Consciousness Live! with Eric Schwitzgebel (S6 E4)

0:07 all right so let's see if we're actually live now waiting for Eric to rejoin us um so I probably should put a link to this in the other live I really don't know why I did is happening well I don't even know if this is going to fix the problem so first let's see um here he is let's

0:42 see if this is going to work uh okay all right hello I also changed my speaker and microphone okay so I hope it's I hope it's working this time what holy going on whoa so I haven't yet heard the echo but it was like a 10 to 20 second delay so check check all everything is picked up on my end everything says it's picking up my voice I'm still not hearing an

1:15 echo uh but I'm not hearing anything so here I'm changing the audio input to see if that helps at all um try uh switching back to this I'm looking at every audio setting that there is here it's the same as it was and it seemed like it was working a little at least I mean there's no Echo but check it's picking up the sound of my

1:47 voice okay so I still can't hear you let me my speaker settings could I'm not hearing the echo either I'm not hearing anything so um I can hear you perfectly I can hear you very well I can hear you now oh you can I don't hear an echo okay so I think we're fixed okay whatever I don't know what combination of things fixed it but now we're fixed so let's go let's be conscious it's time semiconscious for a while I had to start a whole new stream so I hope

2:19 someone puts a link in the other one um yeah I don't know that was very weird of course how else could we start a discussion about bizarreness and weirdness and skepticism without that was all planned Eric obviously well done well you know I found with these Tech things it's like we have this when we do text stuff for visiting speakers here at UCR something always goes wrong but it's always something different from what went wrong the previous time so true it's true I mean I've been doing

2:53 these since um you know with goo when I first started doing these kind of conversations I was using Google Hangouts and one of the first one I ever did was with Ruth milikin she like uh the call dropped four times um oh wait someone is saying your uh are Eric's audio is choppy and mine sounds like it's doubled oh no so they're having the problem they're having problems now I wonder but we can hear each other fine I can hear you

3:25 fine I'm going to hope that it works out in the in the long screen because this gets recorded and then hopefully it'll all I mean I can't uh everything says it's fine the connection is fine um You're Gonna Change My what' you do I changed my mic how is the sounding whoa yeah say something again yeah I'm talking again okay how is it out there I see uh a couple of people who say that they're is it sound the same or different I mean the connections

3:59 says it's excellent the audio has picked up um all the settings seem fine so I really am confused uh check check check mike um the only thing that I did was switch to that so can you still hear me I can hear you fine okay I can hear you fine my mic had been on my camcorder and now it's on my now it's this guy so that might have been why I was choppy

4:34 before yeah people are saying it's still choppy out there I'm not I don't know how to fix it to be honest because it's working I can hear you oh it sounds great now someone says okay all right so let's just go and hopefully yeah we'll see what happens we'll see what happens okay all right here we go um wow so Eric I was got to say we are live but we've been live uh people people are confirming that we both sound good now so that's very good thank you guys I was telling you I had a really bad experience with with the Ruth milikin

5:06 call um she actually ended up having to uh she's so nice you know she ended up calling on the phone and we talked on the phone I recorded it and then uh tried to sync that up with a with a video it it didn't work but anyway she was very nice that was the worst one so pH so Eric thank you for joining me and having this adventure um yes can you uh say a little B about who you are and what you do for those who may not know you right so I'm a uh professor of philosophy at University of California

5:39 Riverside I do a wide range of things publishing all kinds of stuff um Consciousness is one of the main ones I've been publishing on I think my first published paper on Consciousness was in the year 2000 but I also work on way in the year 2000 yeah way back uh yeah so I've been working on it for 23 years uh also work on belief moral psychology classical Chinese philosophy science fiction so uh my interests range broadly and we like those interests I've admired

6:14 your work for a long time I really like people who take a serious approach to seemingly strange ideas uh which is you know one of the things that you might think philosophy is good for sort of slow slow thinking in that old Russell way so I really appreciate your work um and this new book that you have out the weirdness of the world is is a really fantastic book uh so you know it's first I want to start with the title because when I told my eight-year-old son that I was going to talk to you about this and I said we're going to talk about how the world is weird and he said don't say that Dad um like that it was a bad thing to say or

6:47 something I was like no it's a good thing that's the point of the book in a way so can you tell us about how you arrived first of all at the title of the book The weirdness of the world yeah um I don't know how I arrived to the title other than that once the title occurred to me I'm like oh that's got to be the title and almost everyone that maybe not your son but almost everybody when I give them the title they're like oh that sounds interesting so uh and unlike you unlike what one usually encounters with

7:19 uh uh with presses when I proposed the book to Princeton University press they like oh don't mess with that title we don't need to send it to marketing we like that title wow okay so all right so what did you why were you indicating the weirdness I guess is what I was getting at because many people might interpret that as a way of saying that if something is weird then it's bad then it's bad right well I like the way that you um I like the way that you just said it right that you like Philosophy for its capacity to think seriously about ideas that we might find strange bizarre

7:53 weird right and the book is really intended to be a celebration of that so um I mean the central thesis of the book which kind of I hope the word weird kind of captures is what I call um the universal Universal bizares and Universal dubiety and this is regarding theories of Consciousness and fundamental cosmology so with respect to both kind of big picture issues and I think they're related uh which we can

8:25 talk about if you want something bizarre must be true that is something radically contrary to Common Sense um but and this is the universal dubiety right dubiousness but we know one Theory kind of compels our Ascent over all the other theories right so something strange must be true but we don't know we can't know at least for now at least in the foreseeable future which of these strange possibilities is in fact the correct one that's so the world is kind of weird in this sense right it's it's

8:59 strange it defies our sense of what's normal and uh expected and comprehensible yeah very interesting I I mean it's such a I think people need to be challenged in this way I mean you kind of say in the book that you're expecting the push back to come from a certain quarter namely of people who thinking that this stuff is maybe that there's some um kind of Common Sense view uh that captures some of these deep things maybe it's not fully articulated yet maybe um it's not universally accepted but that there's something in the background that uh a kind of sense

9:33 that well what would be normal as opposed to weird would be what we ordinarily think about the world before we think too hard is that is that a way of characterizing it yeah I think right I think there are probably two main sources of push back right one would be people who think that there is a common sense understanding of fundamental cosmology and Consciousness that we can get to maybe we're making progress to maybe we' already figured out and they can reject things that fly in the face of Common Sense uh and some philosophers are attracted to that kind of view and

10:06 then I think the other source of rejection is kind of approaches that say Hey well science has already told us all the answers uh so you know maybe it's Bizarre by the standards of common sense but it's not dubious we know kind of the fundamental structure of the world and how Consciousness works right so the two work together in that way right right so so I mean one of I want to ask like a I want to put a big overarching kind of question in your mind you don't have to answer it yet but I want to I want to know sort of when I was reading the book what I was thinking was it seems like on

10:40 the one hand you you have an argument that common sense is incoherent it can't be uh really made sense of and I want to talk to you about the details of that but but seems like that's part of your argument and I find that okay interesting um but then in the other part of the book there's a lot of parts of the book but uh in it in another part of the book you endorse a kind of 1% skepticism and I was like okay that's interesting but then what's the 99% so it the 99% is supposed to be something like the common sense view right uh or not but then if there isn't

11:13 a common sense view then what is it that we're not skeptical about and I found myself kind of puzzling about that as I was reading and so I wanted to get your kind of you know an your take on that um but maybe first I wanted to ask you I mean if you want to have something to say about it right now that's fine but if you want the about it I would also ask you about the details of this argument that there's no like Common Sense view about the mind um let me answer that question because I do have an answer to that okay cool so right so in part of the book I

11:47 advocate what I call 1% skepticism According to which we should have 99% confidence that the world is kind of more or less how we take it to be and 1% confidence that something some r rically skeptical possibility is true like that you're currently dreaming that you're a brain in a vet that you're in a short-term simulation or something like that now how does that fit with my saying the world is bizarre the thought there is and I guess this is pretty similar to some stuff

12:19 that David chamers has has argued that there are some bizarre views there are a lot of bizarre views in fact basically most of the bizarre views that fit within that 99% so for example suppose pan psychism is true right this is the view According to which everything in the world is literally conscious that's bizarre but from an ordinary day-to-day perspective right yesterday exists tomorrow exists I'm right that there's a coffee cup here I'm right that I'm

12:52 having a that I'm talking with you I'm wrong about the fundamental nature of Consciousness and I'm wrong about the fund fundamental cosmology but you're not a bolman brain or you're not a brain in a vat that's the idea right but I'm not a boltzman brain or a brain in a vat or currently Dreaming or something like that right so those so the 1% skepticism is really reserving that 1% not just for not for psychism doesn't fit in there right for example right or other kinds of bizarre views about the nature of Consciousness

13:25 and cosmology don't fit in there unless they radically threaten our everyday knowledge in a way that I don't think the pan psychism does right okay so even idealism and and these kinds of views are are going to be in that 99 so I guess I was misreading what you meant by the 99% because I was wondering like yeah if you had like if the well theist beliefs you say you have have to have some skep you know open up the ideas but where does like what counts is does does theism count as one of the 99% or one of

