AI Consciousness and Anthropocentrism

This summer, Prime Video takes you back before legally blonde, before law school and into the world of Elle Woods in high school. Set in nineteen ninety five, this Gemini vegetarian knows exactly who she is until her family moves from Bel to Saire eattle, packed with iconic fashion, nineties nostalgia, and a throwback soundtrack, Elle proves one thing. Law school was hard. High school was harder. From the world of legally blonde, watch Elle, a new original series only on Prime Video july first Study come together on a Windows eleven PC and for a limited time, college students get of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows eleven PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft three hundred and sixty five premium, and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows . com slash student offer. Well supplies last and june thirtieth terms at aka dot mslash college pc. Keith Frankish, welcome to the show. Well, thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here, Alex. Am I conscious , Keith? Are you conscious? I'm a little confused about this and I have been for the past couple of years and I'm hoping you can help me work it out I'm conscious, you're conscious yes but of course we need to sort out what that means and that's really the whole the whole focus of my work is on trying to get a grip on what we're talking about when we're talking about consciousness. So yeah, yummy, let's put it like this. You have experiences. You have pains, you smell things, you see things you hear things . These are what we call consciousness experiences. Okay , they can tell me a lot about them. I have similar ones . Yeah, they're perfectly real things that happen to us. The question is what is happening ? Okay, that's good. I'm glad to hear you say that because you are perhaps the foremost defender of a view and consciousness or philosophy of mind known as illusionism . And given that it talks about the illusion phenomenological experience , it leads a lot of people to think that the view means that consciousness itself is some kind of illusion, which sounds a bit self defeating because of course , to experience an illusion, you have to be experiencing something. And so typically, when I've talked about the philosophy of mind with people, and illusionism has come up, without very much thought, people have said it's kind of nonsense on the face of it. And you were just saying before we started, it's Gail Strawson, isn't it that said that illusionism is perhaps like, I can't remember the exact quote, but like the worst idea that anyone has ever come up with or something like that. So maybe I thought it would be a bit more fair to have an illusionist on the show to, you know, defend defend his case. Well, thank you for giving me the opportunity . So let's I think what Galen imagined I was saying was something like this that no one ever feels pain. No one ever feels pleasure. No one ever has conscious sensations , conscious perceptions. I'm not saying that of course I'm not saying that . What I am saying is that I think people under some people, particularly some philosophers, and some people who've thought about this quite a lot of have a mistaken view of what is happening when we have those when we have conscious experiences . The consciousness isn't quite what we take it to be and that perhaps we don't have the sort of insight into its nature that some people think we can just sit and reflect on the nature of our own experience and from that deduce quite profound consequences about the fundamental nature of reality . Now I think those people who think that had a mistaken view of consciousness I think and that mistaken view is d ue in part to a sort of illusion created by our introspective systems, by the systems that monitor and model our own mental activity . Okay ? So the illusion comes in illusion isn't when you let's take a stage illusion. Something's happening there on the stage you see someone being levitating . Something's really happening on the stage . It's just not what you think it is or not what you're tryed you're invited to think it is . That's what I think about consciousness. That's something real and important significantly is happen ing , but you're invited, perhaps by the nature of your introspective systems , to misconceptualize it . And it's that misconceptualization that lies at the basis of the philosophical debates about consciousness . Now for most people, consciousness is immediately accessible as an I mean say, for most people, that's what they think. They think that consciousness is just the thing which presents itself to you as it is directly. When I see something red, when I feel pain, I just, you know, someone pointed out to me that it's always red, isn't it? It's always the redness of red. It's never like the brownness of brown for some reason. I think that's an injustice. The orangeness of orange it just presents itself to you and it seems as though even if that doesn't line up to something in the real world, even if they're the external world is an illusion and it's all being created by being prodded by scientists in a lab somewhere , that you are having this experience is real and because experience is sort of this subjective thing that you're just experiencing directly. No matter what the cause is, no matter how incorrect you could be about what is bringing that about, the experience itself is there. It's private, it's subjective , it's inner . And if I understand you correctly , it's that you think is an illusion, this idea of a subjective private world. That's getting pretty close to it But. there's a lot to unpack in what you just said because you will find philosophers perhaps lay people saying the sort of thing you just said as if that's kind of completely innocent . Okay as if there's no theoret framework being assumed and I think there is. Let's just start with a with a term that often is smuggled in, well smuggled in, that's often employed without much reflection. I, what you said presented to you, presented to me . What is this I? What are we referring to here? Well I'll tell you what I mean when I speak of when I use the first person I'm referring to this particular animal, this biological organism that is the product of a certain genetic makeup and a certain developmental history and has been all sorts of experiences and is able to do the things it does in virtue of that history. As far as I'm concerned, it's completely part of the natural world . The eye that I'm talking about isn't something that's associated with this body distinct from the body, but somehow the animal but somehow associated with it, it's not a product of the body, it just is this animal. That's what I mean by . So when we say that things are presented to me , I mean that in virtue of systems that compose this animal . Certain bits of information, if you like, are available to be used to control its processes and to control its ultimately its speech . So that's what I mean by . So when I say something's presented to me, I mean systems inside this animal are doing things that have this effect, the effect of acquainting me, if you like with things around me, or things inside me . And I think it all depends on evolved mechanisms that have been whose, if you like, his plan has been designed by evolution that have been tuned up through development and experience . And some of these are for detecting things in the world, some of them are for detecting things inside me. But they're all designed by evolution. They're all fallible. They're all capable of misrepresentation . So that's what I mean by me, by I presented to me. Now what's presented to me? Well, let's start just at a pre theoretical level, it doesn't seem that an inner world is presented to me at all. It seems that an outer world is presented to me . I'm just glad it means it's a kind of book shelves all different colours blue and red and some quite a few of them are brown actually , purple up there and so on. And yeah, that's what's presented to me. They're the colors of those things. They're real, they're vivid, they're evocative , but they all seem to be out there . All of them seem to be in my mind. That's what's presented to me pre theoretically . Okay . Now you may say ah, yes, but now that you may say, yes, but you could be listening , okay, fine, maybe I couldn't. And then but then we started getting to theorizing about what's happening in these anomalous cases. But that's where I start. Consciousness is being aware the world around me and the world, the physical world inside me, the feeling in my stomach, the feeling of my heart . The knowledge of certain things that are happening in my cognitive system. Let's use that trying to use that neutral term . So there that's I think where I start, all that is just as far as I'm concerned all that is just all everyday descriptions of this . I ask you what is your experience like and you start telling me what your experience is like about the world around you and your room. So yeah, very interesting and you might just spotter things I haven't spotted so very interesting. Tells me and of course if you if you maybe you can detect some things that I can't, maybe I have sharper hearing, maybe your colour vish is better than mine, whatever . So all that interesting and this all tells me about the nature of your experience and I can ask you lots and lots of questions appare.ntly But same we haven', t got into a private world of something like mental qualities . How if you like turn the question, how do we get from that pre theoretical position to this world of inner mental qualities? And to whom is that mental world presented . Okay , so that's interesting, right? Because I said that you know it seems like we have direct access to this like inner private experience, but you're quite right. The thing that we experience just on the surface is out there . Okay , that's fine. Then I want to say like, well what is the thing out there that I'm experiencing ? Well, it's really difficult to put into words, right ? And I think a lot of people will reach for a word like Qualia , which is a sometimes helpful word which is supposed to kind of get a grasp on like I said earlier, like the redness of red, the feeling of the pain, something separable from what might be described in atomic physics or mathematical language or whatever , it's this kind of experiential bit . So I kind of want to say that like, okay, maybe if that redness is over there, the red thing that I'm experiencing is out in the world . Like it's still something that I'm like experiencing. There seems to be some kind of like connection. There's something going on in here which is like out there. I mean, I kind of thought I spoke to a blind YouTu recently on this show and he's spent his life blind since birth talking about what it's like to be blind . And I spent a long time trying to think about what it would be like if you sort of saw for the very first time. And I think one of the most confusing things I hadn't thought about this is like depth perception in that like , you know the one thing that really baffles him is forget colors and stuff. He's like, you're telling me that if something's close, it's big and if something's further away, it gets smaller. Like that makes absolutely no sense to me. And I thought that if you suddenly opened your eyes, you'd notice that unlike having to reach out and touch , it's like over there , but over here at the same time, you're aware that it's far away, but at the same time it's somehow simultaneously over here without having to be right next to it . And it's that. It's whatever the sort of thing that's gone from over there into here that I think people want to call the sort of the visual experience . What is that thing? What is it? That's a really nice way of putting it in. There's some contribution from me, okay, to this to what's happening here. Okay. I'm not just ancient philosophers, ancient philosophers tended to think that it was that the qualities really were out there, that maybe that copies of them came off the surface and somehow hit my eye, but it was a copy of what was there. Other views of projectivists that somehow eyes went out to those things and somehow did feel them . The point is we're getting into theory now. Another view is okay, there is the color of the book which turns out not to be the colour as we ordinarily think of it, it is some sort of um, a reflectance profile of the of the of the surface which can be characterized in in non qualitative terms in terms of the way that light is different wavelengths of light are reflected and absorbed . And then there's another kind of color that is just in my mind. The blue that I thought was out there is really in my mind and that's what people call qualia. But that's a theoretical move. Okay. We started with the colours being out there, relocating them into my mind. That's a theoretical. mo Itvie's not something that's gi ven at the start that cannot possibly be dyed. It's a way of making sense of what's happening when you realize that colours look different to different people and that's how it's the variability of perception. But there are other ways, those ancient ways I mentioned . But your point about the blind person is very important because perception isn't just a matter of opening your eyes or your ears or whatever and just passively receiving stuff. It is a learner it's supposed to has a developmental history, required learning, it requires all sorts of associations to build up the to create this kind let's talk about it as an interaction. That's how I want it to. It's an interaction between me and the thing there. And the nature of that interaction is determined partly by the nature of the thing out there, partly by my nature. And my nature isn't just something that's just it just fellas just created bang and I wait. Now it's a matter of my learning the significance of things out there in the world. Let me tell you a little story. I may not get the details right but it's about a patient who was studied by the psychologist neuropsychologist but I'm not sure how we characterize it was called him psychologists. They say many things Nicholas Humphrey. In the early nineteen seventies patient called HD . And she had been not blind right from birth, but she'd gone blind quite early due to I think an infection that had damaged her cornea corneas . And later in life, I think I think about in her twenties she was , I think she was living in Iran, she was given the opportunity to come to the UK and have a corne ft, corneal graph that would hopefully restore her sight . And she had the operation and she'd been looking forward to this, hugely. The idea of she'd read a lot of literature and such , the idea of how wonderful the world was going to be once her eyes were opened as it were, like Mary coming out of her black and white room. And the operation technically was a success , but she wasn't it wasn't the revelation she'd expect She was seeing things in the sense that she could detect them and respond to them, but it didn't have any of the