Joe Rogan Experience #1739 — Philip Goff Transcript

Transcript

0:00 The Joe Rogan Experience. like when do i empty this ashtray when do i throw out some of these objects when do i move them into So thanks for doing this, man. I'm a philosophy professor from Durham University in the north of England. is somehow rooted in or derived from this very simple experience both feel something when they're being eaten and react to it.

3:06 is incredible. So Monica Gagliano, for example, has done experiments subjecting pea plants to And also other people, you know, the sophistication of trees and the life of trees to the extent that they're hooked up under the ground, what some people have called the wood wide web. fundamental particles, quantum wave functions, you know, maybe even other universes,

5:54 I can't directly observe your feelings, but I can ask you, right? And, you know, I can Like that's one of the things about plants, right? you know, exactly what kinds of physical activity and there's just no consensus. To do that, we have to set up attend to so if you think about your experience of because that's where things like cognition, like working memory is.

10:38 So we know what we know experimentally is that you can't attend to all of that. Were you actually experiencing the road or were you just on total unconscious autopilot? hammered into our system in order to keep us alive right i mean that's you could only concentrate on Like there's a reason for all this stuff, right? Sorry, go on. Right? Like, does this table have a certain amount of consciousness?

14:10 siegel and dean martin and jerry lewis used to play there and is a classic old mob run nightclub I mean, no one wants to have a house where someone was murdered in. sure. Consciousness is what it's like to be you. Right. to reflect their incredibly simple nature. Luke Roloff is a very good, very rigorous panpsychist philosopher, Its consciousness is going to be

18:58 rooted in the idea of human consciousness. I mean, I suppose for the latter half of the 20th century, interesting approach to consciousness by Bertrand Russell in the 1920s, which was also that the story, the description of reality we're getting from physics is just pure math, right? to the fact that physics is just purely mathematical. at the fundamental level of reality, what we have are networks of very simple conscious entities.

22:28 So when we think about these conscious entities in terms of the mathematical structures they if we can have facts about these conscious entities that realize those mathematical structures, that the mathematical structures identified by physics are the bottom level, right? In terms So the concept of the consciousness, if you go back to the beginning of life,

25:22 And did it emerge when it started to change environments? Did it come out of it just because there's predators and prey and it had the need to survive, it had to recognize its environment So we need to distinguish these kind of philosophical zombies from Hollywood zombies, right? for survival is behavior. So if a creature without consciousness, a complicated mechanism

27:52 many philosophers and you're getting more and more complex matter. And then suddenly at some point a miracle happens and They fill a leafcutter ant colony up with cement, and then they dig it out to try to find how it's constructed. So they have vents that go up through the ceiling, Oh, my God. I don't know how long it took. And again, they actually have vents.

31:18 they communicating if they're just communicating through pheromones and odd signals that they're giving off like how do they This is just reducible to underlying chemistry, underlying physics. last week we had a three hour debate on what does he think he's just so confident that, the causal dynamics of the world are reducible to physics. All that the panpsychist adds is that

34:26 I think, you know, I think we know a fair bit about the basic chemistry in the brain, like, you know, how neurons fire, calcium chambers, neurotransmitters and so on. 5.5 million neurons. You know, we're only 70% of the way getting way through getting a connectome I think physicists are too quick to have the assumption that, I think an assumption that goes beyond physics itself,

36:27 composition that's making it react certain ways and when the chemical composition is imbalanced as we've discussed already. the subtitle of my book is Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. I hope that this will, Physical science just tells you what matter does, right? it does. And so there's a kind of hole in our standard scientific story of the universe.

