Episode 232: Mind Over Matter

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, David Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] Racism doesn't bother ya, bad words don't bother ya. What bothers ya? I hate uh... I hate frauds. The Queen and us pay no attention to that bad... Good man. Good. They think deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you have. Anybody can have a brain?

[00:01:07] You're a very bad man. I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, today we're doing the topic voted on by our beloved Patreon supporters, Panpsychism. Is this the least prepared we've ever been?

[00:01:31] I was hoping you were gonna come prepared. You know how usually it's like either a Tamler topic or a Pease topic, I was like I hope we both understand that this is a Tamler topic. But no.

[00:01:43] I'm definitely willing to prepare in the way that I'd say I did for the Thomas Coon episode most recently, but I found the literature a little tough to, I don't know, really throw myself into.

[00:02:00] For reasons I guess we'll talk about when we get there and not any reasons that have anything to do with our beloved Patreon supporters. Right. It just turns out to be less like Miyazaki inspired spirits live in the stones. That's what I want it.

[00:02:19] That's all I want it. And I was gonna just dive right in and just embrace it and every but like that like and then instead of like we're talking about zombies again, but now it's like micro fucking

[00:02:32] micro experiential zombies or you know, we'll have some I think hopefully decent things to say about it. Luckily, you have a deep background in philosophy of mind. So I'm a publisher also philosophy of zombies, zombies. But fortunately as as unprepared as we are for the main segment,

[00:02:55] we are we are way more unprepared for the opening segment to the point that we had to tweet out like an emergency broadcasts to to like help send us questions that we will respond to because I don't know. Like did we think we what was the deal?

[00:03:13] Like why did we not have an opening segment topic? I think we should just put our cards on the table here and say it's because we had terrible weeks. Yeah, I don't think we even had anything.

[00:03:23] It's been a brutal week and like the day that we normally record, we spent instead on the decoding the Guru's podcast. That's right. So all our energy was spent. And in fact, we're paying forward to the to our patrons too,

[00:03:39] because we're posting the raw video for that for beloved patrons. So hopefully they'll forgive us if they were. Forgive us. So what do we have on Twitter? So we asked, we said, do you need advice and think weirdly that we might

[00:03:53] be able to help or shed light on your problem, tweet or email us recording very soon? This was literally like I posted that 45 minutes ago. We got it. But we got some good ones. I think we can do an opening segment of this. Yeah, yeah.

[00:04:08] Because all right, if you had to, this is a good question. If you had to give up your academic career to study a pseudo scientific subject full time remote viewing astro projection, morphic resonance, etc. What subject would you pick?

[00:04:21] So this is pretty easy for me, but maybe not. You would be a ghost hunter. I would. Yeah, I would definitely look into that in greater detail, especially since it's clearly what I'm going to die being remembered for, if anything. The I have an issue with the assumptions.

[00:04:42] The assumption is that I'm not already in a pseudo scientific. Thank you for saying that. I would have been really mad at myself if I hadn't. No, you know, I find it so hard to even think about what I would. Astral projection sounds super cool.

[00:05:01] I think I would. Yeah, I would study something like weathered, whether dreams, you know, have any impact on like if you can have prophetic dreams. How's that? Oh, that's good. I like that. Yeah. In fact, that's like the good thing about being a philosopher as

[00:05:20] opposed to someone who at least has a pretense of doing like empirical science is that I could just do these things, you know. You could write. You could write a very hard hitting article in whatever, you know, the mind on astral projection. Morphic resonance.

[00:05:41] I don't know what that is. I don't know what that is either. It sounds. Sounds hot. Matt, Janckowski said partially because of your recommendation, I've started watching The Shield. The show is fine, but the intro theme music is intolerable and makes

[00:05:56] me question that the show can possibly be good. I'm in season three now and every episode is a struggle to hit mute to avoid the song. And this this actually there's a broader topic to be. I think I know what you're going to say.

[00:06:10] Well, it is a terrible, terrible, terrible theme song. Have you been turned off before entirely to shows because of the music? No, I'm also not even sure. I think it's a terrible opening. It gets at the just like stress and like. Yeah, it's great.

[00:06:28] It's grating in a way that I think fits with the show thematically. I have a general problem with shows that that have Mexican gangsters in it and every single time they go to like the place where the Mexican gangsters are hanging out, they play some Latin hip hop.

[00:06:46] And you would think that like Spanish hip hop is widely listened to in Southern California. No, it's just like their way. It's the same way that they put like a funky filter whenever they have they have to convince the viewer that this is taking place in Mexico.

[00:07:01] You know, they put like a different. That's what they do to set the stage for you're about to see some Mexican gang. Yeah, but they just do like. Yeah, no, the music in general in the shield is disappointing. It's very late 90s.

[00:07:24] So what I thought you were going to say is the broader issue, which is like, why don't you just skip ahead if you don't know, like, I like this is or something that we get every so often people will tell us there's a

[00:07:35] certain segment or there's a certain kind of thing we don't do. Like, so you just skip ahead if you don't like that kind of thing, you know, like that's what I do with podcasts. It's a very weird thing.

[00:07:45] It's like people feel do people feel obligated to just watch every second of something I had or listen to. I had a girlfriend who was a completionist about TV shows and she did she do some sort of pathology.

[00:07:59] She needed to watch like the whole intro to Netflix and things of the ilk have made it easy, just like we make it easy. Like right now you could just hit next and you would skip the entire intro segment. Maybe just go to the next episode.

[00:08:15] But yeah, mute it, you know, I guess maybe if you don't want to, if it's if you don't have one of those kinds of players where you can hit for the opening songs that I like, I do kind of feel like your

[00:08:29] ex-girlfriend did where like I kind of feel like I'm not going to I shouldn't skip the wire, you know, even though I love, you know, or the Sopranos or the Sopranos. It sets the stage. It puts me in the in the mind state, you know, totally.

[00:08:42] Yeah. But I and I think with the shield, I wouldn't be that committed to it because it's not that good. It's also it's also isn't it pretty short? Yeah, it's it's short. And it's very noisy. Yeah. And and I believe it's Puerto Rican, not even Mexico.

[00:08:55] So you have our permission to skip it. Just don't skip the shield. Don't don't stop watching a good show like that. All right. André Habet, Dr. Summers, former human situation student here. You can call me Tamar.

[00:09:08] I remember way back in 2012, you all spoke on the show about the dissertation process and I appreciate appreciated the framing. Any further insights into getting it done for context? I'm no longer interested in pursuing academia. It's funny that he still wants to.

[00:09:24] I don't like I stand by what I said, which is what Alex Rosenberg, my dissertation advisor told me, which is just get the fucking thing done and don't feel like you have to read every single thing on that on that

[00:09:37] topic or respond to every single just get it done. That's all that matters. Like get your ideas out, do the thing. And, you know, nobody's going to read it besides the people in your dissertation committee, which is false because even they aren't reading it like fully.

[00:09:53] So really, all it is is something for you to go back to and be able to make use of in some other way, like a writing sample for jobs or for future articles or, you know, things like that, which I

[00:10:09] my dissertation was very useful for me to me for. But I think the best part of that, the part of that that I stand behind so strongly is don't feel like you have to respond to every person

[00:10:21] in the literature and don't feel like you have to read even every person who's written on that topic because that will just paralyze you and slow you down. Yeah, it's a similar thing with just any time you even submit

[00:10:35] to a journal and the reviewers give you twenty five different things that you need to address. I think the temptation is to to satisfy them. And then what you end up doing is writing a paper that you never wanted to write in the first place.

[00:10:49] Yeah. And and I think that's a danger of a different kind for your dissertation. And I would say to add to what Taylor just said, besides just getting it done, there are a couple of mistakes that I think people make.

[00:11:01] One is to think that this whatever their dissertation topic is is going to somehow determine the rest of their career. Right. And as you can tell in Tamler's case, it certainly didn't. And in my own thing, a determined is just had the common feature

[00:11:16] that I am interested in that thing that I was studying and I'm still interested in it. But the second one is on discussed. No, it was actually on moral judgment. It was on sort of perceiving moral blame and responsibility. And praise.

[00:11:30] The second one is to think that you can't change your dissertation topic because there's a certain point at which you can still do that. And if you're not feeling it, like if you dread the thought of working on your dissertation, maybe you should go back to your

[00:11:44] committee and say, I want to do something else because it's not worth spending all your time on something that makes you miserable. No. And even though nobody is going to read it really, it's still a really good source of material for you to go back to

[00:11:57] as you're starting to try to publish more frequently. And so you should definitely be doing something that you care about and want to. And, you know, all this presumes that you have the kind of advisors that will let you take this advice that we're giving.