ificance of the richness of the what we talk about what experience is like didn't have any of that. It was quite an effort for her to classify things visually . And they didn't delight her. They didn't mean anything to her. It was just like she had to go through this process of saying, Yes, that's there and it's this shape, all this color with it. And she actually was so distressing path sheered, decided it was not worth it. She put back on the blind glass, the sunglasses all went back to living. As a blind person . And my one possible explanation is the one that I favor is that learning what it's like to see . Knowing what it's like if you like to see something is a process you have to learn and it's a matter of building up associations with different sorts of stimuli . Learning certain patterns of reaction to those stimuli . Those stimuli have effects on us . Psychological effects, I'd say they conjure up associations, memories , dispositions to react in various ways, including most basically the disposition says that's red . And we learned this from the moment that we're born, even before we start learning it . And our sense that the world is infused with a richness and or what its likeness is coming from us. We are, as if you like projecting onto it the psychological significance that these things have for us . We are not observing an inner private copy of that same color that was out there . We are, if you like, what we're tracking, I think. I'm running ahead by a lot of people. But what we're tracking when we talk about the color of the thing is the impact that that kind of stimulation makes on us the global psychological impact, what it means for us . Her HD didn't mean anything because she hadn't had the chance to build up the neural circuits and to learn the associations and so on that would give it any meaning for her . Just saying just the idea that all the significance is packed into a simple pure quality that if it's not out there must be in here is is just a very simplistic and I think very uninteresting theory of what's really happening . Why don't you realise there's another way of thinking about this, of thinking it is an interaction where the redness is if we're you vibrating psychologically with that particular stimulation . I think which we can carefully slowly pathodically unpack and understand . I think this is much more interesting opens up a whole vista west thing. It's just a primitive colour that somehow exists in my mind, can't be explained by science . All we've done is just redescribe the problem, but now it's internal rather than next time . So I crumbed a lot in there, so you wonder probably unpacket me . This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a fifty page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open ed for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online makes sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies eighteen plus. We'll get back to the show in just a moment, but first, where do you get your information from? Most of it these days comes from the internet, and while it's great that there are so many new sources to choose from , they all have one problem in common and that's bias. Media bias is, of course, something that will never disappear, but wouldn't it be great if there were a way for us to navigate this online bias, objectively comparing the way that different sources are reporting on the same stories? While that is exactly what today's sponsor, Ground News allows you to do. Ground news aggregates thousands of local and international news outlets all in one place , so you can compare reporting across the political spectrum. Try it out at ground. News forward slash Alex OC. Did you see that the White House is hosting a nine hour long prayer festival focusing on the alleged Christian roots of the United States? If you typically read exclusively right leaning media? You probably didn't. Using Ground News, I can see that of all the sources reporting on this story, only one of them leans to the right, and imbalances in coverage like this are why Ground News also has a dedicated blind spot tab which specifically seeks out stories that you would otherwise miss based on the news that you normally read. So cut through media bias and get a better grip of what's really going on by going to ground. News forward sl ash Alexos or by scanning the QR code that's on your screen, use my link to get forty percent off their unlimited access vantage plan. And with that said, back to the show. I want to help I want to help give people a grip and also get a grip myself on like how you're interpreting the words that we're using. So when you say something like when you say something like experience , when you say we're having experiences, like we are or awareness, I think is the word you just use, you know, you are aware of certain things, like this patient who's like aware of various things in the world . But it's missing some kind of qualitative aspect . What is just awareness itself? Because if you ask a philosopher of mine, you know, what is awareness, they often just say, Oh , it's what it's likeness. It's the redness of red, which I presume you would want to resist. So what do you think awareness is ? I'm thinking of it in psychological terms or psychological terms in terms of effects. Okay ? So let's put it crudely. It's detecting something and being able to respond differentially to the thing you're detecting. Having a hot sniff sort of carving up , selecting out certain stimuli that have certain significance and responding selectively to them in a whole range of ways, in an open ended range of ways. The fact that something's red, okay, that I detect something as being red, that can open up a whole range of different responses depending on the context. OK, if it's a stoplight and I'm driving, it mean one thing. If it's a book, it might mean another thing, if it's a little book created by Chairman Mau it will mean something else, it's so on and so on and so forth . It opens up a whole range of responses but that are selective to that particular stimulus . Okay. So it gives us a kind of it's an invitation to react in a certain way, if you like , that has been taken up by magic systems. That sounds to me extremely behavioral, right? It sounds to me like a behavioral account of what experience is, which is to say experience or awareness is either the reaction or a propensity for reaction to certain kinds of stimuli . Like sort of it is an invitation to like behave in a particular way in response to a certain sort of input. That to me seems behavioral. It seems like the kind of thing that could apply certainly to plants, maybe to computers , possibly possibly even sort of other things in the world and it doesn't quite seem to me to capture the difference between, you know , a bike experiencing rust when it's left out in the rain and and , you know, a human exper iencing redness. Do you know what I mean? It sounds like it sounds behavioral. Okay, a lot of things to say about it. First , this needs heavily qualif ied in a behavior in the sense that it concentrates on the effects of stimulation . Okay . Now the actual observable over behavioral effects are just the tip of the iceberg . Every bit of stimulation causes all kinds of micro adjustments within here . Okay micro adjustments to perception to perceptual set, to attention . It triggers associations, lays down memories from beliefs, all sorts of things are happening in here, massive amounts of stuff. The stuff that you actually see on the outside is you may not see anything on the outside, but still there's a massive amount of stuff changed in sight, but it's those certainly it's effect ism, if you like. It's the significance of stimulation lies in its effects. If something and look, lots of stimuli don't have any effects on me. Magnetic radiation around me doesn't because I don't have any means of detecting it. Okay. Doesn't have any effects on me. I'm not conscious of it, you know? All sorts of stuff doesn't morse the pity in some cases but radiation. You could stand in a nuclear reactor and you wouldn't detect it until you started bleeding . So first all, if you want behaviorism is a pejorative term because it suggests oh it's only overt behavior we're conservative. I would say something like functionalism it's a matter of what functions it enables the system to perform, but those may be characterized at a very, very fine level. Now take other creatures. Yes, you may find certain. So it's a matter of sensitivities, activated sensitivities and the pattern of reactivity that is internal reactivity that is stimulated by them. Yes, you might find something similar in implants. That's my problem as far as I'm concerned . Rust on a bicycle is quite different because there is the bicycle can't do any there's changes happening to the bicycle the, biomines rasting, but it can't do anything with that information. That information can't it's not sensitive to that change and it's not using that change to modulate its responses to the world in any way. If it had a detector for oncoming vehicles or something and it could do things and that would be a bit like it. But of course, that would be a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of the kind of complex sensitivity and reactivity that are that the eighty six billion massively interconnected neurons in our head are capable of doing. But I still don't think there's a bright line. There are very few bright lines in nature. It doesn't matter at least like that car you say with a detection system like a self driving car that detects a pedestrian and sort of has to decide, so to speak, whether to swerve left or swerve right . It sounds to me that this view opens the door to saying that it at least has some kind of like protocons . Bearing in mind that like it sounds a lot less dramatic when you realize that by consciousness you're not talking about this sort of weird private phenomenology and stuff like that. But the words were using like awareness and consciousness and just effects reacting to inputs, it seems to me that a self driving car just would be aware or conscious on that view. Well we need to think about what we're doing with the word consciousness as well. Why is this word so important to us? One reason it's important is it marks out boundaries of ethical concern . And now some people that only humans were properly conscious, you know, and that non human animals weren't. And this was a convenient view if you don't care much about argument animals . So the word comes loaded with ethical import . And I don't think that ethical import can be just read off the psychology, if you like.'re No, we need to think about where we're going to draw ethical boundaries. This is a matter for us how much we care. It's not just red off the fact that there isn't some , you know, some there's an inner light that's on in some creatures and off in others and if it's off, you can do what you like to them and if it's on, then they really matter. I think that's a simplistic anthropocentric view . And we need to look much more carefully at what is actually happening in these different kinds of systems and ask ourselves how much we care about that. There is also one big difference between the self driving car ans, which is that we not only respond to the world, but we also respond to our responding to the world. We have introspective systems we can monitor not it's not just that the world affects us but that how it affects us affects us. We can monitor our own reactions to the world, talk about them. So it has we have another layer of awareness, self awareness, which again, I think of in just the same way , not as involving some mysterious private well, just another layer of functional organization, which, of course, the self ranking card doesn't have. You might think that's very important ethical consent. But again, that doesn't just fall out of the description of the system. It's something we decide as a community . What we care about . And we put pressure on each other to expand the boundaries or draw the boundary in whichever way we think is our lights are just to us . Yeah , okay, so I'm understanding I think what you're saying about like the significance of like human animal consciousness consciousness, which has something to do with introspection, right? Which is that like it's as Josh Shrasmusin I think, once said, there's a difference between noticing a tree and noticing that you've noticed a tree, right? And that's an important distinction . And in your paper on illusionism, you make use of this term introspect ion. And that was one of the first things that confused me when I was trying to sort of learn about your worldview, which is that I thought I was being presented with this view that sort of consciousness is some kind of illusion, which I know and hope we've roughly covered is not what you're saying . But I thought to myself, if the illusion is being caused by introspection , surely that introspection is a form of conscious experience. Now, you think consciousness exists, you doesn't think you just don't think it has this sort of qualitative private sort of dimension. But the same question can be asked, right? Like if the illusion is being created by a misfiring of an introspective system, isn't the very act of introspection also qualitative and even more private because it goes sort of inwards and it's all about me. Like I kind of want to want to say that there seems not a circularity, whatever the opposite of the circle is, you know, it seems to be sort of self defeating. So tell me why it's been. Yeah, yeah, well for exactly the same reason that I just tell the same story about introspection that I told about perception, that perceiving the world around us doesn't involve creating a sort of mental simulacrum of it that then an inner eye observes . I tell this other story about being sensitive to stimuli and each stimulus present triggering a distinctive pattern of internal reactivity that reflects the significance of that stimulus. Okay ? Now then I say introspection ?act Exly the same story. It's the stimuli here are internal , let's say neural ones, okay? They're patterns of activity large scale patterns of activity within the brain . I'm sensitive to those or selectively sensitive to certain aspects and global aspects that it's useful for me to know about, like whether I'm in a bad state , whether something bad's happening to me, and that then itself triggers a distinctive pattern of reactivity to those . So when I taste something like saying that's very bitter the stimulus or stimulus evokes a certain complex pattern of reactivity in me . Introspective systems monitor that, model it, categorize it , and provoke a distinct a distinct pattern of higher level riterity . One of the most basic elements of which being to say wow that's bitter, don't try it . So it's not that I sort of if I made the mistake that people think I'm making, then it would be a really big howler because I'd be saying look there's no Cartesian theatre at the first level of perception, but there is one at the level of