13:59 the 1% so it is does seem like some value judgments are going to be yeah you're right it's uh I should have been clear about that now in retrospect I can see how that confusing um but you're right like so to take another example idealism and this is the example that Charmers uses to make this point right he says well he appeals to Barkley right so Bishop Barkley thought the only thing that exists in the world are minds and their ideas there are no material objects at all it's all kind of a big choreographed

14:30 dance by God right so this coffee cuup is just an idea in your mind and my mind and your viewers mind right and there's no like physical coffee cup out there right now that's bizarre but Barkley says there's no violation of Common Sense here because coffee cuffs still exist and we're still having this conversation and tomorrow is going to be just like you think it's going to be and yesterday is like you thought it was so there's no violation of common sense so it's bizarre metaphysically but it's not a radically skeptical scenario right right because our ordinary day-to-day beliefs are not

15:06 upended right so there so in the 1% why the what you're Distributing your recan is over is these ones I mean so it does Wonder make one wonder why simulations get there I guess that's why you limit yourself to Temporary simulations not just simulations right okay now that's correct so right so in fact you know David Charmers and I have been going back back and forth a little bit about this and I've got a a forthcoming paper where I'm going to talk about this in more detail but right so so chamers says the simulation scenario is not a

15:40 skeptical scenario kind of for similar reasons and he appeals to Barkley as an example right if you're in a big stable simulation then you're wrong about fundamental reality but you know all your ordinary day-to-day beliefs still turn out to be true but if you're in a small simulation or an unstable one then Luxembourg might not exist the world might have been created 10 minutes ago the future might not exist in the way you think it is right and that is radically skeptical right so then there's this interesting question which is if we accept the idea

16:17 that we might be living in a simulation conditional upon that how confident should we be that it's a large stable simulation which is a non-skeptical possibility versus a small or unstable one which is a skeptical possibility and my claim is that if you think that to whatever extent you think there's some probability we're living in a simulation some substantial subset of that probability should be assigned to the Poss the pro the likelihood that it is a small or unstable one right so we

16:52 shouldn't just say oh we're living in the Sim but you know I'll be fine right we're living in the Sim it could very well be a short or unstable or small one right and so we should we should be worried about that you we should hope that we're not living in a simulation well count says unstable because in the book you have that picture of you know God tripping over the power cord um is that unstableness the power cord tripping does that indicate that that simulation is unstable or is it something more about that there's no continuity in the laws or something about the way the simulation has run itself that makes it

17:24 unstable right so uh if God trips over the power cord right then the simulation is small it's short it has a truncated future um an unstable simulation would be one where the laws of nature change uh or there are radical changes in the simulation of another sort right God decides to uh you know release Godzillas all over the planet you you know whatever yes we Sim players from the 90s remember this lots of disasters right heavily influenced by Sim City exactly I

17:58 love s City a great it's a great game um but uh so I guess so the debate between you and chers then and this is something that I guess we're skipping the skepticism which is fine um because I want to come back I guess to some of this other stuff that uh about how there's no common sense view or but anyway so yeah the this is an interesting issue because I guess in in the tomr's book on this he argues that you know you should have signed at least a certain 25% or so probability to us living in a a simulation and one assumes

18:32 that he defines it in a way that it's a stable simulation that's long lasting um and so I guess your dispute with him would be that's too quick because some of that 25% has to be allocated at least to these unstable short simulations so that you can't really rule out is that is that the idea correct so um he he's as Charmers always is he's really careful so he's not slipping over that issue you know uh small simulations count as simulations on his view uh and so he does agree that some subset of your

19:09 Credence whatever Credence you have say 25% that you're living in some simulation sub subset should be to small simulations which would then be skeptical scenarios and when he says a simulation is not a skeptical hypothesis he's very clear to say in the crucial points right assuming that it's large and stable yeah exactly he says that right out in the book he's like look I don't have this isn't an argument that you can like refute that kind of skepticism that's radical skepticism on your use right so he in that book he is a

19:45 little fast on the issue of you know how much of our Credence we should distribute to the smaller unstable skeptical simulations versus the large stable ones it's more like he's saying okay let's just talk about the case where we're in a large stable simulation that's not a skeptical case and then he quickly presents some reasons for thinking maybe we are in a large stable one but he doesn't really get into that in much detail right yeah

20:18 so some of those would be like the apparent infinitude of the universe or something like that or that that we can pretty much seemingly look at any part of it in any amount DET tell he want or I'm curious about what kind of reasons he might offer for thinking we're in a kind of stable he gives kind of a Simplicity argument so he says something like well look if you were to say it's one city then you would have to have a really complicated set of scenarios for what to do when you get to the edge of

20:50 the city right and how do you how do you simulate that so that people wouldn't be fooled you so people would continue to be fooled as they cross the border of the city and then come back well you need to have all of this stuff in place in order to make it work with a kind of City sized simulation which is very complicated it would be very complicated in a way it would be easier just like run the whole thing uhuh so that's the structure of his argument basically and the structure of my reply is okay well

21:23 yeah maybe that would be complicated right but think of all the re sources that would be involved in like running a real large one right there's going to be a comple there's going to be a tradeoff between say cost and simplicity here yeah interesting so the way I'm thinking of it now is that so you could sort of buy charr's argument that there's this like you know at least 25% and also be a 1% skepticist87

21:58 devoted to these temporary situations point1 devoted to this whatever and sort of all could sort of still work within itself um but I thought you suggested in your book that you didn't think you could really get up to the 25% in the first place but maybe that was maybe living in a Sim my Credence that we're living in a Sim is not as high as 25% so what do you I mean this is not really related to this but what do you think's wrong with that argument that uh why isn't it that high because you think it's just one of the bizarre possibilities or then we

22:31 shouldn't have because you do say in the book there's none of these things are compelling enough that we should go up to 50% so maybe this is just that part of that argument overall yeah I mean I think there are lots of things that would have to be true in order for it to be the case that we're living in a simulation and once you kind of multiply these things by each other you maybe end up with a lower Credence than 25% right so you have to accept a certain kind of theory of Consciousness for it even to be possible right you have to think that uh technological

23:02 civilizations are stable and continue to exist for long periods of time after having developed high technology capable of running a Sim I'm actually a pessimist about that I think probably the simplest simp the simplest resolution to the firy Paradox is that Tech technological civilizations are unstable you then have to like are you worried about the GPT Arc is this is this part of your like that we're going to AI is going to be a possible destroyer of humanity I think that's possible um my my skepticism my pessimism about the

23:39 firmy Paradox is a little more abstract than that uh it's more that basically uh as you gain technological power that is basically always a two-edged sword uh technological civilizations are going to probably almost necessarily have small living environments like planets and once if you get the increasing technological power uh then one thing goes wrong and you make the environment uninhabitable for the beings in question right so I think there will

24:14 be my inclination is to think that there are the technological advance and reasons of in if of efficiency will tend to cause technological civilizations to Great to to gain increasing technological power and increasing fragility so that one thing goes wrong and it's over right so that you get this domino effect so it's increasingly complex and then therefore intricate and therefore many things can go wrong at

24:47 many different points right interesting so there are two there are two Dimensions to this right one is just think about like if you're a hunter gatherer tribe nothing that you do in the forest is going to wipe out all of humanity which is spread across the globe right but the more power you get the more there are going to be possibilities to wipe out all Humanity right so that's Dimension One and dimension two is right this incate interconnection right so you could think about

25:21 when one of the things that we've seen over the course of long periods of evolution is you get more and more complex organisms over time right you go from um procaryotes to ukar right and then from ukar to multicellular organisms right and then from multicellular organisms to kind of social organisms right and with each of these moves there is a certain kind of efficiency that you get by the specialization of the subparts

25:54 integrated into a hole right so we could think that at some point it will be useful for all of Earth to become essentially a single organism and then one death is extinction for that interconnected that interconnected right so you don't need to necessarily buy this idea of strictly speaking an organism right but the aidea of the

26:28 efficiencies of interconnection right the efficiencies of specialization right they're great I mean I don't have to be a farmer it's great to specialize right but now I'm dependent on Farmers right and as again just at an abstract level right as we get more power more technology and more specialization then we get the sufficient system and their are reasons for rewarding efficiency right right we get this efficient system but the more efficiency the more

27:01 fragility oh yeah I mean you saw a version of this just in miniature with the uh shipping crisis during the pandemic right shipping had become so efficient exactly right and then one thing goes wrong and it's chaos yeah exactly right that wouldn't have happened with 19th century sh shipping right yeah much slower yeah exactly it was because it was so efficient that it was so fragile yeah good point interesting so then huh I mean I I'm wondering like where are we keep so the possibility of AI

27:35 destroying us like uh in the near-term future I mean some people I've seen people saying I'm not going to see my kid graduate from college because AI is going to destroy us before then I mean serious people that work in AI I mean I don't know you may disagree with them but people have said that but it sounds like so you think that that part of the 1% that we should design some small probability to maybe some AI future thing but this other thing is more probable to you it's not it sounds like you would have higher than 1% in this kind of