[00:12:11] But I totally agree. Like right about something that you're deeply committed to. And if it turns out, oh, I thought I would be interested in panpsychism, but seems to be just a lot of philosophy of mine stuff. That I thought I had escaped from.

[00:12:28] I thought it was going to be about like fucking lots of different kinds of people. Fucking rocks and cactuses. Yeah. And I'm sorry, you're not interested. I'm pursuing it as a career. I'm glad you're still interested in one of the essential aspects of it.

[00:12:52] I think actually, you know, we talked about this quite a bit about the sort of the knowledge that most people can't stay in academia, at least not in in the way that they probably want. I think there there needs to be less regret about leaving academia

[00:13:08] in the sense that I think a PhD in many topics can be a very good thing to do. Whether like it's just good for your mind. It's great, I think for like it can help you in your career.

[00:13:21] Like there's no it's a very weird thing right now that there's a segment of academics who it seems like their main job as they understand it right now is to like convince students not to go into academia. And I think it's because of the just brutal job market

[00:13:39] and all these various other problems. But just going to graduate school and getting a PhD and if you're funded, that can be a really rewarding thing just as a way of having a full life. It doesn't have to be necessarily your career.

[00:13:54] It does mean that you're taking a risk and you're going to have to figure out a career if academia doesn't work out for you professionally. But still, you know, you'll have gotten so much out of it. Yeah.

[00:14:04] And I think that to the extent that the advice is if you don't like what you're doing, you should change. Then that's just general advice that you should probably follow. But like a lot of the people who think that academia is miserable,

[00:14:18] it's not that I don't believe them. I just think that it's also true that so many jobs are even more miserable. Exactly. That's right. If you think this sucks, just wait until you try to, you know, the other thing. All right. All right.

[00:14:33] Why does nobody care about my wordle score or do they? I think they do. This is not everybody's just you. Yeah. Do you post yours? I have, but always with like a little joke or twist to it. It's sort of like dreams.

[00:14:48] Like nobody really wants to hear your like your dream is interesting to you and you alone. Nobody really cares to hear about like what your dream was. I was going to post a wordle and then say, if I don't play wordle,

[00:14:59] then Putin wins and then thought, oh no, like maybe that's not cool. Do you think I did the right thing or should I have done it? I think you shouldn't have even said it right now. It's like thinking about having sex with a kid. It's wrong. That's right.

[00:15:17] Just even to just think about it. OK, I want to talk a little bit about Dan Finan's question because not because the question itself because of the grander topic of our age difference. He says Caddyshacker Animal House. And I was like, I don't know.

[00:15:34] I probably remember some of Caddyshack. I've never seen Animal House and I take it that these are formative movies for people of your age. And I was trying to think what my equivalent would be. And I'm not quite sure if I want to be very clear with

[00:15:51] my assistant right now, David is five years older than me. Younger, precisely. I'm sorry, five years younger than me. Yeah. And it turns out to matter. And in every other way, given the advanced years that we've gotten to, that is a meaningless distinction.

[00:16:08] But you're actually right that with these two movies, it actually probably does matter because everybody I know in high school at least saw those movies and a lot of people. I don't think I think Animal House was even before my time

[00:16:24] in terms of people getting really excited about it. But but Caddyshack people, you know, would die for. And people quoted all the time. And it is kind of funny, you know, it's a good it's a funny movie. Well, I mean, in some ways, Bill Murray and Chevy Chase.

[00:16:41] And yeah, what I got in for like my formative comedy years was like the shitty attempts at recreating those movies. So like, you know, I grew up with like, yeah. And like Police Academy one, two and three, you know,

[00:16:56] like just stuff that wasn't it was was just not that good. You didn't like the guy that makes all the sound effects. I loved that guy. Yeah, everyone. It was the best part about it. Who I hated was Bobcat Goldthwaite. I forgot that he was in it.

[00:17:14] Were you confused about your attraction to Steve Gutenberg? Steve Gutenberg, I had no idea he was Jewish, you know, I didn't I didn't realize what that meant. You can't tell from looking at him. All right. Do you have an answer to that, though? Caddy Shack or Animal House?

[00:17:34] I guess Caddy Shack, but like, I don't have strong feelings. I remember liking Animal House. I haven't seen it. You know what I would think might be like this version for you as Fletch. Yeah, that was like, what was that, like 85 or something? Like, yeah, six.

[00:17:48] And so like, I would think that that would be your caddy. Yeah, I saw Fletch on VHS. I do remember must have been right around 1986. Fletch is good. Fletch holds up. Yeah, I haven't seen it in years, but but speaking of academia,

[00:18:04] Agony on Wizards, which I don't totally get. How old is too old to start a career in academia? I, you know, I started at a somewhat late age of 30. But like, what do you think about like starting a PhD program?

[00:18:18] Some people do it like 36 or 37, some really good students, master's students that we've had have gone to really good PhD programs that were around kind of mid 30s. I think that can work too. I have strong opinion that it's that it's it's a misguided to think

[00:18:36] that there is a too old. I mean, maybe too old for you, but people all the time say like, no, because then, you know, I would be 45. And when I finish or whatever, like, you're going to be 45

[00:18:46] at some point anyway, you'll either have a PhD or you won't. Like my grandfather went and got his PhD in geology in his late 50s. But I take this to not just do a PhD program, but actually like with the motivation of then getting a job

[00:19:09] and making that your career, because that's what it means. I mean, he's doing a career in academia. I mean, I think that's the same. Like, I don't quite understand why it would be age dependent in any way.

[00:19:23] Like, do you want to start a tenure track job when you're 45? Well, maybe you don't want the stress, I guess. But like, I don't. I mean, I think if you think you love it, go for it. Yeah, I agree actually completely 100 percent.

[00:19:35] You want to do this empathy for people in Ukraine, but not Yemen? Yeah, I mean, I think there's an obvious answer there, which is we probably shouldn't write. I mean, we should have empathy for the people in Ukraine.

[00:19:48] For anybody that our attention is pulled and that there is propaganda that pulls us in one direction or another or that we're partial to one group or another is is one of those features of human nature that you can fight against. I think this is probably targeting

[00:20:05] there was like a day or two where people were saying that the only reason all of a sudden Americans give a shit about another country getting invaded is because they're white and they look like white Americans.

[00:20:17] And then somebody tweeted, I think it's the, you know, the 1619 Project Women. Why am I blanking? And Hannah Jones, right? Yeah, right. She said like Europe is like not even a continent. And then Jason Stanley, your boy tweeted,

[00:20:34] stopped like talking about, you know, whether Europe is a continent or whether I forget his other. Oh, was that like the social construction? Like like the continent of Europe is a social construction. And I take it the implication of that was that, like, you know, again,

[00:20:52] what what you're really being drawn to is the whiteness of them, not like European this of it. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe that's the case. I do know that we we have a particular diplomatic history with Russia. And I think we're like more involved there.

[00:21:09] I don't, you know, the same way that we were super involved in the Middle East. But I do think there's something to it. Totally. Yeah. I mean, I think like like you said, that the solution isn't to not feel empathy for the people in Ukraine.

[00:21:23] Solution is to be like, oh, yeah, we've been like having drones circling like villages in Yemen for the last like 15 years. Maybe we should think about like how that feels for them and not just how it feels for Ukrainians to have their country invaded.

[00:21:36] You know, maybe we should have thought about this with the Iraqis. Maybe we should, you know. So obviously I agree with all of that 100 percent and the double standard, especially as Americans of, you know, how how strongly we're reacting

[00:21:49] against this versus like some of the shit that we've done over the last you know, 50 years is it's hypocritical for racist reasons, but then just off for just imperialist nationalist reasons. Yeah, there is also some a topic that I think might be interesting to talk

[00:22:06] about at some point, which is I do get overwhelmed at the polls on my empathy. Like there is so much suffering that it is distressing. Because when you do pick one thing to be to care a lot about,

[00:22:23] it does seem like it's a very easy thing to be accused of that. Like why don't you care about these other people who are even more deserving? And then you never, you know, nobody wins that way.

[00:22:34] I don't even know what my proper response as a human being ought to be about how much I care about wars that aren't here, which is to some degree. But like I also can't do a whole lot, right?

