hole in the sense that i am defined by a certain structure and i would cease to exist if that structure ceased to obtain among my parts but i also think that at the level of really fundamental metaphysics um that's there's another sort of hole that needs to be talked about and that i think are

40:47 called aggregates which are the things that for which compositional identity really does hold they are just the many parts considered as one um and so they'll have different persistence conditions it's one of the key differences um you know that if we talk about you know the hole here in the sense of an aggregate then if it were dispersed to you know wide my head was blown up and all the parts went to different places the aggregate still exists it's still you know it's scattered now it's one piece here one bit fair but still

41:20 exists because it's just them considered as one right um and part of the reason why we have to think about aggregates at the very fundamental level is that the difference between you know highly structured holes and holes that aren't structured like that um i think is is susceptible to sovereignty's objections right you know yes me and you are not related in the same way that my two cerebral hemispheres are but we're related in some of the same ways at the very least we're currently you know happily communicating information in

41:53 ways that is updating the structure of my brain to match certain structures of yours right and if you just added more and more of that by imperceptibly increasing steps uh you would get to a point where you know we would be just as integrated as two halves of a brain and at that point our you know the mind that we combine to make would be something like an individual human mind even though right now it's something much more like a a widely dispersed aggregate now you know that's kind of what i try to the steps from one to the other what

42:25 i tried to go through in the final chapter with my perhaps slightly uh macabre the thought experiment when two become one yes um i don't know if this is sort of a tangent but how do you read fiction at all ever uh i i i try to um yeah i wish i read more fiction than i do but i've i've i've read a fair amount yes there's a recent um book by a woman named anne likey or leckie um i'm not sure it's uh but she has she has a character in there that's a a

42:58 composite of many hundreds of minds um that have joined together in this so she actually that's one of the things that people really like about this this series of books of hers is that she really tries to imagine this thought experiment that you cool it's a version of it i think but it's actually a character in the book and she tries to like tell it from their point of view and it's um it's very it's very interesting yeah i mean there's there's really there would be a lot to write if you ever tried to do a systematic history of composite minds in fiction yeah um because yeah there were uh

43:34 cases like the one you talk just talk about and lucky um the you know the the various menacing hive minds that you find kind of pursuing the protagonists around the star trek universe um there's there's very sort of telepathy that often kind of push at the boundaries between minds um and potentially kind of blur them and it's i mean a lot of a lot i will say a lot of the i think a lot of the depiction of composite mind in fiction is often

44:09 driven less by the reality of what it's what it actually would be like and more by you know sublimated political anxieties right um about mass consumption and so on um but that's definitely something that i will have to look into because i do love seeing this kind of thing explored in fiction yeah i'll send you i'll send you the link to it if you're interested um so but going back to the the main issue i mean i guess part of what i was was thinking about was that you know taking quantum mechanics seriously like we are there are senses in which you and i are a hole

44:41 a structured hole even because we've been in the same room together and so therefore our atoms are entangled uh particles are entangled and that in a sense means that we are no longer fully separate but so that's more than just an aggregate wouldn't you say or i mean once you start bringing yeah sorts of things yeah uh and so i should i mean so certainly an aggregate is not defined as you know having no structure well it's just defined independently whether they're structured or not oh i thought it was merely like you could like you know it's like the left half of my

45:14 hand and that pine tree over there it was more of like that sort of thing um yeah no so so an aggregate is meant to be the the very inclusive category that includes um those sort of holes along with cases where there is more structure i see um but what what distinguishes them is they're not defined by the structure um so they don't have persistence conditions that relate to the maintenance of that structure right okay um yeah that makes sense okay good

45:44 all right so um so when we're talking about so slicing up the individual components and attributing the same properties to it so you want to say well like i'm you're hearing the sound of my voice right now but so is this neuron in your head is also hearing the sound of murray voice i wonder how far that extends because we focus a lot on the brain but i'm wondering about your liver and your kidney and you know the do those figure in um so one question that i have and this is something i've talked about with philip before uh when i was talking with him in

46:16 bernardo and that you know philip was very brain focused and bernardo was like no it's the whole organism and of course there's other background disagreements but that was one thing that came up and i do wonder what your view about that kind of uh yeah um so i mean so as you say there's there's kind of two questions here so so one question is you know how much is it just a brain story you know our minds to what extent are they just brain based and to what extent does the broader

46:50 peripheral and enteric nervous system actually contribute to what we think of as our mind our mental lives and then does the question of you know whichever of those models is true um how does that like what does that look like in a constitutive pan cyclist framework right um so so i i'm fairly agnostic i think about the first question um i'm very particularly of like a causal constitutive fallacy kind of

47:24 running too much from oh this thing causely affects my mental life to saying this thing is a part of my mental life um and so suppose that we take you know some part of me that's almost certainly not a constituent of my mental life um i maybe my kidneys i don't know i don't know enough about kidneys for this really but um i think a pan psychist ought to say that the kidneys are conscious um kind of just like everything else

47:57 they're probably uh you know closer to the consciousness of something like a plant than to that of a brain endowed organism um and that consciousness that they have is a component of all the consciousness stuff going on in my body um but it might make relatively little contribution to the consciousness that i report when i talk to you the consciousness that's within the scope of my introspective mechanisms um and yeah so some similar

48:31 questions arise when people think about pregnancy you know there's a sense in which the the developing fetus uh is a part of the parent's body certainly to some extent biologically it's got a shared circulatory system right um and you might think that towards the end at least there's a there's consciousness going on in the in the developing brain um and so you might say sure that's an element of the total conscious goings on within this this organism but it's not connected in the right ways

49:04 to the brain for it to fall within the purview of the introspective mechanisms that generate the reports the you know the reflection that by which the the parent can say is what i'm experiencing right now so so i guess this is maybe an area where you do disagree with some other hand psychists but because i don't know if uh that generally they want to say the liver or kidney is is um like the ch is the chair conscious i mean are spoons conscious what i've understood mostly is that the

49:35 answer is no um those things have conscious parts but they are not the whole is not conscious in any way but i'm hearing you it sounds like you're saying yes yeah so i i'm a universalist pancycist um i believe in unrestricted phenomenal composition i see um and philip phillip gotham has also defended unrestricted phenomenal composition in print i don't know if it's his current view um but it's certainly not for instance headers view right um there are certainly

50:07 some pentagons who want to have highly restricted phenomenal composition often because they're more sympathetic to emergentism than i am um so i i mean and i'm i'm sympathetic to unrestricted phenomenal composition for the same reason that david lewis is sympathetic to unrestricted composition in general um namely that there's no sharp boundary between the cases where it seems intuitively right to say that there's composition and the cases where it seems intuitively wrong

50:39 to say that um and although you know lots of things can vary across a fuzzy boundary it's plausible that nothing really fundamental can vary right um because fundamental things can't be analyzed as changes in degree on some underlying spectrum and so if you think that being conscious or not is a fundamental difference then [Music] then i i think yes vagueness considerations are going to push you towards

51:11 allowing all composite things to be conscious in some sense um although i should know as you say the the book is not exclusively about pancake of them so you know in in chapter five i do give a you know a model on which there is vagueness about the boundaries of consciousness and not all things are conscious um and you and one of the implications of that will be that some entities may be indeterminate they may be neither definitely conscious nor definitely not conscious and you're saying on the pan psychism that you accept that's not the case exactly i mean i'll still want to say

51:45 about those cases that there's there's maybe something that's indeterminate like it may be indeterminate whether we should call them intelligent or not um you know based on the the fact that they partly match the model we have from ourselves and partly don't um but the pan psychist i think has to deny that that vague question corresponds to the question of consciousness per se yeah so is this related to i mean maybe i'm i'm drawing a connection that isn't there

52:17 but is this related to your argument about ei being a priori that the experiential inheritance is a priori because it sounds you know well anyway let me ask you what can you tell us why you think it's a it's a priority that this is true and then i'll figure out whether i was mistaken or not sure so so yeah so let me say two things i guess um so yeah why why is it the case that it's the same consciousness whether you count it as one whole or as many parts right um so the priming argument i give for this

52:50 is uh it is a priori and is derived from a claim about the nature of composition at least when we're talking about aggregates but they just are the same portion of reality described in a different way and i try to kind of motivate the thought that for that reason there will always be some corresponding property of the whole for any property of the parts um it won't always be the same property right um so i you know my kind of go to example is like a i take a bunch of circles and i arrange