28:08 uh solution to the firmy Paradox um right so it's not AI concerns in particular oh think it's worth taking them seriously I'm not you know I'm not thinking there's near term catastrophic AI risk uhuh but among the among the maybe longer term risks put put AI in there for sure yeah um and technologies that we can't even foresee now exactly yeah but that's that's the real risk is

28:40 we don't know what's coming but okay interesting so I was yeah that that's a interesting answer I want to go back to the I mean this whole question about how what's the 1% what's the 99 um I still kind of puzzled about it but I want to go back to the the stuff about the bizarre Ness of the metaphysics and accounts of the mind so I think you do a good account a good job of drawing out the um the quote the bizarre consequences of all of our major theories I mean we have physicalism we

29:12 have dualism and we have idealism and compromise mix views basically um and each one of those has results which are seemingly are at odds with common sense um so I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit what you think each of these things are I mean you know I think maybe this stuff is well known but maybe it's not so can you just tell us what you think each can you give us a synopsis or is that too much oh these four different kinds of theories sure yeah of what's bizarre about them well let me first say the the fastest

29:48 argument for the universal bizares thesis is just an empirical induction right no one AG if you look at the history of philosophy the entire history of philosophy in the whole planet you will never see someone who has presented an indepth positive theory of the nature of Consciousness who doesn't commit to something radically bizarre but you'd think that some people would be motivated to create a non-bizarre theory people say oh yeah that totally makes

30:21 sense right so the fact that one does not exist despite centuries of effort across multiple cultures is an empirical case inference to the best explanation for the fact fact that it's not possible to create a non-bizarre theory of everything and then one reason it might not be possible is if common sense is incoherent then you couldn't create a coherent theory that respects every aspect of it so Ken just really quickly so what does it mean to say that it violates Common Sense what it means is that

30:57 when you there is some implication of the theory it doesn't have to be on the face of the theory but there's some implication of the theory that if you were to present it to non-experts they would say man that is so strange I don't think I could accept that right so just we already talked about pan psychism and idealism so those are good examples right the idea that every literally literally everything including like a solitary proton at the edge of the Galaxy is has conscious experiences you know people are like that's pretty strange I mean that doesn't mean it's false right exactly no we not talking

31:31 about whether it's false or not absolutely yeah it violates her ordinary understanding of things right or Barkley's idea that only minds exist there are no physical material objects at all right again that's like pretty strange it's a violation of Common Sense he claimed that he was on the side of common sense so how do we I mean Barkley is an interesting case which you know first of all there's different kinds of idealism so Barkley has a particular brand of it and I think the most popular one nowadays is like objective idealism analytic idealism which claims that the stuff out there is mental but still Barkley's an important person but he claimed to be on the side

32:03 of common sense like I only believe in what I can see so it has um you know this this weird implication but why why why is Barkley wrong that his view isn't a common sense view according to you I mean I don't know who's right here I'm just asking like what your view on so Barkley admits he admits that the ordinary person does not somehow he says wow I I don't know why people feel this but the you know the ordinary people seem to think that sensible objects have an existence independent of being perceived isn't

32:37 that strange that nor people think that right so he acknowledges that his view is contrary in that respect to what ordinary people think and when he's defending Common Sense what he's defending is that houses exist that you know hands exist and that you have direct experence so he's just defending the 99% he's defending the 99% okay I get it now yeah uhhuh um so that yeah that's uh I mean so some people are accusing us of

33:09 only thinking that non-ph physicalist views are bizarre um but obviously that's not what you think because you think physicalism is a bizarre view as well uh but one you know one wonders if it's as bizarre as these other views um so or if it even makes sense on your view to rank these things in terms of their bizarreness and then one might have a preference that Rose above a certain level perhaps right so I wonder first of all what's bizarre about physicalism according to you right so I do think different views have different degrees of bizarreness

33:44 okay and idealism is probably more bizarre well it's bizarre on its face in a way the physicalism I think is maybe not bizarre on its face W interesting it could be that the majority of the world population would reject physicalism but merely merely thinking that something's false is not enough to show that it's bizarre it has to be kind of a jaw-dropper count as bizarre so I don't think either physicalism or dualism

34:17 where by dualism I mean the idea that they're immaterial Souls basically right I don't think either of them is bizarre on its face what happens is I think they're bizarre when you make theoretical choices and pursue implications of of any particular implementation of physicalism right so if you are for example a functionalist which is maybe the most common type of physicalism then you think right basically anytime you have the right kinds of causal

34:51 relationships among things you get conscious experience and then you get these fun interesting counter examples or if they're not interpreted as counter examples right bizarre implications right that if you organized all the people of China to implement the functional state of a brain for an hour that group would be conscious right uh or John sur's Chinese room example right functionalism seems to suggest

35:26 that you could create Consciousness out of any kind of well sirl says you know if you took beer cans and wire and powered it by windmills you did in the right way you'd have Rich levels of conscious experience like that of a human right and that I think that counts as bizarre yeah now you might if you're a functionalist you could say yeah okay that's contrary to Common Sense people kind of scratch their heads when they think about that you really think that right that seems bizarre but maybe that's maybe that's the right view yeah exactly I mean so the functionalism is a

36:01 view that I always thought was just obviously kind of bizarre um in this sense that you mean it in the book uh it really takes a lot of I mean there's a reason I think the identity Theory came first and then people sort of moved away from it because it's sort of not the most natural view but who knows I mean you could debate maybe the identity theory is bizarre too right the idea that you have to have a brain in order to have conscious experience yeah right I mean so much of Science Fiction is premised upon the Assumption of the falsity of the identity Theory right when aliens

36:33 come to visit Earth or when we think about robots being conscious people are generally assuming they don't have brains like ours they've got radically different have those big brains in in a bubble above their head what are you talking about well maybe some of them right no but right but so this is one of the questions you know one of the questions I had when I was reading the book and maybe this is why you say that uh idealism is sort of bizarre in its face because what it says is like the table itself is mental um or but see that's the thing is I wasn't sure if

37:07 according to you the bizarreness of the idealist view was that the table itself is mental or if it's the claim that the table doesn't have a standalone existence um because you might think well okay so you could have forms of idealism that say that it does but it's just a mental Standalone existence that's the kind of analytical IDE ISM which I don't think you talk about in your book uh but some people like that version I think even you know like Helen yet Chappelle has written on this and then there's a lot of work um you know by Bernardo Castro and other people but anyway it doesn't really matter the just

37:40 the the point though is that um the thing out there uh could have Standalone existence independent of my mind and still be mental um so I wondered if like the part that you thought was bizarre was of the idealis was specifically related to the Standalone existence or whether to it was to being mental or to both both both okay uhhuh right yeah the Standalone existence is maybe a little easier to understand its bizarreness I mean so why think Common Sense takes a view on this

38:11 the mentality of it is sorry go ahead I mean why thinks Common Sense takes a view on this so for for my when I talk to students about this like and I say we talk about idealism and then I say so that you know the things in here they're mental things right and they're like no and I'm like they're like what what does it mean to be mental and they're like well I can touch it I can feel it you're like great so when you go home and dream then there's physical things that right because you're touching them and feeling them and they're like well no that's different so but in what sense is it different I I it's the common sense view is like the physical is what can be

38:45 touched isn't that the common sense View and that's sort of what Barkley's Point that's what he was on about was like no the common sense view is that you see the stuff it's right there not that is hidden from you and you see it by seeing so I I I I don't know to what extent like this matters too much but it does seem like an issue right I mean I don't I think to say that a table is a mental thing and not just a material thing in

39:21 the whatever sense of material an object of physical study or something like that is to violate our Common Sense understanding right so but is this so this is people think tables as mental things no go ahead I agree with you but this is something I like to I wonder about because you know lots of people will say that humans are not animals and then I find that very bizarre like I mean in a different sense of bizar I find that very strange thing to say that humans are not animals it's like so usually I will say well what do you what are we rocks or minerals like

39:53 what else is there around here besides Ro rocks minerals animals um so what they mean of course is that we're a special kind of animal not that we aren't animals at all um that they're something special unique about us so I think that when a lot of people are like thinking about mental and physical they're doing something similar as with animal um uh that they don't really mean that the mind isn't physical um they they just mean or I think they think well what physical is what you can touch and then you know I can't really touch

40:25 the mind of seems to me so it seems maybe not physical in that sense but a special case of the physical maybe um or maybe that's a spe so I don't really see common sense as really committing or being shocked by these kinds of I wonder why it's like so yes an average person might not have thought about that and be like I was assuming a different view but but uh the say it's you know shocking or bizarre or something seems more strong than that I was assuming a sort of a different view maybe the idea is that Common Sense doesn't have a apparent view that it's assuming I think I

41:01 suspect that it is more common sensical to think that there's something non-material about us but I don't I don't think common sense is necessarily firmly committed on that what I do think is a violation of Common Sense which is bizar what is bizarre is to say something like oh well mountains are mental entities right the mountain right if no human or conscious being had ever evolved on