[00:22:44] So so sometimes I wish for the time when I didn't know about these things. Like you should. You can do. You can go to Ukraine. You're right. I could always do something. Yeah, yeah, you're right. I'm not going to let's be real.

[00:22:58] I'm not going to no matter how much younger I am than you. I'm still too old. Yeah, it's funny though. We were talking about this with the gurus yesterday. Like it does seem like some of the more bullshitty culture war stuff

[00:23:13] has taken a little bit of a breather. You know, like there's been less of that because this doesn't lend itself as easily to culture or war stuff as say COVID did. It just feels like everybody's taking just a little break. I'm sure it won't last. Yeah, yeah.

[00:23:30] And there have been we talked about the attempts to try to spin this into a cultural or topic, which is like, yeah, no. All right. Is it meaningful to consider one place more civilized than another? And should we care about more civilized places?

[00:23:44] I found this to be kind of an interesting question because. I was just thinking about I was watching, you know, at some YouTube rabbit hole about Western music theory. There's a YouTuber named Adam Neely, who is an amazing lead good video essayist about music.

[00:24:03] He's a jazz performer and he had a video essay on white supremacy in Western music theory. And he laid out a very dispassionate case for why classical music of the Western tradition ended up dominating what we call like music theory and how like African civilizations

[00:24:23] had a much more complex set of sense of rhythm, for instance, than we did. And other cultures have different different scales. And it's really easy for me to think impulsively that, of course, there are some places that are more civilized than others

[00:24:40] until you really think about, well, just what do I mean by civilized? Do I mean that they have more technology? Do I mean that they have less war? What like, what does that mean? And I think at that point, you're just sort of at a wash.

[00:24:52] Like, I don't know. Well, it's going to betray some parochialism. Exactly. How you define civilization. Now, somebody could say, well, I define it as, you know, like, how much computer technology have you achieved or whatever?

[00:25:07] And then it'll be clear that, you know, if you define it in a narrow enough way or precise enough way, then it'll be clear that it's a meaningful distinction. But definitely not. Then if that's what you're doing, that you should care more about one than the other.

[00:25:22] If I had to embrace a normative sense of the term, I would say, how how the quality of life for the people who live in that society is. What do your poorest people look like? What do your prisoners look like?

[00:25:39] Like, you know, people in prison for committing crimes. What do your children look like? That those to me would be the markers that I would endorse, I think as markers. What color is your skin? What's what's the BMI of your average person?

[00:25:57] No, I mean, but yeah, that's also complicated because sometimes certain countries' conditions aren't good because of the actions of certain other countries that like to consider themselves more civilized. Yeah. No, no, it's true. I can't you're saying they can't help being less civilized. I agree.

[00:26:16] Hey, you said Africans have more rhythm. So they have a complex poly rhythms. Right. I violent seems like one of those, though. I think what people offer when they accuse somebody of being uncivilized, I think they are accusing them of being like brutes about their violence.

[00:26:34] But it's all that's also just like a we draw, you know, we have drones to do our killing. You guys are doing like stabbing people and beheading them. You know, we're more civilized. Like we're just like in a bunker in Utah, like playing with Joyce.

[00:26:48] Basically an Xbox game. Yes. I my measure, which I actually think is a good measure, is like, what do you think of Andre Tarkovsky and his films? How can you describe why they're so transcendent?

[00:27:04] You say that as just as I read somebody replying to the grooves who said, can't tell how glad I was to hear that both Chris and Matt hated the movie. I'm a devoted fan of the wizards, but they fucking love and appreciate the most boring movies.

[00:27:17] I was proud of myself for not falling asleep, let alone watch it twice. Are there audience just like dipshits? Well, clearly he's our audience, too. Yeah, people get bored if and just like you got bored with the Chalmers article. See if I did or not. All right.

[00:27:40] I feel like there was another one I wanted to do, but we need to. Yeah. How about the last one? It's Friday night. What are you drinking? I am drinking red wine because I had a bourbon a little earlier as I was trying to get through the Chalmers.

[00:27:54] I'm drinking water and a fucking mocha. So do you want to explain why you're not drinking right now? I'm not a big drinker. I never drink. Well, sorry, I rarely drink when we record. Last night was an exception.

[00:28:11] I took a couple shots, but I rarely drink when we record. I am you're intoxicated. I think it's what you're saying. I want to be sharp because you come with some bullshit sometimes, you know, I got to be on my toes.

[00:28:23] Yeah, well, but if I come with bullshit, I'm, you know, half in the bag and also like probably inedible. So. All right. Well, when we come back, we are going to have a very detailed technical discussion about panpsychism. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp Online Therapy.

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[00:31:07] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the time of the show where we like to take a moment and thank all of our listeners for getting in touch with us in all the different ways you do on Twitter, on Reddit, on emailing us, Instagram, Facebook.

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[00:36:24] And so far we've answered every single question asked of us. Yeah. And we've done it well. Yeah, I'd say we've answered every single question asked of us. So thank you, everybody for all your support. Thank you so much. We're very grateful. All right, let's talk about panpsychism.

[00:36:45] This is the most requested topic from our Patreon supporters. Normally, I think every single time actually we've had a really good discussion and it's been a really good episode for the six or seven times. How many times have we done this? It's a good question. Yeah.

[00:37:06] And I hope that this will be the case this time. I think the difference perhaps is maybe that we came in with certain expectations about what the debate would be like that weren't met. But I guess just very briefly, panpsychism is the view that

[00:37:29] the fundamental entities of reality are mental or conscious in some way. The idea being given that the only thing we have direct access to, the only thing we know that we can't deny is the fact that we have consciousness.

[00:37:44] Conscious phenomena are the one thing we essentially can't doubt. You can't doubt it if you're experiencing it. So then and we can maybe talk about a limit of this who say you can or the denit kind of view, which is you kind of can't and kind of can't.

[00:38:01] But but this is the one thing that we that we have direct access to. And so why not think that this is as fundamental or more fundamental than what we take to be matter like non conscious matter?

[00:38:17] Because if you if you think that consciousness arises in some way or emerges or is completely separate from what you think of as matter, which is essentially non conscious or non mental or non mind based, then you have this whole

[00:38:36] host of problems or questions that come up about, well, how does that lead us to have the subjectively rich qualitative experiences that we have? So if you just say I think this is the sort of driving idea behind it that

[00:38:51] the fund like at the most fundamental level, everything is conscious. Everything is mental or mind based to some degree. At the very least, you're coming up with a more parsimonious explanation for all the things that you are trying to explain.

[00:39:08] All of the phenomena in question and most and especially the fact that we have these subjective states, qualia, we see redness, we smell coffee. Like why not just combine the two? Unify the two in a way to make everything mental. Right.

[00:39:27] And whether or not that's the parsimonious move, I guess, is what is that debate? But I do. I think that it really is important to understand what it is that the claims panpsychism is all about as a way of trying to get out of the rather sticky

[00:39:43] position that modern philosophy put itself in or modern here meeting like post a cart, which is that seeming puzzle that emerges from the belief both that things that the fundamental nature of existence is material, that there is the only stuff

[00:40:04] that is in the universe is material stuff and the undeniable truth of consciousness. That is we are experiencing things. And so the ways in which people have tried to get out of this is to either posit, no, there is separate mind stuff.

[00:40:18] There is separate experience stuff like that we have that is completely different from material world and that's like all dualism in all its forms. Or as you say, be just double down on materialism and say either. Whatever you think consciousness is, is not really the case.

[00:40:37] It just is nothing but material stuff or that you don't understand what I mean by material, by material. I mean, also things that can in like this awesome way arrange themselves to be conscious, it's just that it only happens rarely. And and I think broadly those three strategies,

[00:40:59] I mean, those two strategies are the ones that in some form or another people have have tried to endorse throughout the debates in philosophy of mind as to how to understand the nature of consciousness and I didn't know.

[00:41:11] So just as like in my background, I didn't really know that panpsychism was a viable candidate as an explanation for this this hard problem of consciousness or at least one that was taken seriously. So I don't think it is.

[00:41:30] I mean, this is one of the issues I have with the debate. So number one, I honestly was going into this thinking that I would be really attracted to the panpsychic position because, you know, I have come so far from

[00:41:46] my days as a young graduate student and early career professor, you know, denying everything, being a skeptic about everything. You know, like I'm now so much more open, obviously, to the strangeness of the universe, what kind of open is so value laden open. Yeah, it is.