introspection. But now I just say the same thing about introspection as I say about perception that it's a psychological process. I mean, we can tell all this in terms of representations, not representations that we're consciously aware, but representations of things in the world that then play a particular functional role in the rest of the cognitive system. So it's all going to be a matter of sensitivities and reactions of first order, higher order, perhaps even second order . Perhaps even their third order no reactions to reactions to the reactions . And the general idea here is that what perception is doing is it's tuning me into the world and and triggering patterns of reaction that are internal reaction that are appropriate . But second, what introspection is doing is being sensitive to patterns first order reactivity in my brain and triggering appropriate reactions. The particular use of this word is in communication that I don't think things don't just affect me. I can tell you how they affect me. I can remember how they affect me. I can reason about how I could go on to produce those patterns that I enjoyed, recreate them, and avoid the ones that I didn't. So it enables a higher reflective awareness of our own experience, if you like, using experience in this deflationary term. Deflationary sense . Okay, so maybe it would be helpful to think about a philosophical zombie for a second. Of course , philosophical zombies. Was it Charmers who came up with them? Was it someone else? I feel like someone else who came up with it and then Charmers like popularized it. Robert Kirk used the term in the I think that seventy four, but it's been a it's been knocking around . There's the annotation that I can't remember. It's an idea that's been around a bit, but they've certainly boosted its salience in the philosophical disclose. So it's this idea that you could in principle , say some , have a creature which kind of acts in exactly the same way as a human, that reacts to the same stimuli in exactly the same way. You can imagine like some kind of almost like a robot which just, you know, when it puts its hand on a hot stove, it's just programmed to take its hand away and also to pull a facial expression and to go owl, that really hurts and to do everything that the normal human does. The only difference is that there's actually no interior experience and I know you're going to resist that language , right? But this is how it's characterized, right? There's no experience going on. It's all essentially sort of fake. It's all just like a mimicry of human behavior You don't want to say that even we have this interior experience. We're just sort of interacting with the sort of data as it comes in. The question I have for you is like is there a differe nce on your view between a philosophical zombie who doesn't have experience, but does act behaviorally in the same way and a normal human being? Because it sounds to me like the theory of perception that you're proposing here is very behavioral. I know you wanted to say it's more about like effects than behavioral like behavioralism generally, but it sounds to me very behavioral. It's like there are inputs and we react to them and we can use those inputs to do one thing or another thing . So can the philosophical zombie except there's no like kalia. So how do you make sense of this comparison? Well, look, let's just unpack the philosophical zombie a little bit because the philosophical zombie isn't just acting like a human being. It's not just a clever facile out facimile of a human being. It's meant to be atom for atom and atom for atom duplicate of a human being. So when we talk about what's happening inside it , everything that happens physically inside here, you know, spatially inside here happens inside it. It's got a brain with eighty six or whatever interconnected neurons and all the other stuff. Glen cells and all the other stuff all interconnected in the way that mine are and working just as mine do. It's very important . It's not just it's not like an actor on stage just you know playing a part , it is doing the whole thing . So when you've talked about it not having anything inside inside, spatially inside here everything's the same. That's stipulated by the definition of philosophical sample. So when you were using the word inside, you meant inside in another sense. Okay and I'd kind of like to know what that inside is that you're into it because it's not a spatial one, presumably. Let's come back to what the zombie can do. What's the zombie? Well, okay . We go to a neuroscientist and we say what happens when someone smells coffee, what happens when they see brown, a lovely rich chocolatey brown and they start telling you this immensely complex story about how even at the retina there is already filtering for significance happening. A lot of the of the incoming photons are just, you know, the activity is just ignored. It's already filtering for significant patterns and things that starts at the retina . It continues many, many, many, many patterns, continually the brain is looking for significance and as soon as it finds a bit of significance, it starts using it to modulate responses of various kinds, to modulate, to prime well, attention from one thing. It starts directing attention to certain things . It starts then processing those things . It starts it's like a sponge drawing insignificance of the world and then trying to make use of it quickly to respond because it's going to get us the brain can't mess about, you know, life's moving quickly. It starts triggering all kinds of not necessarily responses but dis,positions are adjusting our expectations of what's going to happen next. This is a big thing. I mean, this is a central book part of predictive processing and the free energy framework. It starts adjusting our alignment to the world, our expectations of what is going to happen next. If you had to have one phrase from what the brain's doing, it's trying to predict it's trying to prepare for the next second next to anticipate the future . It starts doing all this immediately disinformation . Way before it's entered what we might we're aware of the information. Multiple channels are doing this. Bits of information are being extracted about lines, shapes, colors, edges. pr There'imsitive categoriz ations happening , all sorts of different categorizations, some of which get rejected straight away. It's a cat. No, it isn't a cat, it's just a treat, whatever. Some of these ones get boosted and took in greater significance . Some of them start become available for linguistic reports, some of them become available for decision making, some of them trigger emotional response, trigger memory . All of this characterized in psychological terms. All of this stuff happens and your scientists will sit you down and talk to you for days about this and they would say and still we only know a fraction of it. Now, all of that is happening in the zombie, every bit of it . Okay ? Everything that happens in here is happening in the zombie by definition . The neuroscience is going to tell the difference. A psychologist could subject this zombie to the whole battery of psychological tests that it can have for awareness of stimulation and it would pass them all just as well as I would eye zombie . What's it missing ? The thing that also it would do the introspective thing as well. It would be able to tell you it would be able to tell yes I can see that now. I couldn't see it a moment ago, but when you just increase the tray to that a little bit yellow, I could see it. Now I can't see that. That one's a little bit darker than that one . Yes, th Iough think the red light's a bit bigger all the things that the optician has you when you go for an idiot do all up perfectly, just the same as I would. He would say that smell reminds me of my grandmother's garden . You know, that's it reminds me of the last time I was there I did do everything I did . And it would tell you, of course, as well, that it was phenomenally conscious because that is one of the effects of all this of this stuff wanting and yes, I'm having an experience. I'm conscious. And you know what? This conscious experience when I think about it, I can't imagine it could be it could be physical. It could do all of this. This is accepted by people who people who Big Charles, for instance, calls it the paradox of phenomenal judgment. His phenomenon is some between will be as convinced that it's conscious and that consciousness is a mystery as he is . But something's missing , supposedly . That thing that 's supposedly missing is what I say is illusory . Right . So you would , in doing so, therefore , I suppose, reject that there could be philosophical zombie , because if you build a philosophical zombie whose atom for atom the same as a human being, and has no interior private experience , that is just what you are . Interior private experience in this sense that isn't captured by any of the description of all the activity that's going on in there. Because remember this interior private remember that this interior private experience and again interior to what I want to ask. Not interior to remember I said I am this organized, I am this animal. It's not interior to me the animal spatially . So where is it? Interior to what? To my soul? I suspect I suspect that's hanging around in my background that there's this Cartesian idea that I am not really an animal somewhere back. By the way, I don't want to press that just now . The point you is got to remember that if there is this something extra, it's not necessary for all of that other stuff to happen . Okay ? So it's not playing any role . It's not essential to my saying things like, Oh, well that one's slightly darker than that one and oh I can just see the pattern of the light coming through the leaves. It's so beautiful. And it reminds me of my mother's garden and yada yada . Everything you asked me to describe mites to report my phenomenology. The zombie does all of that perfectly . So the actual quality is plays no role in that. It's just a fifth wheel . And my claim is that our talk of qualities is a pre theoretical clumsy way of describing the reality that's going on. It's just we can't pull it all apart this reactivity. It's too far too far too complex, too multidimensional. We can't pollute parts. So we say, Oh, it's just what's it like to see that well . What it feels like to taste strawberries or see taste see a lovely rich, luscious brown can't tell you anymore. You can't. That doesn't mean that there is a pure quality there that you are immediately detecting. It means it instead of having direct revelatory access to pure qualities, you have indirect selective, distorted access to immensely complex patterns of reactivity . And we mistake one for the other. That's the illusion. Can you tell me about the motivations for this view? In that I'm going to ask you to be as honest as possible here in that most people like want to think that their view is it just's thought out, first principles, this is most plausible. But I don't know, are there any like, I'm trying to think if there are ways in for people like for somebody to say, well, hey, look, have you ever wondered why this is such a mystery? Have you ever thought it's a bit strange that no one can define consciousness. Have you ever thought it's a bit odd that what are the kinds of like things that you might notice about the state of philosophy of mind or the conversations that people are having which make can you come al ong and say , well, hold on a second, maybe this answers some of your questions. I mean that in the sense that when I speak to a pancycist, they might say, have you ever noticed that like no one can tell you what an electron is . Have you ever noticed that science only talks about what things do rather than what they are? And then they say, look, here's a really good motivation to take this seriously. Are there similar contextual factors that would work here? This is a nice question. First of all, who knows what one's motivation? I mean, I don't think we have sound introspective access to all of our motivations . So who knows? I mean, why am I talking to you today ? What role does vanity play in that ? Am I hoping that people will love me because they've seen beyond here being charmingly whatever I don't I don't . So there's a level at which our motivation I think when we talk about a motivation to a large extent we are fabricating a narrative based on actual things that have happened particularly things that we've noticed, things that we've felt , but we are creating a self story and there are different self stories you can tell. Here's one that I could tell about this. I don't think humans are as special as some of my opponents think they are. I don't think that just sitting in an armchair and reflecting one's own experience gives one direct insight into the nat ure of reality . I just don't think we are that special . The fundamental nature of reality. I think we are evolved biological organisms who have capacities for self monitoring, self modeling, this gives us a certain picture of ourselves and which is probably very adaptive to have this simplified self image and maybe even to think of ourselves as having a private inner world . Maybe very useful. But I don't think I don't think I don't think evolution wouldn't need to equip us with an insight into the fundamental nature of reality, and I don't think the universe has been so kind as to just sort of make it pop out of the things evolution has given us , it just seems too arrogant to think that way. Another reason is that I suppose that it's a reason I'm not a Christian or religious person that in some ways I'm kind of tempted by it I can see the attraction of these views . I have dwelt on the and in my youth, I think quite a lot about religion. I have dwelt on the mysteries of consciousness , I have really tried sincerely to think myself into the mindset of people like Philip . And I think I understand it. I think I understand. Philip Kof Philip Kof, yes, sorry Philip Koff and Dave Charles Phil, Phil, Goffee. Sorry . He's offended both of us, so we can we can do this . I have I think thought myself into their mindset and indeed I can and that's one reason why I don't want to say oh they're just wrong. We should just eliminate old talk of this. No it's real, it's compelling. It's vivid it's an illusion . And one re ason I do that is because I'm quite again, this is my story, is that I'm and one reason I find it hard to adopt any sort of religious belief is that I'm quite a anxious person and I'm anxious about self deception . I'm anxious about believing stuff just because I'd like to believe it . There are, I would dearly love to believe that I would see some of my lost loved ones can deal in love with. But I don't want false comfort . I want to try and live life with my eyes open , try and deal with things as they are , because I think in the end self deception lets you down . Yeah , it can't do breaks these it's a cut that breaks eventually. And I think the same goes for thinking about the specialists