41:34 Earth there would still be mountains even if there's no mentality around there would be mountains if the idealist says mountains are mental entities they seem committed to denying the existence of mountains unless there are Minds around right the universe is a is a big mind or something so that's very bizarre so going to exactly so that I mean we're not saying these views are false we're just trying to say that they're committed to something we're saying it's not the Common Sense picture yeah right yeah right the idea I mean you could say

42:06 oh yeah well there mountains before humans because there were Minds always on Earth because May the universe is one big mind or you know even mountains have mines or something like that but you know now you're by the standards of mainstream contemporary anglophone thinking in our culture you know it is uh that's something that's kind of a a bit of a jaw-dropper so do you think I mean this I don't want to get too distracted but if you were raised in a certain Society could you have a like could I

42:41 don't know why I'm picking on idealism because I think you said that one's more bizarre than physicalism but could you if you were raised in a certain like you know very Orthodox meditation focused um you know the the endorsing The Emptiness of all terms you know so very very strict sort of version of a kind of Hinduism or something like that or Buddhism depending on The View could you then have if you were just in that little monk confined area in that Community would idealism be the common

43:14 sense of view if you were raised there I mean so it just depends really a lot on what common sense changes so I have two observations about this right one is despite the fact that common sense is changes and is culturally variable I still think I mean I'm open to hearing a counter example but I never have I still think it's true that every well-developed cosmology of Consciousness has violated the common sense both of its era and of current

43:50 mainstream anglophone thinking right so if you go for example for Buddhism right the Buddhist Buddhists they did not see no self and dependent origination as common sense right they're they recognized that there's like a common understanding of things and then there's the Buddhist understanding which is very different right right so that's one observation the other observation is yes Common Sense changes and it could change radically and and by Common Sense I kind of mean at the group level and individuals have different ideas one my favorite example of Common Sense changing is cernus right so at the time CERN cernus suggested the earth moved

44:25 around the son that violated common sense right right it's like the Earth is not moving it is obvious that the Earth is not moving this is a bizarre thing to say that the Earth is rotating around that that thing up in the sky right but now it doesn't violate common sense right we've come to accept that right so I meaness Common Sense could change so in part of the reason why I think this matters maybe because like you know if we think that I uh that idealism is more bizarre than physicalism even though physicalism has some bizarre implications is not right on his face you still might think that

44:59 that's largely a product of the culture that we happen to find ourselves in where everyone is very science obsessed and so forth and so on so even saying that that's like less bizarre is not a point really in physicalism favor on your view right it's just basically saying something about the background assumptions of the average P or group of our society at this time or is it saying anything more than that I think it says a little more than that okay um so if you thought we had a good method for answering these metaphysical and

45:31 cosmological questions that didn't appeal to Common Sense then you could say oh yeah so so what common sense says that that is no bearing on what we should believe but the in my view the problem is we have basically three methods for trying to settle these questions and none of them are any good so despite the fact that Common Sense kind of stinks it's one of basically three broad approaches we have to try to deal any with these issues and we're going to try to deal with these issues we kind of have to some extent count violations of common sense

46:05 as a strike against a theory now it's not going to be a definitive strike against a theory because every theory is going to violate it to some extent right and I don't think it's like we bring out our common sense ometer and then just like okay whichever one violates it least is the one we're going to choose right because there are other reasons I mean the the other methods we have think you Our Kind of Science yeah as we understand it right but there's not like a straightforward scientific test for the truth or falsity of psychism or the truth or falsity of functionalism about

46:38 mentality we could talk about that if you want right but right but I don't think there's a straightforward scientific test for for questions at of this magnitude there is scientific evidence that kind of bears on it that makes certain theories more comfortable than others in certain respects but you can't just like okay tomorrow we're gonna test and figure out the right whether psychism is true well and panus like like goth and them uh explicitly say that they are you know saying nothing that is can ever be tested or is incompatible with any scientific finding so that's kind of their view it's like

47:12 exactly exactly right and Rudolph Cari says well look you know an idealist and a materialist measuring a mountain they're not going to say there's some difference in the measurements right right exactly that's all of the mountain weighs n gram Eric right I mean there are some people there is some empirical evidence is relevant for example if you think there are immaterial souls some people who thought that have thought okay well maybe we can weigh these things right you know and see if the body gets a little lighter after it dies or maybe we could try seances and see if we can communicate with these things right and as the evidence comes in negatively on that that puts a little

47:45 strain on certain versions of substance dualism but not all versions of substance dualism right so it's not like it's irrelevant and then the third thing is something like theoretical Elegance fruitfulness you know those kinds so philosophy doesn't even come in here as one of our meod well philosophy philosophy is I think philosophy is the big picture thinking about anything so I think philosophy already is in it from the beginning right as soon as you're uh talking about the most fundamental big picture issues whatever tools you're using you're doing philosophy yeah I I

48:19 mean I I guess I so I have an A a secret harboring for a desire for to be a philosophical method that kind of is uh not distinctive of philosophy but maybe a way of doing philosophy or something um and I sort of think that what's distinctive of that is like commitment to the idea that an argument counts as evidence and not everyone accepts that there are a lot of people who think that no arguments are not evidence they they they don't really they shouldn't count as like an like the kinds of things that you bring up um uh so what counts as an argument we can argue about that or you

48:51 know is it only formal arguments or inductive arguments we can argue about that but I think that's sort of the philosoph philosophers are committed to the andil the philosophical method depends on this idea that if you give an argument there's there's evidence that you should accept a conclusion um so that uh that that seems sort of like an important thing that obviously you probably GNA say that's just part of rationality or something like that but um that's my inclination yeah but uh yeah but but so other people are going to say evidence but yeah so evidence means I mean it depends

49:26 I I think people will disagree about that but I think people who might say this are going to say it's going to increase your probability that something is true so abstract reasoning or arguments that uh with from premises that you don't know whether like for example simulation hypothesis um starting with uh speculative premises and then reasoning to a conclusion that's um you're now supposed to put some Credence into that's not based on experience or anything that you've seen But actually these you know these abstract arguments uh I think a lot maybe not a lot but I think some people

49:59 are skeptical of that as being something that you should take Serious um and I mean more than just empiricism I mean although empiricism is related I mean this idea that the the reasoning itself is kind of an inadequate reason to believe the the truth of the premises given that we don't know the truth excuse me the truth of the conclusion given that we don't know the truth of the premises is very asra and speculative as long as we have some degree of credence in the premises we put them together and get to a conclusion then we probably ought to

50:34 have some degree of credence in the conclusion maybe multiplying the credences of the premises together or something like that yeah no I agree with you I'm just saying I don't think rationality to me yeah yeah well all right so um I want so this idea that physicalism is less bizarre it's kind of related in a way to the point I was just trying to make um so I couldn't help but notice that the bizarreness of physicalism relies heavily on science

51:09 fiction um and that there aren't as far as I can tell any real like empirically motivated cases of bizarreness except for very specific versions of physicalism like maybe the type identity Theory which says there has to be some common brain State between me and an ant and a and a and a octopus if they fa the same state so that's you know you same brain State huh well okay so you can maybe work your way to believe that but that takes work um but so other than that like the idea that the the mind is physical is counter exampled not by

51:45 anything we've ever seen but only by those things which are uh fictional um and you can specify the fictional cases and reason about them um but it seems I guess I would say if I was to really try to push back on this view which I remember I'm very open to your I'm not really trying to more interested in what you're going to say than I am trying to really make this point but uh if I were going to push back on I would say well the the that bizarreness really should be discounted in a sense because

52:20 of the skeptical nature I mean the extremely speculative nature of the counter examples antari and an heads things of this nature are very cool as far as stretching your mind out but this might be the difference between swallows and moles and I know you read that Edward mashery review and and there may be something I don't know in the background related when I read that I was like okay so maybe this is sort of what I was what I was thinking about in a sense because it does sort of seem like in a way you can make up the counter example if you get to not really worry about like have we ever seen it so

52:56 I I agree that we want to leave some room for those things out there not I don't I want to be a neural chauvinist in the sense you define as like ruling them out from the beginning even if they showed up we would say n no to their having a mind but I do Wonder like what like really level of credence we should give to this hypothesis given that well there are no counter examples on Earth that we know of um and well yeah I we we've I mean it's specifically not only to the idea that Consciousness is physical but to that

53:29 involves brains um so I wonder if you think that this doesn't matter as much as maybe I do or what you might your response would be to someone who says yeah that's maybe strange to say Commander Data doesn't have conscious experience but then in the Star Trek world it's just kind of not a possible world but so what I mean fiction is full of all kinds of stuff like that so how serious are we supposed to take this stuff I mean until commander data shows up and says hey

54:01 Jerk why why are we really supposed to like think that physicalism is bizarre for making this commitment right so I guess I have two thoughts about that one is I think hypotheticals are fair right so if your view has the implication that if there were such and such a case it would be an entity who is conscious or it' be an entity who's not conscious and we have a kind of pretty compelling intuitive feeling that that's

54:37 the wrong decision about that case then your theory has that bizarre implication even if we haven't encountered that entity yet as long as it's I'd say physically possible naturally possible entity so in that sense I do think the speculative cases are fair right your theory says if we came across this kind of case it would be conscious people and people say no it wouldn't be right or that's their strong intuition right then that's a bizarre implication of your