40:19 And you can change how consciousness interfaces with the world. But that's not the idea. The idea is that physical properties like mass, spin and charge are forms of consciousness. Imagine if this is all a giant waste of time. But he's really clued up philosophically Consciousness is what underlies what matter does, you know, in another possible universe, you could have physics run on different hardware

43:57 Like, why even assume that? I don't think we can explain consciousness in terms of physical science, right? we've been operating in for the last 500 years was designed by Galileo to exclude consciousness. What is not discussed much is the philosophical work And this was a problem for Galileo but he was also a great philosopher. location, motion, properties that you can capture in mathematical geometry. So in Galileo's world

48:24 So this is so important. consciousness that doesn't it doesn't make any sense i do understand that mathematics mathematics it's mathematics engaging with consciousness yeah Yeah. So look, there's definitely a lot we can do We even attribute genes to those compounds, But all of that story could in principle go on in in what we call a zombie in without any kind of inner life

52:26 neuroscientist what it's like to see red by, you know, getting him to read your theory in braille, ago realized that. And he said, if we want science to be mathematical, oh, it's gone so well. look the question is what comes first so both both the panpsychists like myself and the materialists like Sean Carroll, for example, you know, many, many people are materialists. We both think, you know, we don't do it the other way around.

54:48 Or matter is explained either That's my view. Everything has some sort of component of consciousness. Yeah,'s what i don't understand how do you make that leap capture the structure in quantitative terms. But you can't fully pin down, I would argue, maybe you disagree, Yeah, it's not that they obviously have that quantitative structure, But he says, you know, I'll never fully understand, you know,

57:33 It's chemicals. or is it the other way around? an interface so so yeah i agree with what you've just said, it more neutrally they always go together and that's a scientific question concert said if you well For the materialist, what there is at the fundamental level of reality But what if it's like mathematics? that it's an all-encompassing thing that allows this creature to innovate, to create structures

1:02:13 Can you make sense of the idea of, you know, that, I mean, I don't mean, I mean, does this So if silicon creatures somehow evolved then they would very sophisticated life forms continue to innovate and procreate. Yeah, I wonder whether, I mean, just a kind of totally mechanistic way, mechanistic thing. The animal needs motivation, right? Without that inner experience, what gives an animal a cause to action? I think all the things are connected,

1:05:23 It makes better things constantly. It's never quite And all these things move this animal in this very certain and specific direction, which fuels the innovation, can imagine a conversation, another alien says, so are they conscious? Do they have inner experience? Very easily discernible evidence of it. Oh, thanks. It was going to come just at the start of the pandemic.

1:08:25 different in other ways, Because our senses have evolved for truth. or instinctive judgments about the mental states of others, the world and if like i mean like when you're playing a computer game sensory experience is kind of like an interface between the world Well, if we take things down to the quantum level, what are the fundamental level? And we're looking at consciousness as a thing that assumes that it is conscious.

1:11:42 What if it really is just sort of a mathematical component conscious experiences what what is happening so i i mean so i i um sorry i run a podcast with a guy magic fairy dust you know it's and then you know it's it's a nice elegant solution because you And he wants to apply that to consciousness as well. cases, it always seems like an option to deny the datum. You know, maybe we're not really free in

1:14:56 You just think you feel pain. Actually, so, What does that mean, no one's ever felt pain? Do you understand that? Think your teachers a piece of shit about that. I showed him I My fellow panpsychists get annoyed at me taking this illusionist view seriously. it in terms of electrochemical signaling. I think that's just incoherent. The idea that we really

1:18:13 Yeah, yeah. fully account for the taste of coffee in a way that's going to cause a reaction. and that ultimately the end goal of all these experiences is to encourage survival, to encourage It's just a fact that certain kinds of chemical structures in the brain correlated with certain kinds of experience. will allow this thing that the human animal does so well which is innovate breed procreate form

1:22:15 in the brain, right? What if it's everything? What if it's all those things? Yeah, well, so I think standard model of particle physics predicts the behavior of particles just on the basis of, you The panpsychist says, no, no, there's just particles and fields, just mass, spin, and charge. physical science, the evolutionary story, what stuff does, you know, basically, I think

1:24:28 it's just focused on this narrow task of what stuff does. Consciousness isn't something we discovered in a particle collider. done, you can go home. I want to say no, no, no, no, no. That's important. But there's this other is that that term not complicated enough for what it means to be conscious it's because it seems Yeah, I kind of think, I know where you're coming from there.