[00:42:08] But I guess disappointed me about the literature, at least that we read. And I did read a ton of stuff on this, actually, is that I'm not even sure this is a substantive debate. Like I'm not even sure that this debate isn't terminological.

[00:42:23] I mean, that's something we can talk about. But I guess what I'm but in response to what you were saying about panpsychism being an explanation for the hard problem, because it seems like it has all the same problems as the materialist.

[00:42:37] It's just maybe like different words that and but it's the same problem. Right, so explainatory here like I don't know that I even mean it. But what I was trying to get is that there is a seeming contradiction

[00:42:53] to these two beliefs, the one that the universe is nothing but matter. Right. And the other, the undeniable fact of existence. And I think that panpsychism is viewed, at least that's my understanding, as a way to get out of the fundamental contradiction.

[00:43:09] Because at least as Strossen, we should say, I guess what we read. We read an article by Galen Strossen and we try to read an article by David Chalmers. Strossen's papers called Realistic Monism, Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism.

[00:43:24] And I think that what he's the move that he's trying to make is to say, well, the mistake was to ever think that one, the way to get out of the obviousness of materialism is to posit non-material stuff. That was that was bad.

[00:43:38] That's like the wrong way of going about it. We don't want to be dualists. And the other one was to say, if you posit only material stuff, that you can't have a consistent view of you that is consistent with the reality of subjective experience.

[00:43:52] And so he wants to say, well, the error the whole time was to think that physical stuff isn't experience stuff. And so what he wants to say is at the most fundamental level and obvious, like, well, it's not obvious. It wasn't obvious to me.

[00:44:06] Nobody here means that rocks are like thinking things, but rather that even at the most basic constituent level of matter, like photons, atoms, whatever quarks, that there is some degree of subjective experience happening. And I think that the belief is that if you posit experience into matter,

[00:44:27] then you don't have to worry about this problem. At least that's what I think strawson things. Yeah. So the problem is getting into the details then of how this explanation is going to look because disappointingly, they're not arguing that there's some overriding consciousness.

[00:44:46] Like I thought I thought I could get like some Buddhist shit out of this, you know, like like a universal consciousness. Yeah. Kind of a universe of consciousness and and mind in a way that really is at odds

[00:44:59] with our current with our current scientific understanding of how things work. Or if it's not at odds, at the very least, it's it's a necker cube kind of like different framework, a different lens for how to understand the world.

[00:45:13] Whereas with this, because you get into the details of like what it means for an electron to be conscious or what it means for like an atom to be conscious. It's like, well, OK, whatever it means, it's not that electrons are having

[00:45:28] the same kinds of conscious experiences that you and I are having at all. Like nobody thinks that that would be crazy. So you still have the question of how however you understand electrons being conscious, like however you understand

[00:45:42] what that means, translate into this kind of macro level consciousness that we experience all the time and just saying, oh no, but that actually now makes sense because the electrons are conscious. No, it doesn't right in the same way that I get frustrated with

[00:45:57] materialists who say when you see red, that just is, you know, this combination of brain states or something like that. And saying you see red is just a way of saying that this combination of neurons is activating your brain or whatever. Like that's not an explanation.

[00:46:14] You know, that's that doesn't explain how that turns into my very rich and seemingly qualitative experience of of red to start talking to me about electrons, but in the same way like, you know, talking about conscious electrons doesn't do that either. You know, right?

[00:46:33] So no, I totally agree. Here is the force that I see this like the whole, let's say the Strossen article has, which is here are some views that I think are logically contradictory. Right? So he really thinks that it is a

[00:46:53] mistake of analysis to think that you could get experience out of non experiential things. Yeah. And so it's true. The solution just is he and Chalmers both. They actually have zero commitment to any like universalists sort of conscious

[00:47:12] this or they don't even care to describe what it would feel like to be a rock or an atom. They just want to say the way that we're going to get out of this contradiction that we've found ourselves in is just to make some statements that aren't

[00:47:27] internally inconsistent. Yeah. Right. And that's fundamental, I think, to you and me both dissatisfying. It maybe is a little more satisfying to me and that I am uncomfortable at there being any logical contradiction to begin with. So the attempt like feels like one that needs to be undertaken.

[00:47:44] But it seems like in some ways I would rather sit with the discomfort of knowing that something fascinatingly experiential arises out of non experiential matter than I would just simply positing that experience is built into the fundamental

[00:47:59] nature of reality because I don't I don't know what that means. I just don't. OK, so here's the two things that he thinks people like you are committed to that can't be reconciled. Right. And he calls one of these propositions and the physical stuff is in itself in

[00:48:19] its fundamental nature something wholly and utterly and non experiential. So the idea is that whatever you think the fundamental stuff that makes up the universe that isn't experiential. That's not that's not conscious in any way, shape or form. Right.

[00:48:38] And then the other proposition is experience is a real concrete phenomenon and every real concrete phenomenon is physical. So there's two things being asserted there. Number one, that consciousness is real and the churchlands and their hot tub

[00:48:56] can say it's not, but you know, it still is and they're still feeling the bubbles and the heat like everybody else. And every concrete phenomenon is non experiential. How are you supposed to reconcile those two things?

[00:49:14] And it seems like Strossen says that the only real way of doing that without being an eliminated vest about consciousness, which is silly, is to claim that it's emergent in some way. As you said earlier, you put matter, non experiential matter in certain

[00:49:33] configurations and it can give rise to conscious experience in the same way that like you put two hydrogen atoms and oxygen atom together and it'll make liquidity or something like that. When you look at water, that's not that seems like something completely

[00:49:51] different than two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom. It's like still fundamentally like the same thing. You can explain one in terms of the other, even though it seems totally different. One emerges out of the other in that configuration. Yeah.

[00:50:07] And I actually liked this part of the paper where he tries to take down emergence and I think it's because I have a particular annoyance with the way a lot of psychologists and people who do

[00:50:21] neuroscience, some of my best friends, they like to just say that there is no problem there. And so when you try to push them on the hard problem, they say it's not hard at all. It just emerges just like liquidity might emerge from non liquid things.

[00:50:35] There's a new property that emerges and this new property here is consciousness and it is a result of whatever neurons in particular network configurations. And I think Strossen rightfully points out that no, there's a there's a little bit of cheating going on there where

[00:50:52] the property of liquidity is understood to happen when electrons are sorry, when molecules are placed in certain configurations, just like solidity, just like crystals. We understand exactly what it is about collective molecules coming together to cause the property of shininess or liquidity or whatever in the same way.

[00:51:13] In his example that nobody has any problem understanding how 11 things that are not a cricket team can come together to make a cricket team. Like that's not a mystery. I don't understand that cricket in general. Why don't I understand cricket either? Let's just say an NFL team.

[00:51:29] How many people are on the NFL? So the temptation is just to point to the stuff we understand and somehow use it as by analogy, as a way to understand what consciousness is. And he says that's just sort of cheating your way into explaining.

[00:51:47] You're not really doing anything. You still have the problem of how in the whole process of putting atoms together into neurons, into brains, how consciousness can get in there. And so he says if emergence in that sense is what you mean, like emergence is just a miracle.

[00:52:04] You're just saying you're just saying in a different way that like the miracle happened this way, but his miracle isn't his miracle just to put it in earlier? That's that's that's the thing. That's the thing that was ultimately so disappointing about this is I'm not

[00:52:19] sure that the miracle like is is avoidable because look, when you're talking about here's another point that Philip Goff makes. And I think Strossen makes in a and and Chalmers, they all use frustratingly different words for this.

[00:52:37] One thing physics can't do because of the way it's set up is talk about the intrinsic nature of matter, of atoms, of electrons. It can only describe how they behave. And that's how we understand these things.

[00:52:52] We don't understand what the nature of an atom or an electron or a proton is. That's not like something that physics can even just the methodology isn't designed to even try to figure out what that is.

[00:53:09] It is just looking at behaviors and trying to come up with causal laws. And that leads to, according to this view, a kind of circularity where everything is defined in terms of its behavior around this other stuff rather than going into its intrinsic nature.

[00:53:29] Now, as I understand it, some materialists want to say, well, but that's just it. Like if you don't need to talk about intrinsic nature, that's a philosopher's term and we can talk about these things in terms of equations, differential equations and just how things interact with each other.