55:11 view uhuh so if we haven't run across that yet that's that's strand one of my responses strand two okay strand two is some of the cases are not hypothetical right so I have this whole chapter on whether the United States is conscious right the United States is not a hypothetical entity right okay I see where you're going with this and right it's got higher order representations for example it's got a lots of information processing complex responsiveness to its environment right if you take the kinds of standard things the physicalists or

55:44 materialists say about Consciousness it looks like the United States kind of has those things so either you have to develop your theory in a way that excludes United States Consciousness or you say okay well look it has these things so it's conscious now I take the consciousness of the actually existing United States as a group over andove the over and above the consciousness of its members as a kind of bizarre possibility something that would be contrary to our Common Sense

56:16 understanding of things right so that's a nonhypothetical implication of a broad range of standard materialistic approaches to Consciousness uhuh interesting and then when materialists try to wiggle out of that implication they end up sometimes often I think maybe perhaps inevitably adopting different bizarre implications uh in order to to to get out of that I mean I yes I agree the I like the US argument um it's very cool uh it targets I think functionalism and you bring this

56:50 out nicely in the book where you say okay so well you got to say something special about brains then um if you want to be a kind of physicalist who denies this there's got to be something special about brains and in fact there are many special things about brains and most of the things that you point out can be like addressed in this way like information processing blah blah blah blah but you know I've always been kind of a secret fan of the kind of block style thinking about this which is that there's one thing about the brain which is super surprising in the US doesn't do it and that's this transfer of mediums from electrical signaling to chemical signaling at the

57:25 synapse uh which seems completely bizarre completely unexpected when people discovered it they just thought it was completely the most that can't be the way the brain works I mean there's I read this book it was the war of soups and uh the war of soups and Sparks which was the whole debate about whether electrical activity in the brain was there how it worked whether or not it was some other thing so there was this whole I mean this went whale pass you know Echo denied this kind of stuff so it's like okay um that's in the the 70s I think it's not too bad far back so this

58:02 uh the idea that that this works this way was extremely counterintuitive and people you know thought you could give op prior reasoning like our reflexes are too quick and we were doesn't blah so it just turns out it's wrong so it's a very interesting unique feature of the brain that there's this kind of electrical signal that is then transduced into a a synaptic chemical signal then back to electrical signal so I don't know that looks like something I mean yeah that's itself pretty bizarre I guess you say that Consciousness is has to do with something about that um but uh it's I do think we might you know think about

58:37 hypothetical cases and drawing out the bizarreness of that right so if we met a naturally evolved alien species right again this is just a hypothetical but I think of this is an implication of the view that's bizarre then you have to say the view has bizarre implications we met a hyp hypothetical alien species that only worked electrically and didn't have the chemical synapse right instead of having you know calcium ions and almost identical to us except calcium ions exactly exactly it's just it's just the

59:10 electric potassium and calcium man that's where it all comes down to I agree it sounds very strange it acts just like us it's got a brain ritually identical to ours except instead of calcium pottassium channels it's got electrical channels all the way through and say oh no they're not conscious right they say wait we're conscious yeah they speak in language they seem to experience pain they talk about their dreams and you say sorry no calcium channels but see that's not an actual example though so that's kind of it's a hypothetical implication of the view and I think if the vi has counterintuitive

59:43 hypothetical implications then you got to accept that it's got bizarre consequences so I I want to so first of all that's what I would say about the us as being an actual case I'd be like okay so they don't have brains what's special all brains well here's one candidate okay so maybe it's not I mean I've been become more friendly to functionalism in my old age but this is my last dieh hard like probably what I thought of as common sense view the common sense view being that Consciousness has to be like dependent on the brain somehow like the things which have minds are the brained things and you know it seems to me that there

1:00:19 is a kind of a common sense Prejudice towards maybe life but I think more specifically brains um with respect to these things so but the counter example that was here was not the counter example to that just um pointed out the counter example to that was like the fictional one again so if you're like weighing but but hold on Eric I I mean to cut you up but just to finish the idea the um so if you're weighing all your evidence and you're like where do I sign how do I adjust my beliefs and you look around Earth you look here and you

1:00:55 don't look at commander data and you don't care about antarian aens and you say confined to here what's here probably you should conclude it has something to do with brains um or maybe life more generally if you want to get trees and their underground root systems in and stuff like that uh so then you bring in all these other things these conditionals which I agree are valid implications of the theory and then you go okay so do we see anything like that around here no we in the infinite extension of the future find something like that yes but

1:01:28 is that supposed to um impact the common Sensen of the G look around here part of the earlier part of my rant because I think the G look around here part is playing a big role and by and just to finish the rant if you talk about water like okay so water is H2O well aren't there similar bizarre consequences to water being H2O on your view in that you know in the infinite extension of the universe there's going to be some some bizarre

1:02:01 implications like dry water there's the possible world of dry water where H2O is not a liquid it's a Sandy substance well gee okay so it's accepting water now's H is a bizarre thing huh I thought it wasn't so it does seem to me I wonder like how and I don't mean this as an objection I'm just curious to flesh out your view on these things although I think of it as kind of a way of getting physicalism I head of the others slightly because you don't have to do you don't have to invoke common sense I excuse me you don't have to invoke science fiction in order to get the violation of common sense with any of

1:02:35 the other views um but you do have to invoke science fiction to get the counter examples to brains and that seems to me kind of like an important difference it's either a consequence of our perality or some kind of significant thing yeah you I think that might be right right um I mean my preferred position is physicalism or materialism if I had to make a a wager um so and maybe that is an advantage of it I think right with idealism and dualism

1:03:10 you can kind of prove pretty quickly that they violate Common Sense idealism violates on face dualism produces uh what I think of as what I call the the the quadril of insolent which we talk about if you want uh but where I think Common Sense has got to be violated right away whereas physicalism it's a little it's a little fussier to get the to show how it violates common sense and I don't have an in-principle argument that all physicalist theories must violate common sense and it does to some extent turn on these hypothetical

1:03:44 examples you know if you accept certain versions of physicalism so I think I can accept what you're saying I do want to point out though that when we think about what's so special about brains the more obvious candidates for what's so special about them are things like that they coordinate sophisticated envir environmental reactiveness yeah that they store complex information right and it kind of seems

1:04:17 like that's more likely to be the kind of stuff that should matter to whether something conscious then oh it's got an electrical chemical shift right that sounds like right so if you think about it's what matters to Gold what makes something gold is it's electrical chemical stuff why wouldn't it the same be for Consciousness well it's it's a kind of physical stuff that's what physical stuff is let me let me give it an analogy right so there are these old racist theories that try to rank the races so they try to figure out okay in virtue of

1:04:51 what are the Whites superior to the Asians and the Asians Superior to the blacks right and they try to find a physiological thing and they say oh well if you look at the distance between the belly button and the bottom of the crotch it's uh I forget whether it's higher or lower for the Caucasians and medium for the Asians and the opposite for the blacks so that's the thing right so if you're looking around kind of trying to find the physical thing I mean but of course that's absurd right right but it's it's a post Hawk you're trying to find the thing that gives you the answer that you want but it's not a

1:05:23 thing that seems intrinsically like it should matter then there's some reasons to worry about your method right so that's what a little bit what I'm worrying is going on here right you you are trying to say okay we we we know the brains matter we don't know why they matter right but if we choose this thing then we get the result that we want which is that the United States is not conscious somehow we know an I was actually more saying I think it's a common sense thing which is I say that like it's some kind of thing which has a Nature and Science and we can find out what its like physical nature is it's

1:05:57 not common sense that it has that nature but that it's kind of just like the other stuff around here um the the the fact that gold has you know a certain number of protons and thus electrons and thus Bonds in certain ways where you can see very quickly how the number of protons is super relevant to all the stuff we care about with gold uhhuh well I think you could debate that the I agree yes it's not in the same way clear how is relevant that the that the

1:06:31 fact that you've got electrical to chemical conversion across the ion channels is relevant to the stuff that we care about in Consciousness which is I think the stuff that we care about that's revealed by these hypothetical examples are things like the capacity to engage in sophisticated environmental responsiveness represent oneself at a higher order level throwing you a little bone here hey I'm not a true convert of high that kind of that kind of big picture stuff seems

1:07:06 like what we care about yeah what we think about when we're thinking about what kind of entities are conscious or not right and if we say ah well it's it's because of this little specific physiological thing unless there's a story for why that physiological thing is super important into the big picture thing like there is with the protons and gold right then it's like then it's a little bit like the belly button case yeah um I I want to say something about that but first I just want to say for the higher order stuff like I'm not a committed to the higher order Theory um I think that we don't know which if

1:07:42 any of the theories that we have about Consciousness um relating to the the neural correlates of it or how it relates to the in the brain I don't think we know I think higher order theories are misunderstood a lot and people think they can dismiss them of hand so I get sucked into arguing and defending them but I don't really think I mean think it would be quite surprising if Consciousness in the brain turned out to correlate with a thought or anything cognitive although I think it's a possibility so um I yes I the bones are appreciated but my own view is that these are things are much more complicated and that we don't really know so I'm on board with the not