53:24 them in a square shape you know i can say that this this hole i've made is the very same thing as all of these circles together it's not circular but they are so there's that difference in properties but it does have corresponding properties it has the you know the fine grain shape properties that are like that its edge has this kind of circular contours to it um and conversely you know the parts aren't square even though the whole is but they do collectively have a corresponding property namely being arranged you know in a square pattern relative to each other um

54:01 and so the thought is uh yeah given that it's the same portion of reality either way it must be corresponding properties and if the properties in question are fundamental ones ones that can't be analyzed into any more basic terms then the only possible corresponding property would be that very same property yeah so that's that's the the attempt i make to give an eight five case for it um i do also say in chapter chapter three that there might be ways

54:35 of giving more a posteriori arguments there might be some other routes to the same conclusion um part of me kind of trying to hedge my best a bit right but but you're most attracted to the a priori version because of i mean a lot of it had to do with just thinking about composition and sort of lessons there to consciousness yeah exactly um and i guess yeah part of me is is motivated by i guess kind of reacting against um or i mean using as a useful jumping

55:09 off point um some of the work uh about eliminativism regarding holes so you know some philosophers have said uh you know holes don't exist there's actually there's just you know the fundamental particles or whatever there is at the ultimate level arranged in certain ways there's no such thing as tables there's no such thing as coffee mugs um cable-wise yes exactly particles around the table right um and they give an argument for that essentially along the following lines it

55:42 looks to me they start by assuming um that the whole is something different from its parts um and then they say well if it's something different then you know we should only admit it into our ontology if it has a job to do and the thing is holes largely don't have a job to do because any job they would do is already done by their parts so trenton merrick's talks a lot about you know you throw a baseball at the window the window shatters well you know what is responsible for that

56:15 if you have you know simples arranged baseball-wise their properties both intrinsic and relational will explain why the window shatters you don't need to add a baseball in there and so he says therefore there are no baseballs and i think that's like a reductive ad absurdum of treating the whole and the parts as two different things thinking that we have to independently assign properties to them so i think look you know if an argument has led me to say there's no such thing as baseballs i should reconsider the steps that led me to that

56:48 point um and in particular you know if i end up denying the existence of baseballs because i wanted a baseball to be an independent reality from the the parts that make it up then maybe i should just abandon that expectation i should just say you know the baseball just is the symbols of a baseball wife right how long is that they do exactly i mean it's interesting because you can see like a similarity between like uh dragon kim's causal drainage argument um so if you think that the the hello

57:23 if you think that we're gonna have like the mental properties uh do any work but they're constituted or identical to or whatever functionally realized by these physical properties then those are the things which really do the work and so it sounds like you're gonna give us roughly the same sort of response in that case as well that's no uh that's that's a reductio of thinking that these things um are well the functional property and the realizer are distinct or something like that yeah i mean maybe it's not a reductive thinking that they are distinct in some sufficiently thin sense right but you you can't separate them

57:58 too much you can't start treating them as kind of independent matters you know the functional property perhaps is not strictly identical to any of the realizer properties but it's also clearly not an extra thing um you know it's it is dependent on them in such a way that it i would want to say inherits their causal efficacy right um and i want to be able to say something something similar about consciousness something so about holes in general um and yeah i mean the reason why i've

58:33 sometimes qualified composition as identity as composition as something very close to identity is that the strict identity statements often become problematic for instance for modal reasons to do with persistence conditions right but the the kind of guiding intuition that we're not adding extra things we're just reorganizing how we think about the same things um i think that's that's worth holding on to yeah interesting so can i i want to circle back around to the the inheritance idea here because it's it's more

59:06 than you just inherit the phenomenal properties of the of the of the parts but it's well because well what i guess yeah what happens to the subjects um you don't inherit the subjectiveness the subjects you just inherit their phenomenal properties is that is that how it works or how exactly are we thinking of the relation between subjects and phenomenal experiences and how do those inheritance properties work so so one of the tricky things here and i know i keep sort of saying this is that it depends a lot on

59:39 how you think of subjects right um i was thinking of the metaphysical notion right yeah okay so i mean in that sense i guess i would say something like you know the parts are subjects you know that's what it means for them to have phenomenal properties i mean the whole is a subject that's what it means for it to have phenomenal properties um and so yeah it doesn't really make sense to talk about the whole inheriting the the subject of the particle but it is if it is the parts

1:00:10 you know subject to some caveats then that's that's something like it inheritance i mean it it is a subject and it is just them um i guess how do you get the this the the u-level subject uh so i guess what you're saying is that the u-level subject really just is a bunch of micro subjects but it also sounds like what you're saying is not the u-level subject is something yeah over the micro-level subject so that's i guess what i'm getting

1:00:41 hung up on right so i i want to deny the over and above thing i want to say that the me level subject is nothing over and above the micro level subject um at the same time the me level subject has some really interesting properties like say self-awareness and memory um that gives me this autobiographical sense of my myself as continuing over time do you say silver awareness uh sorry i said self-awareness oh i heard silverware sorry

1:01:14 okay um silver awareness maybe for certain artificial intelligences made of silver circuitry but no um so self-awareness right awareness and i do want to say that that is a that is ultimately going to be traceable to some relational fact about the micro subjects the fact that they stand in the right sort of relations to enable them collectively to be self-aware

1:01:47 um in the book i end up kind of talking about these at different places because i think when you want to discuss self-awareness it's going to be you're going to get lost in the details if you're still really focusing on micro subjects right at the micro level just like you know a physicalist i think it doesn't have to explain the mechanisms that allow the brain to be self-aware in terms of atoms ultimately it does boil down to the atoms right but if you look at the atom's scale you won't be able to see the structure that generates self-awareness

1:02:21 yeah so i guess maybe i'm falling prey to the baseball adams thing i guess i'm not i'm not sure how the u-level subject ends up being a subject um in the in the sense in the metaphysical sense i can see how it's a subject in the other senses the psychological sense and so forth but um so first of all like maybe i should just ask you to say what you mean by by the metaphysical center sure so so i think that when people talk about the subject or

1:02:56 the self or the the me sometimes what they have in mind is uh what i call a persona something defined by the psychological traits that make you unique that make you distinctively yourself um people often talk a lot about memory here but also about your personality your values um and you can kind of get people to have these intuitions by talking about uh thought experiments where you know maybe i i die but uh all the information from my brain is it's uploaded or downloaded

1:03:28 into some other person or system uh you know and that system will think in the same way as me it'll have the same memories um it will you know say hello this is luke here um and so one way of thinking about subject is that the subject is what has survived into this new body there um but i think people also have the intuition sometimes that that the me is so something very basic that lies beneath

1:03:59 all of my changing experiences and thoughts you know it's the the thing that allows there to be any experiences and thoughts at all and it would you know i could survive even losing my memories of losing my personality um and i i separate those two in the book because they put very different explanatory demands on on an account of you know where you get a subject you know how do you explain the existence of the subject because one of them you know will focus on rich information processing but won't have a requirement

1:04:33 that subjects be fundamental or kind of metaphysically heavyweight and the other the other one will kind of be the other way around right um but maybe i can just ask do you see a when you say that you don't see how the the composite thing is a subject do you see how it gets phenomenal properties um well through the inheritance right just yeah so that was part of maybe that's where i'm getting hung up on because yeah i don't really i guess i don't understand how i get the

1:05:05 phenomenal properties i do have from the ones at the micro level uh and that's i know you have a story about confusion so maybe we'll end up having to talk about that in order to get to get through this but um i i guess what i don't what i'm yeah so what's confusing me is how i as a subject have the experiences i do which ultimately are just composites of uh the more fundamental subjects and their experiences um it seems like what you would get is a

1:05:40 lot of subjects and a lot of experiences rather than a subject so i don't yeah so maybe i don't see how i get phenomenal properties yeah um i mean so so part of the intention when arguing for experience inheritance was that it would get you a composite subject just uh relying on the premise that anything that has a phenomenal property is a subject because if you have a phenomenal property that means that there's something it's like to be you and the subject is just defined as something something that there is something it's like to be um