[00:53:47] And that's just all there is to the universe. And that's all there is to consciousness, too, is just how things interact with each other in the brain. Given that they are now going to be completely neutral about what the intrinsic

[00:54:02] nature or as Chalmers says, the quiddity or as I think Strossen's term is the ultimate, yeah, so so that so it could be something like deeply strange, like a proto conscious kind of entity because it could like it could be anything.

[00:54:19] That's not what they're in the business of doing is trying to explain those things or trying to investigate that on the flip side. You have the panpsychics who then want to say, we have to try to explain what

[00:54:31] the intrinsic nature of the universe is or the fundamental entities of the universe are. And so I'm going to say that they are conscious in some way that is very different than how we are conscious, in fact, completely unrecognizable

[00:54:50] to us in terms of our direct experience with consciousness. So then it seems like that's not going to do any better at tackling the hard problem of consciousness because we would have so little way of moving from this proto consciousness to like the rich concept conscious experience

[00:55:13] that we are desperate to try to explain that so fundamental to how we just interact with the world, how we understand the world at every level has to be filtered through that. So yeah, it just seems like a lot of these

[00:55:25] same problems come up in there and it's not even clear what they're disagreeing about because especially since a lot of the physicists don't even have a take on what the fundamental entity of reality really is.

[00:55:40] Yeah. And even even if they had a take that take wouldn't involve a claim about whether or not there's subjectivity to an atom because I think they would just say, I'm not sure how we would even describe that.

[00:55:52] But I think that part where it's there is this still this huge question about how the fundamental experiential stuff turns into our consciousness. Yeah. Is just shifted the question. Right. And so like it has the illusion of progress by positing experience at the most fundamental level of reality.

[00:56:17] But I don't know, as you say, what the difference is between the question, how do experiential atoms become experiential humans? Yeah. Like is all that they're going to say is well, no, it's just like complicated. Right. Like we'll leave that we'll leave that to the scientists.

[00:56:37] Right. Which is exactly what the materialists say. Right. Right. You know, they say like, oh, well, we don't understand it now. But you know, we didn't understand how humans could evolve out of amoebas. And so, you know, like that was conceptually crazy at a time.

[00:56:53] So we should just trust trust the process, you know, and I think that six years. And I think I think that it just bothers these philosophers of mine so much that they have a problem that seems intractable, that they're OK, solving it by shifting around the words.

[00:57:17] I mean, here's what I like about what Galen Strassen does. You know, he's coming at it from this perspective that philosophers, they're so happy to just be these kind of hardcore reductionist or if not reductionist, functionalist, emergentist. It's like panpsychism is crazy.

[00:57:36] The idea that, you know, things could be fundamentally mental. That's just like, you know, incredulous stare stuff. That's possible worlds, whatever. Like they'll do anything but just admit that there might be some fundamental kind of mind stuff at the center of everything.

[00:57:53] And they'll be very scornful and put panpsychic views, which is which have been around forever, they'll consign them to, you know, Ptolemaic astronomy or something like that or something that's deeply superstitious and not worth taking seriously.

[00:58:10] And I think what Galen Strassen does a great job of in his work on this is say, look, this is not any weirder or more superstitious or less hard, hardheaded than than your view. Now, I like it and I agree with that.

[00:58:32] I like maybe we, you and I might have a different take on this. I agree with Galen Strassen that what he's proposing is no weirder or more goofy or wacky than what they're proposing. What I'm not sure about is whether it's less, right? Which he thinks it is.

[00:58:50] You know, it's like, I think it's just another way of describing the same problem. That was the sinking feeling that I had as I was going through this whole literature. Yeah. So OK. So a few things, if I have to summarize this,

[00:59:03] I would say, Strassen and Chalmers, whoever, Goff say you have defined this problem into being like the way that you set up the definition of material was always going to introduce this problem. And so let's avoid that by changing the definition.

[00:59:24] My deep problem is that the reason that we felt cheated is that they are borrowing a term that I think has been used to mean something that is similar only in the slightest way. And that is the view that some mystics have had,

[00:59:45] that some people who do deep meditation might have, that that there is either a universal consciousness that pervades all of existence or that there is just like a deeply mystical that there is some evidence that has come through,

[01:00:01] not through the empirical senses, but rather in some other deeper spiritual way that there is life that pervades or that there is spirit that pervades. And they've taken they've taken that term panpsychism that is pregnant with possibility about, you know,

[01:00:15] a non scientific view of of existence in the mind and the fundamental nature reality, and they've used that term to mean we're going to define the problem out of existence much in the way that philosophers defined it into existence when they picked what they mean by material.

[01:00:31] Well, so and I think in other modes, Galen Strassen, when he's talking about real physicalism, right, like what she takes to be his version of panpsychism, right? But what he says is it can have nothing to do with physics, socialism with capital S in the middle.

[01:00:51] The view, the faith that the nature and essence of all concrete reality can in principle be fully captured in terms of physics. Real physicalism cannot have anything to do with physics. So this is an unfortunate way. Really trying to make the distinction.

[01:01:09] It follows that real physicalism can have nothing to do with physics. So this the view, the faith that the nature or essence of all concrete reality can in principle be fully captured in terms of physics. Real physicalism cannot have anything to do with physics.

[01:01:22] So unless it is supposed, obviously falsely, that the terms of physics can capture the nature or essence of experience. So there like and this is why I was still it's page one, but I was still like really hopeful and actually really liked the Strassen article.

[01:01:38] Yeah, but like I still hear is like, oh, OK, because I'm attracted to this view, the methodology that you're taking to trying to understand the universe and having it had to, you know, it has to be quantitative in this way.

[01:01:56] And there is this just qualitative aspect to the universe that that language is incapable in principle of of explaining or helping us understand like I'm into that and I would want to know more about that. I still still think he baits and switches you.

[01:02:13] I think that yes, exactly what he's doing. And I think that the only thing that he's saying there is as he sort of goes into in his exchange with Dennett or in the original article with exchange with Dennett is that he thinks that by physicalism,

[01:02:28] he simply means like the hardcore materialism that isn't necessarily true of science, but it just became sociologically the line that scientists use that that the fundamental that fundamentally the material world cannot have experience built into it. Because all he's saying is that I think it can.

[01:02:49] Right. And so this is the thing. So Philip Goff just had this book come out, which I haven't read called Galileo's Error, where he says the problem is and in Gaelens Russell alludes to this kind of view many times when he's talking

[01:03:03] about Eddington and Russell, that the mathematical approach that physics has to take that that that has certain kind of limitations that closes us off to qualitative aspects of the world and our experience of the world,

[01:03:20] which is why it is so bad at trying to illuminate the nature of consciousness and that we have to like have another kind of science that can better capture these more qualitative aspects of the universe that just aren't amenable to the quantifiable equations like the observation,

[01:03:45] right? Like measurement and observation. Yeah. Or I don't know, like something like but then that's never fleshed out is what that would be. So like one way of understanding is for like a neuroscientist who's interested in trying to understand how the brain makes consciousness, none of this matters

[01:03:58] because they're they're going to proceed in the same exact way. But I yeah. And I think my sense was and this was I listened to a bit of a podcast with Goff and in reading Strossen is that push comes to shove.

[01:04:13] They're kind of agnostic as to whether atoms have experience or not. They just are are saying like, well, don't rule it out because we have just as much reason to think that they do as you do to think that they don't. Right. But what does that mean that?

[01:04:27] That means have like that's the. I don't mean it. I don't. It means nothing. It means no, it doesn't mean anything more than saying matter doesn't have consciousness. You know, like it's just the same thing. You know, this is my problem with the debate. It is like saying,

[01:04:43] well, this whole time you've been defining a bachelor as a single male and that's caused problems for the way I think about bachelor. So let me change what the word bachelor means a little bit. They're analytic philosophers. So I guess like that matters.

[01:04:58] Matters, whether their term has baked experience out of their metaphysics. I think they just think we made a mistake of baking experience out by defining things the way that we did and they just want to bake it back in. Yeah.

[01:05:11] But I'm fine except that it's not experience in the way that that word means something for us. The whole impetus for panpsychism is how seemingly in principle impossible. It is to get a kind of neuroscientific explanation for the richness of subjective

[01:05:32] experience and saying that matter is like an atom is is is conscious, made of mind stuff in some way doesn't. Like I don't even know how to interpret that. I don't know what that means. And if it yeah, it's like it's consciousness all the way down.

[01:05:49] But it's like, wait, you haven't told me anything when you say that. Right. In the same way that I think like the materialists don't tell you anything when they just say, oh, no, the consciousness emerges out of the emergence. This could yeah. Yeah.