1:27:59 So I don't know what to do. I think we're just kind of stuck with the word now. One of the things that I love about science and the study of quantum mechanics and this this whole process that we're involved in moving in the same general direction. And how much of it is out there that we're not tuned into? whether it's because they're too small on earth dealing with gravity in the environment and going through life we only have so much

1:30:29 the motivation for panpsychism is not capturing our common sense intuitions or something. The you know, this might interact with certain questions of fundamental physics. But it could be that certain interpretations of quantum mechanics fit better, say, with a panpsychist theory at the fundamental level. it's hard to see how you can do it. So, you know,

1:33:48 so there was recently this issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies You know, I think it's a possible way forward. I mean, on the first question, I would just say that what panpsychism offers us is a so i mean it's it's not it's not something you can demonstrate You know, rather than trying to explain consciousness in terms of But how do you even make the leap

1:37:29 as the fundamental building blocks of reality, But you needn't think of it as God or something. as a result of millions of years of evolution. and philosophy this is partly an empirical question of what kind at higher levels what more integration in the molecules than there is in the liquid as a whole. And in a rock, likewise, But spelling it out is going to require collaboration with neuroscience

1:41:12 than understanding it in a materialist framework. speculative theoretical physics, explain their consciousness to you like what what can be done to try to quantify this idea You know, what's the... no, look, this works, you know, public observation experiment, it's got us technology, it's done so well. And, you know, for a lot of the 20th century, because of that enthusiasm

1:44:05 theory that can accommodate both of those things. And I think the, you know, the panpsychist direction of that looks more promising than the alternatives that have kind of got nowhere. I'm really open-minded on that. A panpsychist can be open-minded on that. And so, you know, but then in some mindsets I think, you know, you said to me, but maybe, that it's so good that it hits all of the various aspects of your sensory perceptions.

1:47:31 could you upload your consciousness? So just if you upload the information in my brain, I'm inclined to think the consciousness would be lost. Inside the tissue is cells. Inside those cells is Well, where is the experience? I think you think that about everything, though. And in his recent book, he's converted to a kind of right? So like you think, I don't know, where does life emerge? Maybe there's a fuzzy boundary,

1:51:48 life maybe it's hard to make sense I find that hard to think of. which is a highly intelligent animal that operates in packs this still seems to be the case. or there's nothing that it's like to be a snail. It's a very distant experience. make sense of is that there's that there's no fact of the I'd say they're different things. Find out if he has babies.

1:55:36 I totally disagree with, and I love to try and get in their mindset, to like think more things are conscious. That's someone who doesn't have any experience with babies. If you're wrapped up in a kind of theory of consciousness, you don't really have experience. Yeah. they can't do anything, can they? I think if you're not a panpsychist, you've just got to say, there's this moment when it suddenly switches on.

1:58:55 Do you think when it goes along the lines of what we were talking about earlier Yeah, he's an interesting guy, and he makes his case of view. I mean, maybe I should put in the time to underlying chemistry or physics. by I am as well but there's certain people that I respect that have they feel the loss like you could feel something horrible had happened there like and this is

2:02:35 it sort of feels like it's not just. died on that on that day i was thinking but you know i mean look i let me let me be totally clear You know, so here's what I think, actually. between that you can engage with an experience. You can take seriously the possibility that it know it's a possibility you can work with you can engage with your you know certain spiritual

2:05:51 a podcast of uh a really interesting guy um what's it called is it the waking cosmos podcast You'd have to be a panpsych. I mean, some people say then, okay, what about quantum entanglement? I don't see why a materialist couldn't necessarily accommodate these phenomena. you could just think there's some kind of no non-local connection between brains you know i

2:08:52 you were motivated to adopt some kind of spiritual conception of reality, what you're experiencing in the mystical experience If this is a real thing, how will it be proven? No, sorry. is inconsistent with the reality of consciousness. of human consciousness so i think you know i think it's deeply important how will we prove it we But if you religiously follow that through, you wouldn't believe in consciousness

2:13:27 Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much, Phil.