1:06:14 and so so part of the part of the kind of the shift in in view that i'm trying to go for on which you know it's the same mass of consciousness however you carve it is to kind of to kind of say look and on any way of carving it and anything that appears on the given scheme of division will be a subject because it's it's a it's a thing with consciousness and to be a subject just is to have consciousness but yeah so i guess i i don't see why it

1:06:47 isn't the micro subjects that are the subjects and then maybe there's an illusion of this other thing but uh maybe that's because i'm just not fully taking seriously the argument or so i must be subject to the illusion um the persona or something like that i guess i mean i guess if it seems to the persona like it's a subject like that that seems to me like it is being a subject at least if it's a phenomenal illusion yeah i can i can see what you're saying

1:07:20 but because i guess i was reading too much into your definition of subject maybe that's what i'm doing wrong here um because i was thinking of the subject a subject as a thing which has the properties um and if anything was that it would be the fundamental elements they're the things here uh and yeah there's a structured hole that's me because there's all these relations between the parts but there isn't some unif well maybe yeah maybe i'm it's the phenomenal unity that's yeah so i i think i'm getting hung up on every every which way

1:07:55 so i just don't see i mean i it's not that i want me subject level me to be a simple but i would like me to be a thing that has phenomenal properties and i guess i don't see how you get that from what you get the thing yeah yeah but it sounds like what you're saying is you don't need that all you need is that there are fundamental properties and then but it's a factor there's a subject i mean i it's not that i think the phenomenal properties don't don't belong to a thing the thing is is the brain it's the it's the many micro subjects together it's the hole that they form

1:08:27 right um i guess i'm being in a sense quite reductive about things yeah this one thing just is all of these other things um yeah partly because i think you know if you if you want a thing that's something more than a bunch of other things together then there might not be any things like that you know anywhere mental or physical right um um well i agree yes i agree i mean so that part of this maybe was to talk about the

1:08:59 unity of consciousness because you you do sort of especially phenomenal unity not like the kind of functional stuff um but you do assume that that's a real property uh whereas you know i guess someone like me would sort of think we have the illusion of unity at more than we have actual phenomenal unity um uh so well so how do we get on your view phenomenal unity from the micro subjects today sure yeah so so phenomenal unity is often introduced in a kind of an ostensive way people will say

1:09:33 you know here are two experiences i'm currently having um let me you know attend to this fact i'm having them together they have a conjoint phenomenology it's not just something it's like to see the screen and something it's like to feel my hand it's something it's like to see the screen and feel my hand together right um and uh and i likely i think follow um people who have people like timbane and barry daynton and dave thomas who have written about this relation given somewhat different

1:10:06 analyses of it but but take that to be some interesting relation here that kind of takes two experiences and forms them into a third experience that um that that is the two of them had together right um and i i think that if consciousness is a fundamental property and this relation will probably have to be a fundamental relation um because it is defined as you know the relation between two things such that together they are a conscious state

1:10:40 but it's not a phenomenal relation i mean it's it itself doesn't have a phenomenology the relation uh it doesn't have a phenomenology that belongs distinctively to it but it's obtaining is always a phenomenal fact because the change in their phenomenology from having the two of them not unified to having them unified i think there's a change in phenomenology from that so if i uh yeah at least to a unified thing that

1:11:15 that something phenomenally changes as opposed to just two phenomenal things are joined together yeah the i think the the joining together is a phenomenal joining together it changes them from two uh you know independent or separate experiences to a complex experience um i mean it's it's a little tricky to talk about this because on lots of views here it doesn't quite make sense to think of a single subject having two disunified experiences so one of the the theses that people debate is must the subject experiences all be

1:11:47 unified it might be that when the two experiences aren't unified um you know that's that's a reason for saying that they're not they belong to the same subject right um and so i do think though that if if this is a fundamental relation then and if pansexism is true then the most natural way to fit it into the world is as one of the physical fundamental relations that is phenomenal unity is the kind of intrinsic nature of i don't know what one of the

1:12:19 interactions or maybe just spatial distance or something like that yeah okay so and maybe if i can just add so sorry sorry so i think part of where people part of what may be seeming problematic to you about how you get the macro subject is is something like the feeling well if each part of me is a subject and i've got all of their experiences together i still don't have you know a big phenomenal field like i

1:12:52 experience right in which in which all of those experiences apart right is i don't have these experiences phenomenally unified with one another um and i i think it's at least a live possibility that there could have been a universe uh on which that happened a universe with lots of micro subjects that never become phenomenally unified um but i think that would be very

1:13:25 different from our own universe the fact that each of us has phenomenally unified experience indicates that somehow phenomenal dnd is established um and given the the assumptions i just discussed um it's probably going to be one of the fundamental physical relations and if that's the case then it's actually there so to speak from the beginning you know it doesn't have to be added at a certain point in the creation of the brain but it's actually part of the background conditions that enable the brain or any other physical structure to come together um so maybe maybe you can take me as offering in response

1:14:01 to you know your worry about how to again actual subject with a single unified experience uh if if that really is needed then i'm happy to build it in to the fundamental architecture of the universe yeah i see interesting i guess part of it also is that i feel like for for someone like me that that likes to approach things from like a kind of higher order theory point of view which i know we disagree on and that's fine um but but i do find very compelling the idea that uh that phenomenal consciousness is

1:14:35 for me that it's that when i have an experience it's it's it's not just there but it's for it's presented to me in a certain way like it's from my point of view there's something that's like for me to have it and it i guess i feel like if there were a bunch of me's or tiny subjects that that would be the way it was presented um and it isn't so this is a little it's not it's related to the idea that you know introspectively things don't seem like a bunch of little things but from the subject point of view um so it doesn't seem like there's a

1:15:07 bunch of subjects it seems like it's it's my experience not a bunch of different subjects experience and so i i i mean maybe this is why i was thinking confusion is going to play a role here but i don't know so what what do you think about that kind of uh you know that that the phenomenal consciousness presents itself as being for the subject yeah yeah yeah so so i want to to agree with the the basic thought that yeah it's some somehow it's like built into conscious

1:15:39 experience that it has this for me nurse right uh or whatever we call it a sense of mindness um but i don't think that that mindness is kind of guaranteed to to kind of track all of the metaphysical facts about who it is in fact for and relay them to each of the subjects that it's for um so i think for instance that uh you talked about i think like hearing hearing a voice and there's also some

1:16:12 neuron that's having that experience more plausibly you know an assemblage of nuance right some part of me um so i i think the the view that you end up having to kind of hold uh if you want to combine minds is that there is this one experience of hearing this voice it belongs to me and it belongs to this part of me and it has built into it this sense of being for me being mine but what that means is that for every subject to experience with it it is experienced you know as belonging

1:16:44 to them right um and i think that that's even when the themes are different even when the themes are different each of them will feel this is mine and they'll be right you know i'm not saying that this is an illusion right i'm just saying that there's that this is not omniscience so to speak right um and i think that there's a separate story to tell about yeah how do i form my judgments of self and other um you know what is it that makes me feel

1:17:15 like some some experience uh or broadly some action or some some event is mine or is someone else's and i think that has a lot more to do with uh like not not so much the basic metaphysical factor who actually has it but about the the volitional dynamics how it relates to my will right you can kind of trick people into thinking an action is theirs if it's the exact same action that they were willing at that moment right um and in a sense you know all the parts of me

1:17:47 are subject to this sort of illusion in that you know in in good cases all the parts of me are on the same page and they have a unified plan and that makes them all feel like oh it's just it's just all all the one of us so to speak um but sometimes that does break down and then you do get to start you start to get this phenomenology of alienation and dissociation right so so do you think the minus goes all the way down to the fundamental level like for the electrons is it true uh i i i'm inclined to think so although of

1:18:21 course then we do have to start you know unpacking there are different ways in which something can seem mine i don't want to build in you know a tendency to reflection or the capacity to form the concept of myself um [Music] but i i'm i'm happy to think that if this really is a built-in element of conscious experience as such then it's then it's yeah that presents all the way down i'm happy to say that it's something like chalmers's view that there's that there's acquaintance and acquaintances has carries with it also

1:18:55 acquaintance with the acquaintance or something like that that's somehow built into it or yeah exactly it sounds like it's going to start getting more complicated fundamental properties at the at the micro level well not necessarily i mean i think part of the part of the idea of of acquaintance and likewise part of the idea of like the reflexive kind of self consciousness of self-consciousness um for people who like that idea is that it's you know each layer of self there is not an extra thing it's just that the the experience itself is of itself and