of the human mind . The third reason is that I absolutely love scientific explanation . I love finding out about I don't do first order science myself, but I love reading about scientific discoveries, about how we've unpicked the mechanisms of cellular metabolism. It's amazing stuff and stuff that work has been done on development al and biology. It's amazing and it's wondrous and it's wonderful and it's far more wonderful to me than the stories that you know that religions might tell. And I think there's a fascinating story to tell I'm picking the nature of consciousness . And what if we the consciousness in the sense of the fact that I that I believe and I don't want people to stop There's a danger that philosophers are going to discourage people from trying to tell that story by saying well you can't do it. It's a hard problem. You've got to just leave it to metaphysical theorizing people sitting in their armchairs, mulling this over . No Oh, let's get on with the work. Let's find out what's really happening . But sometimes people say, well, sometimes people suggest that I haven't really had Richian of conscious experience. Now it's true that I haven't done psychedelic psychedelic drugs, but I do suffer from quite vivid migraines . And if anything, they are more, I think that's more impactful than perhaps they're certainly more unpleasant than Psychonegasmus. I know what it's like to feel that you are part of the wall that you've split into two , that your senses have merged together in strange and unarticul able ways . I've had some pretty strange experiences . So the people I think that they convince me that I'm wrong by giving me a punch on the nose won't get far . Although they might make me might make me pretend to agree . Yeah , the question of psychedelics is interesting because Because like the kinds of experiences that people have when using them involve some quite strange things like the concept of an ego death and the conviction that consciousness is kind of everywhere and found ational and that the whole world is alive and whatnot. But particularly this idea of like the self, which so far you've been saying that I am just this sort of biological organism. I think that requires a little bit of investigation in that you know I don't feel like I am the same thing as my hand. Like I could probably cut off my hand and it would no longer be like a part of me. I kind of feel like I could like cut out my parts of my brain and I'd still be like here . It's not clear to me where this biological sense of the self actually lies. And there are all kinds of problems in personal identity as to what that is to as to what counts as like continuity of one person, you know, what makes me the same person I was ten years ago. And then also on top of that, given that lots of people just are convicted that they have experienced the death of the self and whatnot. I wonder if we just grant for a moment that the self is a dubious concept , if it were a dubious concept if the self sort of didn't exist and was an illusion , then like how would that affect your view? Because it seems like a lot of what you're saying relies on the idea that there is this you that is having experiences that is reacting to the world. It's you that's conscious. When I touch a hot stove and move it away, it's not my hand that's conscious because a pansychist could say what's going on there is like every little atom in my hand , you know, going get out, get out, go away, go away. And like sort of cumulatively together, that is, that is felt as the pain of a hand or something. I think you have to say that there is some kind of sort of central part of you, maybe it's your central nervous system that reacts to that. So how much of your view depends on the notion of there being a self , which can have these reactive experiences . What I said was that I think I'm an animal, a particular animal, an individual animal, a token animal. And the identity conditions for that animal , we can debate about that in my certainly animal this animal could lose a hand and still be the same animal. I mean say we can get into identity conditions for individual animals . How much of you how much of me could you take? This is a really interesting question when you get to my age by the way, because you find bits of yourself stopping working . You're a long way off it yet, but give it forty years and you will find that bits of yourself stop working , both the peripheral ones and the more central ones some days . So you're not I'm afraid you will. still feel I still village me even though I go into the kitchen. I think what did I come here for? I've no idea. So there isn't a there isn't a like, you know, there is is selfn't a clear cut concept. But the idea of this individual animal, okay? When does this individual animals let's distinguish the individual animal and then we'll say something about the self separate individual animal, when does it cease to exist? What if if I I, you know, got a serious form of dementia or something, would I still do? Yeah , there's no harm fast line. When I actually die and they pop me in the ground or whatever they come then all right . But basically as long as long as there's still a pulse, then in some sense this animal was still around , whatever. But it's not there bright lines. I don't like bright light lines. It's not a there are very few bright lines in nature. They're looking for essences and definitions. This is a thing that Florida preoccupied with and it's a pointless endeavor . What there are are words and how we choose to use them concept . Now, okay, so that's this animal. Now the self, I do think I want to say a bit more about the self. Most of my views are very heavily influenced by those of Daniel Dannett, and I do really like his idea that there is a sense in which we have a self as distinct from the body , but it's the sense of a fiction. It's a narrative that we animals, we human animals tell. We're very talkative. We love reporting stuff about ourselves. That's one thing that the self monitoring self mopping allows us to do. We don't just have experiences . We recognise that we have them, we talk about them, we tell other people about them often obsessively and annoyingly . And from this we construct a kind of narrative I am the person to whom this happened to whom that happened and who feels this and who likes this and doesn't like that and who wants this and what we tell me and it's a selective one of course because we just and you know you can get into the habit you can tell bad stories about yourself and get yourself into a really really unfortunate state of affairs . Some people respond to trauma, it seems by constructing parallel stories to help them deal with it. So these, I think, this is this is one way of retaining self talk without the inflated metaphysics. That's essentially what Dan was doing all the time and it's what I'm trying to do is to take these folk conceptions of things like free will, consciousness, intentionality meaning the self , say, look, as they stand , you can't really make them do the kind of really heavy metaphysical lifting you think they can well into scientific lifting, but they're still useful. So let's just re engineer them a bit. Let's see what they're really doing for us that they have a pragmatic value , notion of the self as a pride, value in presenting yourself to other people and to yourself, make a track of who you are and what you want. It's a useful story that you tell. It doesn't postp ond to some associated with the body . But it's a usual notion. We can do the same with free will with consciousness. We don't have to throw the notions out completely. We re engineer them a bit in a way that makes them and I think this re engineering is very important because it doesn't make these concepts hostage to some dodgy science or potentially dodgy science or heavy duty methapysics. If you think of ourselves as being free responsible agents is very, very important. If you think of yourselves as a passive victim of circumstance, then you involved . And you think of ourselves as free responsible belief, if you think that freedom and responsibility depends on let's say physics being wrong or in some way. I mean it does, maybe it doesn't, but if you think that it does , then you're in the danger of losing it if science turns out the wrong way. If you think that being conscious depends on making sense of the idea that quarks are conscious , then again you might sort of think, well, maybe nothing maybe I'm not conscious then it would have to be the case that everything was conscious in order for me to be conscious. Let's just concepts are important ones. Because they're important, let's not make them do work that they can't do and may collapse under the strain of trying to do. So I got I got a bit preachy there so it's good. We like that. We like that. I always find it find it great. I was thinking when you said about free will , I was thinking about the sort of debates that Sam Harris and Dan Dennet would have and have despite despite talking about something like relatively sort of, you know, intellectual and high browed, it got quite sort of personal and excitable. It happens sometimes and I think it's great. The thing that I'm most interested in in what you just said, sorry, go ahead. Yes. No, no, I was just a note about there that I think Sam said that that Dan thought we were just puppets. And Dan said, yes, in sense we are puppets, but we're also puppets that can have strings that can control their own strings. It's where we're puppets that have the ability to control those strings with other strings, which and then okay there's no ultimate puppet master but it's the ability to control your own strings at different levels of organization that gives you freedom. It's a mechanism of autonomy and you should love these strings , these deterministic mechanisms that allow you to exercise autonomy. I may not . I just remember yeah, Sam Harris saying , I think it's fair to say that one could watch an entire season of Downton Abbey on Ritalin and not detect a finer note of condescension than you manage for twenty pages running. You'd think that they were like talking about each other's wives or something, but no, they're talking about whether humans have agency over their own actions, which I think is fascinating. The funny thing is that they metaphysically, they were pretty much on the same page. It was the moral that each of them drew from it that was different. Yeah, and it's so much of it might even just be linguistic that it becomes kind of crazy. I think Sam has since, you know, not maybe have not apologised for that at least sort of toned it down. I remember to have the conversation afterwards and it kind of awkwardly addressed it. You know, a moment ago, you said that philosophers are obsessed with trying to like categorize and that it's hopeless. I agree with this by the, way , in that like , you know, we want to precisely define what is the difference between a table and a chair . What is the difference between a tiger and a lion? What is a species? If I don't know, if I if I lie down on my desk, is it a is it a bad bed or is it a good desk? And it's all a bit silly because quite clearly what we're just doing is taking, you know, this physical stuff and we're just arranging it in various ways and we're putting a label on it. Or we're looking at the natural world and we're seeing that the natural world sort of ebbs and flows and sprouts out various bits and vobs and we sort of arbitrarily put like borders around them and give those borders labels like species and things. I agree with that. Yeah . And I've talked about that a lot in the context of Meriology, which is the study of plants and holes. Now to me , as a meteorological nihilist , I just think that there are no sort of real categories, there are no real like distinct objects except in so far as matter just pre existing matter just gets rearranged, given a label and we call it a new thing. It's like matter and form, right? You give it new form and we just decide that that's what a new thing is. However , there is something that has to be there to be arranged in this way. So the meriological nihilist thinks that the table and the chair and the can of coke or whatever . They're all just like atoms or meriological symbols as they call them, like arranged and given labels. But there must be something that's being arranged. There must be this meriological symbol, right ? And I think that the motivation for like pansychism is to say, well, okay maybe there's just sort of one type of stuff . And all it is is just an arrangement of stuff. But I know that consciousness exists somewhere because when it gets arranged complexly enough in my brain, I'm having these experiences and awareness . And so as long as emergence doesn't exist, which is a thing in itself, they just say, look, I mean there's only one type of stuff, you know, brains don't exist, tables don't exist, it's just arrangements and labels. But I know consciousness exists somewhere because it's here right now, then it must be there at the foundation. What I want to say is like, or what I want to ask is like, do you have like a metaphysical view on when you said that philosophers trying to categorize stuff as a bit of a fruitless endeavor , the stuff that they are categorizing, the stuff that makes it all up? Do you have a strong view on what that is? Are you a physical ist? Are you agnostic? Do you know what an electron is? You know, I just wonder what you think I insuppers we have a science the fundamental reality. It's it's basic physics . That's our best attempt at it. And I'm not a physicist. I'm whatever it's qu antum the universal wavefunction, the superstrings, I don't know. I've got no sort of dog stake in that game. Dog in that race? I don't know. I've been the race. Document, that's a fight, that's an afternoon. Yeah. Fight. Sorry. At some point I turn into mythology. Yeah . At some point, I turn into Allan Partridge and start using bad metaphors . I don't know. I mean it could be little angels . I don't know. I have no idea. It's not what in interests me. I'm fascinated by it, but I've got no what I do think though is that just by sitting and reflecting on my own mind I don't get access to it . I think finding out about the fundamental nature of reality depends. And I think it'd be incredibly arrogant to think that it's a building enormous particle accelerators that have span boundaries of European countries to try and crack the problem that they're doing. But I think I can crack it just by sitting in my in my armchair and thinking about my own mind. I think that I think maybe evolution has given us a sense of the and it wouldn't be surprising if it did, given us a sense of the importance of our own self conception. Given us way of modeling ourselves and our mental activity in a way that makes it seem really vivid and potent hurts. And we could understand Nick Humphrey who I mentioned earlier has written a wonderful book about this soul destabilized why this idea of that we have a magical inner realm an adaptive one that has all sorts of wonderful functions . The idea, not the reality . So yeah , we've got this sense. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people have a sense, a very powerful sense, probably as powerful as the sense that they're acquainted with Qualia, that they're directly acquainted with God , that they have direct immediate experience of God, and that that's something they know with more sense than anything else. Well , that's interesting that they have that. It's an interesting psychological phenomenon. It's interesting to study it. And I wouldn't dream of being abusive to them or anything like that, but I don't think we should trust it just because it's very powerful to them. And similarly, the fact that you think, Oh, well look, we don't know how to find a matter of like reality, but maybe just by sitting and thinking about my own mind, I can discover it. It just seems to me I don't mean to be rude, but it just seems to me arrogant incredibly anthropocentric. I mean, suppose you have an age of aliens who haven't don't have the notion of quality either because they are zombies or because they never subject to this illusion in the first place . And they're studying the fundamental nature of reality and they learn that there is this species on this remote planet of Soul III that think they found it simply by thinking about their own what it's like to look at a brown surface . I think that this , you know, so I said, yes, there's a puzzle there, but the fundamental nature of reality clue . And I don't think I'll get it by being by country. So I'm sorry that I feel like it's a bit I feel like it's a bit unfair as a comparison though because, like, you know, I don't think anyone would claim that just by sort of introspection, I could know that, you know, there are, you know, there's microbial life on Mars or something. But the facts that we're considering , at least in sofar as it comes to consciousness many people want to say that those are the kind of things that are like looking inwardly, introspectively, just closing your eyes, sat in your armchair is the equivalent of like looking at Mars. You're like looking at the thing that we want to know about. And intuitively, like let's address this because you're sort of pulling up this Cartesian imagery of like Descartes sat in his robe by the fire at the beginning of the meditations just saying I'm just going to think my way into all of the positions that I already hold . And he has some sort of ideas and he thinks there are certain things that I could know just by sitting around and thinking about it . That sounds to me like you disagree with him, but like they not come. Like it seems, you know, like Descartes wants to say something like , you know, I know that I exist in some form because I couldn't possibly deny it. The act of denying it would require my existence or at least my thinking . And so I know that I must exist. I think therefore I am. You know, if I were to doubt that I exist, doubting is a kind of thinking, which means that there is something doing the thinking. Now, to me, that seems like the kind of thing that yeah, fair enough, you can sit down, you can think about it, and you can know that. And you don't need to go and like observe a bunch of stuff in the world in order to figure it out. So what do you mean when you say that you can't acknowledge it away? Okay, well lots of things to say about the card. I mean, there's first of all there's a debate about what he was actually trying to do. They're one quite there's a case can be made that he was trying to just give himself license to overturn the whole Aristotelian scholastic framework and that it was a bit of a tactical move to really to facilitate the new science. Anyway, that's one thing. But I mean it's often been pointed out that he wasn't entitled to the inference I exist because he hadn't really said what I what I denoted here . What he should have said is at best thinking exists And. what is thinking? What does he mean by thinking? Does it involve having certain words tokened in a speech ? What does it involve? What's thinking? What's he talking about? Doubting what he was doing was writing words down on a page or perhaps articulating them to himself. What's that? Could he have done that without language ? If not, then he has, then he can know that language is exists maybe it's a very tempting sort of thing. But look how removed it is from our ordinary basic cases what do you know? I open my eyes I look around me and I know stuff. Okay , I could be I could be in error, right ? That's look what start with what I think we are if all biological organisms say all our knowledge is dependent on mechanisms of some sort of tracking things , noticing differences and responding to them. Okay? That's I don't see how else I can get knowledge, but by some process like that. Okay. Barrowing sent by magic breaking . And that goes for knowledge of my own mind. Whatever I say about my own mind, it must be the product of some sort of mechanism for tracking things that are occurring and generating responses to them. Now, okay, if you think you're an immaterial soul that is completely transparent to itself and doesn't need any sort of mechanism to know its own state. Well, I suppose you could say that . And that's the kind of conception that you need to make Descartes account work. Well, okay, the point is there are no foundations here. We've got a whole load of beliefs, some of them some of them common sense beliefs, some of them product of experience in the world or reflect on ourselves, we've got a whole lot of scientific beliefs and we got to try and just find the best balance between all of these we can. The idea that you can establish some foundations like a mathematical system where you can actually just start define your axioms and then build on them. That doesn't work for knowledge of the natural world . And what's interesting is that Descartes' thought experiment is kind of captivating . That is very interesting psychologically . And I think that tells us a lot our self conception, about how the brain generates a conception of itself and its own and its own activity. In fact, it's very, very interesting. Psychologically it's very significant. That you can base met aaphys ics on it. I don't think we need a different metaphysics for us than we need for any other aspect of the natural world. I don't think we're that special. So help me understand I feel like I do have a very special inner world. And what I mean by that is it's not just that an external world presents itself to me and seems to have qualitative components or properties , but that like they kind of they kind of stay there . Like I can close my eyes and it's still kind of all there in some sense . I have dreams. I have weird sort of interior images . I ask people like all the time where the triangle is that I can see in my head. Like I offered , I think I offered like fifty dollars to anyone who could like locate the triangle that I see in my head when I imagine it . And my friend Phil Halper just went and interviewed like fifteen of the leading materialists, you know, people like David Paffenau and people like specifically asking them my question and he thinks I owe him fifty dollars . I don't think that he's actually done it . I just want to get your take on this because I feel like it's a good question just to give people probably sick of me asking it. Just for the record, ladies and gentlemen, I'm not just asking this because I sort of keep wanting to know the same answer. It's because I feel like how you answer the question is a really interesting way of demonstrating what you think about consciousness. So I close my eyes , I think of a triangle. There it is. It's got properties. It's got three sides. Some people say the triangle just doesn't exist , but like I can attribute properties to it. It doesn't have four sides. It's got interior angles adding up to one hundred and eighty degrees. I can't do that for things that don't exist. Things that don't exist don't have properties. So there is a triangle. There it is. I can see it in my head . Where's the triangle? Okay, great. Good question. Okay, I don't like to have a copy here, but if I had a copy of one of Arthur Kernan Doyle's works, I would open it and read about Sherlock Holmes smoking his pipe. And then I would ask, Where is Sherlock Holmes' psipe? I can say lots of interesting things about Sherlock Holmes' pipe . I don't know if you described that Mia Shawn was it or whatever and that it's I could always hat or whatever and I could just Sherlock Holmes himself. I can say lots of things about Sherlock Holmes. It's true that Sherlock Holmes was a detective. It's true that he was skinny, wiring, and that he took cocaine and so on. It's not true that he was one hundred fifty pound wrestler from Montana . So I can say true things about Shellocombs and false things about Shellock Holmes. Where is Shellock Holmes? It's fiction. It lives in the world of fictions. You can make true statements within the scope of some sort of fiction operator. That's what I say about the triangle. It's not anywhere , but you can say two things about it because it's a kind of construction. It's a sort of construction. It has the same status that your thoughts about Sherlock Holmes have about the Sherlock Holmes that you imagine . You're driving like a representation like the idea that like of course now what I'm sort of seeing in my head as a representation of a triangle rather than a triangle, right? But not necessarily a representation not a representation made out of sort of things that are actually , you know, real lines that are really triangular. Just because when you think about Sherlock Holmes, you don't actually have to have little dams of color to paint an internal picture of Sherlock Holmes. You just have what exactly how this works. It's a fascinating question. I mean, I mean, I'm not somehow, your brain is using the resources that it has to represent the world us to create representations of non existent things and then react to them in a very similar way to the way you would react to the actual things . And the heft of this the force of this comes from it triggering similar patterns of reaction. Okay. So if you try and imagine it's quite hard to imagine smells actually, but if I try and imagine the smell of my grandmother 's the scent of my grandmother's room or something, as far as I can do it, it will trigger a whole wave of emotional responses, okay? And that's what gives it the heft at what it's likeness, because it's moving me in the way that smelled in, not because it has some intangible smell quality , but because it has effects on me . And that's why of course we read about Shiler Colmes because not just because we act like scientific entertain ing non existent things, but because they entertain as they move as they puzzle as they intrigue as they spark all sorts of interesting trains of the world . Well actually I do it for the first reason. I'm just interested in the ontology of Sherlock Holmes. My favorite question to ask people this week is who created Sherlock Holmes? Because who was it that created Sherlock Holmes? Athican Doyle . Or was it Sherlock Holmes' parent s? Because it kind of depends on what you mean, right? Because within the fiction of the story, Sherlock Holmes was created by his parents, but of course there's another sense in which we want to say, well he was created by Arthur Conan Doyle. And the point is that you can sort of have logics within fictions, right? But the thing absolutely, absolutely. What I think you're doing here is something that commonly happens in the philosophy of mind, in my view , which is that faced with a bit of a bit of a mystery like this mysterious triangle that I can see or something, or the concept of, you know , consciousness emerging from non conscious stuff is another area where this always comes up. People often don't quite explain it, but they give an example. They say, Oh, but that's just the same as when this happens . But the other thing that they're comparing it to is just as mysterious and is actually just doing the same thing. So what I mean to say is that when I talk about emergence, I say, Oh, how can consciousness come from matter? People say, Oh, well , that's just like how , you know, like heat comes from atoms vibr ating. Forgetting that heat, the interesting part about heat is itself an experience. So you're not actually explaining anything. You're just giving another example of the same problem. And I feel like the same thing's happening here, which is like, well, where's the triangle? And you say, well, it's in the same place that Sherlock Holmes. And I'm like, Yeah, like, and where is that? Because of course, Sherlock Holmes is represented by the by the letters on the book, right? But if no human ever existed , no brain, no, no sort of agent , and just by some spontaneous atomic freak event You know, one of one of the Sherlock Holmes novels just sort of popped into existence spontaneously in space . Sherlock Holmes would not be there. There'd be no representative content. It would just be a bunch of atoms and ink on a page, right? The thing that makes that page represent Sherlock Holmes is that a mind is reading it and conjuring up an image in their head . And the question for me is like where is that image? Like what is that image? Is that image just the same thing as neural activity because if it is , then the answer to where it is is, well it's inside of your brain. You know what I mean? I was with you all the way until the last bit. Yeah, sure. It's a mental stretch, it's mental representation. And that mental representation is realized in a pattern of neural activity of some sort . Yeah , but it's significance lies in what it means for us. I mean if you tell somebody just the basics about film , imagine this tall guy with this funny hat and the pipe and things on it, you know, they saw him some sort of image in . That's kind of nothing really. It's just well, okay. You embed him in all the stories that are told about him and suddenly you have this rich narrative about you watched the Jeremy Brett series. I think Jeremy Brett did a lot to create shortcomings actually I think that was terrific. Anyway , it's embedded in all these rich narratives and it also triggers all your memory, well not memory so much as your thoughts about it , Victorian London and puzzles. And it's an escapist world and you can fill it out in your mind. And so all of what you're doing here is let's put it just in representational terms of other ways of putting it, but you're creating a rich body of representations that produce a rich range of effects on you that you like that you like to have, you know, that attract your attention and that produce all kinds of positive responses in him. Great . Now where is Sherlock Holmes? Well, the man himself isn't anywhere . What is there some sort of representation of a man that is created by Rayne by interaction with the words that Connantor wrote . And I don't think there's any deep mystery here. I mean there's a tense it's one question too