[01:06:04] I do think, though, that I'm 100 percent team strawson when it comes to tackling the claims that Dennett and other limitivists make because that to me is a move that is even it is even sillier. Right. Like I actually don't understand and I've never understood.

[01:06:25] And even after reading this exchange between strawson and Dennett, he still don't understand if Dennett's just trolling us. Like I feel like Dennett's just trolling us like the fundamental claim that the way. So yeah, it's like the panps like it solved the problem by saying, no,

[01:06:43] look, it's consciousness all the way down. And the Dennetts of the world describe it by saying like, no, no, not even you and I are conscious, which is just mind boggling to me. Like, I don't. Well, no. So let's be fair to Dennett here,

[01:06:56] although I'm completely on your side in this. He says it's not that we deny consciousness. That would be really silly and crazy. It's just that we think consciousness isn't what you think it is. Right. But but the very strawson points out like, no,

[01:07:14] the very thing like he actually quotes that as saying like, no, we are all philosophical zombies. Yeah, which is just bizarre. And I think Dennett, like at least the church ones are just going to like just be flat out a limit of this.

[01:07:30] I think Dennett does try to have it both ways at times. But then when you get into the details of why he's not denying the existence of consciousness, but he's just saying it's completely different than what we

[01:07:43] think it is that like the details of that just turn out to be. It seems like either denying consciousness or just recognizing that the hard problem exists. But what it doesn't do is explain or in any way like try to like get out of the

[01:07:58] hard problem, explain it, solve it, or even show why it's not really a problem. Right. What bothers me about the Dennett view and I love Dennett because because of his sort of embrace of cognitive science and his

[01:08:13] his naturalism and just I think he's done a lot for integrating these various strands of thinking from within neuroscience, just cognitive science at large, philosophy of mind. I love all that stuff, but he does do this thing that really bugs me,

[01:08:30] which I won't call science to scientism because I don't stoop to your level. But he does this thing where he says, well, no, look, pain is just an illusion. By analogy. Does he say that? Yeah, he says he says it's illusory.

[01:08:45] And the analogies that he's trying to make is sort of like with a narrative self, like or identity, the problem of identity. You could say, look, there really is no you, Tamler. It's all just right. Like we can fool ourselves better than anything else.

[01:09:01] But what he's denying and what Strossen is trying to call him on is as Strossen says, when you say the illusion of pain, what you don't seem to realize is that illusory pain is pain. It's just the same thing. There is no deeper claim there, right?

[01:09:16] The very sort of fundamental nature as you start out with, like the one undeniable thing of that, there is a subjectivity to existence is what needs to be explained. And for him to say that the way I'm explaining this is by saying that's

[01:09:32] illusory is to weirdly take the structure of these other arguments that make sense and to apply it to this thing in which it doesn't really make sense. So so Strossen's reply, he has a number of choice quotes from Dennett.

[01:09:44] So he says, a philosopher's zombie, Daniel Dennett writes, is behaviorally indistinguishable from a normal human being, but is not conscious. The zombie may, for example, be a piece of brilliant machinery with fleshlight covering that looks and acts like a human being, although there is nothing it

[01:09:57] is like to be a zombie, it just seems that way to observers. Plainly, the zombie is not conscious in the standard rich, quail-involving sense of conscious. And he goes on to quote Dennett again, are zombies possible? Then it asks, they're not just possible. They're actual. We're all zombies.

[01:10:12] And that just seems like, wait, you've missed what we're trying to explain. No, I agree. But then I think that like that's not fully consistent with. He's slippery. Yeah. Here. OK, let's let's look at his reply. Right.

[01:10:28] So he says, Gail and Strossen's most obvious mistake is his misrepresentation of my main claim. I don't deny the existence of consciousness. Of course, consciousness exists. It isn't what people, what most people think it is. And I said many times, I do grant that Strossen expresses quite

[01:10:45] vividly a widespread conviction about what consciousness is. Might people in Strossen in particular be wrong about this? That is the issue. And then further down, so he's quoting Strossen again. One of the strangest things that the deniers say is that although it

[01:11:01] seems that there is conscious experience, there isn't really any conscious experience, the seeming is in fact an illusion. The trouble with this is that any such illusion is already and necessarily an actual existence of the thing said to be an illusion. Which seems right to me.

[01:11:17] No, we deniers do not say this. We say that there isn't any conscious experience in the sense that Strossen insists upon. We conscious, we say consciousness seems to many who reflects upon the point to involve being directly acquainted as Strossen puts it with some fundamental properties, qualia.

[01:11:37] But this is an illusion, a philosopher's illusion. Yeah, I guess I just don't know what that means. No, I don't either. It seems like there's equivocation going on, but it's really frustrating because I don't even know what it's equivocating to. I just don't know what he's saying.

[01:11:49] No, I don't either. Here's my attempt. So my attempt, it's not going to be satisfying, but my attempt at explaining what Dennis is saying is he is endorsing a kind of functionalism. He is just saying no consciousness is simply the stuff that our brain is doing.

[01:12:06] Like processing information and all that. And so there's no mystery there because we know how computers process information. Right, right. But then it's like not an explanation. No, it's not. I feel like this is what Sean Carroll was doing in in that discussion,

[01:12:20] was just saying that's just it. He even said at one point, let's say we have a neuroscientific explanation like we see how neurons interact when a person experiences redness or whatever. Yeah. Saying that the person experiences redness is just saying that their neurons

[01:12:37] neurons are interacting in those ways. Yeah. I mean, you can say that, but you haven't explained like the neurons aren't red. That like the neurons don't compose the experience. So I guess the question would just be fine. You can say that.

[01:12:53] But then I don't feel like a conscious experience has been explained to me. I've just gotten correlations in one kind of language that doesn't seem to map on to how I describe experience. And so, yeah, it's impressive.

[01:13:08] If if that would be possible, it would be impressive to correlate all those things as precisely as possible. But I still think there is that explanatory gap that you have to at least admit exists.

[01:13:22] Yeah, I'm open to the belief that we've just never we were asking the wrong kind of question, like, I guess, like it seems it seems like this is all just extremely wrought. I don't even know if the way in which we're asking the question

[01:13:41] about subjectivity and experience and consciousness is maybe we're misguided from the beginning and maybe we'll never solve it. But I do know that this that self-satisfactory nature of saying that we've made progress by either eliminating consciousness or by saying it's all even atoms are subject like

[01:14:01] have subjectivity is something that I just just it's like more frustrating to me. I'd rather I'd rather be a full on mysterious. Like I just, you know, I totally I was thinking, although I didn't go back

[01:14:12] to like the Colin McGinn stuff, but I was thinking, you know, maybe like this has made me somehow like think, oh, yeah, he might be on to something. And I was like his view is even stronger. It's it's not that we don't currently have the proper conceptual schemes

[01:14:28] to try to understand consciousness, but there's something about being human that would make that like impossible for us to do. And maybe that's too strong. But I am fully in agreement with the right now. The tools that we have, the conceptual tools that we have,

[01:14:43] the methods that we have, like that's not going to that's not going to do it. You know what does bother me too, though, is that in in my dear colleagues and psychological ones, especially many, many of the ones who are like the best

[01:14:56] neuroscientists who like no shit about the brain that I, you know, that I could never understand, they do seem to miss entirely that the hard problem, they actually look in frustration and say, what do you mean? How does consciousness arise?

[01:15:11] They just like, not like, look, like there is this part of the brain that like does this and then you get consciousness. They completely miss the whole explanatory gap argument. Like they just really think that they must think terrible things about

[01:15:25] philosophers who consist, continue to say that this is a mystery that needs to be solved because they're just like, no, I mean, we just need better MRIs or whatever, and then we'll be able to tell you how it happens.

[01:15:37] But what's so bizarre about that view is that the only reason they can conduct MRIs, the only reason they can engage in scientific endeavors at all is through this conscious experience, which is how the only way they interact with the world in a scientific way.

[01:15:56] It's a very bizarre view and maybe like, you know, it comes down to like philosophy of science things as what counts as, you know, a satisfying explanation and what doesn't. But yeah, I find that very strange too, that they just don't.

[01:16:11] They might say that a robot could do science, right? Like they're just you don't need consciousness to do it. Maybe a robot could, but they're not robots. They have to. The only way they do science is consciously. Well, I don't know. I actually disagree with that.