1:19:28 thereby of itself being of itself whether that's all kind of packed in um and that the complexity only comes when you have evolved you know a brain that can unpack that formulate it into sentences and connect it with memories and form plans and so on i guess it still seems to me a bit introspectively puzzling that i don't have access to the composite nature of the subject um it it just it doesn't seem like what i

1:20:03 get maybe this is comes out the reflectivity but it doesn't seem like i have awareness for myself for that self for itself for those cells for it just it seems introspectively not like that i mean so the the i mean the verbal expression of mindness is tricky because in a sense i'm trying to kind of separate mindness as this special quality from the like referential machinery of

1:20:37 picking out a particular subject you know it's yeah precisely it's not this experience for this and this experience for that all of them i have mindness so all of them are experienced by me as mine um but i guess what i'm saying what i've done to cut you up but i guess what i'm what i just occurred to me is what i'm thinking is that that's a phenomenal property of the experience and so should be present in in my in the me the me level experience but but you don't find it there and so

1:21:10 if it is phenomenally manifest and there's a bunch of them there and you don't find them and i think it i i guess i sort of want to say that it is present um you know but part of what i sort of try to to motivate is to thought you know we've never been anything other than what we are you know if we are in fact a you know huge assemblage of many many minds together then that's all that we've ever been and that's what we were talking about when we formed these you know these impressions of mindness

1:21:43 and what consciousness is like um so i i sort of wanted to to see if i at least see if i can think through the idea that this is what it's like to be many experiences at once um is it possible to first just take a five-minute break at all yeah if you like if you're willing to continue that's absolutely fine yeah sure uh let me just come back in a couple minutes okay thanks i'll whistle dixie while we're doing that all right

1:24:23 i got glitter on me from uh kevin's art project oh hello all right hello

1:25:55 if you have to leave that's no problem i don't know i just uh just had to take a quick break okay cool um cat you issues see his tail off backwards and forwards yeah um so i mean i i did want to because i guess this is uh getting to issues at least in the same ballpark as um what i think of as an objection to this

1:26:28 sort of view which you deal with extensively in the book so i did kind of want to bring it up which is that introspectively if you have a kind of revelation um and i know you have a paper on this too but the hoist by our own petard i had to look that up i did not know what that means so i guess that's from shakespeare means you know blowing up by your own bomb or something i did not know that yes um but anyway so whether the the thesis of revelation is a problem for the kind of pan psychism that you want to defend and i pressed philip a little bit on this and i've always thought that it was but your paper is very interesting and defends the idea that no it's not

1:27:02 uh and really it's because there's like a family approach to revelation it's not one one sort of thing um but can i anyway so can you tell us a little bit about revelation and how that's supposed to work sure sure yeah so so revelation is the idea that being conscious tells you what consciousness is by having an experience you are put in a position to to grasp something like its nature maybe not the whole nature of everything to do with it at least the nature of what that experiential quality is like

1:27:35 um so you know what when i when i see something red i know what it's like to see red i may not know everything there is to know about that but i i know what defines that experiential type um and this idea that there's some kind of a genuine grasping of nature is i i think fairly important to the arguments against physicalism yeah um and i'm i'm sure philip said that uh he's he's developed

1:28:11 that that line of thought at length um but it does look like it's potentially a problem for constitutive and psychists because you know they are saying look when you have an experience there's a lot going on there that you don't know about namely you know a trillion simpler experiences or aspects of a trillion simple experiences kind of blended together um and so what i try to do in the book and yeah add a bit more length uh in the paper

1:28:43 is try to diffuse this threat um in particular i try to say well they get a few kind of twists and turns the argument argument can take but the basic idea is um yeah you you do have genuine knowledge of the the nature of the complex quality you know what it's like to see red you know you know uh what seeing red is in general um you don't know what on this occasion

1:29:20 uh gives rise to that experience you don't have insight into what constitutes this particular instance of seeing red right um but what that means is that you are being acquainted with the nature of this quality you are in a position that if you're acquainted with or familiar with the nature of some other things you should be in a position to tell whether or not they are enough to explain it um yeah and that that's why this kind of substantiates the argument

1:29:55 against physicalism because physicalism uh you know requires us to in some sense know what it is about the physical that explains consciousness um and so if we so all you need is acquaintance with the nature of say seeing red uh to be able to evaluate you know does this complicated physical arrangement is that the right kind of thing to explain this um and that leaves does leave it open i think for the constitutive pancakes to say

1:30:28 uh you know the red in this case is constituted by a lot of simple qualities and we don't know those distinctly we don't have you know them in isolation so in a sense we can't actually perform this evaluation of whether they are enough to explain the redness but we don't have the argument against antichrism analogous judgment against physicalism because pancitis you know in a sense are almost defined by saying there is something at the fundamental level that it eludes our scientific craft this there's something there that we don't

1:31:01 have a grasp on um except that we know it's something like what we ourselves experience so i yeah yeah i guess i'm i find that pretty puzzling um because well for for for a couple of reasons firstly the argument against physicalism because it seems like the physicalists could do the same thing and say well what we know is the experiential nature of the property uh and that's what i think actually but that doesn't mean you know what its metaphysical nature is its metaphysical nature maybe

1:31:33 neurons or fundamental properties of atoms that are conscious so so how do you preserve i guess what i was one thing i was curious about is how you preserve the argument against physicalism and against this kind of move which i was just trying to make yeah yeah go ahead yeah uh well so so i think it's it's correct to say in that instance that uh we don't know you know just through the revelation principle we don't know the constituents or the basis of our particular experience of red on a given

1:32:06 occasion right um what we know is the what it is for an experience to be of that right um and that i was saying is enough for us to to make arguments of the form here's a you know a candidate explainer is this the right kind of thing to explain why we would have an experience of red and my claim essentially is that panseikism has you might say a greater epistemic humility about

1:32:38 the fundamental level or it you know it has a picture of the fundamental level um that has more space for things that we aren't acquainted with right um in a way that kind of i think would in some ways defeat the motivation for physicalism you know physicalists will sometimes say things like oh perhaps there's some mysterious feature of the physical that we don't know about yet but that is kind of the first step you know towards something closer to pan psychism that kind of non-standard physicalism yeah yeah like the sort of view on which

1:33:12 there's something else you know beyond what physics says there's something else about the fundamental uh nature of things that if we understood it would allow us to understand why we're conscious right but but what i guess i'm confused about is why we need that as physicists why isn't it enough to say that revelation tells us about the experiential nature of the property but not about what metaphysically it is and then further separate question about

1:33:44 what that is and you can give arguments that it's physical or not but i'm not sure why revelation by itself than has any relevance to physicalism so so i think maybe we're drawing slightly different distinctions here okay um so i i was distinguishing between the the the particular things that constitute a given instance of an experience like you know me seeing red right now and i was contrasting that with the property of having an experience of redness in

1:34:17 general right and it sounds like you are trying to pull apart two aspects of that second thing the experiential nature of the property in general and the metaphysical nature of the property in general right yeah and i guess i i'm not sure i'm not quite sure what that means really because i would have thought that you know it's an experiential property so it's experiential nature just is its nature you know that's that's what it is to be in experiential property is to feel a certain way um so i guess i'm sort of yeah i'm not sure what the

1:34:52 well why why why aren't you doing the same thing i mean i like i see i see your point here why isn't it the same for you given that the ultimate nature of it is composites uh in this way so because i i think that to be a claim about the the basis of a particular instance right so so one of the things that this does commit me to um is the idea that uh you could have different beings in different possible worlds that all

1:35:27 have the same experiential quality but all see redness right um but one of them is perhaps a cartesian soul for which the redness property is not grounded in anything else that's just the basic fact about it right um and maybe for us the pan cyclist thinks it's grounded in a certain set of uh simpler experiences together maybe in another universe it's grounded in a different set of simple experiences together and and each of these

1:36:03 has to be such that a subject who fully grasped the simple experiences could tell that they can generate redness you know that link it has to be intelligible but but it may be a many one relation so how is it but i might be i think the the key thing that maybe is dividing us is my distinction is between particular instances um concretely right and the property as a universal and it sounds like you're trying to