1:08:15 knowing part uh the only thing I was sort of pressing on was the the universal dubiety um which which relates to the universal bizarreness so I was thinking yes you physicalism is bizarre it's one of the bizarre things and I like this idea in fact in this you know quote unquote book I've been working on I start off by saying higher order theories are one of the bizarre things that could be true as per this argument that you make and I say your book and say you know everyone should know about this there probably has to be something that's bizarre about Consciousness

1:08:49 that's true and people should get off their high horse thinking that it's not that way I think it's absolutely the case that you're right however what I was thinking though also was like how bizarre are the various options and isn't our dubiety related to them so you say there's no reason to get above 50% but it sounds to me like we sort of have arrived at like a 75 split the rest 25 because of the science fiction sort of examples and because of the g- look around here nature of like uh Consciousness is innocent and wonderful

1:09:21 I I have it it's here what other things appear to have it the things that behave and move in ways that are interesting what do they have that I have brains what are the things that don't do I mean to me it was a marvelous and wonderful fact to find out that spiders had brains because I just couldn't possibly imagine it as a kid that a spider had a brain like I was to me it boggled my mind when I'm I'm not joking at all when I learned this in school I was like wait worms have brains wait spiders have brains wait brain so maybe that's why I've been obsessed ever since then but I just felt

1:09:53 like it could have been anything in there it it could have been water pipes it could have been cans roaming around it could have been tiny little worm insects riding in a in a weird way like you're antarian ant heads but it wasn't and over and over and over again it wasn't um in the worm in the in the spider in the dog in the cat in Us in the octopus everywhere you look it could have been so like according to your view it just could have been so different but it isn't um so it's got to be something

1:10:28 about either really weird about here but here seems pretty typical if you look cosmologically um not in terms of life but in terms of composition it seems pretty typical there's nothing really bizarre or exotic here on Earth um that you would expect to only find in places like this or something like that so it just seems like it could have been this we should have opened up the head of the spider and found anything in there but we didn't we found neurons working in this way yeah you could tell Evolution or something like that but still still one place somewhere why but we haven't found anything like that now that doesn't mean

1:11:01 that I think it's impossible I just I just wonder like in the grand quest for things that we're looking for in the search for life like it would be very surprising to find some that wasn't having a brain that was moving around we would adjust our views but yeah I think it would be a shock to like most of Earth to find the kind of even just like like Silicon based let alone you know not even computer based or not even like ant heads or but just something with not brains but that had Behavior like I

1:11:34 think we'd be blown away by that um because it's part of common sense that that's doing it what do you think about I mean again we're getting hypothetical cases but increasingly less hypothetical yeah about robots right so it doesn't seem like requires that much conjecture imagine a robot that moves around and responds with a similar kind of sophistication to say a frog to its

1:12:09 environment you know maybe we're getting near that I mean it depends on how much sophistication you think a frog has and how optimistic you are about technological development right that would not be a rain in the sense I think you mean rain it would not anty yeah I would be very shocked by that uh you know I've always been one of these ones who thinks that's not going to pan out like this AI thing and so chat chat GPT was a shock for me and I had to reevaluate some credences and stuff because um it it does very well it

1:12:42 does you do get the feeling of conversing with a kind of semi-intelligent or intelligent of a you know a learning of intelligence there so I I was surprised that you could get that from predictive models I think a lot of people were um but so you have to sort of re-evaluate that stuff but yes if if there were really frog likee things roaming around um I think that would be uh that would be very shocking um and I think I would have to backpedal on a lot of this stuff I would I would not be someone so I'm not saying that you know

1:13:14 if you built the robotic frog and it was hopping around and you stepped on it and it made it withdrawals and was limping around you know I would say you know I feel bad for roombas that get stuck in the corner um so I think that they soone to help those roombas and I'm not even joking like I feel I feel like we kind of have a duty like if you just walk by a Roomba that's bumping into the corner I feel like you did something wrong um to the Roomba uh you know so and I don't even think it has Consciousness I just think that it has a kind of internal drive that is being foiled and it's just all things considered you shouldn't stand in the way if you if you don't

1:13:46 have to so I think those kind of considerations um and you know any sort of precautionary principle and all that like if the thing were there the the default is like it's probably conscious we don't want a moral disaster on our hands we don't want some view like this to lead us into a terrible um moral disaster so I I the way I think about robots is yeah when they show up and are interesting then that's one thing but they haven't and they aren't so maybe that will change and by you know 10 years here's where I

1:14:19 must swallow maybe and you're a mole to to appeal to this right so you want to stay focused on what do we have currently empirical evidence for and let's not speculate beyond that yeah and I'm saying let's speculate I mean I care make our best guesses about what would happen if I'm saying let's speculate but let's let's like qu Let's uh qualify the speculation with a with a downgrader because of it speculative

1:14:52 nature yeah yeah that's totally fair and if you want to say 75% materialism 25% the rest that's not in my view that different from me you know I'm in the ballpark of 50% materialism we haven't really talked about what I call the um compromise rejection views which is actually where the bulk of my non-materialist thinking goes especially especially um uh property dualism and transcendental idealism are both views that although I would bet on materialis straightforward materialism over those I

1:15:27 feel the pull of both of those types of views yeah substantially so transcendental idealism that's good that you brought that up because um you know I agree with you but so this is I why I was bringing up the analytical idealism because I think of that as a kind of successor to those views except they want to say something about what's the Numa thing is but the transcendental idealist and this is something you bring out really clearly in your book which is you know really great that uh we're really limiting our imagination when it comes to trying to conceive of uh like taking seriously

1:16:00 this idea that the Pinal world isn't like the world we experience um so I like the idea of the non-physical Angel singing as as far as a computation um but then you try to take it a bit further so so when you talk about transcendental idealism you usually are confining yourself to spatial uh stuff but then you you want so I wonder about the step from there to the rest of it and what you think is that you're assigning abuse there right so I regard transcendental so Kant is of course the famous transcendal idealist and some people

1:16:32 when they use the phrase transcendal idealism just mean cons view yeah um con Prime yeah we don't have to deal with that yeah right I want to use it in a broader sense and how it relates to K is going to be complicated but in the broad sense that I'm using the view transcendental idealism is composed of two main thesis one is that we don't know the fundamental nature of things and the other aspect is that spatiality is something that arises as a feature of our

1:17:06 minds and I think that and then Kant wants to say something about temporality and causality also Aris all 12 categories baby all the categories right so I just want to focus on spatiality because I think that's the easiest case to think of and if you give the transcendental idealist spatiality then I think you have a contrast with the materialist position because I'm treating materialist uh position as committed to spatiality not being a feature of our

1:17:41 minds right right maybe spatiality is a fundamental feature of things or maybe it's a derivative feature of some more fundamental feature but it doesn't arise from our minds yeah if you are a materialist so I think that is a that is a commitment of materialism that if we can EST if we can establish the falsity of it then we have a contrast to a materialist view right and then you can talk about temporality too or causality or whatever else kind of as a next step if you want okay so what is the you I mean so you don't endorse kant's

1:18:13 argument for the I ideality of space do you or um you give three kind of not sure what his argument is he presents it as a picture I think K presents it as an appealing picture okay the positive arguments are in my mind harder to evaluate and extract and sketchier yeah so you don't appeal to this well what would it mean to have an experience of something that wasn't in space or these kinds of things I kind of point out that it's a it's a pre it's a preconception of experience that there's

1:18:46 space you don't rely on that kind of AR yeah yeah um so I my aim in the chapter of the book H meets cyberpunk uh which is the chapter that I talk about this is just to kind of warm up the reader to seeing it as a live possibility right and I do it through a certain kind of science fictional imaginative exercise where we we start with the conception that we're living in a simulation and then think about okay

1:19:23 that seems at least conceivable now there people have argued against it even being conceivable but I think you know the majority of kind of the bulk of the philosophical Reflections suggests that well it's conceivable at least we live inside a simulation right Matrix Four uh Matrix 4 so and then to think combine that with some thoughts about the nature of computation going back to touring right computation does not have to be spatial comput essentially involves you know different having different kinds of

1:19:56 States different kind of symbols and state transitions there's nothing about this that's inherently spatial could have a computation entirely with an within an immaterial non-spatial Soul so there so that if we put those two thoughts together we end up with the thought that okay it's conceivable I'm not saying it's likely it's conceivable that we live in a simulation that's in stand iated in a nonspatial computer and then right number

1:20:29 one we don't really know what that computer would be like we don't really know the fundamental nature of how that computer is working that gives us part one of transcendental idealism and part two the computer is not spatial right ex hypothesi right and you could start to think of spatiality as simply our way of dealing with the fundamental non-spatial structure it kind of presents itself to us in this spatial way right so then spatiality is something that's really a feature of our

1:21:03 pattern of interacting with things it's how we make sense of this fundamentally non-spatial reality and if you give if you if you grant both of those things as a kind of coherent metaphysical picture then you've got already a form of transcendental idealism as I've defined it right and then the final move is we can think okay like that we're in a simulation in a nonspatial computer is not like we likely right but that there's some fundamental