[01:16:27] I think that there is nothing about qualia that makes us able to do science. Like I think that there is this thing of what is it like to do science? But that's not what's. But you don't doubt that they are consciously that they are conscious while

[01:16:40] they're doing. I know, and not at all. I believe that they have there is a qualia to what it's like to do an MRI. But I don't think that it's necessary to do an MRI. I didn't say it was necessary.

[01:16:48] I'm saying that whether it's necessary or not, they have. They have conscious. Yes. Yes, they have consciousness. And so like the whole reason they even have their physical theories is via consciousness. It's through consciousness. I see their interface to the universe. Yeah, yeah, no, I know.

[01:17:09] It's a weird. I mean, I can kind of get there sometimes, like in my crankiest where I'm like, I don't know, just, you know, the entire single it and the whatever the fucking like, you know, C5. C5 or fire.

[01:17:22] OK, you know, I also heard this podcast with Philip Goff on it. The Lex Friedman podcast came out recently, but he said something that actually really perplexed me. He said that when he wrote that book,

[01:17:39] he sort of has a chapter on why dualism isn't a satisfactory account of consciousness. And then he said, but my views since writing the book have changed, I must admit, because I used to think my argument before was if dualism were true, then we would expect

[01:17:57] to see something like uncaused, non-material things influencing brains. And you would be able to see this in an MRI. You would see sort of like all of a sudden something happening in the brain. And then he said,

[01:18:15] but since then I've actually been convinced by some of my colleagues in neuroscience that this might actually be happening. So dualism might not be as untrue as I thought. Wait, why? I swear. OK, it sounds like I'm butchering it because I'm stuttering when I say it.

[01:18:31] But his view was that in when he was writing the book, he thought dualism must be wrong for empirical reasons, that we would have evidence by looking at brain activity that like it would be somehow initiated spontaneously in a way that would be consistent with like

[01:18:48] a non-material cause influencing brains to light up. Right. And he said that's that's the argument that I had when I wrote the book against dualism. Since then, though, I've been convinced by my mind. I want to understand the previous view.

[01:19:03] So he thinks that like if dualism were true, you would see evidence of it in brain imaging and the way but that evidence would be what? That's what I wasn't quite sure that that like neurons are firing, but there's no cause for that.

[01:19:18] We don't see any cause for that. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. That's the way that's the way that I understood what he was saying. And that since then, he's been convinced that there might actually be some evidence before that actually that happened.

[01:19:30] Well, I mean, it's not like they, you know, to the humian point, it's not like they see the causes, right? So why don't they? Why don't they just think that the thing that happened before is the cause? I don't know. I don't know.

[01:19:43] I was I I'm probably doing an injustice to he's obviously a very smart guy. It just like I was walking my dog listening to this and I wanted to drop my phone. I didn't understand because all arguments about dual, you know, these are all

[01:19:57] really most philosophers would say this is just such a metaphysical problem that that you can't really bring any science to bear on whether or not there's spirit. Yeah, except the kind that you take, which is if they were spirit, we should be

[01:20:11] able to have evidence like scientific evidence. No, no. My view is that if ghosts operate in the physical world, there would be physical evidence. Yeah. It's it's weird. Like here's the thing. I believe that the neuroscientists say that because, you know, when you get to

[01:20:28] really abstract theoretical physics or even, you know, maybe neuroscience at at the deepest level, it's all very weird anyway. Right? Even like the people who call themselves materialists and wear it like a badge of honor.

[01:20:43] It's still all so weird and strange that it's no less crazy sounding or counter intuitive than the panpsychism, I don't think. And I think this is the point that panpsychists are making is, you know, once we go down to the fundamental levels and whether you think there's

[01:21:03] an intrinsic nature to or fundamental entities or quiddities or ultimates, it's so weird anyway that like to try to argue at that point about whether it's better to call that like material or experiential or material or conscious.

[01:21:19] It's just like at that point, like it just kind of loses all meaning because none of those things are recognizable to us in the normal way. We understand those terms, both from the panpsychic perspective or from the materialist perspective.

[01:21:33] So like I'm not sure what hangs on, except maybe just a general open remindedness about how the universe works, but I don't see what the benefit is of having that argument at that level.

[01:21:48] I do agree with you that when you get down to the basics, the fundamentals of reality, it is so odd and confusing and weird that I think that I do end up being a mysterious about this stuff in that I think who whoever thought that we would have

[01:22:08] either the brain power, the concepts, any ability to understand reality is at its fundamental level. My concern is that we just won't know when we don't know. Like we won't know the limits of our knowing. And you shared these articles on some quantum phenomenon that people are

[01:22:26] fucking with and that stuff is so fucking weird that you need. One of the reasons I kind of wasn't enthusiastic about talking about it was because conceptually, I have no tools to talk about that stuff, because I think

[01:22:37] that the only concepts that get you any understanding are really advanced mathematics or advanced to me. Right. Mathematics that then they convert into normal language. And it sounds like gobble de gooke, like something being there and not being there at the same time or something, you know.

[01:22:55] And and it's cool that we've gotten to the point where our mathematics allows us to whatever, say something about quantum fields and and you know, about the entanglement and predictions and make these predictions. But there will be a point at which

[01:23:12] it will just we will stop being able to even know if we're making progress, I think. And just talking about, you know, quantum physics and all the different kinds of interpretations, how to translate that math into something that isn't math.

[01:23:26] Yeah. The variety of ways that people try to do that is incredible. You know, that's where you get the multiple universes. Like I think this is another version of the hard problem is like just getting that stuff to make sense beyond just the formulas

[01:23:43] is really difficult and you can and it's also flexible. You can do it in all sorts of different ways and all of them have their count like completely counterintuitive mind boggling science fictiony elements to it. This is why yeah, this is part of why I'm open to ghosts.

[01:23:59] It's like, you know, it's going to turn out that there's not there's no there there to our disagreement because like sometimes you're just mott and Bailey about it all the time. Like all I ever mean is that

[01:24:14] ghosts as a construct in the way that you talk about them, like there's no evidence for them if what you mean is that like we don't know if there are strings vibrating at the most fundamental levels or whether particles interacting

[01:24:26] and that weirdness means that we should accept weirdness then fine. No, but see here's the difference between me and what I am disappointed to find out are panpsychist is like what I am open to is something that I can

[01:24:41] describe and that will make sense to you, that there really are like spirits that interact with us and that some non-trivial percentage or it really just has to be just more than one or one or more of people who have claimed

[01:24:57] that they have had contact with these spirits are telling the truth and that they really did. If we were that person, we would understand and have immediately like get what that felt like and it would be something like the way that it's

[01:25:13] described. They're actually moving shit around or they're actually you know, talking to you or telling you something or predicting something or prophesizing something to you that turns out to be true. But there's a real entity that's doing that.

[01:25:26] That's what I'm open to and I feel like that's at least making a concrete claim that I just don't know if the panpsychic is making. I don't think the panpsychic is like everything's exactly the same, except that I'm going to describe electrons differently than you describe

[01:25:41] electrons like that's just right. No, they're not making that claim because they because there's zero reason to make the claim about ghosts. It's not it's not going to get their philosophy of mind anywhere to like start talking about ghost experiences. No, but you know what I mean?

[01:25:57] That's just not we can't take a stand on that issue. It seems like because we don't even know what it means to take a stand on that issue. That's the problem. We don't we don't quite know what it means.

[01:26:09] All I know is that it does seem wrong to eliminate consciousness as a thing that needs to be explained. I think that's the only thing I'm certain about when it comes to philosophy That's the thing aside from the denets and the church lens.

[01:26:20] I think most people agree with that. And so the debate is do we have the tools right now and the methodology that we will ultimately be able to explain consciousness just like, you know, we use DNA to explain human evolution

[01:26:41] in ways that might have seemed unfathomable to us 300 years ago. But with the same general methodology, the scientific method and the concepts that we currently have that Sean Carroll's of the world think, no, no, just give us some time and there's going to be a lot of roadblocks.

[01:26:59] And it's going to be a long journey. But we got this ultimately. And that's what I actually don't like. I'm with you where I think maybe but maybe Colin McGinn is right. And no, like you just can't like that's too complex for beings of our intelligence.

[01:27:16] Yeah, it's to the point where I think that if if we had whole network sort of mappings of a human brain, a conscious human brain, and we had every neuron and the the relationship between the substructures that create and all of the firing patterns.