1:36:34 pull apart two aspects of the property as a universal well i was thinking of the instance like a particular instance of experiencing red um so i i i do think uh some kind of revelation thesis is true about that thing's experiential nature but i don't think that tells you i mean certainly doesn't tell you that if idealism is true or not it doesn't tell you whether pansexism is true or not just knowing what it's like to see red in a given particular

1:37:07 instance doesn't reveal the metaphysical basis of that particular experience although i think we've got to do is introspect and rule out idealism but that we can't do that so i guess i i think that it tells it it puts you in a position to evaluate candidate explanations it doesn't tell you what the specific explanation of that instance is but it puts you in a position to evaluate candidate explanations if you fully understand them yeah i guess i don't see that

1:37:38 that okay i mean i guess that's where you just say conceivability arguments and things like that that's where the evaluation of those candidates comes in yeah exactly uh-huh right so we disagreed there um but so okay uh because the reasonable reason i brought up revelation was that i i thought that this is an argument against pan psychism and but the way you phrased it just now was very careful obviously because you didn't say we know everything there is to know about it we just know what it's like to see red which could turn out to be a composite thing on your view so then what we know

1:38:11 is like what it's like to have a composite experience but but i hear like other versions of this that are much more specific and and say things like well revelation tells us everything there is to know about red uh in the experiencing of it we know everything there is to know about it um and you can't you don't you can't endorse that um well i think again it matters a lot whether whether that is everything there is to know about my particular experience of red right now which is you know a concrete thing has a

1:38:44 spatiotemporal location and it arises from particular faces and from particular causes um or if it means everything there is to know about the property in general which usually i take it there's a restriction to everything that is essential to everything that is uh you know that defines what that sort of experience is um because this usually goes with you know quite a you know a fairly narrow view of what that is namely that it's

1:39:16 feeling like this it's this kind of phenomenal quality i mean i think philip has sort of a maneuver here where he says look if you think that there's something else that's essential to the property in general of seeing red i'm just talking about the aspect that we do grasp by uh this revelation the aspect that we are acquainted with that's what i mean by the reddish you know the reddishness of red and you can kind of iterate it a few times i guess the the reddish quality of the reddishness of red but there's you want to say this there's something

1:39:48 that you're acquainted with and i think that even if it's only a tiny sliver of the reality that's going on here here you know in inside my skull um what what's important is that it can still put you in a position to evaluate candidate explanations um did it put you in a position to know that there are micro subjects no i mean i'm not sure that i do know that there are microsoft i consider it the

1:40:20 most likely hypothesis but i am in the position of having to hypothesize i guess what i'm asking is why doesn't the revelation thesis commit you to knowing that and since you don't isn't that a strike against the view so right so the revelation thesis commits me to knowing everything that's essential to the property you know in the abstract of seeing red having that kind of experience right um and i'm not about the instance not about the instance and so i i think that the essence of that property is

1:40:54 in a certain sense multiply realizable multiply constitutable you know it could arise from certain combinations of micro experiences or some certain other combinations or it could exist all by itself i don't think it could arise purely from non-phenomenal facts in any concatenation so you really have to deny the conceivable even the conceivability of anti-zombies or zombies uh and i don't really see an argument for that i guess yeah i mean this is i guess going to go

1:41:26 back to the our earlier dispute about what's built into saying nothing but right um i mean it may also turn somewhat on what we mean by physical um so i said earlier that you know pansys see themselves as kind of filling in the intrinsic nature of the physical things right and so there is a sense in which you know maybe maybe it is possible to conceive of of schmombys you know they're just physical

1:41:58 and they're conscious um but maybe by doing so what you're conceiving of is things that have you know the full nature of what in our universe is physical they have you know all of this that i've got um and that's cheating because they have uh well that that's going to return physicalism into a sort of pancake of them it will make physicalism into psychism if panseikism is true in the actual universe right yeah no i think that the way i conceive of them is they don't have that

1:42:33 they're just physical but they're conscious like in a in a non-fundamental way um you know like in a good old-fashioned it's just the brain sort of way um but but but yeah all right i can see that's a complicated schlog yeah when you're saying when you're stipulating the fundamentality i think you're stipulating something about like the metaphysical dependent relations and i think that involves you in making claims not just about the particular possible world that you're imagining but more broadly about how other possible worlds relate

1:43:07 to it yeah i guess i don't see that but that's that's not um i'm happy to agree to disagree yeah totally um everyone disagrees with me so that's fine um so but i still don't i guess exactly you have it even worse than i do i think with this mine stuff which uh but you do by the end it's hard to disagree because you do such a good job defending it but um i still don't see why the revelation thesis doesn't apply to a particular instance so i i guess i'm curious why you

1:43:39 restricted only to the property type as opposed to my given instantiation of that type like when i experience the red shouldn't i know everything that you know by by you know forming a pure direct phenomenal concept whatever one you like and i think you like pure and some people like direct whatever so you form that kind of concept there it is i know everything that there is about this is but you can't say that or is this where the confusion is going to come in so i guess i'm waiting for confusion to play a role so there there are these these other epistemic intuitions

1:44:13 that we have a sort of special contact with our particular experiences that we're aware of them in a specially direct way right um i guess i i don't see a reason for thinking that this is going to extend to uh like a grasp of their full essence or all their properties um you know i'd be open to to hearing an argument along those lines um and to a certain extent you know i

1:44:46 will own up that i'm you know my my goal here is sort of to find a consistent corner of logical space um and i'm not sure if it will necessarily be the best motivated one overall um but i think that there is a consistent corner here um the way that there's this other thing that's often bundled in with talk of revelation um that if i'm having an experience i should be able to kind of fix on it and and know it um and so yeah so it probably is useful to talk

1:45:20 a bit about confusion and i've already we've already talked a bit about the idea of of one phenomenal quality being blended out of all these others right um and that blending is is what i'm calling confusion um which again i think isn't right it's that we can't separate them they're blended in a way that's not separable exactly exactly so and i want to insist that we are having all of the experiences but we're having them together in this way that kind of doesn't tell us how many of them there are

1:45:53 um and i and i do take this from uh like uh leibniz and spinoza to some extent who are very uh very into this idea that you know the mind has many many very simple perceptions but it kind of got them all blurred together um and and i think that that is usefully thought of to something that in attentional terms so i have you know a lot of experiences but there's a limit to how how much i can attend to them

1:46:26 individually um i can kind of shine the spotlight of attention on certain kind of groupings but not on i can't kind of penetrate more finely than that and then that puts a limit on which phenomenal quality they can know the essence of or the the nature so i'm using nate to an essence synonymously i probably should pick one and stick with it um or pick both and stick with lol okay um can i because this is another question because attention is a functional notion

1:46:58 it's one of the easy problems right so it's not a phenomenal thing so i am confused a little bit about how something that's not phenomenal can play this kind of role on your view so i mean i think i think when you when dave distinguishes the hard problem and the easy problems i think he does you know recognize that a lot of the times you know something that we have a word for

1:47:29 like attention or like really consciousness itself um is going to be a word that kind of straddles both sides so there's a functional notion of attention and there's a phenomenal notion of attention just like there's a functional notion of awareness and a phenomenal notion of awareness um and so you can kind of pull them apart if you really want to just focus on say the functional notion if you want to study that and you know not have to worry about phenomenology and get these metaphysicians off my back um just do the cognitive sign for the

1:48:03 tension um but i i think it would be a mistake to assume that what's going on there is that there are two different kind of separable properties uh and you're just studying the one and not the other i think it it maybe makes more sense to say something like the functional notion of attention is um is a functional role and in us you know the playing of that role is by phenomenal dynamics and so what we uh in everyday language what we

1:48:34 mean when we say attention is the way that the attentional role is played within phenomenal consciousness and that's going to be kind of a notion that blends together some of the phenomenal with the functional kind of skeleton the phenomenal is what fleshes out or fills in the phenomenal outline if you don't actually do you flesh out a skeleton i don't know so but that's a high level property of the brain yeah and and so how is that blended out of

1:49:06 i mean i guess so this is basically the other thing i want to ask is how does the blending work to give me because part of the revolut the i don't know if since revelation you want to reserve that for property types the grasping-ness or whatever of phenomenal properties is their simplicity right that that this is that phenomenal red is simple in a sense um when i when i focus on it um and i i just don't understand how even if you buy the entire story which i find semi-convincing by the way um more than