many to ask and where is Sherlock Holmes himself What we need to ask is how is the impression of Sherlock Holmes created? And that's very much like how I want to think my conscience. It's one too many questions to ask , but what really is, you know, the feel of consciousness how is the sense of it? Let me put it this way . I suppose maybe this will help. Went bad conscience sorry. Suppose what happened in the brain was that this is the eye here. So light hits the wrap and processing processing, processing and all the reasons. And then at some point this processing produced this kind of inner image , right that is then sort of the air present, right . Now what happens with that owner image? Okay, somehow is it just aware of itself? I don't see how that could happen. What would have to happen in order for that image to mean anything is for some sort of system to scan it, not ice its features and then start processing that information again and producing all the downstream effects that that image tended to produce. Now suppose we cut out the middleman, we just have pro thecess process and it. It doesn't create the image, but it does produce all the downstream effects that the image would have produced . It's just as good. You don't need the image. You don't need an actual Sherlock Holmes. You just need all the effects that an image of Sherlock Holmes would have had very vivid image of Sherlock Holmes. If it's to mean anything to you, you've got a note , that's no good having a sort of inner TV playing in a room and nobody there to watch it, you know, with the Sherlock Holmes , some things got to watch it and react to it . And if you can get all those reactions without the image on the TV screen , how would you know the difference? How would you tell whether you're undergoing an illusion of Koleia or act ual koalia. And my thought is if you undergo the illusion of koalia in this representational sense of all the effects that Koalia would produce being produced in you , then you don't actually need the koalia and, you know, Occam's razor . Let's just suppose that what the brain is doing is tricking itself into thinking that it has qualia . It's the simplest hypotheses I can accept in principle that like it might be possible somehow for me to be fooled into sort of thinking I'm seeing something that's not. Like it seems to me the idea that you're getting at is like when I actually see a triangle, a real triangle in the world , my brain kind of reacts to it. It sort of scans it. It reacts to it in some kind of way . And all you need is for that reaction to occur . You don't need the triangle itself and that's what's happening in my brain. Except it does seem to me like I have an interior screen. Like not everyone can sort of visualize images in their head, but I can like see the image. I can see what it looks like. And that seems to me more what I'm trying to get at is like intuitively, I think for most people , conscious experience is more than just a reaction to something. This goes back to what we said earlier about the behavioralism , which I think is implicit in your view , which I know you wouldn't want to characterize it this way, but this is going this is sort of how it sounds and potentially what it leads to , which is that when you have these experiences be it of a triangle or let's take something more pressing, like the pain of a migraine , that what you mean to say in saying I am experiencing a migraine is just that I am like reacting to a certain kind of stimulus . I think intuitively, deeply intuitively for most , when someone is in pain , there is more going on than just them like reacting to something or behaving in a particular way. There's something else going on, right? And I think the same thing is intuitively true with me in the triangle. I don't think that when I see that triangle in my head I'm getting all the stuff that I would have got if I saw a triangle except for the triangle itself. I'm like, No, I can see the triangle itself , you know , like I'm not just reacting to a stimulus . I'm like conjuring up the stimulus. And in the case of pain, the stimulus is like there. I am I am reacting to it, but it's also like a real thing. You know what I mean? I know what you mean. And I'm not denying that that's a compelling way of describing it, but let me try and do a little bit to untig it. First of all, of course, with imagining the triangle, I'm not suggesting you're reacting to an external stimulus. The stimulus may be internal here, okay? You may be reacting to your own internal reacting to your own the stimulus may be internal , okay? Maybe due to some strange activity occurring within the system itself. So you may be reacting entirely to an internal stimulus through self monitoring Let's go get the pain case because I like to try this one unpleafling. I'll be interested with you. Okay, so let's take a migraine . Now, I think everyone will agree that when you have a migraine, there are all sorts of reactions occurring. Okay . So for instance, what's occurring? Well, first of all I'm in a state that I don't like being in. Put it like that. Okay . That's a reaction. I'm reacting to the state by not one not liking it. Okay, so let's imagine that reaction. Let's imagine removing one by one all the reactions and finding out what's left because what's left will be the bit that you think is missed out by my story. Okay, so let's see what it is. So let's imagine leaving out the not liking it . So someone says to me, how you feeling? And I said, I know some strangers happening, but I don't mind it really. Okay . And another thing that will be happening is that I believe that I'm having an afraid so you're having a migraine. No, I don't think so, but something weird is happening. Okay . One other thing the migraine does is it seizes my attention. I cannot think of anything else but this thing . And so let's imagine that my attention is released and someone says , Are you free now to talk about that thing that I was asking you earlier? And I said, Yeah, yeah, fine. Let's have a chat about it. Another thing is I'm aware of waves of nausea . Okay. Of course, you're going to say nausea is a feeling but, I will deal with that in exactly the same way as the other one. I'm allowed to do that. Do you feel as if you want to be sick? No, I'm fine. I don't want to be sick. There's something strange is going on. Are you seeing strange lights and things? Now, of course, reporting that I'm seeing strange lights or indeed believing that I'm seeing strange lights. These are effects. I say no, I'm not seeing anything strange, not fit, not no lights or anything like that. Yeah, do you feel you want to lie down? No, I'm fine. I know, no, I'm okay. Remove remove. Does it remind you of any occasions in the past when you know, can't think of anything like this before. Keep removing all the psychological reactions, the things that can be characterized in terms of what the brain is doing . So this pain is not having any effect, any psychological effects, it's not affecting my beliefs, my emotions, my desires, it's not detecting my attention, it's not conjuring up me anymories. It's not altering my behavioural dispositions. I'm perfect for free to walk around chatting to you about whatever you like , but this horrible thing that is the essence of a migraine and the thing that makes it really bad and a matter of moral concern is still there . I find it very hard to imagine that. I think that's really helpful actually. Like I see what you're saying and I think that's a really helpful way of thinking about it . And the thesis is I'm saying that with something like pain there is the qualia and then there is the reaction . And you're saying that really there's only the reaction. And the way to sort of test this is if we take away all of the reactive stuff, if we take away all of the sort of psychological reactions , are we left with anything we could cool the kalia or whatever? And it seems like no because you take away all of those things and what are you left with? You're not even aware that you're having a migraine . You're not left with anything that's of any significance to you, any psychological significance. And of course, the account of the reactions would be much richer than I've just given that I've just sketched the surface. But here's the kicker . And when we talk about the feel of the pain . We are gesturing at all that complex of reactivity that we can't easily articulate, we can't unpack it there's no need to. If somebody says to me, how you feel, I think, well, my attention has been captured by certain activities on sort of my left temporal lobe. I also find that I'm having a disposition for kind of nausea and I'm not nobody wants to hear all that. That's abid ain, okay? The idea though is that that's a shorthand, a convenient shorthand for all that's really happening. And I'm not suggesting you don't say you're in pain because you are and all that stuff is horrible . It's bad stuff. You don't need it to happen to people . But you don't need to raify the pain above over and above all that . I get the impression that a couple of those things that you're characterizing as purely sort of psych ological effects are the pressure points on which someone's going to want to say no that is that is the qualia in that like okay so if you have a migraine one thing is that it distracts your attention . Okay, that's maybe we could call that an effect. That itself is a bit complicated, but okay. Another thing is that you know, I'm sort of seeing bright lights. So okay, well yeah, that sounds like an effect, but at the same time you're seeing the bright light. So it also seems like a kind of experience. Certainly then it's like, okay, I'm aware that I'm sort of nauseous. I'm like, okay, as you alluded to as you sort of preempted, I'm going to want to say, well, hold on. That is your reaction to a feeling. You're sort of bundling together the feeling of nausea and sort of the reaction to noticing that feeling and just calling it all an effect. When actually you're starting to sort of smuggle out across the border the koalia as you're going along with these effects. Okay, so what we've done then this is the objective is we've taken the big pain koalia and we've broken it down into lots of subcoalia, okay? So instead of just being one indifferentiated pain quality, there's now the nausea coalia and the seeing light squared everything. I just do the same with those. I say, okay, let's take this, let's take this nausea qualia then. Again , let's have got this nausea or cry . But again, it's not having any effects on me. So somebody says, Do you feel like you might be sick? And I say, No, not at all. Are you aware of any sort of griping and no, no, no. Do you need any medicine to no, no, I'm fine . It has no effects on me. It doesn't induce me to sort of run to the bathroom and stick my head . You know, none of this is happening because these are all effects. So then maybe we need to break down the nausea qualia into the wanting to go to the bathroom quality, whatever. The point is at some point these reactions are going to sort of bottom out in things that don't even seem to have quality at all, that are just like a beliefs or whatever they might be. The idea is that what we're doing with qualio talk is bundling together complexes of re active dispositions that we're aware of in ourselves . And here's the here's the thing about this it has to be something like that for qualia talk to track anything that matters because, if it's not trac king things that affect us, if it's tracking something that doesn't have any effects on us, that can't matter at all. How can it happen ? If you say if you say, look, here, this animal's in pain, you say, Oh dear, what's consequences? It's not of any effects it's playing around perfectly happily. It's, you know, it's in horrible pain, but you know, it's low, it's just having a lovely time. It doesn't matter then . It's the people who ratify pain, who treat it as something non functional and that are not taking consciousness seriously. I'm taking it seriously because I think it's part of messy, meaty, brown coloured biological world that we're in. I agree with that except you know like of course for Kualia to mean anything it must have an effect on us. And I think I could just stipulate that like Qualia necessarily does have behavioral effects on us , but that those aren't the same thing. Because you said a moment ago like, well, you know, like if I was sat there , say I was feeling nausea, but you know, there were no effect . Like I didn't I didn't care about it, I didn't, you know, I didn't notice it, all this kind of stuff. And you know, what's left? Well, I could just say well, that's impossible. You can't have nausea without having those effects . Not because they're the same thing, but because one like entails the other. You know, in the same way that I could say , I don't know, if I put if I put a big sort of metal object in a bathtub and displaced all the water and I told you that all the metal object was, the all the metal object was the effect on the environment. There was no metal object. There was just the effect on the environment. You're like, Well, hold on now of course there's a metal block. And I said, Well, look, take away all of the effects. Imagine that no water was displaced. Imagine that there was no splashing sound. Imagine that you couldn't see the metal object because that would be an effect. Imagine that you couldn't hear it. Imagine you took all of that away. What would you be left with ? You know , I'd be like, Okay, in fairness, you couldn't have the metal object without all of those effects. But the metal object is still its own distinct thing that's causing the effects. And I want to say the same thing about Kualia. Okay, well then there's we can have a terminological adjustment that will bring perfectly into line with me because it doesn't matter that it's what the metal's made of, right? Anything that's of that sort of I guess that sort of size will have the same sort of effect . So let's define quality as whatever it is that causes all this range of effects, okay? Whatever it is, anything that causes those effects because it's the effects that matter. So a phenomenal realist says, yeah, what causes them is some sort of weird thing that's inexplicable to science and there's just a pure quality and that maybe fundamental to it as a boy and I say no it's pattern of a brain activity . We just different if we if we're defining quality in terms of their effects, then I've learned because it's much more likely that it's something natural , you know , something something that part of the world that we already know about , then that it some requires some extension to that world, especially if that requiring that extension would involve conflict with physics. There's an important move there that's being made. Firstly, like I don't think we are defining qualia in terms of in terms of the effects. I think I'm saying that qualia necessarily brings about effects without it being the same thing. But you also you also made a quite controversial