1:21:35 reality that maybe is very different from what we suppose it to be and that we don't really know and that spatiality is just our way of kind of experiencing this impossible to understand to us fun Al reality you know that that doesn't sound so ridiculous to me I think maybe that maybe that's the right way to think about things now again it's not my it's not my primary it's not I'm kind of a

1:22:08 little bit more of a mainstream materialist if you had to push me really but I feel the pull of that I think that we ought to reserve a little bit of our philosophical thinking for that way of understanding things uhhuh you know I mean I thought that it might even be the case that you could have brains be doing something interesting in those kind of cases so it might still be the case that you only get Consciousness like ours in that non-physical simulation when there's non-physically simulated brains yes absolutely totally be the cas in a way it's it's sort of it's beyond that

1:22:44 dispute in a way that's even more um bizarrely fundamental but uh but but I don't want to get distracted by that CU when I was reading about this and you know I I I like this view I've known that you've had this view for a long time um but I wonder what how you think it relates to views like Donald Hoffman who Donald you know I don't know if you're familiar with his work but he goes around saying I am physics has shown this physics has shown that re space is a headset that we use to you know it's it's a dashboard it's a headset it's and he's got these arguments I'm not doing a good job of of

1:23:17 my Hoffman impression but he you know this is his view which sounds sort of like what you would classify as transcendental idealism maybe um but I wonder is this like in that category or have you thought about Hoffman's View at all I've thought about Hoffman's view um I think he is some sort of idealist either a metaphysical idealist or transcendental idealist I'm not sure exactly which um I don't accept that physics has shown this to be the case um I think

1:23:49 it's I think it's good that he's out there kind of putting out this view because I think we should accept it as a live option right um but when he says things like Evolution selects for survival not for accuracy therefore and the argument gets very quick yeah therefore it follows that we don't have access to some mind independent truth in my experience when I read his recent book and some of his at least

1:24:25 maybe two of his papers on this the that set of philosophical moves goes by very quickly in a way that I don't find compelling so I like it's an interesting view that he's putting out there but I don't find that the positive case for the view is as welldeveloped as I I'd like to see I see okay so you you don't think that uh the holographic hypothesis and these various other speculative ideas from fundamental physics are are is it that you don't think they could be relevant or you just don't think they are right now uh well like the holograph of

1:24:57 hypothesis from physics I don't think that establishes idealism it's supposed to establish the emergentism of space so the non-fund nonf fundamentality of space which might be in a related category if you think well gee um it's only you know at our level that this emerges I it's you know right so okay so when I was defining physicalism in its relationship to space actually I prefer materialism over physicalism I you've been using physicalism and maybe it's more common these days but uh we could get into that well I think materialism says

1:25:32 fundamental stuff is matter and physicalism says fundamental stuff is what physics tells us it is and those are slightly different things you know physics ends up being idealist or dualist then making physicalism synonymous with what we think of currently physicalism being is going to be a problem right I think materialism is a more robust phrasing of things against those kinds of future possibilities for physics so but anyway phys calls physical physics physicalism right exactly so I I would

1:26:04 usually take the physical J me physical not physics but physicalism not physics ISM yeah how you define what's physical is you know is a big mess right but right so when I was def when I was characterizing materialism or physicalism earlier I was careful to say that spatiality either is a fundamental feature of things in themselves or it's not a fundamental feature but it arises from the fundamental features of things in themselves in a way that does not depend on our minds right right so the holographic hypothesis in physics is

1:26:38 compatible with physicalism or materialism as kind of that second the second of those conject the holographic hypothesis does not show that spatiality depends on our minds it just shows the spatiality if it's true just shows that spatiality is not fundamental right and then the the to say that it depends on our minds is a further move and I think for Hoffman to get to that he has to use his evolutionary selection argument I see uh and that I think is where right exactly things go one of the weaknesses

1:27:10 in his that's where he's quick yeah exactly I agree um okay very interesting so I see where're we're getting on in time I can't keep you forever although there's a million things we haven't even scratched the surface of in your in your your very interesting um very interesting work here but uh I wonder if there's been something that you were wanting to have come up or to talk about that we haven't talked about the answer can be no by the way but I always like to check to see if there was something you were like expecting or you wanted to mention or bring up no not in particular that's been a fun conversation yeah it's been a very great

1:27:43 conversation um if you have a couple minutes I gives a couple questions from the from the listeners um sure so there there seems to be something uh some people asking about um your commitment to physicalism and uh saying that it's largely a product of well that you give it too much Credence so it should be a lot lower than than around 50% and I wonder um why you think all things considered having all of these wonderful bizarre

1:28:19 views um on the table that physicalism still gets up to that level I guess they're not putting it exactly that way but that's sort of what I would interpret right and by the way if you have Qui questions put them in the chat I feel have for a next couple minutes he can stick around um but anyway so I wonder what why why even close to 50 shouldn't shouldn't it be more like nine cuz how many views are there there's more yeah um yeah right so the way that I parse up the possibility space here

1:28:52 the theoretical spaces you've got materialism or physicalism you got substance dualism you've got idealism and then you've got this these compromise rejection view right and by substance dualism their immaterial souls I'm kind of inclined to think empirical evidence is not so good for that idealism is pretty bizarre it seems like the kind of thing you'd really need a very strong argument to win yourself over to I don't I don't see that really strong argument so wait do you think

1:29:25 that physics is against dualism because of like causal closure and stuff or just no evidence of interaction one problem right no evidence of interaction no evidence of immaterial souls okay right it's kind of like there are lots of ways it could empirically have been confirmed right and then the evidence keeps going against those empirical confirmations you know like William James and all these guys were trying to do seances like oh yeah you know yeah they took it serious yeah exactly they took it seriously really um and it's kind of feels to me a little bit

1:29:58 like a view and Retreat it's like uh it it keeps having to insulate itself from the scientific evidence in order to survive um so what about Quantum dualism though like of the chers variety you're not that doesn't get in uh you just recent stuff on the collapse of the wave function Queen uhhuh oh uh yeah I haven't tried to map that under the categories think about whether that's substance or property I I was assuming it that would be a property

1:30:31 kind of dualism since that's commerce's favorite view uh yeah I see that as a substance dualism the minds outside of physical reality interacts with it to collapse the way function yeah but there's room for dispute yeah okay so interesting um so those views so yeah so those views get only a minority of my you know kind of smallish minority of my personal credence uh uh so so then as I said property dualism and transcendal idealism I feel the pull of them but you know at root I think it's a pretty com appealing story to think that

1:31:09 the world is just the physical material world that we think it is that seems to be the way that science is pointing us it as as you were saying Richard the violations against common sense a little less severe than for some of these other views uh it's got a certain kind of Simplicity and elegance to it right there's no other stuff besides just the physical stuff and we're just naturally evolved things right so all of that stuff draws you in I you know I it draws me in and I see the appeal of these other views and I see some of the

1:31:42 weaknesses and criticisms of it but you know so when you say if I had to bet does that mean that you have transcended Credence into I believe physicalism is or you still like would you reject that characterization that you have a belief that physicalism is true um and forget about the debates about belief I know you have a lot to say about what a believe I know I know you do oh no you destroyed the background I thought that was a virtual background this whole time holy skepticism bman okay I think I think what I'm not being a philosopher and reflecting on things

1:32:18 carefully I kind of just assume the phys ism is true or materialism as I prefer to call it right I think that's kind of my default state of mind and I have to kind of like remind myself of the alternative possibilities and the challenges to it uh and when I make those Vivid then you know find myself in the ballpark of 50% yeah where you want to leave in the quad which is a we get to talk about the Practical implementations of all this stuff um but but really quickly someone's asking about a Fantasia um and uh your revews about a Fantasia and uh over relying on

1:32:53 introspection so you know I think of myself as someone who has a Fantasia which I discovered by studying philosophy um and uh it made me wonder did I always have it or did I not have it as a kid and some I hit my head and lost it I don't remember but I can't make mental images but um so some I guess the gist of the question is gist of the question is maybe it's over relying on introspection um right I'm contemplating writing a paper about a Fantasia mhm so in the early

1:33:25 2000s I did a review of the literature A quite a thorough review of the literature on the accuracy of introspective reports about imagery and I came to a very pessimistic conclusion that basically there's no relationship between people's introspective reports of individual differences in imagery capacity and their actual differences in imagery capacity there all there are hundreds of published attempts to find correlation between introspective reports of imagery capacity and things like visual memory visual

1:34:00 rotation um mental folding you know all this kind of stuff you think might be related and basically it's a goose egg I mean you find a smattering of positive results most of those don't replicate there's probably a positive publication bias in the literature which would explain that SM smattering of positive results so I decided this is and I you know published this in 2008 and then it became part of my 2011 book that basically the empirical evidence suggests the relationship what people who say they're poor images versus good imagers probably there's no correlation between that and their real imagery