1:49:40 i should given that i'm not a psychist um but even if you buy that entire story i don't see how that gives you you know from these tiny little elements anything that could ever amount to red so i i just don't see how the how you how and in that part of the book i felt like i didn't get an answer to this it's probably because i need to read it six more times but so anyway how does it how does that how do we get human level consciousness from the confusion blending all these things so so part of what i guess i'm trying to

1:50:12 draw on is the thought that we have some cases within our macro level consciousness where we have an experience at one time and then maybe and at that time it seems like it's just one you know one quality doesn't come to us as composite or as having dissociable elements um and then maybe later on we have a different experience and we realize oh that was an element of the previous experience um and maybe we have a third experience like oh that was the other element and

1:50:44 now we have the first experience again and because we've kind of trained ourselves to recognize these two elements we can say oh now it actually seems phenomenologically composite to me right people will talk i mean i think daniel dennett in consciousness explained he talks about uh this with with notes on the guitar right and i i don't really get that particular example because i'm terrible at recognizing notes and kind of tone death but um but people will also talk about this in terms of smells and flavors um and there's there's potentially there might be examples with

1:51:20 color you know there's some i think intuition to the effect that you know that orange kind of recognizably contains red and yellow as elements but if you just saw orange and you had never seen red and yellow you wouldn't be able to kind of see it as as having the like any any redness to it or any yellowness to it um explain other colors like i mean purple and orange work but you know green yeah so well i mean to me i think green feels bluish and yellowish um the primary colors you know red green

1:51:55 red yellow and blue um they don't seem to be blended sorry i don't get that for green just personally not that it matters but uh fair enough but i can see how some person how you could but it does seem weird to say that it's literally that they're both there as opposed to they're blended uh so purple seems like a reddish blue but it doesn't seem like red and blue i mean to some extent i may just have to kind of lean harder on the intuition here i mean what would it be like if you did

1:52:27 experience red and blue together at the same location in phenomenal space to me the best answer seems to be purple um i mean color is tricky like color processing is really in some respects it's very counter-intuitive you know which colors actually combined with which other ones when you're dealing with like wavelengths and tones um and so i don't want to lean too hard on the particular examples i think in some ways flavor and smell is more useful just for for kind of

1:53:01 pushing this sense that sometimes we have experiences that are other things blended together and they comprise these different elements but we don't we don't automatically recognize them as comprising those many elements yeah let's not even talk about yellow but uh i think flavor is an interesting case because i i know it's you know has inputs from uh taste and also smell but it's an open question whether it's a unique state uh multimodal sometimes that they call

1:53:33 it is which is more than just a blending of them it becomes something else um like unique and distinct uh which is formed maybe out of those two elements but so i'm not sure if i really get the intuitions that you that you're leaning on here um because it sounds like what you're committed to is that if we if we really had and you actually say that something like this at some point in the book if i recall like if we really enhance our brain in a certain way then we would be able to separate these things out

1:54:04 introspectively and we would be able to say in the flavor experience ah there's the taste part and there's the smell component and that seems i guess yeah to me that seems implausible um at least for flavor given the way the brain processes that information yeah i mean i i think what i'm committed to is that in principle changing the internal sensitivity of the brain could allow us to to differentiate elements of our experiential field um you know arbitrarily

1:54:41 finely a wrinkle is that it might the changes themselves might transform things to the point where it's no longer the very same experience that we're now having right it might be that you know the things you have to do to my brain to allow it to you know be that sensitive to like individual particles individual molecules allow me to count the neurotransmitter molecules in a particular synapse you know those might change the brain so much that the experience itself is no

1:55:15 longer the same flavor that we were having before it'll be some different flavor um and i again i you know i will i guess fall back on you know this is a at least a consistent corner of logical space and i do like this i don't i forget if it made it into the book but there's a this passage in william james where he says i find in my students an irresistible tendency to think that the the taste experience of tasting lemonade you know contains the lemoniness of lemon and the sweetness of sugar

1:55:48 yeah it didn't make it in the book okay good good and he says it doesn't at all it's a completely new and distinctive thing in its own right you know it the the lemonade contains sugar and lemon but the taste experience does not contain uh either of these two other taste experiences at all right and i guess i'm sort of sitting here like you know it sounds like he has many students who you know who are very inclined towards thinking of this in blending terms so you know if if we're doing this democratically you know i'm on the side

1:56:21 of the students and it looks like i outvote william james at least um and you and maybe you're on his side as well so this is a little bit yeah exactly yeah um and i i don't really know like what is a good way to resolve this kind of introspective kind of impasse um i guess you know yeah to a certain extent what i'm like my model is that something happens to the the micro experiences that turns them into

1:56:53 the experiences that we have um the difficulty for me is that even if i disagree with you about purple and the lemonade or whatever conceptually you can see the path right but in the case of the micro experiences to red you can't see the path it's completely opaque how those things could blend because like what i mean obviously it's inscrutable in some sense we don't know what they're having but you guessed you're towards some things you know maybe it's like universal love or you know so whatever it is it's got to

1:57:25 be super simple and it's just not clear how things like that could combine into anything except more complicated things like that as opposed to a completely unrelated thing like hearing middle c tasting chocolate seeing red those are very different from me i mean i know you're sam coleman line that maybe they're not so different which i don't really buy either but at least prima facies hearing middle c and seeing red are very distinct and yet on your view they're composed out of the same

1:57:59 micro elements and i don't know how you get a path from one to the other except okay well here's some things which combine so maybe these things too and that looks like more like a leap than like a principled argument sure i mean yeah i mean it's hard for me to to know really like what you know what is cheating and what is playing by the rules in this area um it's philosophy it's all cheating right i mean part of it would be you know it

1:58:34 may be that the the these very simple experiences are have some degree of internal differentiation you know perhaps between like a a that and a this um and then maybe the different modes of combination kind of recombine those elements which might be very different from each other and get you you know things that are different from each other because of the different

1:59:06 ways that they blend those differences um you know there's people will sometimes point out that you know the the neurons in auditory cortex and the neurons and visual cortex are the same neurons they're made of all the same elements right and they're doing stuff right and they're doing all the same stuff yeah um but it might be that the the i think it's there's no clear reason why there couldn't be relatively high level differences that allow

1:59:37 some tendency or element within that stuff to express itself differently in the one place than in the other right um especially you know given that what they are doing you know even the neurons in like auditory cortex um you know they're doing that in the context of the rest of the brain so you know what it may be that neurons in order to cortex in isolation would have a different sort of experience than my hearing experiences um but i i i will fully admit there are

2:00:09 definitely kind of gaps in the view that that need to be filled and that may and you know hopefully it's a contribution uh you know for me to bring out these these points of disagreement more clearly so that we can see you know what is what is really at issue and what would what would have to be the case yeah um i completely agree with that but but i guess the only reason i'm bringing this up is because you know the whole point i thought was to try to solve the combination problem but right at the crucial point it's like there's a gap

2:00:43 so i it doesn't seem like how it solves the combination problem it suggests this interesting idea about combining minds and inheriting experience and all that stuff is great but i but it doesn't show us how we could i a priori derive the experience that you're having from micro experiences which as far as i could tell would be required to solve the combination problem yeah so so i guess i on the one hand i i want to insist that

2:01:17 i i i do think that if you if i mean this is beyond our capacities as human beings but if we were able to grasp all of the micro experiences um i i actually i i do think that they would it's at least a good live option that it would then be intelligible that the way those elements blend when when in the the sorts of connections that they're in would turn out to be the sorts of experiences that we have really so you think um you wouldn't be

2:01:52 able to get invert cases from like you have this very same micro phenomenal properties by inverting no i don't think so i i think that i think that if you're working with experiential elements and if you're working with you know the qualitativeness that they give you then i don't think that they would leave leave wiggle room for changes in the the macro experiential qualities except insofar as you would have to change the way that they relate to each other because it's clear that the structure makes a big difference

2:02:25 and maybe and i feel like what you're pushing on is you know maybe the the structure would have to make such a big difference that it would kind of break rather than just stretch right the different potentialities provided by the the micro level that's that's possible but i i haven't been convinced of it it seems like you could run like a micro phenomenal mary sort of thought experiment they knew only the micro phenomenal properties and uh still would be surprised what it's like to see a tomato when she comes out of her room so like i