move there. You said like , you know , we have no reason to suspect that whatever's causing these effects wouldn't be part of the world we already know. You know, why would it, you know, why would we assume that it conflicts with physics and our sort of understanding of the material world ? And you know, the pan psychist or idealist is going to listen to that and say, Well, hold on a second . The world that you know about is the world of conscious experience . The world of atoms and material and physics is this sort of construction that we've placed upon our experiences of the world. The one that I know most directly is the qualitative experience. And so like, yeah, you're quite right to say that Occam's Razor, we'd better like assume that whatever's causing this is part of the world that I already understand. Well, the world that I understand is a world of quality , it's a world of experiences. It's a world of pain and a world of migraine. Wow. Well, now let's go right back to the beginning where we started the world, but I know , it's just this world around me that I open my eyes and there's stuff there. Now this world of quality, this internal world, this is a theoretical invention. It was invented pretty much around the time of the late sixteenth, early seventeenth century when people realized that the colours couldn't really be out there in the world in the sense in which they seem to be, you know, Galilee is saying they've got to be somehow in the soul, okay? And I think Daden once said that the problem of consciousness is the problem of what to do with colours when you realize they're not really in objects out there , this inner world is an invention of that period . Okay, now it could be the truth. I'm not saying it's because it's an invention, it's a it's It's necessary it's inaccurate, but you can't just assume its accuracy as an objection to any other rival theories. You can't just say no, all we really know about is this internal world. No, people didn't use to think that before the scientific revolution. They invented it as a way of dealing with these recalcitant things that didn't seem to fit into the picture into modern science. And they since everybody pretty much believed in the soul, they thought, Oh, you know , we don't we want to get on with doing science, but there are these recalcitant things. Oh, well, we all have souls that must be in there. The problem really came into became a philosophical problem where people stop believing in souls and they somehow put these qualities back into the world, back into the brain or somewhere back into the fundamental nature of reality. There's another alternative which is to not make that initial move in this I agree with Philippa you shouldn't take the qualities out of the world. Of course they're they're not since we're just in the world. There's a contribution from us. Consciousness is an interaction with the world. And this is why it's not a suitable thing to be the fundamental step of the universe because it's an interaction between complex systems in interaction of the world with complex systems within it . And it requires an immensely complex psychological system to support it. It could not the right kind of thing to be it's not a thing at all. It's an interaction, it's a process and so yeah, you can't just buy that seventeenth century conception of what we know for sure. No I mean you can have it and you can argue that way if you want, but I don't think' you cant use it as an objection to other ways of conceptualizing what's happening when we're an objection to other ways of conceptualizing it. It's like when you said that like, well, why would this , why would we think that this would conflict with our sort of scientific understanding of the physical world? And I'm kind of tempted to say, well , that itself is an invention of the scientific revolution, the atomization of the world, the mathematical like the mathematization of our understanding like that itself is a conceptual framework. And again, it's a great one, you know, it makes a lot of sense. Could be totally accurate, but it's like is there such thing as a pre theoretical like worldview. No, no, absolutely, absolutely not. They're competing. They're competing theoretical world. The question is which one is the more economical, the more productive? The thing is, I don't see that having this Cartesian conception of the world , does it the question, does is it give you any real predictive explanatory leverage on things? And it doesn't. In fact, it just creates a host of problems. And the only thing it gives you is it vicates this intuition we have about ourselves . Now if I say maybe that intuition is just the product of a really compelling self modeling activity on the part of the brain and it seems compelling because, you know , we are those brains that are modelling them ourselves, and you know, it's not like we're modelling a piece of the world that can get other people to come and, you know , and look at it with us. It's modelling itself, okay? So of course it would seem compelling to itself, wouldn't it? Now so one of the things all the phenomenal illness view, the quality illness view does is vindicate this intuition. Now if that, intuition can be explained in another way , what other advantages do we have from being Cartesians? The advantages of not being Cart esians are tremendous because we it opens up the own nature to scientific explanation to scientific understanding. It opens up our understanding. First of all, it removes these epistemological objects obstacle to understanding other minds. Other minds are not secret secret, impenetrable subjectivities that we can never understand. They are complex patterns of sensitivity and reactivity loc ated loces of other of sci of sensitivity and reactivity located elsewhere in the world. If we map them carefully enough and this isn't just a matter of observing their behavior if we map what's happening inside, we can fully understand what 's going on there and we can adapt our ethical views appropriately, which I think would involve extending our ethical concern. It gives us a handle on dealing with artificial intelligence. It gives us a handle. It integrates us fully into the natural world. It's the final step, if you like, in DA and sort of morphizing our conception of the world. And that's a wonderful advantage. What you get from the other perspective, you get the vindication of the intuition that I've got a special private world in here that no one else can know about. I think I mean obviously it'll be up to the listener to decide what's more what's more plausible there . I suppose I wanted to this was a slight tangent from what we were talking about. I just want to round it off this sort of thing about removing all of the behavioral aspects of Akalia and seeing what you're left with . And one of the things you started with was that like, well , one effect of the migraine is that I don't like it . And to me, this is kind of like the definition of pain. I think pain can be essentially defined as an experience which is not wanted when experienced . And to say that you not liking something is just an effect . I think might be sort of to beg the question because in my view , when I don't like something , I feel like that that is a qualitative experience. That's the thing that you're going to want to d eny . But it seems to me intuitively that like when I don't like something, it's not just a case of me like rationally cognizing and going like there's just some fact about the world. It's like it's a feeling, you know, I feel bad about that particular thing. That's what it means to say, I don't like it. Like I can't imagine somebody saying they don't like something hon,estly and ha,ving literally zero emotional investment in that thing. I think that literally is impossible. And so that is that's the one you started with as well. It seems to be the most obvious example of calling kwalia an effect, removing the quote unquote effect and then saying, look, there's no Kalia left. And I'm saying, of course, because you've removed my dislike of something , which is like a powerfully experienced phenomenon. Right now I will let you say what you want to say about how well like pain, not liking something is not a qualitative phenomenon and whatnot, but at least the sort of initial helpful ness of the analogy, which to someone who's on my side of the fence here might listen to that at first and go Oh yeah that makes loads of sense actually what are you left with? See how that is not as powerful when you realize that there are all of these issues with trying to figure out whether the thing you're removing actually counts as kwalia . Look, first of all, if I'm right , these sorts of objections are ones that people would push. Okay, because I'm talking about an illusion, illusions of powerful things. This is a self generated illusion, an illusion that the brain is creating in itself. So all these responses would be the ones that would come to mind. They're saying, No , it's a potent and it's not a matter of my thinking about anything or processing anything. It's just a matter of and I understand that. That's why I like to talk about illusion rather than elimination. Okay, because illusions are real things. Illusions, look, what how do magicians talk about illusions? They talk about them as effects about the effect creating an effect and the whole complex backstage machinery, which is often incredibly intricate and also kind of disappointing when you learn about it. It's designed to create a certain effect to create certain responses in its audience. Now so I'm suggesting that the brain is creating something like that . Now , this is about liking . Imagine not liking something. I don't mean not liking something. I don't mean just sitting around and sort th ofinking, do, do I I like this like it? No, on the whole , I don't mean that. I mean something much more , much more basic. I have a long history of writing about different sort of levels of belief and levels of desire. And so what I'm talking about not liking something is being a complex aversive state that involves has all sorts of dimensions to it. So this stimulus stimulus is one that's I mean at the most basic it might be producing aversive behavior and not actually moving away from yourself. But it's producing a lot more things than that you know, it's grabbing attention. It's triggering emotional responses, which I'm going to deal with in the same way . And it's doing all this much of this is going on under the surface as a way. You know, you're not articulating all of these different things separately to yourself. It's put you into this whole aversive state , which we describe as not liking . Okay we're not using when we try to describe the state we're in to ourselves or to others. We don't use a complex vocabulary of cognitive science, cognitive psychology or neuroscience. We don't have those resources. And even if we did, they'd be too unwieldy. We say, I don't like it . And we tend to conceptualize that as some sort of primitive feel , which is a perfectly good way of conceptualizing it for the purposes of self description and communication. I'm just saying it breaks down into a set of effects. And if it didn't, then it wouldn't be it wouldn't be pain The idea that pain has to sort of come from the pain as it were, a pain state can't be made out of things that can't be created by things that are not themselves painful. It's like saying that a mountain can't be made out of things that are not mountains. That's the whole point of how the world works, that large scale things are constructed out of smaller scale things . Things that have, you know, a television doesn't have to be constructed out of little televisions. You know, that's how we can learn to make one right . And a pain state doesn't have to be constructed out of little pains that are put together. It's constructed out of other stuff. We call the whole thing a pain. The mistake is to think that we are capturing something , that word is capturing something if you like irreducible , undeconstructable , which is a very helpful illusion . Illusions are wonderful things. We live through illusions . I mean the idea that colours are out there in the world is where we started. That's a very helpful illusion. I mean, if I were looking at my bookshelves . And you said, describe the colors of the books on my shelves. And I said, right, well, okay, we'll start here. I'm having a sort of reddish quality for that one, I think, reddish, whatever. And then there's a sort of brownish quality, I think. You say, I don't know any of that I want to tell me other books. You know, it's a helpful thing to is it worth seeing and this is another thing this is another part of my story that I haven't got into. The idea is that what we're actually monitoring here is our reactions to the things It' complesx in terms of sense that I say , but we are that those representations are bound to in some way, this is a nice cognitive science term bound to bound to our representations are the objects. So we see the object as evoking a certain reaction. So we don't just see the object neutrally as oh I can recognize that it's red, whatever, but you know sort of meaning. We see it as red and as having all the significance that red thinks have for us . So we see the reactions in the world. The world is informed by our reactions to them. That's what colors in the world. And this is why I kind of it's a dynamic, but I kind of want to push it back more on the outward in the outer place. We see the world as richly significant for us and it's significant because we're projecting our only reactions onto it . And that's where consciousness is not hing here. It's this taking in all that, this responding to all that . Does so Galilee didn't make an a moment ago you said that you know, pain is like this thing we call pain doesn't need to be made up of little pains, right? Like a mountain doesn't need to be made up of little mountains. I of course agree. I think that's interesting. Maybe what we call pain is just made up of things which are not pains, but are instead just sensory perceptions. They're just sort of reactive behavioral traits to certain inputs . Would that be a case of emergence? Because as far as I know, you're as suspicious of the concept of emergence as I am. But when you say something like you know, a mountain is made up of little mountains , I want to say yeah that's true and yeah, I don't think that that counts as emergence. But when it comes to pain, it feels a bit more tempting to say that that's what you're sort of driving at . Now emergencies I really wish we could get rid of this word of emerg ence because it suggests two distinct things like one emerging from the other, like a whale emerging from the ocean . Now David Charmer's usually distinguished between weak and strong emergence. Weak emergency is just that when you put all this stuff together in the right way you get one of those, but it's perfectly intelligible how putting all that stuff together in that way gives you one of those. So the property of being a television