1:34:34 capacity this is the perplexities of Consciousness book this is in perplexities of Consciousness yeah my 2011 book so since then there's been this big literature on a Fantasia has arisen where people are claiming to find empirical differences between people who claim to be a fantasic that is have no visual imagery EXP experiences uh and um neural states that you might think would be associated with imagery and maybe some performance and tasks now when I've looked in that literature I have found the evidence not as not wholly compelling

1:35:08 okay but I haven't yet done a thorough theoretical review of the literature to assess whether I really want to maintain the skepticism so my current position on that is I'm not going to accept at face value that a Fantasia is a real phenomenon of the sort that people seem to say and think it is now interesting but I'm open to that possibility I think we slow on it and look carefully at the empirical evidence

1:35:43 on this with a critical eye given the history uh of poor correlations bad we've done on this um so so just to be so that I'm clear on this um the the error is on the imager side so they're wrong um not me because I think I can't do it like when when someone says image and apple uh I can't like to no I get pure maybe like I cognize an apple or do something I feel something but it's not

1:36:17 visual in any way I can't picture an apple um so I I'm right about that or I'm wrong about that or I'm just as right as the person who thinks they like my son claims to be able to like vividly picture the Apple like according to him it's as real as seeing it and I was like uh whoa okay so I try to convince him he might be wrong about it he was like no I'm doing it right now he's like I'm not listening to you I'm looking at the app I like okay so the the view is that that that there's a mistake on his part and my part or both it could be both it could be a linguistic dispute right so it could be I this is this is maybe

1:36:50 simplistic but but just to give a flavor of the kind of linguistic dispute it could be it could be that when you say you're not having an image you have an idea of what an image must be to count as an image that makes it closely resemble what it is to visually experience something right and you're like I don't have that right right and your son when he thinks about what it is for an image to be real doesn't have to resemble Vision as vividly and he's like I do have that now maybe you have exactly the same thing when someone asks you to imagine Apple like okay imagine an upright apple and there's a stem on

1:37:24 the top and there's a leaf coming out of the stem and the apple is red right maybe you guys are kind of doing the same thing but you're like ah given what an image has to be this doesn't qualify as an image and your son is disqualifies as an image what else could it be right so that would be one way of thinking about it is just a linguistic dispute yeah it seems hard to sustain that given that he claims it's just as good as actual vision well but he's not like reaching for his I mean just I me he could draw it though

1:37:56 he could he he can draw it from what he pictures whereas I can't could draw what I just described um I could I can't draw what I think I'm picturing in any way um and I don't I would deny that I have anything that's visual uh so it's not that there's an image what does it mean for something to be visual involving light and the distribution of it maybe there's no light in in a visual image it seems like do you have a imagery right so do you like yeah I think I do and I dream I dream in images yeah right so there's that's that's an interesting thing right and so

1:38:31 if you think about like a tune running through your head or saying something to yourself silently in inner speech where you could see how someone would say well that's that's real I'm really imagining that in inner speech but it's not like I'm hearing something right so there's a sense in which it's as real mhm as hearing something but there's another sense in which it is not a kind of hearing at all yeah so it might be like the animal human case sort of in a way that they're say it's not hearing because there's no thing out there which

1:39:02 is making the sound right and it resembles Hearing in some respects but not in others like it doesn't have a volume yeah right but it's got a pace I but speech a little faster I can't imagine shout to yourself in inner speech versus Whispering that's volume thin not just 100% yeah okay well maybe I don't know you know people give different reports about in speech too I mean think all of these well I'm thinking because someone asked the whole idea of my 2011 book is people give such different reports about their experiences exactly really very

1:39:35 different and they're pretty confident about them as as you are and as I kind of expressed but then you try to hook it up with like actual behavioral differences yeah and and it doesn't hook up very well and actually people can be moved pretty easily to change their views about these things even when they sound confident and one of the Striking things about this is this is in my 20 uh 2007 book right so this is an experience sampling method that uh Russ Hurlbert developed and I collaborated with him with him on

1:40:07 where you wear a beeper during your ordinary experience and then the beep goes off and you're supposed to report on what was in the last moment of undisturbed experience right before the beep right and here's something that will happen on the first day someone will say oh I'm constantly talking to myself in inner speech or they'll say I have visual images all the time and then you beep them and they about that and you beep them and there's none of that and you say oh this is interesting before we did the beeping you said I'm talking to myself in inner speech all the time and now we've done 12 beeps and you have

1:40:42 zero instances of inner speech or one right right what which do you think is correct do you think that your generalization initially was correct or do you think that these specific reports are correct and people will say oh it's the spe specific reports my generalization was wrong even though it seemed like they were confident and they were basing it upon their knowledge of their own experience right so it could be the same with a fantastic it would not surprise me let me just say this fit with my experience with with beeping with Hurlbert it would not surprise me if a substantial portion of a fantasic

1:41:15 if you beep them would say oh well I guess I did have imagery in that case despite the fact that they're like oh yeah I don't know interesting um yeah interesting so do you take the same view about blindsight just curiously out of curiosity that is probably degraded Vision that they don't want to classify or you're neutral on that that is my guess about blindsight again I haven't done a really thorough review of the literature on blindsight so I'm not ready to kind of publish this guest or stand behind guess or stand behind it publicly but but that is my guess based on what I've read about it yeah interesting okay um so I guess I have a question now that it comes I see someone

1:41:50 other questions that are lining up so I just don't want to as overstep my I do have a hard a hard uh stop of noon my time three your time okay yes I also because I have kids getting off the bus um so uh we'll have to wrap up very quickly but I I wonder how this fits with your innocence of Consciousness stuff because it does seem like not so innocent after all when you drill down on it maybe some of the Innocence comes from our not beeping people people and if we did we would find I

1:42:24 mean you know challenging them on their what they're saying basically so I wonder how do you think this is intention with that idea that look we just know it and we see it we have examples that's how we Define it and but then when you press people on it actually H I think we know that we're conscious yeah but I think and I think we know some basic structural facts about obvious cases but I I think it doesn't take long to get to medium size structural facts that about which we can be very wrong so right so I'm pretty I'm very

1:42:57 skeptical about introspective reports about conscious experience including whether you are a non- imager right and what it's like to have a visual experience right now right but I do I cannot authentically doubt that I am currently having visual experience as I'm thinking about it right now looking at my image on YouTube right it's just like there I feel that cartisian certainty that inability to doubt that I'm having visual experience now you start asking me structural details about the visual experience like how stable is it right what is the the periphery of the experience right did I have visual

1:43:32 experience five minutes ago when I wasn't thinking about having visual experience those kinds of questions I think we can often go wrong right but that I'm having visual experience right now or I drop a barbell on my toe and it hurts right it's like yeah I'm feeling pain right now I I can't authentically doubt it so my skepticism goes pretty far but not that far and then when I my definition of Consciousness hinges on those kinds of cases about which we're not skeptical right like that visual experience that's a case right that barble on the to that's a case right think about those cases they have an

1:44:04 obvious property in common Consciousness is just that obvious property they have in common all right so one more just on this so you so did I hear you correctly as saying that you don't have a 1% skeptical belief in illusionism that that doesn't get even even a 0 something something that you could be wrong right now I mean chmer told me he does and I was like pretty Blown Away by that that he assigned some small Credence to illusionism being true and I was like but like the hardcore kind of illusionism where it's a limit ISM basically about phenomenal

1:44:36 Consciousness but it sounds like you were saying no because you know that right yeah so there are some skeptical possibilities in which I invest much less than a 01 or 0.1% Credence and one of them is that I've never had any conscious experiences I'm not having one now so I my you know regarding illusionism in particular like Frankish is and Cam's version I actually think that's just a linguistic dispute yeah and we don't disagree in substance I don't think they're illusionists in the kind of radical crazy seeming sense of denying what I think is fair to call the

1:45:17 basic cartisian fact that I'm having experiences right now right they're not going to they're going to say oh well as soon as you use that term phenomenal Consciousness you're importing some anti-naturalistic suppositions I think as soon as you do this term you're not importing necessarily anti-naturalistic suppositions and so I think that the disagreement I have with them is about whether into the very concept of phenomenal Consciousness is ineliminably built anti-naturalistic assumptions or not I think not they think yes so that I

1:45:52 think there's a terminological dispute and the question of like kind of the cartisian question they don't have the kind of almost impossible to believe view about that that's my that's my interpretation of the illusionism yeah I I share that but when you tell them that they disagree with you so I me I try to around about this but that's what I've come to that's how I interpret yes I I'm on board with that well I'm sorry we can't keep you longer Eric but this conversation has been so interesting I can't recommend this book

1:46:25 The weirdness of the world enough all of your previous books have been interesting and exciting too but this one really I think is in my opinion one of the most interesting in the sense of really pushing out these uh strange seemingly bizarre ideas and challenging us to take them serious and I think as I said before I think this is philosophy at its best I I super applaud it um uh someone's got to be a swallow so you know I I enjoy both I like mulling and swallowing I guess I don't know but I think we need both kinds of philosophers

1:46:57 out there so I highly appreciate your work um anyway I'll let you go hang out for one second I'll say bye off air other than that thank you very much Eric yeah thanks all right we are off air wow all right thank you so much that was a great conversation that was so much fun I mean I I meant everything always chatting got