2:02:58 guess i do think that there's a difference so you know part of what the original mary case is bringing out is that you know if you're if she's learning physical structural facts any amount of learning that it doesn't look like it's going to ever get to something qualitative it looks like it's you know it's you sort of picture it like on a graph you know you've got something here and up on the y dimension and more physical factor taking you along the x dimension but you can go as far as you want in that

2:03:30 direction and and it just won't touch the the gap um with micro phenomenal mary who's you know studying these simple experiences and how they combine you know she's studying qualitative facts and and how they generate other qualitative facts how they generate different qualities um and there it looks like it's it's no longer clear that just doing more and more of that will necessarily get you to so it will will never get you

2:04:03 to the particular quality of red um yeah and let me also say you know if you're right i i think there's at least a potentially a fallback for pan cyclists to go for something like uh what uh dave i think called the large palette option right uh on which there's a last ditch ever right we would say every experience we have is present at the phenomenal level at the micro fundamental level yeah i mean well okay maybe i guess i mean it's a medium palette view which says in there's enough

2:04:37 qualitatively distinct elements present in the at the basic level to blend all the experiences we have out of them right um there's only a certain amount of particles and if string theory theory's right there's really only one kind so it does seem like you're going to bump up against some physical facts yeah and so that's that's why i prefer a smaller palette if at all possible i mean i think it's it's not super clear how small the palette is

2:05:09 and so i said earlier you know it might be that different energy levels for an electron correspond to changes in experimental quality right um so you know so it might not be the number of particles that matters it might be something more to do with like the state space of their properties um and yeah i mean isn't this like a problem for the view that there's so much wiggle room here because it's like the theory is unconstrained by any any anything really you can you can basically wiggle

2:05:40 you can wiggle it and bend it you can anything yeah well maybe it's four maybe it's four thousand i mean there's no principled um there's nothing that's principled which allows you to constrain it uh at that level i mean well i i i do definitely think that it's a cost making the palette larger um so it's not like it's wiggle room with with no costs okay um and you know and it's and overall like we're gonna have

2:06:14 to do like a weighing up the cost and benefits of the views and i think you know every every departure from the the ideal of full a priory determination from a small pallet of of simple qualities is going to affect that cost benefit right analysis um yeah like i i don't know i mean do is your concern that there's not enough wiggle room or that there's there's too much like too much yeah that there's no principled

2:06:46 constraints you can basically say whatever you want i mean maybe they love each other maybe they hate each other maybe there's one kind maybe there's 40 kinds maybe every energy state is a kind memory maybe when strings vibrate at certain levels then that's a different phenomenon it just doesn't seem like there's anything which constrains what you're saying here about that microphysical level which just seems like well then yeah it's like what's cheating and what's not cheating like what yeah i can see that concern i mean i i guess it's it's hard for me to feel

2:07:19 too unconstrained because i do think that like certainly once you get above the really basic level and start thinking about you know if if consciousness is is present in in the physical fundamentals what does that mean for the distribution of consciousness uh and a you know complex consciousness in us um you know in in the book i end up finding myself constrained towards a lot of you know views that that even other pancakes think are undesirable right the tables are conscious and so on

2:07:54 um so i feel like i'm operating under fairly stringent constraints there right now about the palette in particular the palette at the fundamental level i mean i mean yes there's wiggle room in part because you know we don't know what the fundamental physics is like um and also because the view is you know accept a certain degree of of mystery to the universe it accepts that we uh you know just as we don't you know consciousness is something where

2:08:26 if if it's someone else's you kind of don't can't understand it fully you know you never know what it's quite like to be a bat and so putting consciousness at the fundamental level does put a certain level of of mystery um that we won't ever get away from i think mystery is better than the kind of incomprehensibility that physicalism would have there um and you know like the you know is a physicalist in a in a better position here with like generating red rather than some other

2:09:00 quality like it's not clear that they are like constrained it's like it's not clear that the fundamental physics for instance is constrained by physicalism um or that they have any principled way of saying you know if the fundamental physics or if anything we're different here's the quality that we would experience instead um well i do i mean just not to derail it again but i do think that there is an a priori deducibility from the physical facts to the phenomenal facts

2:09:32 the stipulation is you need to have the right concepts right so you mary needs to have phenomenal concepts and make the deductions so she can't do it in a room obviously because she doesn't have the right concepts but uh i always think that that's a kind of a missing component of that entire debate um which is of course she's unfairly constrained it's like telling her to do that waters h2o without knowing water is like she can't do it obviously yeah i mean i mean she could be told what water is like the concept of water is one that can be communicated it seems like in a way that the concept

2:10:04 of red can't so that looks like that's a an important difference that kind of cries out for an explanation right i mean even there i think you can anyway so i'm noticing that we're getting well on the time i'm supposed to be actually at a seminar here at a little bit actually but um but i have seen some uh some comments in the chat i wanted to just ask you about really quickly so specifically and i know you have views about this so i wanted to make sure to make give you a chance to talk about if you want to and this is

2:10:35 about composite mind so um luke who has been following the conversation and has asked a couple of times i wonder what your view about composite minds uh has it whether it has implications for the philosophy and so of social sciences what are sociologists explaining according to you and earlier he asked about whether you could give him a kind of analytical marxism um no sorry an analytic philosophy of marxian class consciousness from your point of view so do you have anything that you want to say about that or is that uh so i i definitely think that my view has

2:11:11 has implications in that direction and it bears on uh how we think about about yeah groups larger than the human scale you know what do i think about composite minds i'm a composite mind so i have no objection to there being composite minds you know at a level up um and you even think like the us could be a composite mind if they were integrated in the right way yeah i think i mean i i think if psychism is true it is already uh a very disorganized composite mind just like you know if i say that tables are conscious the us

2:11:44 will be as well it doesn't like tables it won't have any of the kind of conscious structure that we're used to thinking about right if we integrated it if we change the way that foster information we could make it more like a a mind of the sort that we're familiar with more like us and that's what medlock's nation brain that i talk about in the book is it's precisely trying to do right um at the same time although i think that my view kind of has implications in that direction i do also want to underline that to get to like political

2:12:17 prescriptions you have to go a long way and you have to like work through a whole bunch of the intermediate stages that you know that sociologists for instance do study and so i don't think that there's going to be like a direct uh you know jump from anything that i've said to marxian class consciousness any more than there's a direct jump from you know anything about uh you know micro subjects to you know how the brain works at a higher level i also think that so there's an

2:12:50 ambiguity in the way that class consciousness is used and i think it's important to distinguish between individuals being conscious of their position in a class and having uh you know the the moral outlook right and the sympathies that are appropriate to that awareness versus the idea of the class itself being conscious um and you know so i guess i'm inclined to say yeah the class itself may well be conscious but probably not in a way that will have they'll be very useful for you know

2:13:25 figuring out how it's going to overthrow capitalism yeah interesting um it's so i do i guess i can't resist asking you before we i mean i we haven't even talked about two-thirds of your book let alone a bunch of other stuff that you've written so maybe if you're willing i would like to have you back to talk about that other stuff i'll show you i'm happy to come back okay i'm not going anywhere you're stuck for the first year of the future well it's good to have you here obviously and um i enjoy talking with you uh but anyway so let me just at the end here

2:13:57 ask you about the kind of ethical stuff because i i have heard sort of disturbing things from pan psychists before about ethical implications um you know for example for for someone like me i'm a i'm a vegan for ethical reasons awesome um and i was raised vegetarian i'm a big animal person and um some sometimes you hear people say and i've heard you know i've heard you respect about pan psychos say things like this that well you know you've got to eat something

2:14:28 and everything's conscious and so why you know the broccoli is conscious the cow's conscious so you know what what are you going to do you got to eat something conscious and that to me is is pretty disturbing actually uh if if pansysm had that kind of implication then i would find that well disturbing so what what is your view about about that sort is it wrong morally to disassemble the chair is it wrong to eat that no i'm curious about just that general life yeah so i should say i'm i'm also a vegan for ethical reasons and so i have

2:15:03 kind of dwelt on this uh this dilemma um and i think that the the the key thing is that it's not consciousness per se that is of moral significance we tend to talk in that way because you know as non-pan psychists we tend to use consciousness as kind of a shorthand for a lot of particular forms and features of consciousness right um in particular you know i think that uh the ethical standing of a given creature is intimately tied to its capacity for