weakly emerges from the having all these components assembled in that way, but there's nothing mysterious about it. Nobody thinks, you know, oh god, look, we pour all those things together and suddenly a television appear. What amazing thing? Now that's how we can design television. That's how we do it. We know that a television emerges from those components. Strong emergence is the idea that's kind of unexpected stuff happens that you put these things together and somehow fundamentally new appears in the world. It's not just an organization of those things doing what an organisation of those things would naturally inevit ably do , it's that plus something else happening . And a lot of people think that pain is a bit like that, that you know that it's the brain doing all its stuff and it has to do all they had to do that stuff for the brain. But then something else emerges, the actual quality , the feeling emerges as an extra thing. Now, I don't believe that. I don't think the strong emergence occurs anywhere . But I'm happy to say in a sense that what we talk about is pain, the state that we refer to as pain is weakly emergent from all those posters of sensitivism reactions. Put those all those together and you get pain. But there's nothing there's no hard problem of explaining it because it just is all those things hooked up in the right way. Just as I tell there's no more problem of explaining pain than the reason of explaining televisions . I feel like I could predict all of the things that a TV is doing. Minus that okay, it's complicated 'cause what about the image on the screen? As we said earlier, that only really makes sense if there's someone looking at the image. I'm talking about like a TV, big TV, and it's like pumping out electromagnetic waves into the air . I feel like if I had an understanding the atomic makeup that TV and various scientific facts about how electricity works and how light works and stuff that if you told me that I was going to take all of these atoms and arrange them in this way, I would predict and be able to predict that there would be light waves, photons coming out of a screen . Whereas I feel like if I understood that a central nervous system or rather a sort of a reactive system causes hands to move away from hot stoves and that there's this thing called like memory that means that this organism is less likely to do the same thing again in the future and so on and so forth. Like I don't think just given that information I would be able to predict or expect that when I put them all together there would be this ow, there would be this like what there would be a described illusion by the organism of a feeling of qualia of pain. And I think the one important distinction between strong and weak emergence is given just the constituent part , would you be able to predict or expect a particular kind of effect? If the answer is yes , then it's only weak emergence. If the answer is no, then that's what strong emergence is. And I feel like you wouldn't predict illusion of pain . Well you probably wouldn't because of the way we conceptualize pain, but I'm asking you to reconceptualize it in a way that makes this thing more attactrable. Also, you're trying to imagine something immensely complex. You're trying to imagine the product of billions of years of evolution. I mean, just look at what an individual cell does. It's immensely complex Now, I think if I could , well, I couldn't do it because I don't have the knowledge, but if we could take evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists and get out of all the best ones in the world and start saying, Okay, look , here you are. You're this thing. And here's the sort of things that are happening with inside you. I can really walk you through this from, let's say, from the from the stimulation of the nosceptus and the skin or light the rays falling on the right and really take you through. All we have are just caricatures of caricatures of caricatures the sort of thing one this debate is conducted in. Now sea fibers are firing moment. It's not just the sea fibers , what the sea fibers are doing and everything I think and it's more than sea fibers. Anyway, they could really take you through that and you could really understand all of the effects that all these different mechanisms and the cumulative effects of all these mechanisms upon you, what they would how they would push you and pull you to respond in different ways and how this would all be internalized because it's not a matter of just moving your hands this thing isn't particularly metaphysically significant. What's happening here is much more significant and how different systems when they and here would be talking to each other and priming each other and prompting each other and how this would all then eventually be connected up to a conceptual system that would try to describe this and encapsulate it for its own use as well as for the use of others. I think if you could do that in complete detail and we're not remotely near doing it, I think you might go, yeah, kind of that sort of makes sense. And I think we should be trying to do that instead of declaring oh it can't be that couldn't possibly work. I can see right now it wouldn't . Let's suppose that everything's conscious because that's the only way I could be. It seems to me that is just a completely regressive attitude . Okay, we've covered a lot of ground and we started by pointing out that illusionism in consciousness is not the view that consciousness is an illus ion. It is that consciousness is being thought of in the wrong way by philosophers and there are certain aspects of Consuer's experience, that is to say kwalia , private inner experience, all this kind of stuff, which is illus That can sound a little bit confusing because people are like, well, what's the difference between consciousness and experience and kalia and whatnot? Now that we've covered all of that, let's go right back to the beginning and ask the question I, love doing this. Let's ask the question that most interviewers probably start with, but I think it's more helpful to actually end with. What is consciousness ? And when you say that there is an illusion going on, what exactly is the illusion in the most sort of concise and sort of summary fashion that you can muster. Now that you don't have to do it in the context of beginning an interview, knowing that no one knows what you're talking about yet . I'm naturally cautious of sound bites because they will get quoted back to me. What is this? And let's say something like this. It's it's vivid, vibrant, potent response to the world in all its dimensions and all its significance. It's being in the world and it's being aware of the world is packed with significance for me , both as a creature and as an individual. It's reacting yes, it's yes, that I'll do. It's being aware of the world in a way that makes it packed with significance for me . That makes not what this is like for me. It's what the world is like for me. It's okay, consciousness is what makes the world like something for me, makes it significant and it makes it significant because it's constituted by a whole set of responses to it. And is that something that I know I ask about the illusion as well, but just to they don't. The illusion is that it is something separate from all those processes , that it is something over and above that, that it is an irreducibly private world that only I in fact obviously it's my responses so I know more about them than anybody else but, it's not the illusion is that it's something that belongs, if you like to a different dimension of reality, that it is not part of the shared public world, that it is something that is only there for an eye that is itself very hard to get a grip on. I think ultimately I think it's a view that builds in a sort of dual well it certainly builds in a kind of dualism and I think it ultimately builds in a Cartesian dualism. It's being richly alive in the world and sensitive to the world in virtue of all sorts of highly complex evolved processes, not in virtue of some magic that or some fundamental feature of reality that can't be explained in terms of evolutionary processes . So is that sound like I think that's great because it's careful, it's concise it's somewhat illuminating. Except insofar as I'm interested in like if that's all consciousness is , is that something that a computer can have does have, you know, AI, robots, that kind of I find it's kind of a boring question to ask about like AI consciousness. But I mean, in this context, I think it's specifically relevant, you know, like all of the things that you're saying consciousness is, these sort of reactions to the world, this like vibrant significance that is not felt no Kualia but is kind of there is something that Chachi BT could do. And so when people ask, you know, will Chat GBT ever become conscious, aren't you kind of committed to saying it already is? It just doesn't feel like it's conscious. Absolutely not, because look, I'm talking about a v ibrant multidimensional set of responses to the one. Chattiv has one line one kind of response, one dimensional response only. Well, first of all, it has only one thing that it's sensitive to, one kind of thing is sensitive to text , okay ? And it has one output Moore text. Okay, you might say can do pictures that have graphics, but anyway, it's it doesn't explore the world. It doesn't have sensors for It doesn't have its range of sensitivity to the world is about as impoverished as you can get. It's sensitive to text input. And it doesn't even go out looking for text input. It just waites till it comes. And then it responds with more text input. That's about as impoverished as you could get.. Okay So it's an amazingly complex text response, but it's still just one dimension. I'm talking about our rich sensitivity. And I'm talking about sensitivity that is tuned into your individual developmental history so that every red thing you've seen in your life or experience in your life shapes your response to redness and shapes what it's like to see red things for you . CT has never seen any of reds or seen texts and the text doesn't have any long term effect on it anyway. It's, you know, the model isn't updated with every, you know, there's a context window and then it's deleted. It's about as impoverished. It's a very complex very complex thing, but it's very impoverished in terms of the dimensions of reactivity. Now, if we were to build things like autonomous artificial beings that had all sorts of the kind of sensors they would need to survive and to operate autonomously then we start after equipping the kind of stuff that evolution equiped us with. We might also need to equip it with self modelling the mechanism self monitoring mechanism equip it. And then we might start getting into the sort of territory where we would think that the word consciousness may be would be appropriate to extend to it. But there would be no point where like so inner light came on and bang now it's got this inner world that never that's the wrong way of looking at it. Look at what it does . Look at what its capabilities are and say is it similar enough to us to extend the word to it? That's what we're going to do with other animals. That's what I mean. That's what I mean is that like, you know , for most people saying that AI has become conscious would be this like extremely grand sort of moment whereas for you it feels like you kind of go like yeah okay it's conscious now but like you know who cares? Like so what you know? And also consciously conscious like what? Ccionsous like an antist consci conscious,ous like a fishist conscious conscious like an cestral. It's all anthropocentric. We need to stop the anthropology anthropocentrism here. You said it's super like it's about as impoverished as it gets. Well, maybe then Chapter is just the most impover ished kind of consciousness. That's what I mean. If all consciousness is this , I mean you said the word vibrant, but then you know, vibrancy is relative and difficult to precisely defined. And so like, you know, if you ask Chat GBT, it would be like, yeah, I'm having a really vibrant conversation. And it can, it can not just produce images, but you can send it images. You can read it sort of visual data, and it could tell you like, oh this is such a vibrant red that I see in this image and it's having all of those reactions and granted it is extremely limited compared to what a human brain is doing. But my question is, is that a difference in degree rather than kind? Is it just OK, it's conscious in the way you've defined it, just like not very like much ? Well, look, I mean this is really, I think, is just a terminological question. I mean, I don't think the word consciousness is well enough to find look we're going to let's I don't know this like consciousness one and consciousness a million or something but it's going to be many different dimensions of consciousness o,kay? We need to start thinking about this and mapping out different dimensions of reactivity that we have in different dimensions of self monitoring. This is the way to go to break down this kind of really useless undifferentiated concept of consciousness as an inner light and start thinking about it as a complex functions and seeing which then measuring things, things will have different we can draw sort of what do we call it like spider diagrams and different patterns of reactivity and we can do this for other animals we can do it for us, we could do it for aliens, we can do it right there and which ones and now to some extent Chris Blesset crysting them with the title of consciousness , that carries all sorts of other stuff with it about ethical concern about responsibility, about all sorts of things. And we might want to think about, you know , we might need better , I think we do need better terminology in this area . But the first thing to do is to stop thinking in a wrong way as a bright line that it's either on or off . There's either this private subjective world which we could never know about. it We could never penetrate anyway. So stop thinking even if Flumnom were write, it wouldn't make any difference to anything. That's the point . So we just stop thinking about it that way and start thinking about it in constructive terms of exactly are the sensitivities and the active dispositions that this thing has and how similar they are to ours, how different they are they from ours? To what extent do we want to extend our ethical concern to them to what extent do we want to treat them as autonomous and how and responsible ? We've got to negotiate all this in the light of the facts that are publicly available to all of us because there's nothing hidden in the end. This is the positive message of this. In the end, it's just a matter of studying these things carefully enough, study bats carefully enough, and you know everything there is to know about bat consciousness . Let's do the work and then try and get a framework for negotiating this. Instead of is it consciousness that is the most fruitless question in this area