[01:27:36] And we emulated them in a very complicated computer. And that computer told us, hey, guess what? I'm conscious. I don't know that we would have the ability to distinguish whether or not it was conscious and because it's so fundamentally fucked up like that,

[01:27:52] it doesn't seem to me to be a scientific endeavor. I'm like as a scientist or whatever, I could be a functionalist. I could say like, well, we have to treat it like it's conscious.

[01:28:00] We, you know, if it cracks like a duck, then let's just call it a duck. But I don't know that I would know whether it is or not. Right. And they would say or at least some of some of that group would say, well, that just is consciousness.

[01:28:12] So you're wrong to say that you don't know. And I'm not. Yeah. And I think that that's not satisfying to just be to just be that much of a functionalist about it. Yeah. It's a it's a it's always been a deeply dissatisfying area of philosophical inquiry for me.

[01:28:27] And I think it's partly because of the this this terminology and like in the weedness of it, that's so hard to follow. And just the unsatisfying nature of the explanations that have been offered. And I don't know. Yeah. That's my problem.

[01:28:47] And I mean, like, you know, a lot of fields have technical terminology and stuff like that. But even when you really dig into it, like it lacks that kind of satisfying quality. I mean, like if you want to call something pan proto-psychism,

[01:29:03] fine. But I want that to mean something to me that I recognize as fundamentally different than it's. Yeah. OK. So this is maybe my last thing to say about this. There is when when you give me like a trial, like the trolley problem where

[01:29:21] you formulate the footbridge with the lever scenario and you and you realize, oh, shit, there's something there's something weird about my intuitions here. And then you give me maybe some principle that might explain my intuitions in both of those ways.

[01:29:35] I still, even though that's the kind of philosophy I know you don't like, I still kind of get a satisfaction when when there is some sort of like, oh, what your intuition really is about is about direct harm or whatever.

[01:29:49] Like sometimes I'm like, OK, like maybe that's the case. Sure. I was staring today at Chalmers is laying out of the conceivability argument about the zombies. And I read it structural zombies versus categorical. No, this was just the conceivability part where he says here is what the argument

[01:30:10] how the argument goes are philosophical zombies conceivable? If so, does that mean they're metaphysically possible? And if they're metaphysically possible, whatever, like I forget now how I understood it and I read it and I understood it. If it's metaphysically possible, then that means the physical facts can't.

[01:30:28] That's right. Then then some form of like non-material. Yeah, I understood it. And I still felt like I was somehow being cheated into like buying a conclusion. And I couldn't quite get why. Well, so I actually think that that's another way of just expressing

[01:30:46] the view that you expressed earlier on this episode, when you said that, you know, like the neuroscientific, you could look at all the neurons and still not know whether the person was conscious or not, because that it doesn't

[01:31:00] seem like it's explaining or in any way indicating even whether the person is having a conscious subjective experience. I take the zombie argument to just be a philosopher thought experiment way of expressing that same sentiment. Did he need to take us through conceivability and the relationship

[01:31:18] between conceivability and metaphysical possibility? Like that's the part that I'm just like, I mean, I probably not. Yeah, or you know, whatever, dual two dimensional semantics, but right. But like, I don't know. I do think that that and the knowledge, you know,

[01:31:35] the Mary argument are essentially just saying that right now, the way we describe physical phenomenon doesn't seem like it's in the same genre of thing that conscious phenomena is and we have to reckon with that. Yeah, that's right.

[01:31:52] OK, so then I think that what I'm saying is I've never gotten any sort of satisfaction, like there's ever been a conclusion where I feel satisfied in the way that I am sometimes with like a normative ethics paper or even

[01:32:03] a paper on free will where you're like, no, look, this is how determinism isn't incompatible with. I don't get that with philosophy of mind. I don't know, maybe I'm broken. Yeah, no, I do too.

[01:32:13] Right. I mean, because I think like you expressed the point that there is to make about that in ways that I don't know have been improved upon upon with all this technical apparatus that they've constructed around the problem.

[01:32:30] And you never know whether a debate is purely terminological or not. You know, like at every point you're kind of suspecting, wait a minute, what hangs on this? What are the stakes here? Here's my question for the panpsychists and the people who engage in this debate

[01:32:47] is what are the stakes? Like how will this affect either like how we do science or how we understand the universe, how we understand the world other than like, don't just tell me words like, well, it's fundamentally this or fundamentally that.

[01:33:03] Like there has to be some way of grasping it where I realize that that there is a problem here that people are taking two stands on in the way that like a ghost believer is taking a stand on an issue and a ghost skeptic

[01:33:18] is taking a stand on an issue. And there are stakes to that debate. If one of them is right, like that matters or if the other one is right, that matters. And I just don't know what the stakes are. I don't need there.

[01:33:28] Love somebody to tell us because maybe like I'm fully willing to admit that I might be completely misguided on that. Me too. I even think I'll go as far as say. Somehow you'll agree. Even the knowledge debate where

[01:33:42] like justified true belief may not be the best way to define knowledge because Gettier said so with these cases, even that has an outcome that I'm sort of comfortable with, which is, well, look, the belief that there might be a necessary and sufficient definition

[01:34:01] of knowledge in the way that we use the concept was misguided to begin with and like I think we might conclude out of that whole debate. But that gives me some satisfaction in a way that resemblances, Vic Constan was right.

[01:34:13] Yeah. And I don't even get that with like philosophy of mind stuff. No, right. It was so depressing to read the Chalmers paper and to realize that we were still getting back to like zombies, but now they were proto panps, psychic, the Rosalian zombies or something like that.

[01:34:31] Like it's just like, oh man, I thought we were. Did you see Strossen calls them Australian zombies? Yeah. Well, Strossen is I don't think that I think they have a I was going to say friendly rivalry, but I'm not sure how friendly it is.

[01:34:49] But like I, you know, the funny thing about Chalmers also is he's not ruling out dualism. At least Strossen wants to rule out dualism. You know, as again, even that, though, when you get to the difference between property dualism and substance dualism

[01:35:07] and you're like, unless you're positing like a soul, like I'm not sure what the fuck we're talking. People have no bravery unless they're rattling chain ghosts. Like. I just want to know like, like is this really just like what are we calling things?

[01:35:24] What words are we going to use to call things that we all agree upon exist? Like if that's the debate, then I'm way less interested. Like I, like you said at the beginning of the episode,

[01:35:35] me as I thought this was going to be like rivers or spirits that like I can meet when my parents turn into pigs. You were it's it's like it must be so much even more disappointing to you having come in with that possibility.

[01:35:53] Because I want that I'm looking for I am really, you know, and I get it a little bit but not out of this debate. I'm I can introduce you to some family members who will convince you in their ghost stories. Oh, really?

[01:36:05] And you just like ridicule them and watch them in their back. They're completely wrong. Yeah, they're ridiculable. They're crazy. Well, you should like put them in an institution against their will. OK, this is going to be my final pronouncement. That thing that you said,

[01:36:24] whether or not it's all just different ways of saying the thing that we all agree exists, yes, I'm willing to say all the philosophy of mind is only that. I'm pronouncing it. I'm calling it. That's that's it.

[01:36:39] Is everybody is just trying to find a different way to say the thing that we all agree about? I think a strain of philosophy of mind like I don't think that like the philosophy of mind that William James was doing is right. You know, yeah.

[01:36:56] And so I think there is a good strain of philosophy. I think this I was tainted by taking a philosophy of mind class in graduate school. Yeah, that absolutely turned me off. It was the worst class in possible I've ever taken.

[01:37:14] Yeah, I also fully admit that there I'm sure there are domains of philosophy that are much worse than this. This is just that domain that is within reach. Like it's just within reach for my training.

[01:37:27] And that and on something that's interesting to me, like, you know, like it. And I think that it's probably not a surprise that if there if we're going to run our ground philosophically, like consciousness might be the thing that is

[01:37:43] it has it's at that center of A being just completely mysterious and also being something that, you know, we really are certain of but also have very little way of reconciling with the other ways we approach. All right. Well, mystery is fine. Mystery is fine.

[01:38:04] Yeah, now let's go drink ourselves into non consciousness. That's my goal every night. All right. Well, thank you for suggesting this. I hope I'm sorry if we didn't have as much enthusiasm for the topic itself.

[01:38:21] But we're going to get a lot of email explaining consciousness to us, I think. Or explain. I would love that. And explaining the stakes of this debate I would especially love. Yeah. All right. Join us next time on Very Bad Wisdom.

[01:39:14] And a very good man. Just a very bad wizard.