2:15:37 balanced experience um it's classy for goal-directed behavior the place to have preferences about uh you know what some things being better than other things right um and and i think that the best way to infer that kind of structure in consciousness is to look for the sorts of behavioral manifestations that we associate with it in ourselves you know i know that when i don't like something that's reflected in my behavior in certain ways and if i see analogous behavior in in sebastian my

2:16:10 cat then i think that's good evidence for sebastian having preferences and i think that's a good reason to take sebastian to be a being with ethical status um well why don't you say the same thing about electrons when they're repulsed from positive positives and so forth they're retracted by negatives or whatever yeah so i mean part of the answer is going to be that um they don't seem to display what you might think of as teleological behavior that is pursuing the same goal in different ways under different

2:16:42 circumstances there isn't that kind of regularity where whichever situation you put them in they'll always kind of find the way to get back to a certain state i think it's it's also worth noting that you know even if electrons you know are in some sense i don't know if if they want whatever it is that they're moving towards um you know the the upshot for the electrons if i disassemble the chair and if i don't is is pretty similar like it's it's not like that's going to add up to the chair preferring

2:17:15 you know to be electrons in one set of stable energy orbits than being electrons in another set of stable energy orbits right um i mean like right doesn't the table as a subject it's affected by it it's it's affected um consciously it's like it's experiences but yeah it doesn't yeah that's that's what i'd want to say like if there's a change in consciousness but not a change that anyone cares about right um and i think this is kind of reinforced by remembering that you know

2:17:47 these changes in consciousness will just continue after i disassemble the table there's still consciousness around um so and you know some in some moods i find that even mildly comforting that i you know at my death just afterwards yeah it won't be just like completely turning off the lights it'll be like dissolving um but remain continuing to kind of be there in the waterway dissolving of course i still won't care and i won't have any of the things that i want and they won't really be what's

2:18:19 recognizable as as distinctively me so it's not that confident and i don't want to oversell it there um but i and i do have a paper that i co-authored with uh jade buchanan on this um that pan psychism intuitions and sorry was that they imagine if it happened to you or is that that's a different paper uh no it's a different one it's um the the great chain of being pan psychism and intuition it's basically it's trying to say most of the intuitions that we have about conscious consciousness in particular things

2:18:53 like they're not like we don't have to throw them out if we're pan cyclists we keep them we should we need to kind of re-understand what they're telling us but they're still going to be telling us about the ethically important sorts of consciousness so in that regard panticism is not going to have very revisionary ethical implications yeah that's good because i was getting the sense from like some things you said maybe they what you know the electrons desire unity or something like that and if you break apart the chair then you are thwarting a desire of theirs and it's and i mean utilitarians might

2:19:27 not have a be okay with that because if there's enough electrons whose desires are being thwarted their preferences are being authoritative preference for unity so it seems like if you combine those two views then you do get some really strange results but maybe you're not a preference utilitarian or you don't think ultimately that's what's going on down there i think i think it's i think it's unlikely so it's possible that what's going on down there has something in common with what i think of as desire and preference but i think it's unlikely

2:20:01 that none of the differences between me and the electron are like responsible for the moral status that that i have um i think also you know just on the the chair and the unity you know if i burn up the chair the particles you know from their point of view all they know that they've exchanged one chemical bond for a different perhaps tighter one maybe that's what they prefer or maybe that's what they hate you know it's also important epistemically that we have no way of knowing if they hate strong covalent bonds or if they love strong covalent bonds

2:20:34 so you know to a certain extent just go really um and you know like you could say a similar thing i think like to a moral realist you know for all that we know there might be just non-natural moral properties out there that that attach to certain obscure physical situations and outweigh all of the moral properties we're familiar with right given that we can't know them what we have to do as moral agents is kind of remain within the mole universe that we can make sense of

2:21:08 but it doesn't so your view is not going to extend like to trees um or because chairs and trees seem importantly different and you know is there going to be an environmental aspect to this or no i'm not sure because i think it will it will depend on what you were already going to think about trees you know a lot of the all the features that differentiate trees from chairs you know people already know about them and people can already make arguments about you know the tree seeming to be organized in a way that's

2:21:41 goal directed even if that goal isn't isn't as clearly manifest in the like ongoing moment-to-moment processing that it does um and adding that you know all of these different sorts of of processing are accompanied by some sort of consciousness like i don't think that all sorts of consciousness are automatically morally relevant in the same way so i i don't think that this tells us how to answer these questions about

2:22:13 trees there are some people who do think that though that like consciousness is what makes something valuable um and and so what i'm hearing you saying is no it's the kind of consciousness actually so if everything's conscious then what we got to differentiate is between the morally relevant kind of consciousness and the ones that aren't yeah i think that's that's right yeah um and i've i've been talking actually to uh uh to jamie who runs the website uh sentientism.org.com um afterwards

2:22:46 so yeah spreading the idea of sentientism that moral status belongs to all sentient beings and and i think there is this kind of slight looseness about what counts as a sentient being is it just a conscious being or is it a being with the sword of consciousness involved in in suffering and joy um and i asked him and he said you know in practice those seem like they they largely go together unless anticipation is true so i don't have to decide um if antarcticism is true then they

2:23:19 don't always go together and i think that's going to be a reason to to decide that it's the it's the sort that it's a particular sort of consciousness that matters right so and where on your view does deontology fit into this picture um is it something that makes a difference here or is that an added bit um i don't know i i'm i'm open to deontology i think that just as um the kind of paradigmatic

2:23:52 consequentialist considerations are intuitively tied to consciousness via states like preference and pleasure i think that the paradigmatic deontological moral considerations like like non-interference or respectful autonomy are tied to consciousness through the particular sort of consciousness involved in decision making and choice yeah um you know kant for instance is a famous deontologist and he's it's all about the rational will that capacity we have to to to set laws for ourselves and

2:24:26 you know a pan psychist might think that that requires consciousness but they don't think that it's present in all conscious beings right but there's there's something yeah so that's like uh practical rationality reasoning about how to get what you want and certainly electrons are not going to be doing anything like that but but i i guess i was thinking more about universalizability considerations whether we have to include like conscious chairs or trees in in the things which were were

2:24:59 universalizing over um and you know because i i'm kind of very influenced by uh i guess coarse guards kind of arguments that say well you start with the oncological accelerations and you get like stuff about animals in there because you universalize they have to be the part you know you're sentient being they're sentient so you have to include them i mean i'm butchering the argument here but uh yeah you understand what i'm saying so if you include i hope you do anything if you include trees now all of a sudden that's conscious agents that are sentient um well i guess they're not agents well

2:25:31 maybe they are actually trees are very sophisticated um i don't know anyway so if you have to include things like that then we may get obligations towards them in the same way that we might get obligations towards animals from from certain sorts of deontological positions yeah um so so i don't know cause guard's particular argument that well um but my understanding is that agency is important there right um and i guess i would say something sort

2:26:03 of similar to what i said before you know there's a debate to have about whether trees are agents um it looks like you know my initial inclination is to to lean towards the the no or at least to lean towards their some important respect in which they're not agents right um i think that debate would still have to be had if we thought they were conscious um like it would change slightly if you if for instance you thought that agency requires consciousness and trees are definitely not conscious then you've got a shortcut to denying

2:26:35 that they have agency but but it yeah it doesn't the pan psychiatrism won't decide the issue for you even if it inflicts how you have that debate about agency yeah no that makes sense okay yeah i see all right well i like i like that so uh i'm happy i asked about that um i do have to let you go at this point because i'm very late and i apologize for keeping this alone but let me just it's been a pleasure work is i highly recommend it to people i'll put links to all your stuff out there but then thank you it's the paradigm of good philosophical work uh wow okay

2:27:06 and so i i think more people should aspire towards these kinds of big ideas uh and defending them in a very serious way okay you're going to make me blush but uh yeah thank you very much very seriously um and i i feel like yeah it's uh we need more people like you in the profession i'm glad you're here and i really appreciate work oh i'm i really appreciate the work that you do on this series yes and in your uh your writing like i think you're that too the profession benefits immeasurably thank you i appreciate that well and i

2:27:40 will be bugging you since you said you might come back and we'll be bugging you coming back someday um so luke thanks again for joining me and just hang out for a bit and i'll say bye off the air okay sure all right we are we're clear